Far Too Long

Once again dear friends it has been far too long since I have last posted.  Life, school, and a puppy all got in the way and led me wayward in my blogging ways.  But never fear! I am back and hoping to be more consistent than ever and even if I don't have a scrumptious dessert or meal made there will be posts on tips and all get out.

Most recently I made some of the best banana bread on the face of the planet! Using some handy dandy bread pans I bought awhile back from Micheals (speaking of which I need to go there soon, when they have sales on their holiday stuff from pans to sprinkles I suggest you stock up! It's the cheapest you will get this items and you can also get items you can't buy year round but can be used for all types of baking year round!)

Anyways I had a hankering for banana bread the other day so I went out to the store and got everything I needed.  After these babies came out of the oven just take a few slices with a dab of butter and sprinkle on some cinnamon and it is perfection in your mouth!   Here are a few pics from the old phone.

Two days later all of the banana bread was gone and I had some blueberries I leftover from the smoothie kick that I have been on lately that I had frozen so I made some Blueberry bread!  It was almost better than the banana bread but I'd say the banana bread trumps it .

And I thought I would leave you with something cute and part of the reason why I have been absent from the blogosphere.

This is Charlie passed out in the back of my car after a day at the dog park.

Here he is a few days later after the dogpark looking a hot mess.  It was dirty from head to toe and was a shade of gray and brown instead of black and white.

Red Velvet Cakelets and Cookie Experiments

So after the huge delicious success of my peanut butter cakelets, my dad wanted some red velvet cake.  What did I do? You got it I made some red velvet cakelets!  I experimented a little bit with the actual making of the cakelets but still ended up great! I used the same recipe book that I used for the peanut butter ones and you know what that means! It was finger-licking good!

I took the remaining cake left over after cutting the circles and put it in the confection oven to dry, I then crumbled it up and on some just sprinkled it on the top and on the rest rolled the cake in it.


I also a little while back did a little experimenting with cookies.  I found this one blogger Sweet Sugar Belle, you can check her out here http://sweetsugarbelle.com/ .

She is awesome!! And does some great cookie decorating.

Here is my attempt at it.

 By getting the icing to a thin consistent you can use it to "flood" the cookie and fill it in.  Once you let it dry a bit you can layer it with other designs and colors.

These (Below) are the same cookies as above just the next day.  After the icing completely dries it gives it a textured look and looks 3d!  I quite proud of these actually.  Hopefully soon I will be experimenting more with cookies and their decor!

Peanut Butter Cakelets

This past weekend I went on another dessert excursion, except this time something a little closer to home.  My Uncle's birthday is coming up in the next week or so and my Dad wanted me to make him his favorite cake, peanut butter.  He told me to find a recipe with a lot of layers (aka the likes of Dean's Cakes some of the best cakes in the south in my opinion).

Well at first I avoided it, actually I just plum forgot about it.  Then I went to looking up recipes but every single one no where close to what I remember from days of old.  It gave me chocolate peanut butter cakes and just about every other kind except for what I wanted.  So I finally find one but accidentally leave the recipe at home when we go to my grandparents for Fathers Day.  Then I figured it was too late, because I was leaving the next day and probably wouldn't be back in town until after his birthday.

Late the night before I leave I was watching The Next Food Network Star and it was their dessert episode.  Now it seems to me that on every single cooking competition no one is able to make desserts, they always whine and complain and mess everything up.  Sure enough there were probably more misses than hits on this episode.  I get a little mad and decide that I am just going to go make something to prove to them that it wasnt that hard.

 So I go into the kitchen (and listen here for this tip) and started looking through the recipe books my grandma has.  I looked for the oldest, most worn looking books and also for some old church recipe books.  If a book is worn that means its been used alot and stuff is bound to good in there because why would they use it? Looking for the old church books is a good tip as well, especially if you are in the south.  Them church ladies knew how to cook!  People don't really cook like they used to so it is important to get an older book and its bound to have better recipes.

Sure enough I find 3 Peanut Butter cake recipes in the first book I look at.  My grandma tells me that one of them was from my one of my aunts mother and that she was a really good cook so the recipe was sure to be good.  I get to working right then and there.

Watching NFNS I got the idea about layered cupcakes and how I had not ever seen it done and wondered if it was possible.  I get to brainstorming as to how I could make thin layers and then cut them into cupcake size.  I have a sheet pan that would work but then my grandma pulls out this diamond of an idea.  Cast iron skillets, these shallow pans (little did I know were exactly the pans used to make the 7-layer cakes from my childhood) were perfect for making consistent layers of the same size and thickness.

I bake them and cut them into circles with a biscuit cutter  then get to making the peanut butter icing.  I layer 4 layers tall with icing in between the layers and then ice it all around.  Some of the them turned out to be a little bit difficult when the icing would start to harden as they cooled off, but after heating it back up it was ready to go again.

Overall I was extremely satisfied with how it turned out, the cake was delicious and some of the best I have had, and who knows maybe there will be more mini-layered cakes in my future :)

Also if anyone has any ideas for a better name for it let me know, cakelet describes it well but not sure if it is what it should be.

