Tag: food

baking

Because it’s 2016

wittychild

I should preface this by saying that back before the federal election last October, I had had visions of baking cupcakes inspired by each of the three major parties, and holding an informal “election” at work.  Life and stuff got in the way, and it never happened.  (That’s okay; I think this was fueled primarily by a latent desire of mine to make Harvey Wallbanger cupcakes, dubious motivation at best.)  Fast-forward six months, and with the victor clearly apparent, I had my work cut by 2/3.  Score one for procrastination!

Some time ago, I had tried the Black Velvet Cupcake recipe in Hannah Kaminsky’s Vegan Desserts.  It was a neat idea, using blackberry puree for colour and flavour not normally found in pedestrian red velvet recipes, but didn’t work so well in its execution.  The blackberries commercially available in grocery stores taste like absolutely nothing, yielding black-ish, flavourless cakes.

For whatever reason, a thought had been brewing for the past few weeks: why not substitute raspberries for the blackberries, and have an all-natural red velvet without all the Red #40?

Red Velvet 1Red Velvet 2

Clearly, Red #40 exists for a reason, because these don’t quite rock the vivid crimson I was hoping for.  However (and this is a big however), the raspberry puree pairs wonderfully with the hint of cocoa for a chocolate-raspberry dessert that doesn’t taste like sugary Torani syrup.

It just goes to show: Better is always possible.

baking, cooking

Do not touch Willie. Good advice.

wittychild

I have just this to say: lousy Smarch weather!  Things were melting and thawing, darn it, and then whammo, enough snow on March 16 to make things look distinctly Christmassy.  Oh, I’ll admit, it was pretty, but getting snow in my shoes walking through the parking lot to work?  Not so much fun.

Smarch

That’s okay.  I keep telling myself it will melt.  It will melt.

What better way to stave off snow-induced shock than with a hearty vegetarian chili and hot biscuits?

chili1

This is the Vegetarian Chickpea Chili from Sweet Potato Chronicles, and oh, my word.  Now, I haven’t eaten meat-based chili in forever, but in my totally out-of-touch opinion, the pearl barley gives it this lovely, meaty, chewy texture.  It definitely provides a fun twist on the standard cans-of-beans vegetarian chilis.  This recipe is super-hearty, and doubles wonderfully to feed a small army.

With miso in my fridge for the first time since I can remember, I had to make a batch of the Bettah Chettah Biscuits from The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes by Kris Holechek.

chili2

Crispy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside…it doesn’t get much better than that!

(Kinda seems like a fair trade-off for the snow, no?)

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Happy Birthday from the Muskrat

wittychild

I know I’ve disappeared for the last month – January seems to have gotten away from me, but I was quite pleased with myself for having been able to post at least one handmade/home-baked item per month last year, and had no intention of letting my streak disappear!

My mom celebrated a birthday recently, and those of you who follow me regularly know my Birthday Rule.  Obviously there was going to be a homemade cake of some kind; it just took me a while to decide which kind.  I had contemplated tiramisu (vanilla cake, coffee, Kahlua, chocolate shavings) in all its adult glory, but finally decided I needed something chocolate-based.  No matter how fancy I get, she always seems to like my plain chocolate cake/cupcakes best of all.  I got the idea to make a chocolate buttercream frosting laced with raspberry syrup (the latte kind, not the pancake kind), with fresh raspberries for garnish.

Cake 1

Cake 2

But the true stroke of genius, in my obviously completely unbiased opinion, was to place some raspberries on top of the bottom layer once it had been frosted.  It reminded me of some of the fruit tortes from store bakeries, and adds a really nice bit of flavour and texture where one might not expect it.

Cake 3

I also had the perfect birthday card in mind: a Margaret Sherry illustration from The World of Cross Stitching a few months back.  It features a sweet little mouse presenting his hedgehog friend with a birthday cake.

Hedgehog Mouse Card

When I showed it to one of the other party guest, he commented, “Aw, look at the cute little muskrat!”  I’m not sure he was joking.

Also, update on my grammar hoop: I finally got to give it to its intended recipient this week, and he loves it.  He’s displayed it proudly at work, only to have one of his coworkers ask him: “Do you really do it silently?”  Maybe not always…

cooking

Who needs the Good Humour man?

wittychild

I did this a couple of weeks ago and only just downloaded the picture from my camera…oops!

