Two Birthdays and a Father's Day

For my mom and brother's birthday, and father's day,I wanted to make a cake, but I wanted it to be super awesome.  The first thing that came to mind was a vertical stripes cake (because horizontal is borinnnggg...).  I was searching online for the best way to do it, and I remembered that my brother's girlfriend knew about this awesome blog called: i am baker. You must check her out because she makes some of the most awesome cakes ever.

SO, in one of her blogs she made a vertical stripe cake, which I thought was totally awesome, but I would have had to make four 9" cake rounds, and I don't want to do that.  Instead, I baked one chocolate round and one white cake round (using handy-dandy cake mix from my fave: All In One Bake Shop).  The cake mix I used produces a heavier cake - something easier to manipulate than heavenly fluffy boxed cakes. mmmMMMmmm.

1. Bake cake.  They must be different colors for this to work (chocolate and white cake, for example).

Black and yellow (black and yellow, black and yellow, black and yellow).

2. Level those cakes!

3. Use your handy dandy stencils to cut out circles, and then switch out every other layer:

Handy dandy stencils (the pink circles) and my highly scientific way of measuring them out.

Cake circles cut out (with a knife...).  Then switch out every other layer.

 

4. Stack the two cakes, lovingly wrap up in plastic wrap and place in the freezer.  NOTE: if you want the layers to stick together you must lightly mist the cake layers with some sugar water and then freeze.  That way they will freeze together, and when they thaw out together, they will stick together (isn't that sweet?).  Your cake will not be soggy, it will be moist and soft.  Generally, if you freeze a cake right after baking it (like, for a day), it will be softer after you unfreeze it (this is good!). 

5.  Cover in frosting and decorate to your heart's content.

6. Then cut it open and bask in the glory.  (*sound of angels*) Phew.  I'm really glad it worked!

Grown Up Mac & Cheese

There a few foods that fall into my "Favorite" category.

1. Pizza
2. Pizza
3. Mac & Cheese

I know... I'm really sophisticated.  I've had some really good pizza and some really bad pizza (some of which was not made by me).  I've had some really awesome mac & cheese and some not so awesome mac & cheese.  I feel like I'm rambling.  What I'm really trying to say is that most of the mac & cheese I've eaten has been the product of a strange orange powder and thin elbow pasta... the kind that cook within a few minutes.  I graduated to wheat mac & cheese and thought this was an upgrade... another step closer to adulthood.  Well.   Tonight.  I'm an adult. *eek* I've made a grown up version of mac & cheese - thanks to Alton Brown!

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/baked-macaroni-and-cheese-recipe/index.html

I chose his recipe because it was the first recipe to show up on my google search when I searched mac & cheese.  It's pretty good.  I'm just happy that it came out of the oven tasting like mac & cheese.  I'm also happy that I have dinner and lunch for the remainder of the week planned out. yum.

First, go to the grocery store and by all these dang ingredients (it's what responsible adults do, geeze).

1/2 pound elbow macaroni
3 tablespoons butter (I used salted)
1 tablespoon powdered mustard
3 cups milk (I used 2%)
1/2 cup yellow onion, finely diced (I bought the smallest one)
1 bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1 large egg (I'm pretty sure my egg was medium sized)
12 ounces sharp cheddar, shredded
1 teaspoon kosher salt (Uhm, how about table salt?  I think this actually could have made a difference... please just use kosher salt.)
Fresh Black pepper (seems like the pre-made stuff will do!)

1. Boil ze pasta, until al dente:

2. Melt butter in saucepan, add flour and mustard powder until there are no lumps... for about 5 min.

3.  Add the milk, paprika, bay leaf, onion - let simmer for 10 minutes.

4. Temper the egg by slowly adding small amounts of the hot concoction in #3 until it's warmed up enough to be totally added into the above mixture without curdling and making your mac & cheese, scrambled eggs.  (Yay!  Now we all know what tempering is.)

5. Mix in about 3/4's of the cheddar cheese then add the macaroni to it:

6. Put into a casserole dish and bake at 350F for 30 minutes... and put breadcrumbs on top of it if you really want to. Alton Brown suggested that I saute some panko with butter then put it on top of the mac & cheese to bake... but that was too much work and I didn't find any panko crumbs at the grocery store...  So, instead I just sprinkled breadcrumbs on top of this.

7.  I get a coronary just looking at it.  Yum!  Good news:  I still feel like a kid.

Orange and Chocolate Cookies



Stunning low quality photo of said cookies.  (I promise to try and focus next time.)


Now, this isn't completely my recipe, it's really Martha Stewart's - but to be honest, I made her recipe ridiculously awesome.  (Er, thanks Martha!)

This recipe also calls for a cookie press (thanks Martha!)  - which is basically a handheld device that looks like a caulking gun, except you fill it with cookie goodness.

3.5 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
2 large egg yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
The magic ingredient: zest of one orange (*heavens open*)
Lots of chocolate (the higher the cocoa butter content the happier you will be eating the cookie... I also recommend milk chocolate)

1. Wisk flour, salt, and cinnamon
2. Beat butter and sugar til fluffy
3. Add yolks one at a time, mixing thoroughly, then doing the same with vanilla
4. Somewhere between 2 and 4 put the orange zest in
5. Stamp out some cookies
6. 350F until the edges *just* brown
7. Let cool
8. Melt chocolate in a double broiler til liquid-y and cover in chocolate any way you want (I just dolloped some on there)
9. Freeze to get the chocolate solid again
10. Yum. Nom.