Happy Graduation!

So of course when I set aside the time to make a new post, blogger is down so I can"t do anything :(

But alas it is back up again so I can get to my post.

Tis the season for graduation.  Here at FSU people graduated 2 weeks ago, across the country college students are taking, preparing for or have already taken finals.  Which for the lucky seniors means that they are one step closer to graduating or have already done so.  Soon to come will be the lucky high schoolers who are ready for the freedom that college represents.


With that being said, apparently FSU thinks that I have graduated because I keep getting congratulation emails from the school and requests to order graduation announcement.  Unfortunately you are stuck with me for one more year.  Depressing I know.

However many of my good friends did graduate this year and to y'all I say Congrats!

Need I another excuse to bake?

For one of my friend's graduation lunch I was asked to make some cupcakes for the lunch.

Want to see what I came up with?  Well wait no longer.

Its a graduation cap and diploma!

And for the girl who loves music...

My friend Jessica came over around midnight (because of my crazy busy schedule) and helped me make them.  We had been wanting to bake/decorate together and found this to be the perfect time.  Kristin and David gave great moral support as they watched Steve Carell's last episode of the office and stuff about the royal wedding on my computer.

Easter!

Hey there! So as always I'm running a little behind in posting a new post, in fact you will be getting 3 new ones shortly.

And of course while I was in the midst of writing this post I had to stop and run and do something so everything just gets ever more delayed. I also realize that this post is rather jumbled and not the best English but I want to at least give you something

Anyways, Easter.

For Easter I decided to make a cake. It ended up tasting good although I wasn't too sure about how it ended up.

I made a chocolate cake with white chocolate ganache and strawberry filling, topped with white chocolate ganache , "shredded" chocolate and chocolate truffle eggs dipped in white chocolate.

The original recipe had regular chocolate vs. white chocolate, so I didnt take that into consideration when I was covering the chocolate cake because you could see part of it through the white chocolate.  But hey it got ate anyways.

Well to keep it short and sweet I'll just let you take a look and then be done with it.

April Fools!

April 1st, also known as April Fools Day is yet another holiday in which I find an excuse to bake something.  This time I have a mini-bakesale to help raise money for my mission trip to Wales this summer.

Since April Fools is the holiday of trickery I decide to do a bit of "trickin" myself with a flair that would pretty much be expected. With that I give you these :

Spaghetti and Meatballs!

Mashed potatoes!

They are cupcakes!!!

They are so cute and end even tricked me for a second! Several people were afraid to buy them because they thought that it was real spaghetti on them. Silly kids.

I did have a slight mishap when the makeshift pastry bag I was using slightly exploded.  My first reaction was not "oh look what a mess I made"  but more like "oh no the cupcakes! "

Fat Tuesday

Another Holiday gives me yet another excuse to bake and with it being Mardi Gras week and all I thought I would tackle the king of all Mardi Gras desserts, the King Cake!

Who would have known that a "simple" cake would take about 5hrs to make?!

I guess I should start from the beginning.  This week I am on spring break from college and naturally I came home for the week.  My mom asked me if I could make a dessert for her work because they were having like a
"party" of some sorts (really just having dessert).  Originally I wanted to make some sort of cupcake or something not Mardi Gras related but I decided I only have this chance once a year so I quickly nixed that idea.

A regular cake was out of the question because I accidentally left my decorating tips at my apartment back at school, so I kept coming back to the idea of a King Cake.

One of my friends had called me the day before asking me about how to make the oreo truffles because the chocolate they were using wasn't melting for some reason ( sometimes chocolate is tempramental, see my valentines cake for example).  So my mom asked if I could make the truffles and then just dye the chocolate purple, green, and yellow.

Yet I kept coming back to the King Cake.

So I found a recipe and we got the stuff and I began.  First of all you should know that yeast scares me.  I'm always afraid that I'm not going to let it "bloom" enough so the dough doesn't rise right or I'm going to over mix it so that it falls.

Thankfully I avoided that and when the dough was made I had to let it rise for 2 hrs!  Well while it was doing that I made dinner which consisted of homemade pizza (of course more yeast!) which turned out delicious (and unfortunately no pictures because now its all gone and eaten!).

After it rose I had to make the filling, I omitted the raisins and nuts because
     1. I don't like raisins
     2. I like nuts but not in things, I would rather eat them by themselves
This led the filling to be like a cinnamon roll filling.

Before the oven

Then you roll it out, put the filling in it, roll it back up form it in an oval then cut holes in the dough and let it rise for 45 more minutes

After the oven

The recipe made two cakes one turned out really well and the other "exploded" at the seams, well not really but it didn't look too terribly pretty.


Then came icing the cake, a simple icing is just confectioners sugar and water and then the sprinkles on top.  The store was out of like all Mardi Gras decorations so we had to use pink instead of purple sprinkles but it still looks really festive.

A thing to note though is that the icing hardens rather quickly (especially over a hot cake) so you have to either do a bit then sprinkle or sprinkle fast!

Sprinkling it up makes quite a mess but the finished result is divine!