Baking With Love

I know a lot of people who hate Valentine's Day (yeah, yeah I know, it's been over for a bit, but still) and I've never quite understood why. Is it because you're single on Vday? Well, I've been single on several Vdays and I still enjoyed them (though maybe not as much as the day after when I would buy a shopping cart full of 50% off chocolates). You have TONS of things to love on Vday if you don't have a boyfriend/girlfriend. You love your family, right? You love your friends, right? You love your animals, right? See where I'm going here?  Is it because you've never gotten anything for Valentines day? Ryan and I didn't even celebrate it that day. I didn't get flowers or chocolates or a teddy bear and I'm still okay. Granted, he did take me to dinner for a 'belated' celebration that weekend but that's beside the point. I still enjoyed the 14th very much. I think Vday is a great holiday... even if it was made up by Hallmark for more money.  Blah, blah ...and that's the end of my rant!! :):)

Anyway, what I love most about Vday is the sweets. Shocker, right? The night before I baked cupcakes (yes, again- the same ones in my other posts but just added cocoa powder to them) to take to work on Vday to show all of my co-workers how much I luuurve them! I have to say, they were a succes. I wanted to tackle chocolate cupcakes for the first time AND wanted to make a great buttercream. I still can't believe it's taken me so long to get that right, which brings me to this: the best buttercream I've ever made... TA DA!

I used this recipe Fluffy Buttercream Frosting and changed it just a tiiiny bit. I added about two teaspoons of shortening and about half a cup less of powdered sugar. I was jumping up and down with excitement when I was done with this frosting. I kept yelling, "RYAN, RYAN! COME LOOK!!! IT'S SO AMAZING!!" The recipe I used was such a great one. The writer gives a few tips/tricks that worked perfectly. Baking Tip #10: Follow every tip that recipe includes, I couldn't believe how much of a difference those little things made. I found in the making of my frosting that beating the butter/shortening for 7-8 minutes was very important. It was white when I was finished beating it and I truly think that's what helped in the making of it, not to mention I used actual, real butter this time! :-D

Something else I tried was a Pinterest find: Cookie Dough Frosting. Sounds amazing, right? I surely thought so!! However, mine didn't turn out anywhere CLOSE to the one on that website. When I was mixing it, it started to look great but then I asked myself, "How is this going to come out of the piping bag? It's too thick!" So I added more milk. I guess I added too much because I got this:

Uhhhh... Not cute. I dumped it back into my mixing bowl and put more flour/powdered sugar in it. It helped a little bit but they still turned out weird/runny.

Maybe I'll save that for another time. I think I might try to make it by itself as a sweet dip or just something for me to eat by the gallon with my hands...?

Another thing I was super excited about was the decorations on my cupcakes. I wanted to make little red fondant roses but after baking/mixing for 3 hours I was ready for something a little quicker. So, I tried an experiment. I had mini chocolate chips for the topping of the cookie dough "frosting" I made and I figured they melted just fine, won't they work if I pipe out some cute heart designs? Nope!!! Baking Tip #11: They're more expensive and they're definitely more work but you should really buy candy melts. I wanted those chocolate chips to work SO badly but it wasn't in the cards. The candy melts harden very nicely and hold their shape whereas my chocolate drawings started to melt as soon as I took them out of the freezer. They weren't hard enough sitting out on their own so I put them in the freezer. I don't even know if THAT was a good idea. Haha! My designs turned out okaaay but they just didn't hold as well as I would've wanted them to. Next time, I'm definitely going for the candy melts.

Well, I hope everyone had a good Valentine's day and got to spent lots of time with your loved ones!

Until later,
Baker in Training

And here I leave you with my last amazing thing: MY CUPCAKE LINERS DIDN'T STICK TO THE CUPCAKES!!! How? I have no clue. I didn't put any oil in this batter, is that it? Everything I know from experience would point towards oil being the reason they wouldn't stick, not that they would stick. Right? Uhhh... I'll just practice more and find out! See ya!!

Cake Pops- Round 1

The other day, my friend and I decided to try to make cake pops. When someone describes them, don't they seem easy?

1. Make round balls.
2. Shove stick in.
3. Submerge in candy melts.
4. Voila! Beautiful cake pop.

............Wrong. 

Let me tell ya, they weren't as easy as I thought they were going to be. Don't let those pics up top there deceive you. Out of about 25 balls, we only got a few cute ones. I even prepped by watching tons of YouTube videos and reading recipes before making them. Well, they didn't help with these. I want to specifically reference this blog post Cake Pops Are Not Easy because she describes how the first attempt at making cake pops doesn't go as well as one may hope. Our results were the same to the T. For example: the pops falling off the sticks and into the candy melts, producing a "crumby" candy coating that wasn't cute at all. Not to mention the sprinkles we accidentally got in it. Note to self: don't decorate over your bowl of candy melts... That is if you can even get the melts to a good consistency in the first place.

