Archive for the ‘decorating’ Category

Time for a list.

“Things I am sort of obsessed with these days”

• Anything written by Brandon Sanderson
• This licorice! Good grief people!
  
• Clean bathtubs
• Squishy pink baby pudge. Nom nom nom…
• Jeeves and Wooster. On Amazon for only $20? Temptation!
• Blessed peace and quiet

And let’s be honest. “Dipping things in chocolate” is right up there too.

First that, now this.

My husband’s coworkers came out and asked for cupcakes. Chocolate was the unanimous flavor request, with one mention of strawberry. Aha! Chocolate-dipped strawberries. Everybody wins.

I frosted these with stabilized whipped cream, which is definitely lighter than frosting. That makes me happy. I’m not a huge fan of most frosting, but maybe I just haven’t met my true love yet.

Chocolate Strawberries ‘n Cream Cupcakes

adapted from Bakers Banter

Ingredients for cupcakes:

2 cups sugar

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons Instant ClearJel or cornstarch

3/4 cup Dutch-process cocoa

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

4 large eggs

3/4 cup vegetable oil

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1-1/4 cup water, room temperature

For stabilized whipped cream:

1-1/2 cup heavy whipping cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1/4 teaspoon Instant ClearJel

For chocolate-dipped strawberries:

1 dozen strawberries

1-1/2 cup high-quality semi-sweet chocolate chips (I love Guittard)

Directions:

Make the chocolate-dipped strawberries first. Melt the chocolate chips on low heat in a double-boiler, fondue pot, or mini crock pot on low. Make sure the strawberries are clean and completely dry.

Line a baking sheet with wax paper. Hold a strawberry by the leaves and dip it 3/4 of the way into the chocolate. Shake gently to remove the excess chocolate, and place on wax paper. Chill the dipped strawberries in the fridge while you make the cupcakes and whipped cream. (When you’re ready to use the dipped strawberries, make sure the chocolate is completely set, and peel them very carefully from the wax paper.)

Next make the cupcakes. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Prepare two 8″ rounds with grease and parchment paper. (If your 8″ rounds aren’t 2″ high, you’ll want to use 9″ rounds instead.)

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together all the dry ingredients. Add the eggs, oil, and vanilla, beating until smooth. Gradually add the milk, beating until smooth.

Spoon the batter evenly into a paper-lined cupcake pan. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the middle of a cupcake comes out clean.

While the cupcakes are baking, make the whipped cream frosting.

To make the frosting, add the heavy whipping cream to a medium-sized mixing bowl, and beat on medium-low speed, gradually adding the powdered sugar. Increase the mixing speed slightly as the cream thickens. Whip the cream just until stiff peaks form, then add the vanilla and Instant ClearJel. Whip until incorporated, no more than 15-20 seconds. If the whipped cream appears lumpy, add a teaspoon of milk and stir gently until smooth.

Once the cupcakes are completely cool, pipe the whipped cream frosting onto the cupcakes with a large round tip. Garnish with chocolate sprinkles or shavings, and let them chill in the fridge for 10 minutes. Top with a chocolate dipped strawberry. Keep them cool in the refrigerator until ready to serve.

The title of this post should actually be “How a Cake Broke my Heart.”

I didn’t get enough time to love this cake. Or take decent photos, really, but that’s beside the point.

I had just declared it finished and whipped out my camera. Then the doorbell rang, and it was time for my darling cake to go out into the wide world without me. Just like that.

I didn’t get enough time to love it. I’m still trying to shake the jilted feeling. I know. Maybe a few Jeeves and Wooster episodes on YouTube might help.

You wouldn’t think it to look at it, but this cake was actually a fudge cake under the surface. This fabulous recipe has quickly become my new favorite of all time in the whole universe cake recipe dot com. And luckily, chocolate happens to be my most requested cake flavor. I love how that works.

It’s confession time.

I’ve been baking like a mad woman for the past couple of weeks. Yeah. Do mad women bake?

That didn’t sound like a confession. Let me try that again:

I’ve been baking like a madwoman for the past couple of weeks, and my camera spent most of that time in another room of the house, NOT documenting any of the kitchen action.

No photos, no blog post. I’m ashamed, really.

See, the hardest part of food blogging for me is snapping a well-composed, well-lit photo so I can put it in a blog post. It seems like I’m always either in a big hurry with not a second to spare for photography, or I’m baking something for an event where it’s just not convenient or even possible to get a good photo. Yeah, I’m actually just making lame excuses here.

Exactly one second before these photos were taken, I was feverishly tossing sprinkles onto these cupcakes like my life depended on it. And exactly one second after the photos were taken, I was dashing out the door with them.

I love my blog readers. Know how I know? Because I was willing to run a little late in order to document these cupcakes, because they are just that good, and I wasn’t about to let you miss out. See? I’m here for you. I’m on your side.

These chocolate cupcakes are not light and fluffy. They’re dark and dense and down-to-business. These are grumpy-pants Mr. Darcy cupcakes. I really hope you don’t think I’m a weirdo because I just said that.

