Tag: chocolate

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

“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.

baking

That old black [cat] magic has me in its spell….

wittychild

While most crafty/cook-y bloggers are no doubt posting homemade cornucopia centrepieces or locavore turkey and stuffing recipes this weekend, I decided to bypass Thanksgiving entirely in favour of Halloween, which is frankly far more fun.

From the instant I first saw the recipe for Black Cat Cookies in Hannah Kaminsky’s Vegan Desserts, I knew I had to make them.  Because…OMG…cats and cookies?  That’s pretty much a whole-package dessert right there.  And yeah, I realize it’s just a jazzed-up chocolate cookie, but I loved the inclusion of black cocoa powder to get that deep colour.

I vant to suck your blood...

I probably should have used a metal cookie cutter instead of a plastic one with little details etched right in, since I found the dough just a tad sticky and difficult to use with the cutter I chose (my fault – I added more liquid than the recipe called for when my dough wasn’t coming together as nicely as I had hoped).  But any headache I may have had while rolling and cutting paid off later when I didn’t have to frost-in any features.

Okay, so they’re not quite black, but a deep brown.  But I found a no-frosting-necessary way to make them look darker:

Flip the background fabric around!  Score one for innovation!

Happy Thanksgiving!

baking

Son of Cookie Monster

wittychild

Last week, I celebrated my two-year anniversary at my job.  That’s right: for 731 days, give or take, I’ve been delighting and entertaining my coworkers with my very presence in the office.  Okay, maybe not.  And not that anyone else would have remembered the date, but I wanted to do something just a little festive.  I had some extra time one evening and decided that mini cupcakes were in order.

The conversation went something like this:

“I thought I’d do vanilla cupcakes with a pink frosting.  Maybe I can use some maraschino cherry juice for flavour.  Ooh, or that Dr. Pepper stuff I got!”  (At this point, I was picturing something all princess-y.)

“Oh.  But your chocolate ones are so good, have such a nice flavour.”

“Okay.  Sure.  I can do chocolate with a cherry or Dr. Pepper frosting.”

“Why don’t you do blue raspberry frosting again?  It tasted really nice.”

Okay, so I did the blue raspberry frosting again.  (It worked so nicely with the pale blue liners you can’t really see for the chocolate cake.)  I thought I was smart by dissolving my drink crystals in the almond milk before adding it to the frosting, but they didn’t provide me with a sufficiently intense flavour or colour, so I added a smidge of raspberry extract and some blue food colouring.  Maybe it was the addition of the extract, but it had almost a blue-bubblegum flavour this time.  They might lack the characterization of their Cookie Monster predecessors, but they hold a certain charm nonetheless.

My coworkers loved them!  Between 8:00 and 10:00, they managed to polish off 30 of the little suckers.

I still have to try Dr. Pepper frosting, though…

baking

“C” is for “cookie”

wittychild

The Oscar the Grouch cupcakes I made a few weeks back went over well with everyone who tried one – and I was so excited by the way the grass tip created his fur.  I couldn’t wait to try other Sesame Street characters!  I was pretty sure that Cookie Monster was going to be next on my list, because I’ve always felt a strange kinship with him.  My grammar may be better than his, but honestly, the reason I learned how to bake was to feed my cookie addiction.

While searching the bulk food store for some chickpea flour, I happened upon bins of flavoured drink crystals, including a vibrant blue-raspberry.  It was fate.  Yes!  Now I absolutely had to buy some, and mix them into my frosting instead of/in addition to blue food colouring, and I had to make Cookie Monster cupcakes post-haste!  This was going to be great!