Back in June, I scored a Cuisinart ice cream maker at a garage sale for $30.  Sweet!  And then…it sat in the basement for a couple of months, occasionally being moved if I needed access to something under/behind it.  I understand now why I never bought one before: it’s a bit of a one-trick pony, and takes up space (oh, the space!) when not in use.

While flipping through Hannah Kaminsky’s Vegan a la Mode, I found the perfect recipe to break in my new treasure: double chocolate fudge chunk.  Only I decided to leave the chunks out.  Why waste time making chunks if the base itself wasn’t going to work out?

IMG_0608

Well, it did, so darn it, I cheated myself out of chunks!  It was quite a simple recipe, and used both cocoa powder and melted semi-sweet chocolate for an extra rich flavour.  A single scoop makes a perfectly decadent mini-dessert.  And now that I’ve got my feet wet, more involved recipes await!

Thanks for looking!

baking

Cookies for Cats!

wittychild

Well…you might not want to actually feed these to your feline friends, but….

One of the local no-kill shelters had an open house and bake sale last weekend to raise some much-needed funds.  (They do this twice a year – last year, I baked Tiger Blondies for them.)  I knew I wanted to make something to help out again this year, and even booked a day off work to do so, but it took me a while to decide on a recipe.  As luck would have it, my mom had made these wicked monster cookies a couple of weeks before that yielded the perfect oversized-but-chewy snack, and she was willing to contribute to the cause the half-bags of mini M&Ms and mini Reese’s Pieces she had left over.  Sold!

meowster1

I packaged them in some cupcake boxes I had had laying around for ages, and did up snappy labels in Word.  Some co-ordinating Hello Kitty stickers sealed the deal (so to speak), and voila: a sextet of fund-raising yumminess.

meowster2

Thanks for looking!

baking

Any time is a good time for cupcakes…

wittychild

Last week, I decided that I hadn’t baked cupcakes in a while, and it was high time to change that.  And just in case I needed a reason, it was my cat’s birthday – according to the official Humane Society paperwork, which may or may not be all that accurate.

In any case, I brought out my trusty chocolate cake recipe from VCTOTW, and gave then a kitty-centric decorating job, since I had some fondant left over from my dad’s birthday cake.  As one of my professional-baker friends noted, fondant lasts practically forever, and with a little kneading is good as new.  Suddenly, buying a whole box of the stuff for a few little cutouts doesn’t sting so much.

20140903_143722

That’s blue raspberry frosting, by the way.  I can’t resist anything blue raspberry.  And, as my mother noticed, if you turn the cupcake 90° to the left (or your head 90° to the right), the cat turns into a bunny of sorts, like one of those bizarre optical illusions.

20140903_143806

The birthday girl was mildly intrigued, until she determined they were non-fishy in nature.  “Thanks a lot, Ma.”

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Take me right back to the track, Jack!

wittychild

Where does the time go?  One day, I was stitching up Christmas ornaments, and now, poof!  Finals, summer birthdays, that feeling of irritation that occurs when you upgrade your operating system only to find out that none of your (admittedly embarrassingly rudimentary) Windows XP software will run on Windows 8.1….

But I digress.

My dad celebrated a birthday a few weeks back, and in keeping with my Birthday Cake Rule*, I knew I had to come up with something good.  I had seen this cake on the Brown Eyed Baker some time ago and had been wanting to try it for a while.  Here’s my take:

traincake1

traincake2

Since my dad is just a wee bit (ha!) older than the BEB’s birthday boy, I passed on the rainbow cake in favour of something just a little more adult.

traincake3

This is my modification of the basic chocolate cupcake recipe from…wait for it…Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.  It’s rich and moist without being too sweet, nice and light, and goes down easy.  Absolutely worth skipping a half-day of classes to make!