The light and creamy peanut butter frosting is a perfect complement. A friend of mine told me she could bathe in this frosting. Enough said.

Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes

Ingredients:

1-3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1-1/3 cup sugar

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 eggs

3/4 cup canola oil

1/2 cup sour cream

1/4 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a mixing bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, cocoa, salt, and baking soda. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the remaining ingredients. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix just until incorporated and smooth, about one minute.

Scoop evenly into lined muffin cups (fill each cup about 1/2 full) and bake for 18-20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Allow to cool in the pan for about 5 minutes, then remove the cupcakes to a wire rack to cool completely.

Creamy Peanut Butter Frosting

Ingredients:

1 cup butter, room temperature

1 cup creamy peanut butter

4 cups powdered sugar

1/4 cup milk

2 teaspoons vanilla

Directions:

In a large bowl, cream butter and peanut butter together until smooth. Stir in the powdered sugar a cup at a time, and beat until well-blended. Add the milk and vanilla and mix until smooth and fluffy.

Happy spring, friends!

Thank you for being here. You make my day when you come show your smiling faces and leave kind words. I think about you all the time. Did you know that? It’s true.

I just finished a Fondant and Gum Paste course, and I’m bouncing off the walls with excitement, wanting to show you the end result.

Picture a wide-eyed six-year-old, running at top-speed through the door after school, so breathless and eager to show Mom the art project that she made in kindergarten — all covered with pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks, and smeared with orange marker and glitter.

Look, Mom! Look!

Fondant is new territory for me, but I have had a blast learning how to work with it and make it do what I want. I’m not a fan of the flavor of fondant — even the homemade marshmallow fondant — but when the end result is so smooth and pretty, what’s a girl to do? Peel it off and eat the incredible chocolate cake underneath, that’s what.

Gum paste flowers. You can do some pretty cool stuff with gum paste.

Oh, you want the recipe for this incredible chocolate cake underneath? Gladly.

This chocolate cake comes together in one bowl, as easy as falling off a log. The result? It’s a sock-knocker-offer. The King Arthur Flour blog recommends a chocolate ganache icing. Please promise me you’ll do that. It wouldn’t have worked on this particular cake, since I was covering it with fondant. But you can bet your buttons I’ll be playing with ganache next time this cake shows its face in my kitchen.

Fudge Cake

adapted from Bakers’ Banter

2 cups sugar

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons Instant ClearJel or cornstarch

3/4 cup Dutch-process cocoa

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

4 large eggs

3/4 cup vegetable oil

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1-1/4 cup water, room temperature

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Prepare two 8″ rounds with grease and parchment paper. (If your 8″ rounds aren’t 2″ high, you’ll want to use 9″ rounds instead.)

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together all the dry ingredients. Add the eggs, oil, and vanilla, beating until smooth. Gradually add the milk, beating until smooth.

Pour the batter into prepared pans and bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean. Cool the cakes in the pan for 15 minutes, then turn them out onto a cooling rack to cool completely.

Chocolate Ganache

1/2 cup heavy whipping cream

1-1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips, room temperature

Directions:

Place the chocolate chips in a heat-proof bowl. In a small saucepan, bring the cream just to a boil. Immediately pour over the chocolate chips. Let it stand for 2 minutes, then stir gently until the chocolate is all the way melted, and the ganache is dark and glossy. Let it cool slightly before spreading it on the cake. It will be very messy and delicious.

Remember November?

Neither do I. It’s all kind of a giant blur of roast turkey, wedding cake, and contractions.

And pomegranate juice. The lovely people over at POM Wonderful contacted me and sent a case of pomegranate juice accompanied by more facts and figures than I have fingers and toes to count. Bottom line: This stuff is insanely good for you. To say the least. (Mosey on over to their site, and I’ll let them handle all the physiological nitty-gritty.)

So, I gathered a handful of recipes, placed my juice in the fridge, and told my husband not to drink it, because, hey, I had big plans. But that night, we decided to open just one of the little bottles of juice. Just one. Just to try it out. Surely I wouldn’t need all 12 bottles for baking, right?

And that’s how it started. Every couple of days we would buckle, and another little bottle would disappear from the fridge, and I would shave down my list of pomegranate recipes. At last we were left with one bottle. One little bottle of pomegranate juice, sitting all by his lonesome.

My husband asked me several times if he could just go ahead and drink it. No. Are you sure? Yes. Please? No. Part of it? No.

That was two months ago. Two months that little bottle has been sitting in the fridge. Two months my husband has been pestering me to let him finish it off. Two months I have said no, and secretly wondered when I would get around to it.

Valentines Day. That’s when I would get around to it. Here we are, two months later.

So, Happy Valentines Day! I brought you pink cupcakes. Last Valentines Day I brought you pink cupcakes too, but they weren’t as cute, and the photography was embarrassing. And I didn’t bother including any recipes. This time around I’m doing it up right.

