Cake Pops for the New Year!

These looked cute when I saw them on My Charming Kids. I decided to try them.

I'm positive there is some kind of trick I'm missing, but these were almost as big of pain as those stained glass cookies were. They taste good from what others have told me, but they took forever to make!

I'm not going to give you the whole "how to" because you can find it on Bakerella, but I'll give you the gist of it:

The inside of chocolate cake mixed with cream cheese frosting.
The outside is melted and colored white chocolate.

...the outside is where the issue came in for me because we weren't really able to "dip" them in the melted chocolate :( It could have been the type of chocolate we used, and probably was, but out of 60 rolled cake balls, only about 30 made it off the pan, was iced, and made it to the styrofoam block.



But, it was worth it, because they are adorable. And, as my grandmother points out, "If it's weird, you will find it and make it."



Next baking adventure? Rainbow cake. To happen after the next pay day. ;)

Stained Glass Cookies

This was a fun recipe. And by fun, I do mean that it looked great on paper but made me want to fork my own eyes out in actuality.

Cut outs and I? We are not friends. Never have been, never will be. I don't even like the taste of cutouts. But these were just so pretty!

Ingredients were pretty simple. Jolly ranchers and cutout dough (in my case, homemade--unsalted butter, flour, one yolk, sugar, and vanilla).

According to the recipe, the prep time for this was 15 minutes. If someone can make all of this in 15 minutes, I'd be calling the world records group.

Step 1: Make dough, if doing so. Shape into 3 discs. Refrigerate for a minimum of 2 hours. Then roll out.


Step 2: Using a large size and small size of the same (or different, I suppose, if you want) cutout, do cutouts from your dough (first with the big one, and then cut out the middle of the big cutout with the little cutout) and put them on a piece of parchment paper just big enough for a cookie sheet.

Step 3: Separate colors of jolly ranchers. The recipe says "red and green only." I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I've seen color specific packs of jolly ranchers, so I did all five colors in one original flavor bag and had wayyy more than enough.

Anyway. The next thing the recipe says to do is put the jolly ranchers in a food processor. I'm pretty anti-breakingthebladesonmyfoodprocessor/cleaningmyfoodprocessorbecauseihadtochopupjollyranchers so I put each color in a separate lunch bag, went out to the garage, and hit them with a hammer until finely chopped.

Here, I learned something: jolly ranchers stick together, even when finely chopped/hammered, even when only left for 10 minutes. I suggest doing one color at a time, because it become a royal pain to rehammer everything.



Step 4: Pour crushed ranchers into individual bowls or saucers or whatever you want. Then, using a tiny spoon (or a metal baby spoon, which worked great for me), spoon some into the middle cuts on your cutouts. The recipe says "level with the cutout"...I say "higher than the cutout" because level left a few holes.


Step 5: Bake. Recipe says 8-10 minutes "or until golden brown". If I cooked them for 8 minutes, they would have been black. 4 minutes and 30 seconds was just about perfect for me. It also says to let them cool on the cookie sheet, but I took them off (ON the parchment paper) and set them aside so they wouldn't continue to cook.

The recipe, supposedly, makes 36 cookies. I made probably a good 50, maybe more. Most of them were in my first few attempts at this and were burnt, broken, ugly, and thrown away. But hey...some of them turned out awesomely so it was worth it!


...and I'll never be making them again.

Pumpkin Cake

I found this recipe probably in family circle as well, but I honestly don't remember. If doesn't matter, because other than the general idea I completely ignored the recipe and did whatever I felt like doing.

Like using box mix for Chocolate Fudge Cake instead of making my own blend of pumpkin cake. And using a smaller Pyrex baking bowl than they suggested (who knew those bowls we always mix in were actually baking bowls??). It turned out okay for the presentation, but the cake itself is amazingly delicious! So here it goes:

When you bake in a pyrex bowl, this is what it comes out like.

You have to use the same size bowl to make each one, and I baked them for 45 minutes each. Both halves.

And then you have to level the tops of each so that they meet closely when placed on top of each other.

Mix yellow and red with vanilla icing to make orange, and use that in between the halves to keep them together and on the outer edge to smooth it.

Then ice the rest of it, but I suggest doing one section at a time because the icing gets funky. Cut a hole in the top of the cake for the "stem". Cover the icing with reese pieces (it said M&Ms but they don't have an abundance of yellow and orange in them) in the pattern you want and put some kind of chocolate bar in the top hole for the stem.


Voila!

