Baby Shower Desserts

Baby Shower Desserts

I had the distinct honor of co-hosting the baby shower of my grade-school friend Pam.  She is expecting baby Aria in May.  I, of course, volunteered to make several desserts!

Stats:

• 8" round doctored cake
• cooked flour filling and icing
• covered in fondant
• decorated with modeling chocolate blossoms
• "No Fail Sugar Cookies"
• covered with fondant and modeling chocolate
• decorated with texture sheets
• macarons
• filled with dark chocolate peanut butter spread
• dark chocolate fudge cupcakes (box mix)
• iced with mixed swirl of chocolate and peanut butter icing
• failed petit fours (not in photographs)
• cream cheese pound cake
• filled with pate a bombe icing and strawberry jam
• failed to cover with chocolate almond bark

I must have been in some sort of cakers' hell this weekend.  Since the baby shower was 3 hours away, I decided to do some of the work at my house, then pack everything up and do the rest at my parents' house (near the shower).  What I didn't account for was that my parents were in the middle of packing up the house getting ready to sell and retire.  They were out of the country at the moment, so I couldn't ask them where anything was!

This was my first time to use some brand of almond bark that I got at Walmart.  When I went to dip my petit fours, it clumped badly and my parents didn't have any shortening to help smooth it out.  I gave up on them and figured I'd move on to baking cupcakes.  I look under the kitchen cabinet for their KitchenAid mixer and it's not there!  NOTHING is there!  Not even the other ancient standing mixer.  I look in the pantry and there's no hand mixer!  Ack.  I called my girlfriend who was hosting the party at her house and informed her it wasn't going well.  I asked her if she had a mixer and she said she did.  I packed everything up and went over there.  Her standing mixer was not awesome ... it was barely adequate.  I mean this from a caker's perspective, so I am exaggerating, but I was pressed for time and missed my KitchenAid badly!  I managed to make and plate everything else in time (barely).  I was piping the frosting on the last cupcakes as guests were walking in.

We had so much food.  The guests hardly made a dent in my desserts, and I'm sure the chocolate fountain and its accessories had a hand in that.  I'm still working on perfecting macarons. They were a bit chewier than I'd like.  I forgot the baking powder in the sugar cookies, but couldn't even tell.  The cupcakes were very yummy and chocolate + peanut butter icing was a great combo.  I didn't get a slice of cake though :(  The grandmother-to-be showered me with compliments, so it was very rewarding.

Eggnog Frosting

Eggnog Frosting

Hubby loves eggnog.  I'm not a fan, but I sure could eat this frosting all day.  He's been bugging me about cooking something with eggnog ... this definitely hits the spot.

Recipe from "Tasty Cooking Classes with Food City":

Ingredients:
2/3 cup sugar
3 tbsp. flour
¼ tsp. nutmeg
1 cup eggnog
2 egg yolks, beaten
1 cup butter, softened

Pretty picture with all my ingredients in bowls just like the pros!

This recipe reminds me of making homemade vanilla ice cream.

Um ... I no longer have a whisk.  It was sacrificed in a different craft experiment.

 This after tempering and adding the egg yolks.

 Let it cool ... it looks thick and goopy.

Beat in butter.

This is definitely not the prettiest frosting I've made.  After beating in the butter, it looked awful, like a bowl of snot.  I was convinced it was too ugly and could only be used for filling.  It was bagged and placed in the fridge for later.  Turns out it was probably just too warm.  Few days later I let the frosting come to room temp and re-whipped it.  Much better!

FTWs:

• I already had all the ingredients on hand.
• Melted granulated sugar means no gritty texture, as opposed to American style buttercream that contains powdered sugar.
• Eggnog was pasteurized, contained no alcohol (typical grocery store brand), and the yolks were cooked ... safe for kiddos.
• Very creamy results without a lot of butter.
• High praise from test subjects.

FAILS:

• This was my second try at this recipe.  Cinnamon does NOT equal nutmeg. 
• A bit lumpy.  I wouldn't want to try to smooth this around a cake.
• This batch was a little smaller than I'm used to.  I had to conserve, but managed to ice all 24 cuppies.

Ateco tip #844 swirl on spice cupcakes.

