Cakexperiment: Oh My Stars

I was trying to think of some special cake to make for July 4th.  I follow a lot of baking blogs, and the bloggers have wonderful, creative food styling and gorgeous photographs.  Until I'm able to shell out some cash for a fancy camera, I'm stuck with a Canon PowerShot that takes photos of dubious quality.

Still, I am relatively creative.  I'm a cake decorating instructor, so I certainly have all the tools I need.  I'm pretty handy with a piping bag.  I was sure I could come up with something interesting for Independence Day.

I had looked at some photos of cupcakes with hearts baked inside them, by baking one color of cake (pink), cutting out hearts from it, and placing those hearts inside another color of batter (white) so that when the cupcake was sliced correctly or bitten into from the correct side, you'd see a pink heart inside the white cupcake.  Cute, but I wasn't going to do that for my cake.  I'm also familiar with cakes made with specialty pans to create a special shape inside the cake when using two different colors of batter.  Also cute, but I didn't have such a pan to create a star inside my cake, and I definitely wanted to do something with stars for the 4th.

A little exploring in my basement (where I keep all my non-essential baking pans, cake decorating tools, etc.) uncovered the Wilton Star Pan I'd purchased a while back and never used.  I also found several different bottles of star/patriotic sprinkles.  I decided to make a special 3 color (red, white, and blue, of course) star cake for July 4th.  I whipped up some French Vanilla cake mix and then got my colors out.  I baked three thin layers of cake, one at a time, in my star pan after dividing the cake batter into thirds and coloring one with Americolor Super Red and the other with Royal Blue, and leaving the other white.

Then I used two different sizes of star cookie cutters to make some cut-outs in each cake.

I used a jelly roll pan as my cake platter and started assembling my cake.  I picked the red layer of cake as the bottom, and filled in the empty star spaces with the cake stars in the other two colors.

Then I slathered it with frosting and added the white layer,


more frosting, then the blue layer.




When assembled, the cake looked like this from the side:

How was I going to frost this cake?  With star tips, of course!  I used Wilton large star tip #1M for the white frosting on the top, and Wilton star tip #21 for the blue and red.  I also used tip #1M and white, red, and blue frosting in the same bag to do the sides of the cake.  I added jumbo stars in red and blue from Wilton Jumbo Stars Sprinkles and finished it off with a sprinkling of Wilton Silver Stars Edible Glitter.

When we sliced into the cake, it looked pretty cool.  I knew the star pattern/cut-outs wouldn't be visible, but I just wanted the multi-color effect.

As you can see, some of the pieces end up looking like a haphazard checkerboard pattern.  It was fun to play with cake and frosting today.  Usually I'm so burned out with making cakes for my classes that I don't like to do anything more than using sprinkles on cupcakes or cakes at home.  This was a fun change of pace.  And I didn't stain anything!!!

Happy Independence Day, Cookie Dough for Everyone

One of the books I recently purchased as a birthday present for myself was The Cookie Dough Lover's Cookbook by Lindsay Landis.  Lindsay's blog, Love and Olive Oil, became very popular, especially one particular recipe, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Truffles (recipe here.)  If you're familiar with cake pops and cake balls/bites/truffles/cruffles, you'll get the concept.  Cookie dough truffles are just balls of chocolate chip cookie dough (safe, no egg) that have been dipped in melted chocolate/candy coating.  My kitchen has seen it's share of cake pops, balls, etc. and I generally always have some Wilton Candy Melts hanging around, so my daughter and I decided to whip up the egg free cookie dough recipe this evening.  We popped it into the frig and made a quick trip to the grocery store for cookout food for July 4th (brats and my "world famous" homemade macaroni and cheese, which is actually Patti LaBelle's recipe.)  By the time we came home, the dough had chilled enough and was ready to be rolled into balls.  We did so, popped them in the freezer for a while and got my Wilton Chocolate Melter going, and before long we were dipping those babies in the melted chocolate.

They weren't picture perfect pretty, but they sure were tasty.  We did not make a whole batch; we made maybe about 20 or so, and put the remaining cookie dough back in the frig.  I'm sure it will disappear tomorrow, as my daughter will quite openly be "sneaking" tastes from the container.

Next time I'll make them with (egg free) oatmeal or peanut butter cookie dough; these recipes are also in the book.  I'm looking forward to making a lot of the other recipes in the book; it's hard to decide where to start!  Perhaps tomorrow I'll mix up some Cookie Dough Brownies for our Independence Day dessert....

Happy Baking!

Things I Learned This Month

This month brought about several discoveries.  Some were good, some....not so much.  Here they are listed in random order.

