…oh, and cupcakes, too!
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Tag: dessert
Hut…hut…hike!
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.
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…
Birthday Quickie
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:
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!
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…
“I hope you all saved room, because I made your favourite dessert…
…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.
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.
Lemon + Raspberry = Yum!
Wouldn’t you know it, I’ve got myself a little tradition at work. I’m not sure how this went from being a one-off to a regular occurrence, but it seems now that whenever someone leaves (because of retirement or whatnot), they get sent on their way with a lovely gift-box of cupcakes from me.
I made lemon cupcakes with a raspberry-cream cheese frosting for my boss, whose last day before maternity leave was technically today. Since the office was closed for New Year’s Eve, though, I brought them in for her last week.
I was really happy with how they turned out…the flavours pair together very well, and they were such a nice change from the standard Christmas sweets that had been everywhere for the last month.
Evidently, I have a reputation as the Cupcake Girl, because I don’t even have to be present when the cupcakes are discovered. She showed up at my cube a half-hour after I had arrived and deposited my package: “Did you leave cupcakes on my desk?” Of course I did…who else would it be? 😉
Have a safe and happy New Year!
Home for Christmas
Right by the [bad word, bad word] skin of my [bad word] teeth…
I decided that for Christmas, my mother needed a cross-stitched picture of three kitties, to reflect ours. So, with little regard for how much time this might actually take, I set to work:
It was one of my goals for the year to complete a Peter Underhill pattern, since I keep buying them but not stitching them, so this was kind of a two-birds-with-one-stone deal.
I’m quite pleased with how it came out, and so glad I switched out the 14-count white aida that came in the kit for sparkly 28-count evenweave. I think the sparkles really add a festive touch. It’s not washed or anything, yet; I put in the final stitches at roughly 7:45 this morning. My mother is delighted, and is trying to decide whether she wants to frame it, make it up into a cushion cover…
I also got to carry on one of my favourite Christmas traditions: making homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast. I do all the prep the night before, including slicing them and placing them in the pan, then refrigerate overnight. The next morning, they just need to be proofed a tiny bit, and then baked.
The recipe is from Vegan Brunch by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, and couldn’t be simpler or tastier. This alone was worth the price of the book, and the buns have come to be eagerly anticipated. You need a bit of a sugar rush to open presents!
Merry Christmas!
A purr-fect start to the holiday season!
(Because I’m capable of domestic arts that aren’t just cupcake porn, doncha know…)
(But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of that!)
Every year, one of the no-kill cat shelters in town has an open house, sort of a fund-raising/awareness/adoption drive. They hold a bake sale, too, and put out the call for people to bring in baking to help the cause. I try to make something tasty each year, and one year I recall phoning in sick to work so I could stay home and bake a few dozen cupcakes (I’ve since improved my time-management skills).
I wanted to do something just a little different this year. Baking is fine, but homemade treats grow stale quickly, and what if they don’t sell? Isn’t there something a little more tangible I could do? Then it hit me: what about a couple of cute half-aprons? They make the perfect hostess gift, and can be tied on long after the cookies have turned dry and crumbly. I used fun faux-retro prints to keep things merry and bright, and had at ‘er.
To make them, I measured an apron of my mother’s and drafted up a pattern of sorts. They were really simple – I think I spent more time steaming my fingers with the iron than sewing – and generously-sized. I’m not a skinny girl, but the ties wrap all the way around my waist back to the front. The whole project would have been a great exercise in de-stashing, too (besides helping the homeless kitties), if I hadn’t gone out and bought fabric specifically to make these. Next year…
I even made little tags with care instructions:
But, you know, they did ask for baking and not for cute housewares, so I did bring something edible, too. My world city inner-circle famous Cuban Lunch candies, packaged and ready for giving, or just for enjoying yourself:
Hopefully I’ll help them raise a few dollars to help the kitties…what a nice start to the holiday season!
There’s a little fun in every bite
Remember my theory that if you don’t make homemade birthday dessert of some sort for someone, you don’t really care about them? Well, a while ago, knowing that a certain someone had a birthday coming up, I asked him what his absolute favourite dessert was. You know the one I mean – you could be in a restaurant, totally stuffed from a huge dinner, but when this rolls by on the dessert cart, you have to have it.
Why ask him so far in advance? I wanted to give myself time to locate/perfect/veganize a recipe if necessary. If he had replied, “Chocolate soufflé” or, “There’s this really awesome cake that my mother used to make – I don’t think it has an English name; my copy of the recipe is in its original German”, I was going to be prepared, darn it! You can only imagine my surprise when, after mulling it over for a few seconds, he offered, “You know, I’m kind of partial to vanilla. Not a big fan of chocolate, but there’s something about vanilla.”
Don’t get me wrong; I totally understand the appeal that is the blank canvas of an unadulterated vanilla ice cream cone. It’s simple, pure, and wonderful. But vanilla for a birthday cake just seemed so…uninspired. (And frankly, not much of a challenge, but this isn’t about me.) Still, if it was vanilla he wanted, it was vanilla he was going to get. I only wished there was some way I could jazz it up a little bit. A week or so later, it hit me: homemade funfetti cake! He’d still get all the vanilla flavour, but with a far more celebratory look! (It probably goes without saying that this is the basic vanilla recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, my staple for all things delicious and cupcake-y.)
A little blue raspberry icing to seal the deal and make them look a little more manly (?).
A closeup. Besides looking manly, the blue frosting complemented the blue ice cream cones on the liners.
The inside! The coloured-sugar sequins I bought to use as confetti melted during baking for all the colour without the crunch.
All packed up and ready to deliver to the birthday boy!
By now, you might be asking, “Yo, Witty Child, what’s up with your cake toppers?”
I chose Gummi Bears because the birthday boy likes them (this is about him, after all), but also because I saw this cake at Marble Slab Creamery and thought it was pretty:
(But soooo not worth the cost, or the dairy/cholesterol factor.)
Oh, and the Saran-Wrapped coins? This particular birthday was the double nickel, so two 2012 five-cent pieces seemed appropriate.
That old black [cat] magic has me in its spell….
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 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!
Son of Cookie Monster
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…
The Witty Child 