So, here are some of the pics from our trial and error cake pop baking:

 

L: Look at that adooorable packaging for the sticks!

R: Easy (cheap) way to take pops on the go- solo cup! 

L: Heart molds! Cute but waaay too heavy for dipping 

and not wide enough to put the stick in very well.

R: Pink=cake pop maker (weird UFO shapes), Yellow=hand molded.

Baking Tip #8: So many things went wrong while we were making these. The biggest being that the balls (hey! get your mind outta the gutter!) kept falling off the sticks. Now, we did do one thing right in that we coated the tip of the stick before shoving it into the bottom of the ball. Though, make sure you don't dip all of the sticks in one color and then try to cover it with other colors, it doesn't work. Trust me. I don't know if it was because some of the balls were too small or we didn't let them sit long enough to harden or we didn't use enough candy melt on the end of the stick. It was probably a combo of all. Either way, most of our cake pops were lopsided because they started to come off of the stick (or completely did, thus creating the "crumby candy melts") or the coating was too heavy for them. We did make them two ways, a cake pop maker (the pink balls) and the cake crumbles + frosting (the yellow balls). I think the cake pop maker didn't make them as solid inside and a little small so they didn't hold the candy melts as well and the other balls did. Though, neither were perfect.

Baking Tip #9: Another (among many) problem was that our candy melts just weren't working for us. First of all, the bowl we melted them in wasn't deep enough to dip the cake ball in. So, make sure you use a deep enough bowl that allows you to dip the entire ball into it. That way, you can submerge the pop and rock it back and forth in the melts to coat the whole thing (don't swirl it around, that's what makes it fall off). Once we switched to a deeper bowl, we were able to dip the whole thing in, but when it came to getting the excess liquid off, that didn't work either. I think we never got the melts hot enough so it wasn't thin enough to drip off and hardened really quickly. I've seen it done two ways: microwave and double boiler. I tried the microwave and it was okay, but next time I'm going to try the double boiler. What's there to lose in trying a different approach? Nothing!!

It was still A LOT of fun [and work] making the pops. Everyone at work loved them even if they weren't the most beautiful things ever. I can't wait to attempt Round 2!! They'll be better then, right??? Oh, and one last quick question, how do you devour your cake pop?

Until later,
Baker in Training

My Resolution: Bake More!

Though my real resolution is to eat more cupcakes get abs, I don't quite know how realistic that is. So, I want to bake more (and Ryan interjects- cook more!). I think this is more achievable, not to mention is the opposite of getting abs, because it requires zero physical effort, unless you count the arm pain that follows holding an electric mixer up for five minutes straight trying to get a fluffy icing. I've baked a good amount, but not quite enough. I've mainly been focusing on cupcakes/frosting, but hopefully I can branch out to others, i.e. cake pops, decorated cookies, fondant creations, etc.

I started out the first of the year with, brace yourself, a STIFFish FROSTING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Talk about a good sign. Here it is:

As you can see, it's still not the amazing fluffy stuff you see at professional baking places. I'm most envious of those who compete on Cupcake Wars. They make it perfect everytime! I brought these beautiful cupcakes to work and of course I was berated because, "Bleighton!!! We're all on diets!". To which I replied, "Don't worry, they're calorie and sugar free.... ;)". Yeah right, I wish. They still ate them, though. Including myself with no abs and all.

I used the same recipe I've been using this whole time, I just added more and more powdered sugar. I think the recipe called for 4 cups... I put 8. I was crossing my fingers, hoping it wasn't going to give me a toothache from being too sweet. But, to my surprise, it wasn't! The other change I made this time was adding heavy cream. Milk is much too runny and even though I didn't add any to the second batch that was still not stiff, it didn't turn out the way I wanted. So, adding the heavy whipping cream made a HUGE difference. Next time, since I finally bought it, I'm going to use crisco. Some people have told me that they use both crisco and butter, so I'm going to try it.

Now, this one may shock you, but I just realized that I'm not using butter when I make my frosting. Sure, I'm using something that looks like butter, tastes like butter, smells like butter, but truly isn't butter. That could be THE biggest reason why my frosting has been lacking in fluffiness. Unless someone can enlighten me and let me know that it's just fine to use it!!! We've always had the tub-o-butter [margarine] in our fridge.

Not once in my life have I not called it butter or used it when recipes called for butter. Though, we do buy the butter sticks in the summer for corn on the cob, duh! Deep down I knew it wasn't "real" butter, but I used it anyway because it had become habit to use.