• Homemade marshmallows are not difficult to make, and rather tasty.
• When one makes homemade marshmallows, one should have some plan for what to do with all of them, or many will be wasted (thrown out).
• It is easy to forget about one's blog if one does not put forth an effort.  Before one knows it, it's been 9 months since the last post.  (And one has not been THAT busy.)
• Not collecting regular paychecks sucks.  One should plan better next year for being off work during the summer.
• Not being able to regularly teach cake decorating classes because the store where I teach is remodeling (and therefore I cannot earn summer income) sucks.  Finding out that one may be able to resume teaching cake decorating classes earlier than anticipated doesn't suck.  Finding out the new classroom is a lot smaller than the previous one was sucks.
• Needing a plumber for the one working full bathroom in the house sucks.
• Homemade doughnuts are very tasty, but there is no good way to store homemade doughnuts without them either getting stale or soggy.
• One cannot own too many baking cookbooks.  One should always purchase oneself a cookbook (or three) for one's birthday.
• Turning 43 isn't so bad, even if it's closer to 45 than to 40.  Whatever.

I plan to post again very soon (maybe even tomorrow) with some mini-reviews of the new cookbooks I mentioned.

New Baking Cookbooks

I recently added 3 new baking cookbooks to my ever-growing collection.  Whenever I am in a bookstore, I always browse for new baking books, even though I have more than enough.  I have 11 that focus on cookies, brownies and bars.  Cakes and cupcakes - 7.  Chocolate - 3.  And I have 18 that are general baking cookbooks that cover a wide range of baked goods.  That doesn't include the many Taste of Home magazine publications I have, some of which are specifically focused on baking, or the countless Wilton Yearbooks and other publications that I own, or the general cookbooks that include chapters on baking.  Still, I am always on the hunt for a new find.

My poor family must really want to grimace when we visit Reading Terminal Market in downtown Philadelphia almost every year.  If you've never been there, it's a historic farmers market that's been in existence since 1860.  We love to visit Bassetts for the best ice cream in the world (banana) and many of the other food vendors.  There are several bakeries, including Flying Monkey Bakery, which has been featured on Outrageous Food for their Pumpple Cakes, apple and pumpkin pies baked inside vanilla and chocolate cakes and covered in buttercream.  Yes, I said pie baked inside cake.  But that topic is for another time.....the reason I mentioned Reading Terminal Market is that they have a shop called the Cookbook Stall that sells nothing but cookbooks and kitchen tools.  Can you imagine having to forcibly drag me away from such a place?  We tend to spend only about an hour or so at the Market when we go (which has always been at lunch time, and this place gets mobbed by tourists and all the local business people on their lunch breaks), and so far, I have been good about not spending too much time there.  But the next time we go I am going to give the Cookbook Stall the attention it deserves!

Anyway, two of my recent cookbooks came from Amazon and cost me nothing, as I was using up a credit and a gift certificate code I'd redeemed after earning points through Mypoints.com.  These books were 101 Gourmet Cake Bites for All Occasions by Wendy Paul, and Flour; Spectacular Recipes from Boston's Flour Bakery + Cafe by Joanne Chang.  I was tempted by the Cake Bites book because I have several publications focusing on creating adorable cake pops, but nothing that really addresses coming up with creative flavor combinations for the cake pops/bites.  This book fills that void and features recipes for cake bites/pops like Raspberry Cheesecake, Chocolate Chip Cookie, Cherry Cordial, Mint Brownie, and Rosemary Lavender.  I think I am most intrigued by Churro, Root Beer Float, and French Toast.  I can't wait to try these out.  It's a good thing I work at a school full of appreciative taste testers!  (Of course, my kids are usually very happy to try things, too, even though they are pretty tired of cake after all my years of teaching cake decorating classes.)  This book features about 20 pages of cake bite/pop design ideas, too.

I hesitated to buy the Flour cookbook, then went ahead and added it to my shopping cart after reading a review that convinced me I would not regret purchasing it (thanks Amazon reviewer Justin S!)  I've only had the book for a week but I can already tell it will fast become a favorite.  I made the banana bread, even though I'd been completely satisfied with the banana bread recipe I'd been using for years.  The Flour recipe stomped all over that old banana bread recipe I used to make - I plan to forever use this new recipe!  I bought a big bunch of bananas at one of my last trips to the store and I'm looking forward to making it again before the end of the week.  There are also recipes for Homemade Oreos, Homemade Pop Tarts, and Homemade Fig Newtons, along with recipes for croissants, doughnuts, and other treats I am looking forward to making.  My only complaint is the lack of photos.  All of the photos in the book are full color and full page, which is great.  The downside is that there is a lot of unused white space in the book where the recipe directions end; these spots would have been perfect for photos.  I'd rather have more photos of smaller sizes than have all that wasted page space.

