October Goods: Better Late than Never

Morning, kittens. : )

It seems that lately I've been getting distracted by shiny things (or people... or a person... shut uuuup). And in the midst of that, I realized that I missed giving you a few things. So here they are, in no particular order.

1. Pecan-Topped Pumpkin Bread from Cooking Light


I made this pumpkin bread, ate a bit, shared a bit, and French toasted the rest. No complaints here...

In the interest of full disclosure, I skipped the pecan topping (a good choice since I ended up serving it to someone with a nut allergy) and subbed whole wheat flour for some of the AP.

2. Potato Soup


I love soups, but only on certain days. Well... those days come more often once fall sets in. On this particular night, I made a rich, cheesy, sour cream potato soup that ended up reminding me of my grandma's mashed potatoes. Mmmm... I really wish I'd written down the recipe.

3. Pumpkin Beer Cupcakes with Alicia's Halloween Decorations


Adorable, no?! I followed The Bitchin Kitchen's recipe for Pumpkin Beer Cupcakes with Maple Cream Cheese Frosting exactly. Well... that was the intent, at least. As it happened, I halved the recipe without incident... until it came time to add the pumpkin ale... at that point I forgot I was halving and added the full amount of pumpkin ale. But... ya know... it didn't hurt anything. My snafu resulted in a light, almost sponge-like cake.

While I baked and iced, Alicia made these cute cleavers, tombstones, pumpkins and undead hands out of gum paste she died, sculpted, and painted. Another fab collaboration, if you ask me.

4. Chicken Soup for a Sickie


Mmmhmm... another of those soup days. This one was necessitated by two things: a sore throat and a lot of leftovers. A creamy chicken and rice soup was just what I needed and the leftovers from the leftovers kept me happy for a next couple of days. Again... recipe... I don't have one for ya.


Sooo... now that we're both caught up... let's November together, yes?

A Chocolate Peanut Butter Birthday

Happy Birthday, Mr. President.


Seriously. Try to tell me that isn't one sexy cake.

It's fine. Don't hurt yourself trying. I know you can't, in good conscience, act like that cake is just okay. (Am I getting a bit puffed up? You are more than welcome to smack me.)

Anyways...


This three layered chocolate peanut butter cake is not a first run cake for me. I made it last summer and carved it into a hot tub. But... this occasion called for a more traditional presentation. So I layered the rich chocolate cake with creamy peanut butter buttercream.


And coated the whole thing with that very same icing, reserving just a bit for later. And then... ooooh... and then... I made up a thick semi-sweet chocolate ganache with a healthy dose of peanut butter melted in.


I let it cool a bit so it wouldn't completely get away from me, and then I poured it over the top and encouraged a little over the sides. Just enough to look tempting and rich, but not enough to cover all of that gorgeous buttercream.


Finally, I fit a piping bag with a star tip and filled it with the leftover buttercream. Next time I'll add more sugar to this decorative buttercream so I can have big, poofy pillows of buttercream on top. These stars are a bit retiring.

Despite the retiring stars, no one complained about this festive bit of decadence. The birthday boy, who requested something rich and chocolate on par with this blast from the past, was beyond pleased. Just today I received a text in which he proclaimed me a "miracle baker." Well... I don't know about all that... but I sure can follow a recipe. ; )


By the way, how do you like the birthday boy's cake slicer?

Oh Baby, Baby, Baby (Cookies)

Alright... I guess I've put this off long enough.*


You may or may not remember when I lost my mind over some royal icing in a condiment squeeze bottle. Well... that went down while I was painstakingly (it really wasn't that bad) piping out the decorations for these subtle, white on yellow cookies.

But these were no decorate-for-the-heck-of-it cookies. No ma'am. These cookies had a purpose. An inspiration. A (horrors!) deadline.


My friend Katie is having a baby and my friend Blair was throwing a shower. So... the only smart thing for me to do for both of them was... well... bake.

And since I'd recently seen this post on monogrammed cookies, I thought I'd try my hand at some flowers and swirlies.


I think they turned out really well. The flooding (the yellow base icing) was not my best work. I let the piped edge dry too much before I filled the cookies in, so you can see where one stops and the other begins. Not an eye sore, I don't guess, but also not amazing.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I had about an hour and a half to flood these cookies before I was picked up for a Project Runway finale festivus. I might have left the house in heels and a shiny blue dress, but I'm pretty sure I had some icing on my arm. You can take the girl out of the kitchen, but you can't take the kitchen out of the girl.


Anyway... the next day, the cookies were shoved in a big Ziploc bag for the 3 hr roadtrip to Katie's. They made it without incident and I think they went over pretty well.

If you want to know the details of how these cookies came to be, you can find it all right here.

Brownie Roll Out Cookies & Royal Icing recipes
Monogrammed Cookie tutorial

Oh... and I also helped the girls bake iced tea, margarita, and coconut lemon snowball mini cupcakes.



