Stars and Stripes

I know it's been a while since I've posted. Minus a batch of cookies I made for some very over-stressed co-workers of mine, it's been equally long since I've baked. But a holiday weekend with a cookout extravaganza was enough to bring me out of culinary hiding!

For the second year in a row, my brother and Bryan planned a colossal Memorial Day cookout at my parents' cabin in the mountains. The final guest count numbered somewhere in the low to mid 40's, and the smoker was fired up 24 hours in advance. We certainly take our BBQ seriously! With Kevin and Bryan outdoing themselves on an 18 lb. brisket, 2 turkeys, and 9 racks of ribs, I couldn't sit by and not make a contribution. So, naturally, I decided to make Memorial Day cupcakes.

I pondered several more complicated designs, including a flag and a watermelon, but the traveling and the amount of preparation involved in the event pursuaded me to do something a little faster and simpler. I made the icing at home Thursday night so I wouldn't have to travel with my mixer but decided to bake the cupcakes Saturday morning so they would be fresh for the cookout that evening. The cake was my standard box mix with an extra egg taken from the oven and put immediately in the freezer for a few minutes to stop the cooking process. It didn't let me down - the cake was moist and tasty. I piped the buttercream with the 1M tip, my favorite for cupcakes. I used the Wilton color mist and sprayed half of the cupcakes blue and the other half red. My initial plan was to sprinkle blue sprinkles on the red-sprayed cupcakes and red sprinkles on the blue-sprayed cupcakes. However, when I'd done that, they still looked like something was missing, so all the cupcakes got both red and blue sprinkles. Stars and stripes cupcake wrappers and flag toppers from Wilton completed the look.

Even though decorating couldn't have taken me more than 15 minutes total, I would deem the cupcakes a success! Guests were afraid to grab them at first because they didn't want to mess up the display. (Of course, once the first one was gone, the other cupcakes followed very quickly.) I got a lot of compliments and even a few comments that people thought they were professional. I thank the 1M tip for that! :) 

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My Goodness, My Guinness

A few days before St. Patty's Day, I saw this recipe on the food network website. I knew I would be out of town the weekend after St. Patty's so I probably wouldn't have a chance to bake. We were planning to celebrate Bryan's brother-in-law Robbie's birthday the following weekend (this weekend!), and Bryan thought this would be the perfect recipe to try. Besides an X Box cake (which sounds far beyond my experience level) I didn't have any other ideas for Robbie, and this one sounded easy enough, so I decided to go with it.

The recipe was fairly easy to make, and Bryan enjoyed the fact that it contains a bottle of Guinness. (Although, once baked, I really couldn't taste the Guinness and wouldn't have known it was in there if I hadn't made them.) I'd never made chocolate cake from scratch, but this turned out well. And I got to use cocoa powder for the first time! :)

The cream cheese icing was very creamy, so it was a little messy spreading it on the cupcakes. There's no way it could have been piped! I only used 3/4 cup of cream - the minimum called for by the recipe - and I definitely wouldn't have used any more than that. The dusting of cocoa powder on top of the icing gave it another hint of chocolate flavor - and gave me and Bryan a good excuse to make a mess of my kitchen - we were flinging cocoa powder everywhere!

Overall, I was very pleased with the result and would make these again. They were chocolatey but not too sweet, and the cream cheese icing (which is supposed to resemble the head on a pint of Guinness) was  unexpected but very tasty.

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When everything sucks except the vacuum cleaner...

Okay, so it's really my washing machine that I was having problems with, not the vacuum. Even so, Thursday night was just one of those nights - the kind of evening when nothing goes as planned.

My washing machine had been broken for over a week, and I desperately needed to do laundry before going out of town for the weekend. Bryan had met the appliance repair guy earlier in the day, so I thought I was all set to go. After I got home from work, I threw a load of laundry in the washer and turned it on. Later, I noticed that it was being awfully quiet - in fact it wasn't spinning at all! Not only that, but it wouldn't drain either! I tried every combination of settings and cycles that I could, and nothing would get rid of the water in my washing machine. I was left with a load of wet, soggy clothes and nothing to wear for my weekend in the mountains.

In the midst of all this frustration, I was also attempting to make cupcakes for my mom's birthday. I now realize that baking while frustrated and in a bad mood is not such a good idea, but I really didn't have any other time to make the cupcakes. There were only going to be 6 of us there over the weekend, so I didn't want to use a boxed mix and end up with 2 dozen cupcakes - we'd never be able to eat them all. So I found a recipe in one of my cookbooks to make 12 white cupcakes from scratch.