Finally, yesterday my daughter and I made a trip to our local independent bookstore.  She had some cash that was burning a hole in her wallet and wanted to look for a new WebKinz, and the bookstore has been a good source for specific WebKinz she's wanted in the past.  I, of course, could not resist peeking in the bargain corner and found A Passion for Baking by Marcy Goldman.  I glanced through it pretty quickly and convinced myself it was worth the $10 bargain price.  Once home, I paged through the whole thing and determined my gut instinct had been correct.  It covers the gamut from breads and rolls, pizza, scones, biscuits, muffins, cookies and biscotti, bars, cakes, pies, cheesecakes, etc.  There is a recipe for raised doughnuts that hints they are almost as good as Krispy Kremes, so that will be one of the first recipes I try.  You can visit Marcy's online magazine for bakers, BetterBaking.

Good thing that it's cooling down quite a bit this week here in southeastern Wisconsin, because I've got a feeling my oven is going to be in marathon mode.  I'll keep you posted on how things turn out!

Late on Labor Day: Boston Cream Pie Cake for Club Baked

I had pretty much figured out by last weekend that baking this go-around's recipe for Club Baked wasn't going to happen in a timely fashion.  If you haven't already figured it out, Club Baked is a group of baker/bloggers that is baking their way through the book Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, owners of Baked NYC (and brilliant cookbook authors.)  On the 1st and 15th of each month, we all publish a blog post discussing our baking experience (and hopefully sharing photos of said experience) with a chosen recipe from Baked Explorations; all of us in the group own the book.  There is a different "host" each time, and that host chooses the recipe and shares the recipe for the rest of the world in his/her blog post.

We were supposed to publish our blog posts about this time's recipe, Boston Cream Pie Cake, on September 1st.  I knew it wasn't going to work for me.......that day was the first day of school, and the first day back to work for me, since I am employed as a special education aide at an elementary school.  The last days of August were a little crazy, and I figured I'd get around to making the recipe over the long Labor Day weekend.  On Friday night, my mom called and asked if she and my dad could come out to visit with my family and take us out to dinner sometime during the weekend, as we had not seen each other in a while.  This was the perfect opportunity to actually make the cake, instead of just thinking about it or planning to get to it...I'd make the cake and we could all have it as our dessert after our dinner out with my parents on Labor Day.

On Sunday, I made the pastry cream(s).  All of the Boston Cream Pie recipes that I've come across have pretty much been the same.......two layers of yellow sponge cake with a vanilla pastry cream in the middle, then chocolate ganache poured over the top.  However, with the recipe from Baked Explorations, the baker turns part of the pastry cream into chocolate pastry cream.  When the cake is assembled, it goes cake, chocolate pastry cream, cake, vanilla pastry cream, cake, chocolate pastry cream, cake, chocolate ganache.  I debated whether I wanted to go this route......did I really want to mess around with two types of pastry cream?  Did I really want to work with four layers of cake?  Ultimately, I decided to make the recipe exactly as written.

And therein lies the rub.  This morning, I had a heck of a time with the milk sponge cake.  The cake batter seemed very odd to me.....very foamy and runny, and I doubted each layer would rise to the height necessary for me to be able to cut each cake into two layers.  I was right.  When my cakes came out of the oven, they were very flat and fairly dense.  I turned them out of the cake pans when cool enough, and they were only a quarter of an inch tall!  Knowing I wasn't going to use it, I tasted a corner of the cake and not only did it feel like a sponge, but it tasted like one, too!  Not much flavor at all.....I'd read that a lot of the other baker/bloggers had had difficulty with the cake and/or didn't like the texture or taste, so I pulled out one of my Nigella cookbooks and made new cakes using the recipe for Victoria Sponge.  I'd followed this recipe before to make Boston Cream Pie at least once before, so I knew it would turn out much better than this first attempt.  Sure enough, these cakes had a lighter, softer texture and much more flavor.  Here is my cake (I made 8 inch squares instead of rounds, 'cuz I'm cool like that) before the ganache.....

and after the ganache was poured.....

Here's what the sliced cake looked like.  I'm glad I ended up going with both types of pastry cream.  I had to quickly grab my camera to capture those two beautiful drips of chocolate ganache glaze oozing so prettily down the cake!