So... if you have a baby shower that needs catering... Call me. ;)

*It's an inside joke, but I'll let you in on it since we're friends. An admittedly odd friend's wife once prefaced her "Hi, I'm _______" with that very sentence. She had invited me to her house, but she made it extremely clear that meeting me was not high on her list of anticipated experiences. That fateful night still cracks me up. It ended worse than it began, if you can believe it.

Wilton Course II Finale

After many pounds of icing and probably more complaining than was necessary, I finished Wilton Course II and built this graduation cake.


Today, I learned how to do the basketweave and the rope border that goes around the top and bottom there.

That bird was made early in Course II with color flow icing; he's not my favorite, but he was a large part of the course so I had to include him to graduate legitimately. You'll not see him in the following pics. :)


Course II's main focus is flowers and borders. Each class we learned a few new flowers and a couple of borders. We used royal icing for these flowers, so they are nonperishable and they set up hard. (That's what... never mind.)


I used all the flowers I learned to do in the class on this cake. You can hopefully recognize Victorian roses, pansies, violets, apple blossoms, daisies, and primroses. The only flower I didn't include (only because I forgot) was the chrysanthemum.


Even though I complained about the homework (each class requires a different amount of icings in various colors and consistencies, some classes require cakes), the Wilton courses have both been fun and super helpful. I couldn't have done any of this when I started... so that should tell you a lot.

In conclusion, if you are thinking about taking a Wilton cake decorating class, stop thinking and just do.

[Incidentally, this is pretty much exactly what my classmate told me when I was nervous about starting the basketweave on my cake. So... I just started... and immediately did it wrong and had to have my instructor straighten me out. :)]

Day at the Beach: Cake Edition

Today I finished and dropped off my most complicated and nerve-wracking cake to date.

The client (please notice the badassery of my use of that word) was throwing a beach-themed staff appreciation party complete with mocktails, leis, and many inflatable beach... thingys. After much consideration and conversation, the client decided that the cake shouldn't have an inscription.

Hmm... Being quite new to cake decorating, I had to think long and hard about a cake that would look interestingly beachy without a written focal point.

And those of you who were curious about the 3D Wilton cake pans that I messed up yesterday will now have all your questions answered.


Ta Da!

It's a beach ball cake. A beach ball. On a beach. Or the ocean connected to that beach. Whatever.


I decided to get a little abstract with the swirly bits around the ball and the edge of the water. I like the whimsy they bring to the otherwise straightforward cake.

The clients were thrilled with the result. They thought the cake was adorable and that I should make a living out of such cakes. And they just about lost it when I told them that though the sheet cake is a basic yellow pound cake, the beach ball is made of a three-layer pina colada cake with crushed pineapple filling.

Everyone's happy.

Except for my family who got to watch the whole process without getting to eat the final product. :)


Anyone wanna go to the beach?

Reality TV Shows and the Cakes that Love Them

Let's just start this post with a little bit of honesty. Reality TV is fun to watch. It's easy to make fun of and it's pretty addicting. My family watches a fair amount of television, most of it of the reality persuasion.


One of my family's favorite reality TV shows is Big Brother. For us, it means summer and pizza and friends coming over. It also means trashy young people fighting to stay in a living arrangement that requires extrememly awkward physical challenges, weeks of restricted food allowances, hours of painful small talk, and scores of conspiracy theories.

Clearly, Thursday night's Big Brother 11 premiere demanded a cake.


I used the Big Brother occasion to try a recipe from Sky High: Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes. I haven't bought the book yet (I am working on it!), so I followed the recipe for Chocolate Sour Cream Cake and Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Icing according to Smitten Kitchen.


**Alert: it's a wonderfully simple one-bowl chocolate cake with a creamy rich peanut butter icing.**


These two make a really cute couple. They really bring out the best in each other.


But what's this? A ring o' cake?

Hahahaha... here begins my awkward first attempt at a carved cake. :) I wanted the Big Brother cake to be a hot tub since so much of the houseguests' time is spent either cannoodling or at least scheming in the hot tub out back.


I used cinnamon graham crackers to signal the wood paneling on the outside of the tub. And I frosted the ring o' cake so I would have room inside the cake for water.


I used Wilton recipe icing for the water, writing, and other decorative elements. I filled the hot tub with blue water, a dark blue Big Brother logo, and white hot tub bubbles. That done, I piped the houseguests names around the edge of the tub and finished her off with a reverse shell border.


So is it ridiculous? Is it a bit much? Sure. And probably.

But it was tasty! (And it made watching Big Brother mostly bearable.)

Wilton Course 1 Finale

I'm just running through the graduations these days. My four week Wilton cake decorating course finished today with a bang.

Like every other week, I was required to bring my own cake in to decorate. But... yesterday I made bread pudding and I half-prepped some sticky buns for my brother's birthday and... I was just tired of baking.

