baking

A whole lot of lovin’ is what we’ll be bringing, we’ll make you…orange?

wittychild

Whenever I have to deal with carrots (peeling, grating, chopping…anything that ensures my hands will be fairly covered in their juices) and am left to marvel at my Oompa Loompa palms, I’m reminded of the story of how Susan Dey ate so many carrots that her skin turned orange, creating problems during filming of The Partridge Family.

Another coworker is moving on to bigger and better things, and somehow I determined that his lovely parting box o’ cupcakes should be of the carrot variety.  How is it that I’ve had Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World for years, but always bypassed that particular recipe?  Time to change that!

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Just look at that dense, raisin-y, carrot-y goodness…mmm…..

These turned out really well for a first attempt, and gave us an answer to that ubiquitous question: “What’s your idea of a hot Saturday night?”

“Standing in the kitchen with the oven on during a heat wave.”

Go ahead – tell me I’m wrong! 🙂

baking

Hey, grab your bunny-hug! We’re heading to the LC for a two-four, then stopping for a double-double on the way home!

wittychild

Timbits are ten for a toonie!

I didn’t quite realize how many uniquely Canadian desserts there were until just a few days ago.  You’ve got your matrimonial cake, your Nanaimo bars, your beaver tails – which might not be as cruel as their name suggests, but in any case, aren’t exactly part of a balanced diet.

And lo, the humble butter tart became my baking project for the long weekend.  (This would be way more fun that studying, I knew it!)  I used the “Better than Butter Tarts” recipe from Sarah Kramer and Tanya Barnard’s How it All Vegan!, and I’m pretty darned pleased with how they came out.

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The recipe was soooo quick and simple.  The longest part was letting the raisins plump for 10 minutes before I could do much of anything else, but seriously?  So not a big deal when your payoff is tasty pastry.

My momma is a bona-fide butter tart aficionado, and had been more than willing to schlep me to the store to buy raisins and flaxseed.  She dubbed these “less cloyingly sweet than some of the others you get” (where?  Commercially?  From your recipe?), but “really, really good”.  I liked the addition of chopped walnuts on top.  They toasted up as the tarts baked, and added a hint of crunch to the whole deal.  I think this recipe is a keeper!

But before I resume hitting the books, a riddle: What does a Canadian gang look like?

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“Hey, tart.  Where do you think you’re going?”

baking

I “Hab” nothing else to say/Je n’ai rien d’autre à dire

wittychild

Note pour mes amis francophonies: Le <<bon mot>> par-dessus ne traduit pas à la français avec des bons résultats.  Mais cliquez-ici pour quelque chose bien amusant.

I’d like to point out right now that I don’t follow hockey, although I am certainly not above yanking on my dad’s Jean Beliveau jersey and snapping a picture to taunt one of my friends who’s a die-hard Boston fan.  (Although I suppose he had the last laugh this year.)  Truthfully, the only time I pay any attention is when Chicago is playing at home, but that’s only because I enjoy hearing Jim Cornelison sing the American national anthem.

But…oh…the things we do for love – and Father’s Day!

The cake was my mother’s idea.  “Hey, what if you did the cake to look like a hockey rink, with the Canadiens logo at centre ice?”  Right.  Because I can totally draw the Habs’ logo, and I totally know what a regulation hockey rink looks like.  Thank heavens for Google.  In the end, I came up with this:

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The nets were part of a soccer-themed cake-topper set, and are slightly disproportionate for a 9″ x 13″ rink, but I take what I can get.  I used a toothpick to trace the shape of the “C” in before filling it in with red icing, then adding the blue outline.

But wait!  There’s more!  Once I had decided how I was going to decorate it, I wanted something a little different for the cake part.  Don’t get me wrong – we all like chocolate, but it’s been done.

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I used a cherry chip cake mix, made with a can of ginger ale instead of the standard water/oil/eggs to keep things vegan, and then stirred in a few Wilton baking bits in blue.  Without the icing job, it would make a nifty 4th of July cake, but here it carries the theme through.

Rather than try to cover and hide it in the already-crowded fridge until today, we cut into it last night – my dad was absolutely tickled with his special dessert.

Happy Father’s Day!

General Sewing

How much hedge would a hedgehog hog, if a hedgehog could hog hedge?

wittychild

Wait…that’s not right…

Long time, no blog!  Work, class, two ridiculously convergent time-sensitive deadlines…aargh!  But: I completed my first non-cupcake project in ages and ages, and had to share.  For Mother’s Day, I made Mumsie a pair of hedgehog-printed boxer shorts.

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I hadn’t actually been near my sewing machine since the start of December, but this was a nice, easy project to get back into things.  I spied the fabric earlier this year at Fabricland and bought three metres on a whim with no real project in mind – this fit the bill perfectly!  I think this may be my new favourite pattern: cute and practical, with quick results.  Boxers for all!  (Say, wouldn’t that make Christmas gift-giving easy….)

I’m happy to report, she loved them and they have been in regular rotation since last weekend – hence, the creases in the photo.  And they go so perfectly with the awesome t-shirt I found for her on Mental Floss:

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I’ll try to be more faithful about updates.  But with Father’s Day/anniversaries/birthdays around the corner, there’s got to be something craftacular to do, right?

baking

I screw up this St. Patrick’s thing every year…

wittychild

Last year, it was Oreo cheesecake cookies, and now…this!

(OK, to be fair, I did inhale a wedge of key lime pie last night.  It was one of those two-in-one belated Pi Day/early St. Patrick’s Day dealies.  Even so…)

I think I’m going to call these “Favourite Daughter Cupcakes” because I’ve managed to cram my dad’s favourite things into one convenient package.

