Tag: baking

baking

The Faux-stess with the Mostess – Birthday Edition

wittychild

What happened?  One minute I was basking in the glory that is a month off from any real grown-up responsibility, and the next thing I know: Wham!  I’m thrown headfirst into school, and all the assorted homework and studying that accompanies it.  I’m still not sure what happened to January.

My regular readers will be familiar with my Birthday Rule; that is, if you don’t make someone a homemade cake/cupcakes/pie/cookies/whatever, you don’t really care about them.  So, school craziness aside, I knew that last weekend I’d be whipping up something for my mom’s birthday.

I had toyed with the idea of a blue velvet redux, using a different recipe and significantly less food colouring than the last time, but my mom is one who, if I make marble cupcakes, will ask why there’s so much more white cake than chocolate.  So, chocolate it was.  My mock-Hostess cupcakes always go over so well, that I decided to try a layer-cake version.

Hostess Cake 1

That’s two layers of deep, dark chocolate cake (the basic chocolate cupcake from VCTOTW, doubled and baked in 8-inch round pans), with a generous layer of vanilla buttercream in between, and smothered in rich ganache.

Hostess Cake 2

All purtied up…

Hostess Cake 3

The Pac-Man shot. 🙂

The birthday girl loved it; I picked up some vanilla ice cream to go with it, just for her, and within a few days only a few crumbs were left.

baking

I want my mummy!

wittychild

I’ll keep this short, because who wants to read about cupcakes when they could be assembling last-minute Halloween costumes?  (Speaking of which: according to WordPress stats, people are finding this blog by searching “Dolores Haze costume”.  This makes my day in ways you cannot imagine.  I wish I didn’t already have a costume lined up myself; there are at least a couple of people who would appreciate the reference.)

But…following my last rant about overpriced festive bake kits at Target, I saw an equally overpriced kit at Chapters to make mummy cupcakes.  The kit made 12, and it cost $10.50.  And, okay, yes it came with candy eyes, but how important are those to the overall integrity of the finished product?  And do they really taste like much?  So I broke out my trusty chocolate cupcake recipe as well as that for buttercream icing, and made my own, no doubt tastier, version.

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I used a basketweave tip (Wilton #47, I think) to pipe on the bandages.  That was tricky!  I’m a big fan of symmetry and pattern, and to try to maintain a random order of bandage direction?  Killer!  The eyes are mini chocolate chips, and the mouth is red gel food colouring applied with a toothpick (my parents’ idea; before they suggested it, my mummies had a bit of a Hello Kitty vibe and no mouth to speak – ha! – of).

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(Yes, that’s my mummy holding my mummies.)

Have a safe and happy Halloween, everyone!

baking

Because black cake is nothing if not festive

wittychild

Ahhh….I love Halloween.  I might have mentioned that before, but it bears repeating.  This is an entire day where you’re expected to wear a costume and eat candy.  If television would air Technicolor-filmed musicals all day instead of horror flicks, it just might be the perfect day.  And I don’t let being an adult (ha!) with a career (ha!  ha!) stop me – I’m shameless, and will show up to work in costume even if I’m the only one in the whole office who’s dressed up.

While browsing the Halloween department at Target recently, I was a little disappointed.  Sure, Tar-zhay had some different costumes than WalMart (for which I have yet to come up with an adorable, French-sounding pronunciation), but their candy selection was rather mundane.  Same old, same old – and nary an Eat-More in sight.  (These are a precious, precious commodity, and I would trade my strictly hypothetical firstborn for a bag of the minis.)

Ah, but they did have some different food preparation products – juice blends with ghoulish names, a set of four different sprinkles in test tubes, some cake mixes.  One that caught my eye made an orange-and-black marble cake with purplish icing.  Cute.  The price?  $7.99.  Eight bucks for something I could do myself?  No way was I paying that kind of money!  So I came up with this:

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This is the basic marble recipe from…well, you know.  I used gel food colouring to get the batters just the right shades, and then proceeded to fill and swirl as usual.

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With purple icing!  Clearly, my marbling skills need work; this one looks mostly orange.

Now the only hurdle to clear is whether my test audience finds black cake appetizing or not.  Come on, it’s chocolate….

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!

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…..

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…