Random Bakings of 2013

So we all know that I can't resist baking.  The kitchen just begins calling to me and I can't ignore it.  I actually will get agitated if I don't get in that kitchen and create something!  Luckily I seemed to have kept up with my photography of baked goods (even during my supposed non-baking period) so I will post some random sweet creations I produced during the end of my second pregnancy.  I will also try to post the recipes with the photographs in case anything looks so good that you must heed those kitchen callings and create a confection for yourself!  I made all the below deliciousness during November and December of 2013 - while I counted down the days to our new arrival!

Cookies and Cream Brownie Cupcakes

1 box fudge brownie mix
Oreo's

Preheat oven according to package directions and line cupcake pan with foil liners.  Cut nine Oreo's into four pieces, set aside.   Prepare brownies according to package directions.  Place one whole Oreo in the bottom of each cupcake liner.    Spoon brownie batter on top.  Add about three pieces of the quartered Oreo's on top, pressing lightly into the brownie batter.  Bake according to package directions, about 20 minutes.  Do not overbake!

Tuscaloosa Tollhouse Pie

1 frozen deep dish pie crust

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar

2 large eggs

3/4 cup (1-1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened, cut into cubes

1 Tbsp. whiskey

3/4 cup walnuts, toasted and chopped

1-1/4 cups (about 8 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

In a medium bowl, whisk the flour and sugars together until combined.  Set aside.  In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, beat the eggs on high speed until foamy, about 3 minutes.  Remove the whisk attachment and add the paddle attachment.  With the mixer on low, gradually add the flour mixture.  Turn the mixer to high and beat for 2 minutes.  Scrape down the bowl and add the butter.  Beat on high speed until the mixture is combined.  Scrape down the bowl, add the whiskey, and beat the mixture on high speed for 1 minute.

Fold the walnuts and 3/4 cup of the chocolate chips into the filling.  Pour the filling into the frozen pie shell and spread out evenly.  Top the filling with the remaining 1/2 cup chocolate chips.

Bake in the center of the oven for 25 minutes, then cover the edges of the crust loosely with aluminum foil and bake for another 25 minutes (this will prevent the crust from browning too quickly).  Test the pie by sticking a knife in the center of the filling.  If the knife comes out clean, the pie is done.  If the knife comes out with clumps of filling sticking to it, bake for another five minutes and test again.  Transfer to a wire rack and let cool before slicing.  The pie can be stored in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for up to 2 days.

Apple Fritter Cake

(from www.nerdybaker.wordpress.com)

Filling:

1 heaping cup of sliced apples (I cored and quartered and then sliced)

1/3 cup sugar

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

small pinch freshly grated nutmeg

2 tablespoons cornstarch

2 teaspoons water

Plus:

1/2 cup brown sugar (I used a 1/4 cup each of dark and light)

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Cake:

1/3 cup butter

3/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup applesauce

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 eggs

2 1/4 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 cup Greek yogurt (you could use plain yogurt as well or sour cream)

Glaze:

2 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

6 tablespoons milk

For filling:  Make your filling by combining apples, sugar, water, cinnamon and cornstarch in a small saucepan.  Cook on low heat for 5 to 7 minutes, stirring constantly until the sauce is thickened and the apples are a bit soft.  Set aside to cool.  In a small bowl, mix the brown sugar and cinnamon together until well combined and set aside.

For Cake:  Preheat oven to 350°.  Grease and flour a 9×13 baking dish.  Set aside.  Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.  Add applesauce and vanilla and mix till combined.  Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Sift the dry ingredients together.  Add the dry ingredients to the batter in three parts alternating with the yogurt in two parts, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients.  Beat until just combined.  Spoon half of the batter into the prepared pan.  Spoon the cooled apple mixture over the batter carefully and spread as evenly as possible.  Sprinkle 2/3 of brown sugar cinnamon mixture over apples and cover with the rest of the batter.  Sprinkle the rest of the brown sugar cinnamon mixture over the top.  Bake for 45-55 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.

For Glaze:  While the cake is baking, make the glaze.  In a bowl, mix the powdered sugar, vanilla, and milk until the glaze is desired consistency.  When the cake comes out of the oven, immediately but carefully pour onto hot cake.  Try to pour as evenly as possible.  You might have to pick up the cake and tilt it to spread the glaze evenly.  I even poured some out that pooled at the corners and repoured that over the top.  Let the cake sit for awhile for the glaze to set.

 


These Cranberry-Pecan Coffee Cakes were the last  thing I baked before the birth of my second daughter!  The next thing that I took on after that was a very special baby "sprinkle" party for my wonderful sister-in-law.  My handsome nephew was born just two months after Brinley arrived!