I also took a break from needling away at the rather large needlepoint project that’s been occupying my leisure time to stitch him a card.  I saw the pattern in an issue of The World of Cross Stitching, and he rather reminded me of my parents’ cat.

morkandcard

*The Birthday Cake Rule, for the uninitiated: If you really love someone, you’ll make them a birthday cake, or pie, or cookies, or other dessert of choice, from scratch.  None of this store-bakery sheet-cake stuff.

baking

Bake a walk on the wild side…

wittychild

Corniest title for a post ever?  Mmmmaybe.  But bear with me; it’s not as inappropriate as it may seem at first blush.

A local no-kill cat shelter was having a bake sale/garage sale/general fundraising event this weekend, and I wanted to bake something for them, as always.  The scheduling appeared to be a bit of an issue, though: last week was crazy, with attendance-mandatory groupwork classes, presentations, four separate tests, and assignments due that had to be handed in as a hard copy like this were 1995 or something.  This was going to make taking a day off to bake cookies a little awkward – fortunately, tests got moved up, classes got more or less cancelled…and suddenly I had nothing preventing me from making Friday my baking day.

A couple of weeks ago, while rifling through a folder of clipped-out recipes, I had happened upon a simple blondie recipe that had been lifted from Canadian Living.  The original recipe called for making a caramel drizzle and, well, drizzling it on the blondies once they had cooled sufficiently.  So simple, and so, so good!  We discovered, however, that after a couple of days (yes, they managed to last that long!) the caramel drizzle kind of absorbed into the blondie.  It gave them a nice sheen, and still tasted ah-maze-ing, but lacked that 3D “pop” I wanted.  I considered possible alternatives before it hit me: since this is for a cat shelter, why not take my inspiration from their larger jungle cousins?

And so I present…Tiger Blondies!

tb1

The same delicious base, now spread with melted butterscotch chips and drizzled with melted chocolate.

tb2

Golden brown on the outside, moist and chewy on the inside.

tb3

Prettied up for selling purposes.

The volunteers at the shelter thought they looked great; hopefully they helped raise some funds, too!

Remember: spay or neuter your pet!

baking

Ask me about my fuzzy navel!

wittychild

(Re: Subject Line – I think I might have just dated myself…)

A month or so ago, my accounting instructor was explaining the importance of determining cost of goods sold, using one of three main costing methods.  Our cost, she reminded us, doesn’t remain constant, and used limes as an example.  Normally inexpensive, the price has skyrocketed recently due to a combination of poor growing weather in Mexico and the interference of drug cartels.  “So you might want to skip the margaritas this weekend,” she concluded, “since the cost will be passed along to the consumer.”  I didn’t question what she was saying at the time – produce really was an excellent example, because there’s always something to get in the way – but a few days later I read the same thing in the newspaper.  The newspaper article, however, added that many restaurants are pushing other varieties of margaritas, such as peach or strawberry.

And that’s when it hit me: I’m not likely to head to the bar for a pitcher of margaritas, but darn it, what about my cupcakes?

So last weekend, instead of in between studying really hard for my accounting final, I tweaked my margarita cupcake recipe to come up with fuzzy navel cupcakes.

fuzzy navel (1)

This is basically the Mucho Margarita Cupcakes recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, but I used peach schnapps instead of tequila, omitted the lime zest and juice, and added a box of peach Jell-o for flavour.  (If you want to keep this vegan, and live somewhere with better animal-free options available, I believe that Simply Delish makes a peach “jel”.  I do not, so I used the rather more pedestrian option available to me.)  I made a simple orange-vanilla buttercream, and topped each one off with a Fuzzy Peach candy.  One of my testers claimed he liked these better than the original, limey-salty version.

If these make me rich, my instructor is absolutely getting a cut of the profits. 😉

baking

Flowers for…spring?

wittychild

Sure…”spring”.  There are still snowdrifts up to my head in some places, but hey, I firmly believe that one day it will melt.  Until that happens, I’ll have to content myself with a garden of cupcake roses.

Cupcake Roses

These are the vanilla cupcakes from (of course) Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and I jazzed up vanilla buttercream icing by adding a package of cherry Kool-Aid to the mix.  Fun fact: it’s more tart than you might expect, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  It keeps the finished product from being too sweet.  And instead of my usual outside-in piping, ending in a peak of frosting in the centre, I piped from the inside out, creating a vaguely rose-y look.

It almost makes me forget about the snow…