I mixed the batter and filled the cups 2/3 full, as always. I noticed that I had a good bit of batter left over, but I didn't want to take my chances on overflowing cupcakes, so I made a few extras to taste and rinsed the remaining batter down the drain. Big mistake!! About 20 minutes later, I noticed that my cupcakes hadn't risen, like at all! (It was about this moment that I tried yet one more setting on the washer, it also didn't work, and I broke down in tears...)

One thing that did work well - I used my silicone cupcake liners. One, because I have 12 liners and was making 12 cupcakes and two, because they were the only pastel liners I had on hand.

Because there was a good bit of space between the cupcakes and the tops of the liners, I ended up needing a lot more icing than normal to fill them up. This led me to run out of icing when piping the designs on top, and the last 2 didn't get flowers, just some improvised polka-dots.

My mood had rapidly deteriorated by the time I got to piping, and I think it showed. I thought the flowers were just so-so, and overall I was just okay with how the project turned out. I even procrastinated posting the picture here because I wasn't thrilled with them. They did taste good though! The homemade cake batter did seem to dry out quicker than the mix, so they didn't keep quite as well, but I was very pleased with the taste when they were freshly baked.

Overall, I'd say that I learned my lesson. My treats look happier and more cheerful when I am as well. I'll try to avoid baking when I'm frustrated and crabby, if I can.

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A Baking Weekend!

I knew this weekend would be busy - a long-awaited BFF baking day plus a birthday. But baking is fun, right? And I'm all about the fun!

Bryan's mom's birthday is tomorrow, but we decided to celebrate a little early and get together on Sunday. I knew I needed to bake something fun for her birthday, and when I saw this design on Betty Crocker's website, I was hooked. I was really scared, though, because I've never made a cake before. I have assisted and/or observed cake-making a handful of times, but I've never been in charge completing a cake from start to finish. (That's why I usually stick to cupcakes - cakes scare me!) Bryan and I both knew what a perfect design this would be for his mom, and he talked me into tackling the project with his help.

Baking the cake was pretty easy - no surprises there. I used the Wilton cake release on the pan, and I have to say, I was pretty impressed with how cleanly it came out of the pan. (I listened to Ginger and shook well before I squirted it in.) The cake release is so much less messier than flouring that I think I'll use it from now on. All you have to do is squirt a little bit in the middle of the pan and use a basting brush to spread it around evenly - no mess whatsoever!

Next, I printed a template from the internet and cut the flip flop shapes from the cooled cake. That part wasn't too difficult either. I put the cake in the freezer to let it firm up before icing. We were a little rushed for time, and I probably should have left it in the freezer longer than I did. It did firm up some, but it still was a little crumbly on the sides. We did get some crumbs in the icing, but luckily the icing color and the decorations helped to hide that.

If anyone has any good tips for icing a cake, I'm all ears! I didn't have too much trouble with the top, but getting the sides neat and making a clean line between the sides and the top were hard! I don't know if it's because the sides were only a little over an inch tall or what, but I had a lot of trouble getting the icing to stick to the side of the cake and to look neat. Even though I followed the recipe for thin icing, it was a bit thinner than I would have preferred - I won't add quite as much milk next time. I don't think it made too much of a difference on the cake itself, but the lines I piped (which I thought were supposed to be done with thin) didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped.

I wish I would have had the time (and courage!) to make the flip flop straps out of fondant. I used fruit roll-ups, like the directions said, but expected from experience that they wouldn't hold up too well. They lived up to their reputation - by the time we delivered the cake, the straps had fallen flat, but you could still tell what they were supposed to be.

Overall, the cake was cute but definitely had a homemade look to it. I definitely have some room to improve, but I'm pretty happy with my first attempt. The birthday girl seemed to enjoy it, so that made me happy!

In other news, I got to use a culinary torch for the first time! I mentioned that Ginger and I got together for a BFF baking day also. It was long overdue - I think our last one might have been right before Christmas, 2008! Ginger found a rocky road brownie cupcake recipe on the Paula Deen website, and it was super delicious. She covered most of the details on her facebook page, but they were fun, tasty, and something I'd definitely try again. Even better, we got to play with fire!

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Better Late than Never

This weekend, I baked Valentine's cupcakes. I know Valentine's was last week, but these weren't baked for Valentine's; they were received for Valentine's. As one of my Valentine's Day presents, Bryan got me a Pillsbury funfetti cake mix and icing set. And since my family was coming over this weekend to celebrate Bryan's birthday a little late, I figured it was the best occasion to bake I was going to get. We ended up with a mixture of celebrations that was quite tasty!

