The Force...

My sister is the hostess with the mostest! E, my niece, insisted on a Star Wars themed birthday party. She is the REAL Princess Leia! Sarah created fabulous birthday invitations and decorations and gave me the baking order... I know it's my sister, but I am still counting this as my 2nd official birthday baking order!!!

William Sonoma has a cute Star Wars line and Sarah purchased the cupcake packages and the cookie cutter package. Really nice. So all I had to do was make the cookies and cupcakes.

Let's start with the cupcakes. Didn't even need to think about them. Sarah wanted white cupcakes, white buttercream, and clear sprinkles. Easy breezy.

The cookies were an entirely different matter. I've never made cookies before so Sarah and I got together (weekend before the party) to practice. I THOUGHT the "practice" would be in the icing... noooooo (well, yes, but thats later)... the practice that night was just in BAKING the cookies. I picked up a tube of Pilsbury sugar cookie dough. The box cakes work for me, why start from scratch with cookies?

I don't know the scientific reason, but I do know that the Pilsbury sugar cookie dough DOES NOT roll out. No matter what we tried. I fortunately had all the ingredients in the kitchen to make the recipe on the box of cutters from WS. Did you know you have to chill cookie dough for two hours? Fortunately we had plenty of things to talk about while we were waiting on the dough to chill.

Note: Kitchen Aid mixer is a dream with the dough! Also, I have a new appreciation for parchment paper!

The cookies cut perfectly with this dough recipe and they imprinted perfectly. Perfect, perfect, perfect.

Round 1-4 of decorating attempts. Here is what the cookies are supposed to look like decorated:

We tried Wilton's Color Flow icing... at three consistencies. I think the last consistency was the correct one. Sarah was actually really good at the piping. The taste wasn't great... but with a lot of practice I'm sure I could have made it work. As the birthday grew nearer and my work schedule more demanding I thought the odds of attractive eddible cookies looked pretty bad.

So then I though we could use candy melts instead. They taste better and dry faster, the color flow can take up to 2 days to dry, candy melts dry right away. By Thursday this looked like my best option. Candy Melts are easy... just melt in the microwave and pipe with icing tips. Friday morning I got up early to test this theory. Yes, it will work. But no, my piping skills weren't going to pull it off. Worst case scenario we just have plain sugar cookies. I had 30 sets of good looking cookies, each set with a Star, Darth Vader, Yoda, and a Storm Trooper. Plus I had about 40 cookies that weren't perfect but could be used for testing icing.

By the time I'd arrived at work (1 hour drive) I decided that a half dipped cookie in candy melts was the best and tastiest way to go. So imagine yoda, half his face plane cooke and the other half (vertically) covered in green candy melts. Totally cute! Chocolate for Darth, white for the Storm Troopers, and multi colored for the stars. Sarah approved... in theory.

Hubby "didn't get it". THis was enough to bail on the half dipped. I don't think he should have been our "voice of the people" but we also didn't want to spend valuable time on something that might not work. But the candy melts were REALLY good on the cookies. Really tasty. So I thought, what about covering the backside of the cookie? Which we were able to do very quickly. Not perfectly, infact, I was quite depressed after we finished the 120 cookies because I thought I had totally ruined them. But now I'm happy with them and would do it again. My sister provided the ribbons and bags and I had them packed up in no time:

as presented at the party:

And the cupcakes were cute too, because of the William Sonoma items:

and, finally, the glamour shot...

Plus!!!! One of the mom's asked for my number and wanted to know if I did cakes for other people. If she calls that will be THREE official birthdays!

May the Force be with you!

Why Pie?

Our family always has pies on Thanksgiving. Chocolate pudding pie is mandatory, usually pumpkin too, sometimes apple and sometimes pecan - but never cake.

Of coarse, I'm not crazy for pies; I'm crazy for cakes.

I made my angel cupcakes with a fall flair. Too cute(!)... from a distance. What you can't see is that I decided to experiment with gold dust. UG! Dust should only be used with a brush, not sprinkled. It's not a sprinkling decoration. To try and balance it out I added silver dust... which seriously looks like mold when not done right.

My sister: Does this cupcake have MOLD on it?

Me: No, I was experimenting with dust.

So between the gold and mold factors I felt I should "package" them a bit, LOVE IT! Putting ribbon on was much more difficult than it looks but I really like the effect.

There was some debate about the cake being dry. Gorgeous thinks it was dry, but still good. I think I'll just start pouring condensed milk over Gorgeous' servings. :)

Happy days!

Note: Isn't the picture great? My sister took it... I really need to get a camera.

Not as American as apple pie...

I have had this idea in my head for several weeks. I wanted to mix apple pie and white cake. My thought was that apple pie filling would make a great cake filling too! Dad used to make apple pie every Thanksgiving. So delicious and such a great memory. I also thought it would be fun to decorate a cake like a pie but in a very basic way.

