Category: baking

baking

Where the air is free, but the cupcakes will cost you

wittychild

There’s something about the last week of June that just brings with it a certain magic.  For kids, school is almost out for the summer (and I freely admit to watching “Kamp Krusty” the other day and bemoaning that I no longer get to enjoy that last-day euphoria).  For adults, the long weekend is imminent; an extra day off work to celebrate your country with barbeques and street fairs.

In my dad’s case, he got the best of both worlds, since he decided to retire at the end of June.  I sighed, and told him what a lucky bum he was: it’s like graduating, only without the worries of university in the fall or finding a job.  Since he first announced his intentions, it’s been a running joke in our household that he’s going to turn into Oscar Leroy – with all this time on his hands, he’ll find all sorts of little things to complain about and generally become a crotchety old man.  Naturally, I thought this momentous occasion required some sort of festive dessert, although “crotchety old man” is really hard to convey in cupcake form.  (Just for kicks, try Googling “Oscar Leroy cupcakes”.  They don’t exist.)  So I did the next best thing:

It’s an Oscar, he’s grouchy…it’s not such a stretch, really!

I used the basic chocolate cupcake recipe (love it!) from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and made a massive batch of buttercream to do the fur and eyebrows.  I finally got to use my grass tip!  I had bought a tube of black icing from Wilton to do the mouth and pupils, but when I went to do the first mouth I realized that, colour-wise, it was difficult to tell the icing from the cupcake, and so just left the mouth unfrosted.  Note: the eyes and tongue are both marshmallow and therefore are not vegan, but I was under time constraints and this was the path of least resistance.  If you have a little more time, the frosting could be further split and coloured to pipe on eyes and tongue.

My dad loved them!  So much so, in fact, that he was inspired to wear his Oscar the Grouch t-shirt the next day.  Fashion inspiration from cupcakes…strange.

Up next….Cookie Monster cupcakes – a Muppet after my own heart!

P.S. Happy Canada Day, everyone!

baking

Free food always tastes better!

wittychild

I was sitting at work yesterday, minding my own business, when I thought I heard someone say “rhubarb” in the general vicinity of the kitchen.  Has Paul brought in his tasty rhubarb cake again? I wondered, and began a stealthy, nonchalant trek to see what was going on.  He had brought it in a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted in on the ground floor if there was more.  There was no rhubarb cake to be had, alas, but what there was, was free rhubarb (or deconstructed rhubarb cake, if you will).  In fact, its purveyor attempted to send me home with the entire garbage bag full that he had brought in.  I demurred, but decided that a few stalks  – or, ahem, sixteen – couldn’t hurt.  I had never cooked with rhubarb before (although I do enjoy eating it), but getting tons of it for free was like a carte blanche to try something new.

You’d be surprised how difficult it is to find a rhubarb recipe (that’s not pie, because it’s hot out and I’d prefer cooler temperatures to fiddle with pastry) in a vegan cookbook.  Hello!  It’s not kumquats, or something equally exotic, but a springtime farmer’s-market staple.  Fortunately, Hannah Kaminsky’s Vegan Desserts came through with Spring Fling muffins.  And since I had the day off today, I was up and baking first thing in the morning while it was still reasonably cool.

Yum!  I love the streusel-y topping, and the little extra crunch that the sugar gives.  The recipe said it made 12, but I’m not sure what sort of oversized muffin cups the author used, because I got 15 nicely-sized muffins out of the deal.  (Not complaining…now I have more to share with an eager test audience.)

I thought the watermelon cupcake liners were a nice touch, as their main purpose seems to be to send mixed signals about what kind of fruit is inside.

baking

You can’t spell “fibre” without… “brief”?

wittychild

This is probably the kind of thing that could get my citizenship revoked, but I hate Tim Horton’s.  Oh, sure, they used to be good, back when their donuts were actually baked on-site, fresh, in each individual store, before these dark days of par-baked pastries that are frozen and sent to the stores to be “finished off”; back when they focused on being a half-decent coffee and donut shop instead of expanding their lunch menu to include sandwiches that probably taste better from Subway, salty-yet-flavourless soups, and institutional-sized vats of (shudder) beef lasagna casserole.  Unfortunately, flash-frozen donuts and subpar lunch items seem to be the order of the day, and I no longer have any interest in them.  Also, their coffee smells like cat pee (and I live with both cats and Tim’s drinkers, so trust me on this one).  But I digress.

I had some oat bran left in the cupboard from my last adventure with the Applesauce-Oat Bran muffins from Veganomicon, and thought I ought to bake some muffins this weekend.  Last time, I made them pretty much according to the recipe, and added raisins.  This time, I had planned to add some dried cranberries, when my mom reminded me that there were oodles of fresh blueberries in the fridge.  Lightbulb moment!  What about a cranberry-blueberry-bran muffin, much like the ones found at the above-mentioned national treasure of a coffee chain?