Golden Vanilla Cupcakes

2 cups sugar

3-1/4 cups flour

2-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup butter, room temperature

1-1/4 cup milk, room temperature

1 Tablespoon vanilla extract

4 large eggs

1/4 cup vegetable oil

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line muffin tin with papers.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the sugar, flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the butter and beat until mixture looks sandy. Combine the milk and vanilla and add to the flour mixture all at once. Add the vegetable oil, and mix at low speed just until incorporated. Scrape the sides of the bowl. Add the eggs one at a time, beating between each egg. Scrape the sides of the bowl again and beat the mixture on low for 30 seconds.

Transfer the batter to the cupcake papers, filling about 2/3 full. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a cupcake comes out clean. Remove the muffin tin from the oven and place the cupcakes on a rack to cool. Make sure cupcakes are cooled completely before frosting them.

POM Cream Cheese Frosting

adapted from www.pomwonderful.com

1-1/2 cups Pomegranate juice

4 oz. butter, room temperature

8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature

14 oz. powdered sugar

Directions:

In a small saucepan, reduce the pomegranate juice, over low heat, down to 3 fl. oz. Allow to cool.

Place butter and cream cheese in a large mixing bowl and cream together until soft and fluffy. Turn the speed down to low and slowly add the powdered sugar and pomegranate juice reduction. Mix until the sugar is fully incorporated.

Place icing into a piping bag with a round or star tip, and decorate cupcakes.

If any of you happen to have an extra straitjacket lying around (anybody?), I might need to borrow it.

You see, anyone who is 8 months pregnant and in her right mind… wait… that’s complete gibberish. Let me try again.

Anyone who is 8 months pregnant… at all… should not be taking on lots of ambitious projects in the kitchen. The end.

There’s just one tiny problem, though: It’s fall! It’s holiday season! There are events and occasions left and right! And, despite not being able to get up the energy to heft laundry baskets around or mop the kitchen floor, I find myself spending outrageous amounts of time on my feet, putting together dessert after dessert after dessert… and liking it.

Like I said, straitjacket.

I recently took the plunge into the wide world of cookie decorating (thanks to Bake at 350), and whipped up these pretty things for a bake sale. They were a hit! And… I think my body went into rebellion mode afterward. See, I don’t really remember the rest of that day.

But good grief, these were fun. I felt like a 6-year-old again. Bright colors! Sweet icing! Pretty patterns! There are several helpful hints to know before getting into cookie decorating, but I won’t take the time to do a tutorial here. Why should I, when there are several better ones I can link to?

Stay tuned for my next big project — a wedding cake. Yes, I just said wedding cake.

Like I said, straitjacket.

You know, unless the delivery room gets me first…

Vanilla-Almond Sugar Cookies

from Bake at 350

3 c unbleached, all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 c sugar (I use sugar that I’ve stored vanilla beans in)
2 sticks butter
1 egg
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/2 tsp pure almond extract

Preheat oven to 350.

Combine the flour and baking powder, set aside. Cream the sugar and butter. Add the egg and extracts and mix. Gradually add the flour mixture and beat just until combined, scraping down the bowl, especially the bottom.

Roll onto a floured surface (or between two sheets of wax paper) and cut into shapes. Place shapes on parchment-lined baking sheets and refrigerate for 10 minutes. Then bake for 10-12 minutes. Let sit a few minutes on the sheet, then transfer to a cooling rack. When the cookies are completely cooled, they are ready to decorate.

The powdered sugar has settled, the dishes are washed, the green and blue food colorings have faded from off my hands, and I’m back to my old, normal sleep schedule (whatever that is).

Yes, this project was a doozy. But this particular project was a particularly fun doozy. One with turquoise waves, tropical vegetation, and a bamboo hut.

My sister-in-law just celebrated her sweet 16 birthday party, complete with a tropical theme, a couple dozen teenage friends, loud dance music, and the ever-inevitable water fight that just about sent me into cardiac arrest several times (seriously, you’d think the teenage boys would have been hyper-aware of the fact that there was an enormous, edible cake right there. But then, I’ve never been a teenage boy).

Admission: I stole the palm tree and flip-flop idea from an old Joy the Baker post. Although, let’s be honest, hers look a bajillion times better than mine. And please, don’t be too hard on my poor little palm tree. The first one broke into pieces in the last half hour before the party, so this poor thing had to come together in a matter of minutes. And yes, I know the coconuts are supposed to go under the leaves and not on top. But, you can still tell that it’s a palm tree, right?

I have to chuckle when I think that being so busy with baking has kept me from posting on my baking blog. Ah, irony. If I had worked just a tad less furiously on this thing, I might have been able to provide some “work in progress” photos. Alas, not so.

So… you wanna play a game?

Q: What has two legs, a weak stomach, and spends half the morning on the couch with a bowl of cereal?

A: Sugar Duchess in first trimester!

Yes, it’s true. We’ve got a little one coming in December! We are totally thrilled. But I’m afraid it has been quite nausea-inducing for me to spend much time in the kitchen lately. Thankfully, first trimester is over, so I think I’ll be back up and at ‘em for the next little while. Thanks for sticking with me!