My Little Pony Sprinkle Cake

In the fall of 2013, my oldest daughter decided that she wanted to have a My Little Pony birthday party.  I was in the middle of my pregnancy - one that was going much smoother due to my taking it easier this time around - so I decided to have a small family affair at my parent's house.  It was a great time with food, family and a few close friends.

On the agenda was making candy necklaces, a piñata (something my husband insisted on even though our daughter was terrified of them) and a sprinkle-themed pony cake.  It was the perfect little party to celebrate our little girl getting another year older.

The candy necklaces were a huge hit with the kids!  I got small cookies, pretzels, gummi rings and cereal for them to make their own creations.  I would really like to do this again once Lana starts having sleepovers.  How fun would it be to make them before they all crawled into their sleeping bags for a movie marathon?  And since they are custom made, each girl would have exactly what they wanted to munch on for film viewing.  Here are Lana and her friends with their completed creations.  What a bunch of cuties!

Lana really enjoyed this party.  She does a lot better with smaller parties.  She gets a bit overwhelmed as the guest list grows.  Her party for the following year was pretty extravagant, the mixture of a large group of children, heat and activity was really too much for her.  Of course this was the year we tried inviting a ton of kids from her pre-school class and we have now learned from that experience.  Enough about that for now though, I will post about that party at another time.  Here is a picture of my husband showing Lana how to hit a pinata.  She was terrified!  She has sat out of piñata participation at parties since.

So that sums up most of the party games, on to the cake!  Lana's cake seemed simple enough.  A two-tiered yellow cake with vanilla buttercream and completely covered in multi-colored sprinkles.  All seemed good and well until the sprinkles hit the floor - literally.  The night before her birthday, I was constructing the cake.  Stacking went well, icing went well, and then came time for the sprinkles.  As I was covering the cake, my elbow hit the large tub of multi-colored jimmies I had sitting on the counter and deposited them all over my kitchen floor.   The sound of hundreds pieces of candy colored sugar pieces hitting the linoleum was not a welcome sound.  I blame pregnancy clumsiness.

Luckily, most of the cake had been covered by this point and I had an extra tub of sprinkles in the pantry.  A little sweeping, a few more handfuls of sprinkles and the cake was finished.  We decided to use Lana's miniatures on the cake to reference the My Little Pony theme.  Can you tell if she liked it?

Well that wraps up Lana's fourth birthday!  One of the best parties we ever had and it was all due to my pregnancy forcing it to be a laid back small affair.  I really should have learned from this.  Instead I decided that her fifth party would be an over-the-top guest-filled extraordinary event.  How did that turn out?  Stay tuned to find out!

Wedding at the Beach

Summertime is almost always wedding season.  Back in the summer of 2013 I had one more cake order to get through before I put cake making on hold to prepare for our soon-to-be family of four.  It was quite the challenge!  A beach-themed wedding cake, dozens and dozens of cupcakes and a Star Wars themed groom's cake.  It almost was the order that didn't get done.

As all my fellow mamas have experienced, pregnancy does weird things to your body.  Love of sudden foods that once held no appeal and a disgust for dearly loved delicacies is one of the biggest things I dealt with in both of my pregnancies.  With my first child, Domino's pizza became enemy number one.  All it took was one sniff to send me running to the restroom.  Unfortunately for me, cake is what did me in during my second pregnancy.

It was quite traumatic - how in the world am I suppose to make the amount of cake I had promised when just the sight of it made my stomach turn?  It greatly helped that the couple I was making the wedding order for were very dear friends of mine.  A co-worker that I had worked with for six years and his wonderful fiance with a bubbly personality you couldn't resist!  Plus there is that whole baking is my life thing that I have going for me.

And so it began....

The first thing that I did to start preparing for this massive order of cake was making the cupcake toppers.  I bought a chocolate seashell mold and molded a couple hundred seashells out of white candy melts.  I then hand-painted them with three kinds of luster dust to give them dimension.  They were so cool looking!  And they were able to be done well in advance and stored up for the big day, a huge bonus in my book!

The bride and groom wanted a pretty simple wedding cake.  They asked for a custom starfish topper to go with their beach theme.  I molded two starfish from chocolate and dressed them up in their finest for the occasion.  As for the cake itself, we went with smaller layers covered in white fondant and embellished with more hand-painted seashells and "sand."  The "sand" was created by crushing graham crackers with a rolling pin.