Not, perhaps, a spitting image, but certainly recognizable.  My fatal mistake (I realize now) was adding in the drink crystals along with some food colouring after I had mixed all the other frosting ingredients and already had a nice, fluffy buttercream.  I had thought because the icing was “wet” – as in, not yet dried and hardened – that the crystals would dissolve.  They did not, at least not entirely.  And they might be miniscule, but that didn’t stop them from clogging up my grass tip.  After six incredibly frustrating cupcakes, including several attempts to clear and re-clear the holes in the tip using a toothpick or just unscrewing the coupler and rinsing the silly thing out with water, I got fed up, switched tips, and did this:

It may look and feel like a cop-out, sure, but I’ve always liked blue-and-brown as a colour combination, so it’s not that bad.  They’re still whimsical, just in a non-licensed way.

Oh, and in case you were curious: the drink crystals did impart a lovely blue-raspberry flavour that is noticeable without being overpowering.  I’ve learned from my mistake, though, and next time they’re being dissolved in the almond milk first before being mixed in.

baking

A birthday without a cake…

wittychild

…is like pillaging without burning?  No, that can’t be right…

But I do have a theory that if I don’t make somebody a birthday cake (note: cupcakes, cheesecakes, and pies are all perfectly acceptable alternatives), I don’t truly care about them.  So for my dad’s birthday a few days ago, I made him the Peanut Butter Chocolate Dream Cake from Kris Holechek’s Have Your Cake and Vegan Too.

It’s a fairly standard chocolate cake with a peanut butter filling in between the layers and topped off with a chocolate-peanut butter ganache – garnish as desired.  The recipe was easy to follow, and the cake easy to assemble; if and when I do it again, the only thing I’ll do differently is grease-and-cocoa the pans instead of greasing-and-flouring them, to avoid that flour residue (since it’s not frosted all over, it does kinda show).

And yes, I probably will make it again.  Not only did the birthday boy love it, but it went over extremely well with my omnivorous coworkers, too.  Such is the power of chocolate and peanut butter together.

baking

Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a mousse out of my hat!

wittychild

I desperately wanted to bake this weekend – had a serious kitchen itchin’ going on – but it was so hot.  To make a long story short: yes, there is air conditioning in the house.  I absolutely hate it; it’s a battle royale over whether it goes on at all, and so its use is restricted to those days with crazy, 40-degree humidex.  I figure, I freeze my tuchus off six months out of the year or so, and so I can suck it up for a few steamy days because come February I’ll be wistfully reminiscing, “Remember how hot it was in July?”

Baking wasn’t going to happen unless I felt like waking up early and starting while the grass was still vaguely dewy.  So what about a cool, refreshing dessert instead?

I took the basic recipe for Chocolate Mousse Topping from (where else?) Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and added two teaspoons of raspberry extract to the works to give it a twist.  This ain’t your grandma’s Jell-o pudding!  And thanks to Pyrex bowls and the microwave,  I didn’t even have to turn on the stove to melt the chocolate in a double boiler!  It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

I have a hunch – but haven’t tried it yet – that this mixture would be great frozen in popsicle moulds for creamy tofudgsicles, too.  The dollar store is definitely on my must-go list.

Summertime…and the livin’ is easy.

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Paws up for birthday cake!

wittychild

What is it with Margaret Sherry and cute cat designs?  While flipping through a back issue of Cross Stitcher magazine on New Year’s Eve (is that a debaucherous evening or what?), I found the perfect design to turn into a card for my mom’s birthday.  While the red velvet pancakes were charring cooking, she opened a rather unassuming white envelope to find this staring back at her:

I used 18-count fabric instead of 14 as called for by the magazine to get it to fit in the card, and used random colours that looked close enough to those on the model – perfect way to use what I had laying around.  I love the concerned look on his face, and promised to use fewer candles on her birthday cake – if only by one.

(Please excuse the “arty” shot.)

I don’t think the cake could have been any simpler to make: a double batch of the basic chocolate cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, divided between two round layer pans, topped with a coffee-and-Kahlua’ed version of the chocolate buttercream frosting from the same.  Because I had serious doubts about my ability to wield a tube of decorating gel, I had the foresight to trace the words onto the top using a toothpick, and then follow the lines.  Hey, it may not be terribly skillful, but it worked.

And now that it’s all over, I get to breathe easy again, at least until Mother’s Day.