I had a vacation day and finally enough energy to experiment in the kitchen.

The cake part was easy, just a white cake box sub milk and butter for water and oil. I like to cook my cakes in one pan, an 8x3 decorator's pan (by Wilton of coarse), but I wanted a shorter cake so I figured I could make two.

I found an apple pie recipe online (I don't have Dad's recipe) it looked easy enough. Of coarse all the recipes online assume that a pie crust will be involved. I went ahead and followed the directions but placed the apples alone in a casserole dish to bake.

For ease of cutting cake slices I put the cooled apple filling into my food processor just to cut the apple slices down to apple "chunks".

So, one layer of filling, with an additional layer of filling on the top of the cake. I put cinnamon in the buttercream icing and did a "lattice" on top. I think they turned out adorable!

The cake cut beautifully and has a wonderful chunky filling. It also tastes good.

So the problem... the cake is emotionally conflicting. It tastes good, just not "right". I think that apple pie is too traditional to be messed with. Somehow the mind rejects the cake and buttercream because it's not a flakey crust.

Hubby and I both think it's still good. Gorgeous is the one that was able to articulate the conflict.

All in all, I consider this experiment a success.

Flower Triplet

Attended my 2nd Wilton Fondant and Gum Paste class this evening. So much fun! I signed up for the class at Michael's. I honestly thought the class would cancel because no one else signed up for it. But instead, I now have a PRIVATE class. It's all about me!

The first class we made a bow. I was going to write a post about my poor, awkward bow with no gift to sit upon... but it was a really crazy week at work.

So here are the flowers we created tonight. These were made with colored gumpaste: a carnation, a calla lily, and a rose... and a bunch of leaves!

Cupcake Cuties

Had a great baking weekend! Really love how my two cupcake batches turned out.

For my niece, and of coarse my girlies, I made white angel cupcakes. Heavenly. Seriously, if I were going to a heaven themed party I would bring these puppies.

White cake box, milk and butter instead of oil and water; powder sugar glaze; buttercream icing; and Sugar Pearls.

I only had halloween cupcake liners or extra large cupcake liners, I also only have a mini muffin pan or a regular cupcake pan. I ended up using the extra large cupcake liners in the regular muffin pan... I wish I had taken a picture of how silly they looked, will next time.

Anyway, this is now my preferred way to make cupcakes! I love that the cupcakes are tall and elegant. So, here's how I layer... directly on top of the cupcake is a thin layer of glaze, then a twirl of buttercream and a sprinkle of pearls:

Note: before next weekend I am going to devise a way to take better pictures. The loveliness of the cupcakes don't come across. Plus I hate the color of my countertops and so I have been trying to use paper towels as a background. Time to step it up.

The second batch of cupcakes I made for a co-worker who is always helping me out... always... way more than I should need. Anyway, she wanted lemon cupcakes.

Lemon box, milk and butter for oil and water; lemon filling; lemon buttercream icing; yellow sprinkles.

I didn't cook my lemon filling long enough, so it was a little to liquidy (technical term.) I have also decided that one should only use two of the three lemon components. All three together are a little overpowering. But still good.

Note: I love a good zest. Adds great flavor to the dessert and has the bonus appeal of a fresh scent in the kitchen. You just can't bottle that fresh scent. May start randomly zesting.

Boo hoo; add sprinkles

Last weekend in October to try any halloween decorating. I saw these really cute ghost cupcakes made with fondant. I haven't worked with fondant yet (and am intimidated) so decided to use a glaze.

Glazing is pretty easy, you just mix and pour... I assumed that the glaze would smooth over any bumps and dips in the buttercream but it just accentuated them. Since I was doing cupcakes I was able to practice, adjust, practice, adjust. It's all about the learning curve.

My ghosts were sad and lumpy put instead of boo hoo-ing I added crystal sprinkles. I think this will be my icing-fiasco solution from now on, if nothing else, my daughters will be dazzled.

Add easy faces and we're ready to go haunt my sister's house.

The glaze was de-li-cious!

Star Wars...

"The star tip creates the most celebrated, easily accomplished decorations!" -- wilton.com

With this Wilton message in mind I thought it would be easy breezy to create a spider cake and a soccer cake. Not so "easily"... In Wilton's defence they do suggest the triple star tip for filling in large areas. But I wasn't afraid, I had the 1 star tip and was ready to roll!

Both these cakes call for black icing, but I'm not a fan of black icing. It's hard to make true black and if you buy the ready-to-go tube black then the flavor doesn't match the homemade icing. I love to use it for accents, but not for the amount of cake that needed to be covered for these designs.

Anywho, the star technique eluded me a bit. But it was really good practice. I also worked with candy melts again to create the legs of the spider. I think I'll really like candy melts with more practice.

My spider cake, purple instead of black and candy melts instead of store candy:

And my soccer cake:

I made both of these with the Wilton soccer ball pan. My girlies thought it was totally fun and so did I!