Then came the hard part.  A Star Wars themed groom's cake.  I k now that I have written before about trademark items.  They are so hard to do!  If it doesn't look like what the client is expecting it can quickly turn into disaster!  We discussed a lot of ideas with the final decision being a R2-D2 cake.  A 3-D cake at that.  I was completely freaking out but my co-worker had complete confidence in me.  One thing that I can say about my friends - they really know how to push the limits of my comfort zone when it comes to decorating cakes!

My husband helped me a lot with the support structure for the groom's cake.  The center body would be cake and the legs would be made of fondant-covered support pieces.  It was the most challenging cake project I have ever done.  But it was successful.  R2 was the hit if the wedding and had many people asking me for business cards.  All of which I very politely turned down.  After all, I had my own little cupcake baking in the oven that I needed to think about!

And so it all turned out and my cake decorating hobby was on hold.  Well, it was until September.  My little girl was turning four and of course she asked Mommy to decorate a cake for her.  How could I resist?

Has It Really Been Three Years?!?!?

Holy Cow!  I haven't done any cake blogs in almost three years!

It was about this time three years ago that something very special happened in our family.  We found out that we were expecting another child!  My first pregnancy was a pretty traumatic event - insane swelling, high blood pressure and preeclampsia.  It also resulted in the most precious little baby girl!  Understandable, I promised my husband that if we were ever blessed with another baby, that I would take it easier than I did the first time around.  Which meant no more cake orders.



Our second daughter, Brinley was born in 2014 and it has been a fast-paced life ever since.  Juggling two daughters and going back to work full-time, buying and moving into our forever home and recently getting the cutest little beagle puppy you have ever seen (my husband claimed he needed more testosterone in the house to balance out all us girls).  Who had time to bake?  Well I did - it's not so easy to give up something you are passionate about no matter what you promise!  But keeping up with a blog definitely got put on the back burner.  Actually, it pretty much got tossed out the back door!

Now that our little girls are growing and getting more independent with each passing day, it is time to update this blog.  I have missed documenting my baking passion and it was so fun to look back at all my past cake creations!  I am going to spend the next few posts re-visiting some of the sugary creations I have done in the past three years.  Get ready to start having some sweet cravings!

Pink and Purple Baby Shower Cake

This baby shower cake was for my husband's cousin, who is expecting her first baby girl in June. Originally the theme was princess penguin which I had the most amazing cake plan for but when the party people went shopping, they discovered they couldn't find much that matched that theme. So instead they went with a pink and purple theme.

They had complete confidence in me for the design. I admit I was at a lost. I really wanted to do something the the mommy-to-be would appreciate but since I don't see the family that often I wasn't sure what that something would be. I did however know that the baby girl was to be named Natalee Rose so I thought - roses!

I have been seeing a lot of the rose swirl done on cupcakes (and had just happened to practice the technique on some cupcakes for a party my mom was hosting) so I decided to use the technique to frame the top of the cake. I also wanted to use a mommy and daughter silhouette to decorate the cake so I researched online until I found one that I liked.

The cake really was elegant and sophisticated. It matched the party decorations well and the mommy-to-be loved it! I had also tinted the inside of the cake purple which was much to her liking! I really loved the way this cake turned out. The frosting smoothed very well and I didn't even use the paper towel method! I made my buttercream a little stiffer this time (using one less tablespoon of milk than normal) and then used the hot knife trick to smooth it. I really like the results and may use this method more in the future.

I really want to start doing more with buttercream frosting. The taste can't be beat! Fondant is great for decoration... decoration that can be removed and discarded so you can eat the tasty cake! I really want to work on some buttercream roses! But they will just have to wait! I have one more huge (wedding) cake and cupcake order and then it's hiatus time to practice some techniques of my own! June 30th here I come!

Chocolate Toffee Cookies

There's nothing like homemade cookies. Now don't get me wrong. I love a good Double-Stuff Oreo, Girl Scout Samoa or E.L Fudge Cookie in a pinch...but there is still nothing like a homemade cookie. My Dad is a bonafide Cookie Monster so cookies are something I have grown up with. Cookies have the ability to please so many people on a wide-spread scale that it is amazing. There are chewy, crispy, crunchy, chunky, gooey, no-bake, soft... the possibilities to please are endless!

These particular cookies fall into the crispy chewy category. Crispy cookie with chewy toffee bits in it. Kind of like a Heath bar cookie. I happened to have almost all the ingredients for these already in the pantry so it made a perfect selection for my weekend baking treat!