It worked well until I went to move it. Then things started to move. But it was a good thought. Next time I'd probably use a bigger bowl to make it easier, decorate on the presentation dish instead of the wire rack, and more red in my icing. But it's still at least kind of cute :)

Spider cupcakes on Saturday I think!

One Week

Over the last week I...

...was not drunk during the taking of this...


...bought, made, and decorated this in two hours for my sister's July 4th birthday...


...spend two hours talking to my grandma about how getting a german shepard mix puppy would not be the right dog for her and how she knows that, and then came home and found this...


...and then went next door and found this one, his sister (literally)...


...watched Brady's Mozart skills...


...set off some of these...


...bought this for our large group of partiers this weekend...


...and purchased these for B for the weekend in my hopes of turning him into a sandal-wearer.


And this weekend will rock the socks off the past week :)

Cupcake Crazi!

I just felt like "crazy" needed an 'i' on the end. Don't judge.

But here's is my latest baking project: Hamburger Cupcakes!



The "bun" is yellow cake cupcakes, the "burger" is fudgey brownies, and the "ketchup" "mustard" and "lettuce" is all icing...well, half icing half food coloring (at least for the ketchup!). Good tip though, if you decide to make them, cake them the day you plan on eating them. When you take cupcakes out of their "cup" they get hard realllly fast.



I don't have any idea if they actually taste good, because I don't eat the things I bake 99% of the time (too much time with the ingredients!) but they are cute!

The recipe can be found here at Bakerella, and I found it through The Jetplane's Blog.

Because I'm all about the Creative Cupcake (see previous endeavors here and here). In the past, the real kickoff to the cupcake madness, I also made these:



and these:


Because I hate cooking. But I adore baking!

Wonderful Wordless Wednesday

Baby B and Cousin A holding hands.

The girls running away.

Me and Baby B shadowpeople.

Vday cupcakes, made with attitude by me and (mostly) the friends.

Accidental photo failure of me and B's feet...though it's still kind of cool. my jeans are better, though :)


We're currently having anywhere from 50-70mph winds following a nice thunderstorm and tornado watch. I'm almost amusing myself by watching the "power outage" meter calculate failures. So far it's up to 60,437. I figured I'd post some photos while I waited for us to join the statistic, as it's only flashed about 23892 times in the past hour! Enjoy!

Wordless Wednesday

I'm not sure if there is a badge for this or where I got it from, but feel free to holler at me if there is and I'll add it :D

Festival of Lights.

Me and B, festival of lights.

Baby B and her Uncle J. Pretty much the best picture ever.

Me shooting a 9mm at the range. First time ever.

Sugarplums.

Santa Reins.

Owning and Selling Turkey Cupcakes in Georgia

Firstly: I want to make my blog non-generic. Where are you all getting your backgrounds at?

The ups and downs of owning and selling:

1. Fridge. They were supposed to come on Monday between 8 and 12, which apparently meant 2:30pm, and when they did it took 15 minutes for them to say "your compresser is broken" and say they'd be back on Wednesday to fix it. They express ordered the part on Monday to get it here by today, and it never came. No one will be here on Monday, so it will be another 6 days before we have a refridgerator. All of the food is officially spoiled, it wasn't worth keeping the coolers stocked with ice to be honest. But, on the upside it will only be $250 for the part, which means no need for a new one!

2. Camper. The old camper was sold for $600 over book price at $5100 on Ebay last week. The guy that bought it sent us his deposit already, which is why we now own the new camper. Well, he called on Monday and backed out of the deal because he got laid off. There is a lot of legal issues with this, and technically he signed a commitment and HAS to pay the money...but times are hard and if he doesn't have it we aren't going to make him pay it. Thought he was going to cry on the phone. So we contacted the second highest bidder, which was $5000. He bought another camper last week. He said he wouldn't actually mind having both, but he could only come up with about $3000 right now. So, we have no idea what's going to happen and we currently own two campers.

On to more exciting things...

We are headed to Georgia in about 5 hours (yes, 3AM!) so I probably won't be sleeping until then. Thankfully, I'm not driving. I'm not packed yet, as it stands, so I can truly use a bit of extra time anyway! It's supposed to be 64 degrees there tomorrow, and I can't even express how happy that makes me. It's FREEZING here--hence why our food has stayed good for as long as it has hah. We'll be back Sunday night some time.

The real thanksgiving treat is the Turkey cupcakes my best friend Jay and I just made. They are pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. Though, it's painfully obvious that neither of us has a future career in decorative baking. Also, please ignore the fact that my camera takes horrible pictures.


Happy Thanksgiving!