Groom's Cake: All 23 Flavors

My friend Xavier loves Dr. Pepper.  He also loves the Baltimore Ravens.  He recently got married (he also loves Michelle) - so the logical groom's cake is of course a Dr. Pepper cake in the shape of a Baltimore Ravens logo.  Viola!

I was much less ambitious than I normally am - opting for pre-made fondant and a simple recipie that I found online.

Cake:
German Chocolate Cake mix (any will do)
Vanilla instant pudding, small box (if my memory serves me right 3.4 oz)
2/3 C. vegetable oil
4 eggs
12 oz. Dr. Pepper
1 t. vanilla

I cooked this at 325F (in advance) - to keep it from making a dome shape.  Froze all six 9"x13" layers in the freezer until needed. (Every time I went to the freezer to grab some ice cream, these layers were a constant reminder of me making a grooms cake - something I had never done until now! eek!)

Frosting:
8oz. cream cheese
1 lb. powdered sugar
1/4 cup cocoa
1 stick butter
1 t. vanilla

I whipped these all together in my handy dandy mixer (can't imagine doing this by hand) - it makes it super fluffy.

Using homemade stencils, paintbrushes, vodka (for painting - not palliation), powdered food coloring, and gel food coloring, and 20 hours of work later, you have the above picture. 

The bride and groom were happy - that's all I really wanted in the first place.  Congrats again you two!

Pepermint Candy Canes!

I looove Christmas time!  You'll might have noticed my absence on here lately - probably because I was decking the halls or something else extremely festive!  Nonetheless, I have been baking and here is the proof!

 What you'll need:

1/3 c. soft butter
1/2 c. sugar
1 & 1/4 c all purpose flour
1/4 tea. salt
Almond bark
1/4 c. shortening
1 egg
1/4 tea. baking powder
1 tea. peppermint or mint extract

1. Beat butter, shortening, and sugar 'til fluffy. Beat in the egg.
2. Stir in the flour, baking powder, salt, and extract until mixed.
3. Pipe cookie dough into the shape of a cane...or use a cookie press.  I used a plastic bag with a corner cut off to pipe the dough, and that was not fun!  I highly recommend a cookie press!!!

4. Bake at 375F for 5-7 minutes
5. Allow to completely cool

6. Melt bark in a sandwich bag, cut off a very small corner and pipe stripes on the canes.
* For a super festive look add red food coloring to the cookie dough! *

Quince Cake: Mission Completed

First defrost all the layers (that were sitting in a freezer for a good week and a half).

Cover the layers in frosting to prepare for fondant-ing.

Cover in fondant and trim.

Do the same to the remaining top two layers.

Smooth out the fondant as best as possible - this part was pretty hard.   I knew my decorations would cover up a lot of the imperfections, though, so I didn't stress out... too much.

Stacking the layers was pretty easy.  Each layer was on it's own round piece of cardboard.  In between each cardboard layer there were wooden dowel rods supporting the layers above.  To make sure all the layers didn't just slide off each other, I just used one long dowel rod right down the center (sharpened on one end - to get through each cardboard layer... along with a hammer).

The layers are all secured together.  Time to decorate!

Put the cake topper on - and added some brown ribbons around the edge of the circles.

Preparing leaves - hand painted... all 50 of them...

more leaves :)

Applying the leaves to the cake: they stick really well with just a little bit of water.  I ended up painting the edges of the leaves to make it look prettier.  I just put the leaves in places where there were imperfections.  If I accidentally got some of the food coloring on the white parts, I would just wipe it off with a damp paper towel/clean wet paintbrush.

The finished product!  1 hour before showtime.  Phew! *beads of sweat roll off my forehead*

Quince Prep

Here's an update!


This is what 1 hour of fondant making looks like:

It feels like a really kick-butt workout, though.  Don't try making fondant if you're already really tired.  Also, turns out that if you challenge your electric mixer to knead this super tough fondant dough for long periods of time - the bowl WILL get stuck in the holder:

But no worries, even though I wasn't able to jiggle it out, some WD-40 and my boyfriends biceps were able to shimmy the bowl from the stronghold of the kitchen aid.

I also needed to work on the cake topper for this quince cake!  It wouldn't be proper if there wasn't a big ol' "15" on top.  So, I knew that I wanted it to be brown, and initially I was going to make it out of sparkles and silly glue.  BUT.  Then I really had this desire to make it out of chocolate.  I have no idea how to work with chocolate, but it can't be that hard.... right?!  Just melt it and mold it.

I went to the cake shop to try and find a mold for the number "15".   They had really tiny ones (about 2-3" tall) and they were kind of ugly.  So, I ended up just buying some lollipop sticks.  I decided that I was going to free-hand this "15" even if it killed me.

First:
Set up a double broiler.  You don't want to burn the chocolate and this is a good way to prevent that from happening.

  

Second: 

Melt some milk chocolate!  I used Hershey's milk chocolate chips.

 

Third:

Put milk chocolate in a bag you can do some piping in.  I totally ran out of frosting bags, so I decided to use a plastic sandwich bag.  The chocolate was still pretty hot at first, so I let it cool down - made it easier to work with as well.

  

Fourth:

Cut the corner of the bag off (about 1/4 inch) and start drawing a "15" on top of two lollipop stick (one stick for each number).  Then stick it in the freezer to harden!!!

Fifth:

Flip numbers over when hardened and put chocolate on that side to cover up the stick and make it look preeeettay.  Then stick in the freezer!

Voila!  Two numbers ready to be stuck on top of the cake!