Thus, I come to my point- Baking Tip #7: "For baking and cooking: Butter is the best for baking, because its high fat content (80% fat) yields the best results, such as tenderness and flakiness. Whipped butter or butter-oil spreads will not give you the same results as butter, so do not use them in your baking -- though they may be fine for most cooking." (Article Here) Double check your ingredients. This may sound dumb, sometimes I am, but make sure you have what the recipe calls for. The fact that I haven't had been able to make a fluffy, delicious frosting could be because I've been using this imposter butter. Now, I like margarine so I will continue to use it when cooking and maybe in some cake mixes, but after I try it with my frosting next time and it turns out perfect, I probably won't use it ever again to make it.

What's your New Year Resolution? Are you still sticking with it?

(I am!)

Until later,

Baker in Training

Happy (after the holidays) Holidays!

It's a little late to be making a Christmas post, but I'm going to throw caution to the wind and do one anyway!! I had a wonderful Christmas and I hope all of you did, too. It was filled with presents, food, friends, food, love, and food. Did I mention FOOD?

I started out the holiday with a great friend of mine and her darling daughter teaching me their family cookie recipe. Though we ate most of the cookie dough before it even got into the oven, we did end up with some great cookies complete with icing and waaaaay too many sprinkles (courtesy of the cute little girl mentioned above and pictured below). It was a lot of fun!

Isn't that tiny rolling pin the cutest thing you've ever seen?

 

Yes, that is indeed a high heel cookie. Custom made!

The finished product. See what I meant about the sprinkles? :-P

The cookies ended up being adorable AND delicious!! Not to mention the cookies and frosting were made completely from scratch.

I then went on to take a crack at those 'made from scratch' cupcakes and frosting from the previous post again for a food party at work. They definitely turned out a lot better than the first batch.

LOOK! They aren't lopsided (well, a few still are) and they're all the same color!!!

Baking tip #5: Take a toothpick to the top of each batch of batter once poured into the cupcake pan to smooth them out. For some reason, and that reason I do not know, the batter is unevenly spread when just poured into the pan. Even when it looks like they're flat after pouring, they still bake lopsided. I poked the toothpick in the middle of the batter and spread it out in the liner. I was so pleasantly surprised that this worked.

Baking tip #6: This was definitely a "duh" moment for me but of course I didn't think of it during my first baking of these cupcakes. The instructions always say "12-14 minutes". I always put it on the lowest time just to be safe, but I guess my oven is SO different (old, crappy, other bad adjectives) that it bakes in less time than needed. I put them in for 10 minutes and then checked them. They weren't ready so I checked them every minute after that. They turned out to be perfect!!

 Then I added the frosting and sprinkles! YUM!

The frosting wasn't as runny as it was the first time I made it,

but it still wasn't the stiff, fluffy kind. Sigh, maybe someday. :(

Even though I was frustrated with my runny frosting, it was a great Christmas overall. What'd y'all bake for the holidays?!?

Until later,
Baker in Training

I'll leave you with this: the pups, waiting patiently for something to fall on the floor!

Made from scratch!

YAY!! I successfully created home-made cupcakes and frosting for the first time!! Now, when I say "successfully" I mean that I made some form of edible cupcakes and some form of edible frosting without a store bought mixture. I wish that by saying "successfully" I would mean that they were the most delicious things I've ever tasted, but sadly, I cannot. Don't get me wrong, they weren't the worst things I've ever tasted nor were they burnt or anything but they just weren't amazing like I hoped they would be. I had high hopes for my first time.... ;)

I also can't say that I mixed all of the ingredients without using a recipe. I don't think they would have turned out as okay as they did if I hadn't used one. I'm most certainly not at the "eye-ball it" stage. Before now, I didn't have a clue as to what even went into a cupcake or frosting mix. So, after some research, I found and used these two sites, Cupcakes and Frosting. Honestly, the only reason I chose them was because in each of those recipes I had all of the ingredients they called for. Some wanted canola oil, crisco, merengue powder (whatever the heck that is) or some other odd item that I would never in a lifetime have in my cabinet. Those recipes were simple and that's exactly what I needed for my first 'from scratch' baking experience.

So, though the cupcakes and frosting were okaaaay, (they passed the boyfriend test...although men will probably eat anything, right?), they were far from delicious. The cupcakes were dense and a little over baked, not to mention poured unevenly into the liners. I think my very old oven, hopefully my apartment gets an upgrade with the upcoming "renovations" they keep talking about, is hotter and bakes more unevenly than most because I put the cupcakes in for a minute less than what was recommended and a few came out more brown than the others. The cupcakes were also not as sweet as I would have liked...more sugar, please!! On the other hand, the frosting was TOO sweet and also runny. I put in all the right portions [plus about 5 more cups of powdered sugar to thicken up my frosting- bad idea?] and followed the recipes exactly and they still weren't that great.