If you're on the fence about this, just try it.  Minimal ingredients, maximum satisfaction.  I brought these puppies to work, and here's what people said:

• Thanks!  The cupcake is delicious!
• You taunt me, so. My budget is 1000 calories / day. (ish) *sniff*
• You are a flavor magician.  That eggnog frosting is delicious
• I've never even heard of eggnog frosting, but wow was it gooooood! :)
  

Brrraaaiiinnnsss

Halloween 2010!

My kiddo actually went to bed early tonight!  That meant I had some time to decorate cuppies that I made earlier with something more festive.  This was inspired by The Domestic Sugar Bake Shop blog and her tutorial for fondant brains.  Unfortunately I must lack some key talent required to make brains, so here's my quick and dirty version.  I finally had an excuse to try out my homemade modeling chocolate!

Make several rough brain-shaped balls.

Using a toothpick, indent a line along the top of the ball.

 Indent several 1/2" perpendicular lines along the top.

On one hemisphere, indent smaller dashes between the previous indentations 

but DON'T touch the middle line.

Do this for each side, making a zigzag shape.  This will mimic a wavy brain wrinkle.

Indent other random dashes on the sides of the brain.

These don't look that great, but it's the top part that really sells this.

Brraaaiinnnss...

Mix red food coloring with piping gel and some corn syrup.

Take some perfectly good looking cuppies ...

... and ruin them.

Dab the tops of the cuppies with the blood and smoosh the brain on top.

Yum?

Happy Halloween!!!

Happy 4th of July!

Happy 4th of July!

Happy Birthday, America!  I got to try a couple new things here that I now love.  My guinea pigs were my husband's family that came over for some 4th of July festivities.

Stats:

• Duncan Hines Golden Vanilla box cake mix
• cream cheese icing
• swirled with Ateco tip #845
• topped with cherry and blueberry pie filling

Last weekend was the first time I saw "Golden Vanilla" in the cake isle at the grocery store.  I don't know what makes Golden Vanilla different than Duncan Hines' French Vanilla cake mix, but they taste pretty much the same.  Yellow cake + vanilla = yum.  Can't go wrong with that.

This was my first attempt to make cream cheese icing.  After some web browsing, I concluded most recipes are butter + cream cheese + powdered sugar.  Easy enough!  I beat 2 sticks of unsalted butter, 2 (8 oz.) packages of cream cheese, and some enough powdered sugar until I liked the taste and consistency.  It probably was close to 5-6 cups of sugar.  I had my husband taste it (since he's the one that loves cream cheese icing).  He suggested a bit of lemon.  I added a few drops of lemon juice and 2 drops of LorAnn's Princess Cake & Cookie emulsion.  It came out very yummy!

I ventured out to the cake supply store the other day and got some Ateco tips.  I've been wanting to try new shapes for topping cupcakes.  Here is tip #845.  It's a 7/16" closed star tube.  Notice how the metal curls.  I really enjoyed piping with this tip.  I piped clockwise from the outside in.

I only needed 1 pass to ice the entire top.  Usually with the 1M I do 2 passes to make it full and tall.  I'm not sure if it was because of the icing (which was very thick and rich) or the tip shape.  It was easy to make a nice end peak too.

Cakecentral.com recently had a post where the baker filled her cupcakes with pie filling and then topped them with cream cheese icing.  I went the lazy route and just put the filling on top.

These cuppies were extremely yummy!  Cream cheese icing has made my favorites list.  It was nice to pipe; it kept its edges nice and crisp.  The left overs were put in the fridge because the cream cheese would spoil.  The icing got firm, but it was still easy to bite in to.  I'm curious to how it would be like to frost a whole cake with this stuff.

Hope everyone had a fun and safe holiday!

Margarita Cupcakes

Margarita Cupcakes!

Happy Birthday to Jon and Robin!  Last Wednesday my co-worker Jon said it was his 30th birthday.  Whoa!  The big 3-0!  I'll hit that later this year.  I knew he liked margaritas and I've been really wanting to try this recipe out.  We were also going to a party on Saturday to celebrate my brother-in-law's girlfriend's birthday at a pool party.  Since she's currently pregnant, I wanted to give her a safe margarita that she could really enjoy.  I made these on Wednesday night and gave one to Jon on Thursday.  The rest were frozen until Friday so they could stay fresh until the party.

Stats:

• white cake mix exchanging 2/3 cups water with margarita mix
• lemon IMBC (but colored green)
• colored sugar rims
• trimmed straw accents

I searched online for a margarita cupcake recipe, and most of them were just white box cake mix with margarita mix instead of water.  That quantity sounded a little gross to me, so I only replaced half the water.  It had a nice subtle flavor.