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If you’re a regular reader, you probably know which cookbook – and likely which recipe, too – I used for the cake.  If you’re an irregular reader (wait…what?), check out some of the other cupcake posts.  Therein lies the secret.

To summarize: chocolate cupcake, cored and filled with peanut butter buttercream, covered with a rich chocolate ganache that’s been spiked with peanut butter, and topped with a swirl of the filling.  Favourite daughter, indeed!

These are blissfully chocolate-peanut buttery, and can almost make me forget that there are fat snowflakes falling from the sky as I type.

Lousy Smarch weather…..

cooking

One…ONE Monte Cristo pocket…ah-ha-ha!

wittychild

The combination of a stat holiday and a nasty, blustery weather system made today a doubly great reason to stay in the house and stay warm.  And the chance to warm up the oven?  Ooh, can’t pass that up!

For Valentine’s Day, I got a new cookbook: Betty Goes Vegan by Annie and Dan Shannon.  This might seem a tad unromantic, but a) I had been coveting this book since I first heard about it, and b) it was from my parents, so really, something a little more, um, personal would just have been inappropriate.  And honestly, you can’t go wrong with a cookbook anyway.  The first recipe I saw that really jumped off the page at me was Monte Cristo pockets.  Why?  Not sure.  I was never a huge meat n’ cheese freak in my omnivorous days, but there was something about this recipe…

Get it? "Comte" = "Count". Ah-ha-ha!
Get it? “Comte” = “Count”. Ah-ha-ha!

OMG…I’m so glad I tried this!  I might cut back on either the time or temperature in the oven next time as my bottoms got a little overdone (on the bright side, I didn’t set off the smoke detector), but that’s such a minor little tweak.  And for reasons unclear to me, I had a ton of filling left over – probably enough for another full batch – so I’ll likely get my chance to try that out sooner than I thought.  Blackened bits aside, this pastry is, no joke, the flakiest, most amazing stuff ever!  I’m glad I ate lunch before starting in on these, or I wouldn’t have had a picture to post.

And now, alas, I only have four…four Monte Cristo pockets left…

(Ah-ha-ha!)

 

baking

Hut…hut…hike!

wittychild

I hate to use the “S”-word (I’m more of a Grey Cup gal myself), but I’m told [conspiratorial whisper] that there was a big football game on Sunday.  Say what?  I don’t know what it was all about, but it sure must have been super.  In any case, I was thrilled to be able to use my grass tip on something besides assorted Muppets.

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There’s not much to explain about these; they’re (of course) the basic chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, with a green-tinged vanilla buttercream.  The two most interesting things I learned from all of this:

1. Chocolate-covered almonds wobble something fierce when placed on a flat surface to pipe detailing onto them.  And Wilton’s decorating icing-in-a-tube is extremely stiff and awkward to work with, which is my penance for being lazy and not wanting to do two colours of my own icing.  (It – Wilton – doesn’t taste that great, either, and sticks to piping tips like cement even when run under hot water.)  Having a helper hold the last few steady for me was a huge boon to my creative process.  But I’m still using my own icing next time.

2. Speaking of assorted Muppets: I need to use my grass tip for actual grass more often.  A trusted member of my test audience thought at first glance that I had brought him a slightly deformed Oscar the Grouch to try.

But I have 289 days to perfect my technique before the Grey Cup…

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Birthday Quickie

wittychild

Ha!  You thought this was going to be something salacious, didn’t you?  Get your mind out of the gutter; this is a wholesome, family-friendly post.  Literally, actually, since it was my mom’s birthday the other day, and I’ve only just gotten around to posting pictures.

Since the birth-flower for January is the carnation, I snapped up this mini-kit when I saw it at my local needlework shop a few months ago, figuring it was a card just waiting to happen:

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The corally-pink card, although not exactly a match for the flowers, matches almost exactly the top I bought her.  She claims this was a deliberate theme; I claim coincidence.

But what’s a birthday without cake?  After all, you don’t really care for someone if you don’t bake them a birthday cake, yadda yadda, you’ve heard this before.  After drooling over pretty much all the cakes in Kris Holechek’s Have Your Cake and Vegan Too, I decided on the Almond Mocha Cake.  It’s like an almond mochaccino in cake form!

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Layers of moist almond cake with a rich chocolate ganache in between, and topped off with a coffee buttercream?  Yes, please!

We started the day with banana-split French toast, but that disappeared before I could get my camera…

And now, I’m off for a piece of cake…

baking

“I hope you all saved room, because I made your favourite dessert…

wittychild

…store-bought snack cakes!” – Marge Simpson, Homer’s Phobia

Seriously, whyyyyy did it take me so long to try making mock-Hostess/Fauxtess/cream-filled chocolate cupcakes?

Answer: because I had seen the recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance ages ago, and decided it looked like way too much work.  But it really wasn’t!  Okay, so I skipped a step and had my filling do double-duty as the squiggle medium as well, but even the coring, filling, and ganache-ing of the cupcakes wasn’t particularly onerous.

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The cupcake recipe is pretty much identical to the one in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, moist and chocolatey and wonderful, and I made a basic vanilla buttercream for inside and on top.  (For some reason, the Fluffy White Icing prescribed in VwaV didn’t taste like much to me, although my dad seemed to like it.  Weird.)

These came together really quickly, multiple steps considered, and taste way better than any chemical-filled Hostess special ever could.

And for the record: leftover cupcake cores dotted with frosting and dunked in ganache are a midafternoon snack to die for.