Chocolate-Toffee Cookies

(from the American Test Kitchen Magazine)

2-1/3 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup packed light-brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 bag (8 ounces) chopped milk chocolate toffee pieces (such as Hershey's Heath Bar baking pieces)

1. Heat oven to 375°. Coat baking sheets with nonstick cooking spray; set aside.

2. Stir together flour, baking soda and salt in a medium-size bowl; set aside.

3. In a large bowl, beat together butter and both sugars until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat in egg and vanilla.

4. On low speed, gradually add in flour mixture. Beat for 2 minutes or until blended. Stir in chocolate chips and toffee pieces.

5. Drop batter by tablespoonfuls onto prepared baking sheets and bake at 375° for 12 minutes or until golden. Cool baking sheets on wire racks for 5 minutes. Transfer cookies to wire rack to cool completely.

Hints and Tips: I used mini semisweet chocolate chips in mine. I wanted the chocolate to be spread throughout the cookie instead of in chunks, plus that's what I had in the pantry to use. Coat your baking sheets very thoroughly with cooking spray! The toffee in the cookies will stick to your pans even with the spray and I can't imagine how difficult (or I should say even more difficult) they would have been to remove from the baking sheets. My cookies got too brown cooking at 12 minutes so I reduced to 11 minutes. This also helped with removing them from the pans. Bake the first pan according to the directions and then adjust cooking times depending on your oven performance.

Even with all the drama of removing the cookies from the pan (I only had two of the 4 dozen fall to pieces on me) these cookies were a huge hit! My husband and daughter loved them and the 3 dozen I took to work disappeared before lunch time. The next time I do make them, I might try cooking them on parchment-lined baking sheets. Sometimes that will make the cookie softer and it will lose the crispy texture. I guess I will just have to try it out and see what happens!

Double Chocolate Brownies

So I have been really busy lately. Husband started a new job. Enrolling Lana in pre-school. It has been hectic. And when I feel like I am totally losing it I bake. Have you ever seen the movie Julie and Julia? There is a scene where Julie has had the most terrible day at work and she is feeling completely overwhelmed by her life. So she goes home and bakes a chocolate pie. And she is explaining to her husband how she doesn't know about a lot of things but she knows if she puts these ingredients together and cooks them just right it will turn into a perfect chocolate pie. Yes that scene is my life. Baking is my therapy. And thankfully I have a work who is all too eager to take all those calorie-ridden treats off my hands. Still on the diet folks. Down six pounds!

So anyway back to these brownies. I dug out the old recipe binder that is overflowing from magazine recipe tear-outs. Back from the days before Pinterest, when I received multiple food magazines via ye olde mailbox and I was a newlywed. I canceled those subscriptions and promised myself I would renew them when I got through some of the recipe binder bulk. Yeah so that didn't happen.

But things have changed now. I have a Kitchenaid mixer. I have a three-year-old daughter who loves to be my baking assistant. And I work at a lab that has a break room to dispose of the goodies. I'm trying to bake one new thing a week to try some recipes and keep some sanity during my jam-packed summer. Every weekend there is an event!

So here is the first recipe. Double-Chocolate Brownies from the America's Test Kitchen magazine. They were pretty much amazing. Tasted like gourmet brownies but went together like a simple box mix. The only down-side was they tended to dry out quickly. I'm not sure if it was because I pre-cut and packaged them for special deliveries or the recipe just tends to be better the first few days after they are baked. My special delivery peeps didn't have any complaints so maybe I am just being a dessert food snob!

Double-Chocolate Brownies

(from the America's Test Kitchen Magazine)

3/4 cup (1-1/2 sticks) unsalted butter

4 ounces (4 squares) unsweetened chocolate

2 cups sugar

4 large eggs

1-1/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup chopped pecans

1 bag (12 ounces) chocolate chips (2 cups)

1. Heat oven to 350°. Line a 13 x 9 x 2-inch baking pan with nonstick foil, leaving overhang.

2. In large glass bowl, heat butter and chocolate in microwave on HIGH for 2 minutes; stir until smooth. Let stand 5 minutes to cool slightly. Whisk in sugar, eggs, flour and vanilla. Stir in pecans and half of the chocolate chips (1 cup). Transfer batter to prepared pan. Sprinkle with remaining 1 cup chocolate chips.

3. Bake at 350° for 35 minutes, until top is dry to the touch. Let cool completely in pan on wire rack. Lift brownie from pan with foil. Cut into squares and serve.

 All the gooey rich greatness about to be mixed together!

 My little helper mixing up the goodies!

 All mixed up and in the pan. Now time to sprinkle some more chocolate chips on top!

 Right before going into the oven...

The recipe says that it makes 24 brownies. I was good and cut mine into 24 pieces. Be warned - they may look small but they pack a wallop of richness! They are best eaten in the following two to three days. Enjoy!