I was very pleased with how the cupcakes turned out. That's because this time I took Ginger's advice and bought the Wilton cupcake decorating kit and...

... I piped for the first time! Up until now, I've been so afraid of pastry bags, I've been using my Pampered Chef dessert decorator (Wilton also makes one that is very similar) to pipe the icing. After having trouble on Bryan's Sponge Bob cupcakes, I was resolved to try it the "real" way. And Ginger was right - it was easier! Yes, I should have listened to her sooner. (I also took her advice and added an extra tablespoon of milk to the icing.) I absolutely LOVE the way the Wilton 1M tip looks when it's piped on a cupcake - very professional. And now I finally have a 1M tip of my own! Katy was right - it did use a lot of icing. One other thing I learned the hard way - the 1M will only fit on the really large coupler. At this point, I don't really see the point in buying the large coupler though, because I don't have any other tips that will fit on it - so what's the point in making it easier to switch out!?

As I mentioned, Bryan had bought me a Pillsbury funfetti tub of pink icing with white and red Valentine's sprinkles. I had a feeling it wouldn't be enough for 24 cupcakes using the 1M tip. In fact, it iced 9. So I made a batch of homemade buttercream to go with it. I was accidentally too generous with the pink coloring and ended up with a hot pink instead of pastel. But by fate (and certainly not by planning or thought in any way), I had just enough of each color to alternate rows on my cupcake stand. Before my family chowed down on cupcakes, I told them that one of the icings was store-bought and one was homemade, but I wasn't going to tell them which was which until they had tried them both. Bryan said he preferred the store-bought icing because it was sweeter, but everyone else preferred mine. I'll consider that a resounding success. Coupled with the fact that they were way cute, and I'm happy!

(PS - Stay tuned for next week. I've got a pretty ambitious - for me - project planned!)

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Snow Day Means Valentine's Cookies

I woke up this morning to an icy winter wonderland. I figured what better way to warm up both myself and my house than to turn on the oven and bake! Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, so that provided the perfect theme for a batch of tasty treats. Because the roads were iced over, I was limited to ingredients I had on hand in my pantry.

I found a good recipe for sugar cookies on joyofbaking.com that I could make with the ingredients I already had. I'd planned on baking sugar cookies and icing them with royal icing. However, after 30 minutes of cleaning out all my cabinets and looking through every item in my pantry, I discovered that my meringue powder had disappeared! I suppose I could have attempted to make the icing with egg whites, but I've tried that before and wasn't happy with the drippy, messy outcome. The meringue powder works much better for me.

So, out of necessity, I came up with plan B. I tinted the cookie dough with red food coloring and used red sprinkles on top. Still very cute and Valentine's appropriate! I'm out of vanilla extract (thanks to all the baking I've done lately) so I decided to substitute mint instead. I had to use liquid food coloring because I don't have any red gel color (yet!) so I cut back on the extract a little to compensate for the added liquid.

I've had some trouble with using cookie cutters in the past, but I'd done some studying, and this time I had a lot more success. Rolling the dough a little thicker and coating both my cookie cutter and my cookie-moving spatula with generous amounts of flour were the key. Refrigerating the dough for an hour before rolling it out also helped.

I'm pretty happy with the outcome, especially since these were a spur-of-the-moment idea. I think they would taste a little sweeter if I'd had the vanilla, but the mint leaves a nice, fresh taste in my mouth. (Bryan helped with the official taste test and gave his seal of approval.) Most importantly, I feel more festive for the upcoming holiday, and I cured my "itch to bake", at least for now.

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A Bikini Bottom Birthday

For Bryan's birthday, I had known for a while that I wanted to make him Sponge Bob cupcakes. The week before, I decided that instead of tinting the icing blue, I would use spray coloring instead to make it look more like water. The cupcakes were just a yellow cake mix. The icing was Wilton buttercream with Wilton blue color spray and blue sugar sprinkles. I also found Wilton icing decorations that look like Sponge Bob and Patrick to use as cupcake toppers.

Overall, I was very pleased with the way they turned out. When I was making the icing, I didn't have quite enough vanilla, so I used a small bit of almond extract as well, and it was very tasty. The spray was easy to use, but it is important to have good ventilation when using the spray color! I do wish the Wilton cupcake liners didn't turn so transparent after they bake. The icing was a little too stiff to pipe well - I should have used one more tablespoon of milk. But I was able to hide most of the piping with the color spray!

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