Ha!  Tim’s can suck it!  Not only did these come out beautifully, they have almost half the calories of one of those flash-frozen abominations (based on a rough calculation using calorie counts for my individual ingredients, divided by twelve muffins).  I followed the recipe for the most part, increasing the cinnamon by 1/2 tsp and swapping out the cardamom for 1/2 tsp ground ginger.  I also added just a touch of molasses to give them a deeper flavour, and then folded in 1/3 cup dried cranberries and 1/2 cup fresh blueberries.  Now that’s a satisfying 174 calories!

But don’t worry – I haven’t gone totally health-food on everyone.  It was my turn for Bake Day at work last week; check out the margarita cupcake redux:

The minis are so cute; the public loves them; I may well spend the rest of my days making margarita cupcakes to slake the desires of friends and co-workers.

baking

You drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola…

wittychild

…c-o-l-a, cola…

This week’s baking endeavour was inspired by The Brown Eyed Baker, and her recipe for Cherry Coke Float Cupcakes.  My take on this is a somewhat modified version of her recipe; besides the no-eggs thing, whipped topping doesn’t really lend itself well to storing completed cupcakes, so I made a maraschino cherry juice-laced buttercream frosting to help carry the cherry theme through.

They turned out well, meaning that my beta test group is still alive and walking around – and technically, they’re fine; everything a cupcake should be – but I’m somewhat disappointed by the lack of Coke flavour, considering there’s Coke in both the cake batter and a light glaze underneath the frosting that served only to make my cooling racks and kitchen table sticky.

I suppose Coca-Cola syrup, the kind they use for fountain drinks, might provide a more concentrated flavour, or cola extract, if such a thing exists; however, if I do something like these again, I could see making my basic chocolate cupcake recipe instead and turning them into bona fide Black Forest cupcakes.  But…as a sweet dessert, they’re perfectly acceptable.

Happy Victoria Day, everyone!

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Happy Mother’s Day!

wittychild

This year has been a far cry from last year’s adding French knots and framing on Sunday morning.  For once, I actually came prepared for Mother’s Day.

Besides the towel that I posted last weekend, I stitched up a little card for Mumsie:

It was a free kit that came with a recent issue of Cross Stitcher magazine.  The kit included googly eyes that looked freaky-deaky (the mama koala looked merely surprised; the baby looked like a strung-out Keane kid), so I added French knots to give a somewhat more natural look.

And you can’t have Mother’s Day without dessert, can you?

This is a variation on the raw strawberry cheesecake from The Post Punk Kitchen.  I made the filling as per the recipe, but used the vanilla cookie crumb crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky instead.  I’m not normally a cheesecake fan, but this wasn’t bad – light and mousse-ish, with a nice strawberry flavour.

The cake, incidentally, made a lovely finish to our breakfast of cocoa-Kahlua pancakes from Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites.  Dense and chewy, they were like eating brownies for breakfast.  Yum!

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

I shake de tree.

wittychild

Sshhhh!  This is a top-secret sneak preview of a little something I whipped up for Mother’s Day, so think of this as an advance screening.

You may recall that a couple of years ago I embroidered a Swedish Chef towel for my mother’s birthday.  He still gets a lot of use, but it’s seemed to me that he could use a companion towel – most of our other tea towels come in pairs, except for the poor, lonely Chef.  So, bork-bork-bork, I decided to embroider the squirrel design from Sublime Stitching’s Forest Friends pack.

At this point, you’re probably questioning the connection.  Why not another Muppet, or something more kitchen-y?  Well, it all started like this: the very first episode of The Muppet Show that I remember seeing was the one guest-starring John Denver, with a camping theme.  In this one, the Swedish Chef has traded his kitchen for a little set-up in the woods, and has decided to make squirrel stew.  I can’t do it justice; just watch the video.

Now that it all makes a little more sense, on with the towel:

Here it is, posing on the oven door.

A better view of the stitching.  It’s done mostly in stem stitch with the little tufty fur bits in backstitch, and a hint of satin stitch to keep it interesting.

I also got some baking done!  (Although this is not for Mother’s Day.)  Behold, the Applesauce-Oat Bran Muffins from Veganomicon:

Truly, I have no future with the Muppets, as I didn’t haphazardly fling a single ingredient while making these.  🙂

baking

Drat this cupcake top!

wittychild

Questions that get really annoying after a while:

1. Where do you get your protein?

Actually, I daresay that most people who ask this are just genuinely curious and eager to learn, but after the twentieth time you’ve fielded this question…aargh.  Ever hear of legumes, whole grains, soy products?  Because I eat a well-rounded diet that consists of more than just french fries and Dr. Pepper, I’m fine.  Trust me.

2. Aren’t a muffin and a cupcake the same thing?

I can see where you might think that, but nooooo.  Technically speaking, a muffin is a quickbread, while a cupcake is just a small cake.  The mixing and baking instructions do vary somewhat.  Aren’t muffins also inherently healthier?  Well, no.  They can be – I’ve never seen a bran cupcake – but I made a batch of each yesterday and each recipe called for the same amount of sugar.  A quick visual breakdown:

This is a Mocha Chip Muffin courtesy of a recipe from the Post Punk Kitchen.  Unlike a cupcake, its top is slightly more domed (to wit, I’ve never heard anyone complain of the cupcake top protruding over the waistband of their jeans).