Here are a few pics from my baking adventure-

First came the mixing (oohhhh, aahhhhh):

Taste test--Butter and sugar together is SO yummy! But, of course, I didn't taste the batter in the pic below with the raw egg (ewwwwww). 

Then came the finished product (yep, that quickly and without any mess, of course :-P):

See how uneven they are in both color and height?

See how runny it is?

One of these days, when I'm not a beginner anymore, I will try and post some baking How-To's. I know there are TONS of blogs out there (like this amazing one that I'm currently obsessed with: Bake at 350- her cookies are amazing and I will eventually tackle those) that have baking tips and tricks but I want to try it anyway. Right now I'm just trying to learn from my mistakes and trying not to repeat them the next time. Let's see how that goes.

Until later,

Baker in Training

Lucky Me!

Lady Luck must have been on my side because last night, I WON SOMETHING (two of my co-workers also won, yay)!! At a work raffle, I put two of my three tickets into a box labeled "cookie making set". Which, as you know is very appropriate for me with the whole learning to bake thing and all. Finally, after the other uninteresting prizes were claimed, the announcers brought up the box of tickets for the cookie set. I crossed my fingers, closed my eyes and chanted "oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please" under my breath. Something must have worked because they called out my ticket number and I couldn't help but shout with glee (making a pretty big fool of myself, of course)! I pretty much ran to the stage to claim my prize. I rarely win anything. It was awesome.

Here's what I won:

1. One cute green basket that currently sits under my kitchen sink helping to organize my cleaners.
2. Two Betty Crocker sugar cookie mixes and though I want to make my cookies from scratch eventually, I think I'll use a mix first and work on my Royal Icing. Yum-o (yep, a little Rachael Ray action)!
3. One Betty Crocker cookie recipe booklet. They all look delish!
4. Two silicone spatulas.
5. Two sets of Chrismas sprinkles.
6. One set of Christmas themed cookie cutters.
7. One set of measuring cups and spoons.
8. Two cookie cooling racks.
9. Two cookie baking sheets.



I didn't even own half of the things that were in that basket. The best part of it all, you ask? I got it FO' FREE! I really like free stuff. Who doesn't?

Until later,

Baker in Training

Happy Halloweeeeeeeeeen!!!!!

.....I prefer the treats, obviously!

So, after a long evening of making my halloween cupcakes and fondant shapes, I learned a few things:

• Cupcakes are small, thus the figures should be small. Mine were larger and that's a pretty big mouthful of fondant.
• The first bullet point leads to this one: I should flavor my fondant with just a little bit of vanilla, because it tastes kind of plain.
• Black fondant is the hardest thing to work with. It was stickier than the white fondant and I had to use a lot of powdered sugar. Then the powdered sugar wouldn't come off of it no matter how I tried. Annnnnd it stained my hands and the counter, gr.
• Regular grocery store frosting doesn't work very well in a piping bag. Not only was it runny and sloppy but there isn't enough to fully frost 20 cupcakes... I learned that the hard way and some only have a little bit on them just to hold the topper in place.
• It took about 3 hours to craft 11 pieces, so I need to speed up a little or my creations are going to take all day. 
• The edible glue is awesome!! It sticks perfectly the first time. I only had a little bit of trouble sticking the black eyes to the orange pumpkin. It slipped just the tiniest bit and the black leaked onto the orange.
• In fact, my new tools proved extremely useful. I haven't used them all but I will eventually.
• I haven't experimented with homemade cupcake batter or icing yet so they taste the same as the first ones. I'll work on that next! 

The ghost was nearly impossible to stand up on a cupcake so he didn't make it on top of any. :(:( Baking tip #4: Don't use toothpicks!!! I used them with small marshmallows to attempt to make the ghost sit up straight but it didn't work at all. The toothpick punctured the marshmallows and came through the top of the ghost's head. I struggled with the ghost for the longest time trying to get it to work but then just scrapped it altogether and stood it up on its own fondant body which worked better than I thought it would. I saw a few YouTube videos that used two large marshmallows isntead to drape the fondant over. I'll definitely try that next time. The only thing I've found that toothpicks are good for are testing the middle of your cupcakes to make sure they're done all the way. At least they're good for something!

I didn't have any good pictures of the witch hat on top of the cupcakes, so this one shows its good side!

Also, I loved the orange and black cupcake holders, they're too cute. Overall, they were a lot of fun to make and I can't wait until I can create some more!



Until later,

Baker in Training