So, all in all, I am glad I made this, but in the future I will likely use the pastry cream and chocolate glaze recipe components, but rely on Nigella's tried and true Victoria Sponge for the cake.  I'm an experienced baker and it takes a lot to frustrate me, but that first cake did it and I don't expect to want to give it another try.

This recipe was hosted by Brooke's Bountiful Kitchen.

Sunday Night Cake: Club Baked

I'm really glad I joined Club Baked.  I like knowing that on or around the 1st and the 15th of the month, I'm going to be baking something, and it's likely something I haven't made before, even though I've owned the book we are baking from, Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, since it was published.  I also enjoy the glee in my kids' eyes when they ask, "Is this for us?"  Because I'm a cake decorating teacher, I often have to bake cakes or cupcakes to take to class to help me illustrate the decorating techniques I'm teaching, and I also bake treats for various meetings and things I attend.  Ryan's and Katie's eyes light up when they realize a baked treat isn't leaving the house.....it's all for us.

This time, the Club Baked selection was hosted by Julie of Little Bit of Everything and we baked Sunday Night Cake.  My husband Dave teased me because I was supposedly being conformist by actually baking the cake on a Sunday night.  (I was not in the mood for such teasing and told him that because of his sarcasm, he wasn't getting any cake!)

Sunday Night Cake is a pretty simple cake lightly flavored with cinnamon, topped with a pudding-like chocolate frosting.  The cake is very simple to make; the frosting requires a little more work, but the end result is a wonderful cake that's perfect for family dinners, potlucks, etc.

After mixing the cake ingredients together, I had a wonderful, smooth and silky batter.  The scent reminded me a lot of oatmeal cookie dough, probably because of the cinnamon.

I filled my square cake pan with batter.  (Oops, looks like I got a little bit on the island!)

While the cake was baking in the oven, the kitchen was filled with a wonderful aroma, which was soon overpowered by the chocolate aroma when I made the frosting, which begins similar to a pudding cooked over the stove, then gets whipped with a mixer and butter is added to it.  I probably whipped my frosting a little longer than needed, because I wanted a lighter, less pudding-like frosting.

The end result was a light spice cake topped with rich chocolate frosting.  When I read the recipe, I wasn't sure about this cake, because I am not a huge fan of combining the flavors of cinnamon and chocolate.  Still, I enjoyed this cake.  (So did Ryan and Katie.  I believe they both said OMG when they took their first bites.)  I think the next time I make this, I will follow a suggestion in the recipe and top the cake with powdered sugar instead of the chocolate frosting.  Even better, I think it would be good with the Honey Buttercream featured in another recipe in this cookbook, or with a cream cheese frosting.

Chocolate Mint Thumbprint Cookies

It's time for another edition of Club Baked!  Yes, I am baking my way through one of my favorite cookbooks, Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, along with my new blogger friends, fellow baker/bloggers in Club Baked.  This time we made Chocolate Mint Thumbprint Cookies and our host was Jamie of Random Acts of Food.  Thanks, Jamie!

I was ready for some baking therapy this week after learning that a telephone job interview I had lined up for a job I was really excited about was cancelled.  Yuck!  Sometimes when I get in a funky/depressed/my life sucks kind of mood the only way out is to BAKE (and, of course, consume!)  I got out my ingredients for the cookies and started.

I chopped my chocolate and melted it along with the Andes candies bits, and it looked silky, shiny, luscious, like this:

Then I got my other cookie ingredients together, including two wonderful sticks of butter:

The butter and other ingredients were mixed together in my mixer (which I sometimes call my Boyfriend):

And the cookie dough was thick, sticky and fudgy looking, almost like thick brownie batter:

I have a tendency to not be very precise when it comes to measuring dough into equal balls, as the recipe indicated, so I used a tablespoon to measure it out, then roll it into a ball and roll it in coarse sugar.  Then I used the back of a teaspoon to create the little hollow, or thumprint, of the cookie.  The unbaked cookie shells looked like this:

After my cookies had baked and cooled, I filled them with the wonderful filling, which is made up of cream, white chocolate and peppermint extract.  My filled cookies looked like this:

We ate some of the cookies soon after they were filled, not waiting for the filling to set.  I then put them in a container in the refrigerator, and I must say that I do prefer the taste of the cookies when they are chilled.  The recipe says they can be served at room temperature or chilled, but I think the mint flavor comes through better when they are cold.  Even though they are chilled, the cookies don't become rock hard and are still nice and chewy.

I'm really glad we made this recipe for Club Baked , because I may have otherwise overlooked this great recipe, thinking it would be too complicated.  They were rather easy to make and quite delicious!

Thanks for stopping by to read!