I'm not a big of a fan of white cake.  I like my yolks.  Could be that I'm used to denser cake?  When my mother-in-law ate one, she thought it was angel food cake.  

We've had this canister of colored sugar for a while.  It's the kind that you use on the rim of your cocktail glasses.  It was perfect for these cuppies.

I flavored the IMBC with LorAnn's Princess Cake & Cookie emulsion.  That gave it a subtle lemony flavor.  I added some lemon juice and margarita mix to give it more of a boost.  A few drops of green food coloring brought it home.

Here's a finished one.  I think this is using a 2A tip.  I don't have much experience with icing cuppies with anything but a 1M swirl.  I learned that I had to make the base pass first, otherwise the cuppie would be too top heavy for me to rim it with sugar.  My first cupcake was dropped completely into the sugar.

The pink on green was pretty.  Helped detract from the ugly mound that my piping ended up as.

I trimmed some bendy straws from both ends and stuck them in to the cake.  It does confuse people though.  But no, just for decoration ... no hidden pocket of booze in there.

Cheers!

June Cupcakes

June Cupcakes!

So I took my first cake "order".  My neighbors were celebrating their daughter's 6th birthday and asked me to make ballerina cupcakes.  Since it's illegal in Texas to profit from home-kitchen baked goods, I asked her to just buy me the box mix she wanted and 4 sticks of unsalted butter (the things I always seem to have to run out to the store for).  These took me 4.5 hours from start to finish! I wanted these to be special, and I got to try out some new things.

Stats:

• Betty Crocker yellow cake mix
• vanilla and "Princess Cake & Cookie" flavored IMBC
• 1M swirl
• sprinkled with sugar pearls
• Cricut-cut cupcake wrappers

So I've been sifting my cake mix as per tip from cakecentral.com.  I've found that changes the cake almost dramatically from what I've been used to.  After 23 minutes in the oven, the tops looked fantastic!

It wasn't until later that I noticed the bottom rims were a little dark...I might have burned them :( Oh well...lesson learned.  I'm not sure if it was because these were Betty Crockers and I'm used to my Duncan Hines cuppies baking perfect after 23 minutes or what.

I finally had the chance to try out my new emulsion.  This is Lorann's "Princess Cake & Cookie" emulsion.  It tastes lemony with a hint of almond (in my limited palette's poorly educated opinion).  I added a teaspoon of this to my regular Cake Love IMBC recipe instead of any other flavoring.  It was AWESOME!  Very light and slightly citrus-y.  A little somethin'-somethin' you can't put your finger on.  Great for summer.

I made regular vanilla IMBC in pink in case the Princess flavor was not their cup-o-tea.

Here's one of the final cuppies all dressed and ready to party.  I love sugar pearls!

On Saturday I purchased SVG cupcake wrapper files from Visual Designs by Chris.  This was the one from the sets that was most appropriate for a ballerina theme.  On a side note, I'm SUPER excited about a new Cricut cartridge coming out July 1st: Cricut Lite Cartridge Cupcake Wrappers.

It was very annoying to have my Cricut grinding and buzzing away to make 24 wrappers.  I was able to fit 4 templates in one page of cardstock, but that's still at least 6 pages to do.  I did encounter some weirdness.  On the 4th page, the cuts started tearing in certain places and my subsequent pages tore in the exact same spot.  I changed the orientation of the paper and rotated the file and that seemed to fix it.  All I can think is that my cutting mat has worn out in that spot.  I went to Michael's the next day to get a new mat, but all they had were the 12"x6" ones.  Grrr!  Who uses those??

These disposable aluminum pans from the grocery store were perfect for holding 12 cuppies in each.

For extra cuteness I bought some ballerina scrapbook trinkets.  My handy hot glue gun helped me attach these to cut skewer sticks. 

These were inserted into some of the cuppies.  I guess I forgot to take a picture of that though.  Here they are un-flagged.

BONUS

I used my left over Princess IMBC to try my new bismark type for filling another batch of cupcakes.

Unfortunately, I didn't do it well enough.  It was my first time trying to fill cuppies.  You can see what's going on inside the dang thing!  I think I wasn't injecting enough icing.  When I bit into one, you couldn't tell I had tried to fill it.  I should've tested one upfront instead of after they were all crappily filled and iced.