So I...


dumped out a yellow cake mix


poured a can of soda over it


watched it do its science fair thing for a minute and then mixed it up. The cakes (two 8" round) baked for thirty minutes exactly and after turning them out, I walked away for the evening.

I iced the two layer cake at around 11pm with a tub and a half of cream cheese icing. I'm not trying to win any prizes here... I'm just trying to half-assedly do my homework. :)

I got up this morning at 7:35am to...


make this mess


and these roses. They are still a little cabbage-y with their jagged edges, but I'm getting there. I think I need to tend to my tip a little.

I thought I gave myself enough time this morning to get going and get everything together and ready, but I came to a conclusion. No matter what time I get up and begin the prep, I will always be just on time to class. At least I'm that.

And... an hour later... I left Michael's with this beauty!


What my cake lacks in homemade baking/icing it makes up for in classy Wilton-method decoration. This design is called the bouquet something-or-other, but I'm sure you don't really need to know that.


And while I'm okay with my roses, I am in love with my sweet peas. Those are the little flowers around the bottom of the cake. They are so easy to make and they work every time. Such fun.

And just in case you are wondering, I signed up for Course 2 today. Me and my classmates got a super sweet deal and ended up getting Course 2 for a whopping $12.50! CanNOT refuse that.

Course 2 is all about flowers and borders, so you can look forward to seeing more of my awkward practice this July.

A Hello Kitty Birthday

A while back, I filled out the 8 Things meme and listed kid birthday party cupcakes on my list of wishes. Well... somebody paid attention and my wish was fulfilled this week.

My friend Gianna is turning 3 and her mom asked me to whip up some cupcakes for the occasion.

And what did Cutie pic for her 3rd birthday party theme?


Hello Kitty!

In talking with the birthday girl's mom, we decided to do a bunch of cupcakes and one mini cake that Gianna could eat, share, look at, smash, throw, etc. I loved that idea because a mini cake would allow me to write a traditional birthday message - that just seemed necessary, I guess.

So I thought through several decoration options, and I got excited about little white cupcakes with offset bows and a cake with Hello Kitty on it. But... then... I struck that, reversed it, and came up with...


Hello Kitty cupcakes


and one cake with an offset bow.

For the cake, I played it safe and consulted Anne Byrn's Cupcakes from the Cake Mix Doctor again. :) [I want to make an "Anne Byrn is my Homegirl" t-shirt. Have I mentioned that?] Anyway... I made the cake from her White-on-White cupcake recipe.


I made two batches and divided each batch in half. I took the four bowls of batter and dyed them the green, blue, pink, and white of the party decorations.


I dropped the batters in randomly by spoonfulls until the cupcakes were about 2/3 full. Then I lightly swirled the batter in each cup with a toothpick. That little swirl makes the batter look a little less Partridge Family bus and a little more tie-dyed and random.

I did the same thing on a larger scale in the 6" mini layer pans.

Sadly... the cake baked up more pastel than I intended so it was more the idea of the party colors than the actual colors themselves. No big deal really. Technicolor cake is a little bit frightening anyway. :)


Ooops... sorry Kitty.

I'm pleased to report that the cupcakes were a big hit. The cake was soft and a little bit rich and the icing (Wilton method, obvi) was professional bakery delicious.


I'm told the party-goers enjoyed them and that there was no leftover cake beyond the first day.


Most importantly, this birthday girl thinks I "did a good job." :)

Zombie Love Cake

Q: How do the undead declare their love?

A: Just like the rest of us.


With well chosen words... on a cake.


With hearts around the side.

This is my idea of practice with lettering and stenciling. I guess I'm not your average Wilton pupil.

The quote was taken from Return of the Living Dead.

Q: Why are zombies so often wearing ties?

Strawberry Lemon Cake!

Thank you for helping me decide what to do for class today. You all ended up choosing the Strawberry Cake + Lemon filling, the cake that came to me in a dream.

I'm serious. It did.


And a dream it is.

I used Anne Byrn's recipe for Strawberry Cake. The cake did not disappoint.

I "filled" the cake using the Wilton method that involves torting a single 8" cake, running a bead of frosting around the outer edge of the bottom layer and then spreading a filling to the frosted bit.


As promised, I used lemon curd. Lovely, lovely lemon curd.

Flavorwise, this cake reminds me of Trix cereal in the best way. Citrus and sweetness to the max! The cake is ultra moist because of all the strawberries and such inside. Adding lemon curd to that just makes the whole thing more like a pudding of sorts. It's fantastic. I think the flavors work really well together.

(My mom didn't love the lemon and for her I left the lemon out of the second 1/2 of the cake that is in the works at present. I think you'll like what I have in store for the decoration on that one.)


So... armed with a frosted cake (sans cake carrier) and legit decorator's tackle box, I went to class this morning to decorate this cake the right way. And you can tell me how I did.


By the way, Happy Monday!