This is a variation on the Golden Vanilla Cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.  Its top is flatter, and, if you’re looking for a very basic way to tell them apart, it’s frosted, whereas muffins generally are not.  I’ve been known to eat naked cupcakes if I’m too lazy to make frosting, but really, it’s a cake.  It should be frosted.  Come on.

So remember, kids: flat n’ frosted = cupcake.  Round n’ naked = muffin.  Class dismissed.

baking

The lovers, the dreamers, and me.

wittychild

After a lengthy two-week-ish cupcake sabbatical, it should only make sense that I’d be up to my old tricks again.

But with a twist!

I’ve long been intrigued by the rainbow cakes (“Oh, that explains the title!”) that proliferate various DIY-type sites around the internet.  They looked perhaps a little fiddly, albeit not terribly difficult, and ooh…colourful!  It was a cool, cloudy, day today, and I decided that a little colour would improve things immeasurably.  With my trusty copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World – the Golden Vanilla Cupcakes recipe, if anyone’s trying this at home – and a few bottles of food colouring, I came up with these (and stained my thumb yellow in the process):

You can see their rainbow goodness right through the liners!

With a slight drizzling of icing, peeled and ready to eat.

You knew there had to be a cross-section, right?

The trickiest part was getting equal colour distribution.  One-sixth of a cupcake recipe doesn’t yield nearly as many generous spoonfuls as you might think, and the first seven or eight wound up with way more purple than the last few.  I tried to amend my spooning technique with the other five colours, but that didn’t quite work out.  I was initially bummed about that, but now…nah.  It just means that each and every one is unique.

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

So Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny walk into a bar…

wittychild

Wait.  What?

Okay, so I’m not insanely early with this, I swear.  Just kinda, sorta four months late.  I think my inner monologue started something like this (perhaps abridged for the sake of time and space): “Oh, boy, I love doing Mill Hill beaded kits.  They’re so quick and cute, and if I start stitching now I’ll have this finished in plenty of time for Christmas…All right, now that I’ve got the stitching finished, all that’s left is to add the beads.  Ooh, they’ll twinkle nicely when this is hanging on the Christmas tree….Oh, well [bad word]!  There’s a bead stuck on my needle!  Hmm, maybe if I try pushing it back off the way it came…nope…”

One of the red beads got stuck (as in, super-stuck) on my beading needle.  Right over the eye.  I could neither slide it over the eye and down to its rightful place on the ornament nor slide it back off.  Considering that at this point I had already completed most of the beading and had, oh, three red beads to go, I was considerably unimpressed by this development.  So I calmly and rationally did what any psychologically normal person would do: stuffed the entire works into a drawer to be ignored until some to-be-determined point in the future when I felt like dealing with it.

A few weeks ago, I happened to bitterly mumble something about “that [bad word] bead”, to which my mom replied, “Why don’t you just take a pair of pliers and crush it?  You do have extras, right?”  Genius!  So, yesterday I took a pair of pliers and crushed the sodding little thing to bits, whereupon I cheerfully resumed my otherwise pleasant little project.  Here it is, with one of my mom’s potted plant-like things standing in for a Christmas tree.  Hey, foliage is foliage:

It’s called “Kitty’s Gift”, and I can see now that I need to trim the backing paper on it…but I’ve still got eight months or so.  She looks rather like my youngest cat, too.

Gratuitous cat shot:

(Yes, the cat, I got dressed up in time for Christmas.  The tree, not so much.)

Also on my list of Easter weekend homemakery, I made a pie from scratch for the first time.  Well, the crust is from scratch, at least.  I didn’t want to go to all the trouble of doing a scratch filling only to find out that the crust was going to be inedible, but…next time!  I used the Buttery Double Crust recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, and dumped a can of peach-passionfruit filling in between.  The edge of the crust turned out a little lumpy and imperfect, but I’m still satisfied for a first attempt:

My Pennsylvania RR Peach Passionfruit Pie.  One of the pies in the book shows a crust with little stars cut out; I happened to have a small locomotive cookie cutter handy so used that instead.

I could use more four-day weekends.  I get so much more done around the house than I do at work.  🙂

baking

Say it with baked goods

wittychild

I’m afraid I don’t have a terribly exciting story this time.  A gentleman I know very generously supplied me with four 1:160 scale automobiles from his personal stash.  I was extremely grateful, and decided to…say it with baked goods.  A very vocal peanut gallery was rooting for the cappuccino cupcakes from (you guessed it) Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, which I prettied up with swirls of mocha buttercream and chocolate-covered espresso beans.

Although I’m not a huge fan of Michael’s, there is no denying that they stock some spiffy cupcake boxes.  The recipient was delighted with his unexpected sweets, and I had an excuse to bake…win-win!

(And yes, I do craft/bake/produce other things besides cupcakes, I swear!)