DIY Tie Dye Cupakes!

I asked June what she wanted her birthday party to look like (because I'm not sure if she knows what "theme" or "motif" is yet), she just said "purple, pink and blue."

As you might recall, my stance on cupcakes is to spend more time on the baking/recipe OR on decorating...not both. I went with decorating this time, but fancified the cake instead of the icing for a change. 

I started out with a box of white cake mix, then separated the batter out into three containers.

I used food coloring to make purple, blue and pink batter. I used plain old blue food coloring for blue, but for the purple and pink I bought special ready-made color gel that I bought at Hobby Lobby for about a dollar each. This was out of a combination of laziness and mistrust in my own ability to mix good enough colors. 

Each of those colors got poured into a plastic sandwich bag. I snipped a corner of each and, alternating colors, squirted some of each bag into each of the cupcake papers. When I was done, I took a knife and swirled them a little to really get the tie dye look.

FYI - I used a cool cupcake tip I found on pinterest. Normal cupcake cooking instructions are to fill the cups 2/3 full and bake at 350 for about 22 minutes. The tip is to fill the cups 3/4 full and, once the cupcakes are in the oven, lower the temp to 325 and bake for 25 minutes. This causes the cupcake to rise up more and look like a more full cupcake (rather than the sad little flat ones that you normally get out of boxed mixes). 

This tip worked out really well for the ones that I was able to fill 3/4 full. Once I realized I was running low on batter and wouldn't have enough cupcakes for the party, I started filling them lower, so I did end up with some flat ones. 

Check out how cool they looked when they were done!

A little twirl of store-bought icing and some purple sugar sprinkles and, voila, done!

Of course, the kids barely noticed that they were cool colors. They were just, "ZOINKS ICING NOM NOM NOM"

My only tip for others would be to buy more than one box of cake mix if you really want/need the full 24 'cakes for your occasion. (Of course I can never seem to get a full 24 cupcakes out of these box mixes, so maybe I've just always filled mine up too much?)

Fall Cookies and the Princess Helper

June and I made these pumpkin chocolate chip cookies the other day after I saw the recipe pop up on a blog I read.

Since we're in our little rental apartment, it maybe "furnished" but that does not mean complete. I went out and bought a baking sheet because the one tiny one that came in the kitchen wasn't going to cut it. I also had to buy flour, sugar and all the other ingredients. (Man. I miss my fully stocked kitchen. And spices. Just having spices.)

I was the measurer and June was the pourer. We were both the stirrers because June - despite being THRILLED to be stirring - only wanted to go as deep as the first half-inch.

Yes, she's wearing her Belle dress. She loves it and would not be swayed by my warnings that it might get dirty.

Just as Natalie said in her blog, the cookies didn't really re-shape during cooking, so they kind of turn out in these unfortunate looking lumps. (I actually find them rustic and charming, so there.)

June could hardly wait for them to cool off, which meant that we spent about three minutes sitting on the floor, blowing on our cookies waiting for them to not be molten.

She had to go to bed almost immediately after that, so she only got to sample one cookie that night. (I might or might not have given her one for a special breakfast treat the next day, though. Don't judge! It's the season for celebrating, y'all!)

Cat Cupcakes...Catcakes

I made cupcakes with June for the first time last week! A coworker of mine had resigned and I decided to make her some send-off sweet treats. That night I asked June if she'd rather go to the park or help me make cupcakes and there was no hesitation, so out the mixing bowl came.

For a while now my strategy has been: spend the time baking or spend the time decorating. Not both...that is just too much for someone with my time constraints and feelings of exhaustion every night. Since I knew I wanted to decorate these puppies, I went for a boxed mix.

My stellar time management ended up with June eating a cupcake right before bed. Luckily she did actually sleep that night.

 Since my coworker is a cat lady (I say that affectionately), I decided to make some cats based on a picture of them I saw in a book. (Cat lady story - when I borrowed her iPad, I saw a folder called "For Olivia," much like my "For June" folder on my phone. I said, "I didn't know you had kids!" and she said "Olivia is my cat.")

This is the first time I've ever "built" something on cupcakes. It was very tame, just adding on ears made out of thin chocolate wafer cookies and piping the icing onto them.

About how we ended up with blue and yellow cats... they were originally going to be gray and orange but I found out a little too late that my food coloring had dried up. I did what I could with the colors that were left and ended up with blue. Strange enough, the blue ones were the house favorite at work!

Meow!

Green Tomato Pie

What do you do when your boss gives you a bunch of green tomatoes?

You Google "What to do with a bunch of green tomatoes, not fried green tomatoes." The result I liked the best: Green Tomato Pie.

Some of the reviews said that it tasted like apple pie and that it's not all that uncommon in the South. I was intrigued.

It called for you to stack/layer all of the sliced tomatoes and then pour the sugar mixture on top. This went against my intuition because I kept picturing delicious sugary goodness on top and marinara pie on the bottom.

The pie came out beautiful. I love homemade crust.
The results:

First of all, I didn't have the thickening agent or any substitute, so I just did without. This worked out fine with a peach pie I made once and I had hopes for this one. This didn't turn out so well since tomatoes have a lot of liquid in them. It was a little soupy.
But once I cut the first piece I was able to drain the pie, as it were.

The taste really was good. I couldn't believe how sweet it was (actually I can, the recipe calls for 1 1/4 cups of sugar. I actually think it might have been better without that extra quarter cup). It did taste like apple pie and this crust recipe was so delicious.

Even my coworkers liked it, and I'm including one picky eater and two foodies!
In summation:

- Don't leave out thickener

- I think I'd like the tomatoes cut into smaller pieces because they didn't fall apart as much as I thought they would.

- I don't like raisins so I substituted craisins. They were delish.

- Use a little less sugar than it calls for

Peppermint Oreo Truffles

Yesterday this:

...became this:
Peppermint Oreo Truffles. They are so delicious and rich.
If you're interested in making some, here is a LINK to my blog post about cake balls. These were made the same way except that I crumbled up a package of Trader Joe's peppermint Joe-Joes in the food processor instead of a sheet cake. I didn't have cream cheese (like I've seen in some recipes) so I used chocolate syrup as my binder.

YUM!

Sunday Sweets

I've been put in charge of the party planning committee in my team at work. Which really just means that everyone else in the 4-person team wants to celebrate birthdays but no one is really into arranging those sorts of things, so it's my job.

It was my boss's birthday last week and she requested blueberry cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. Ask and you shall receive!

Both made from scratch. I looked through a bunch of recipes online for a good-looking blueberry cake. A lot of them looked like (and commenters said) they tasted more like muffins than cake. I went with this one because all the commenters said it really was cakey.
If anyone is interested, I made this recipe. But keep in mind that this recipe is for a small cake, so it only made about 16 cupcakes. Also bear in mind that they don't rise much, so next time I would fill the cupcakes almost to the top of the holder rims and only have about 12 large cupcakes. Baked them for about 21 minutes and they came out perfect.

The cream cheese frosting recipe is pretty much your standard recipe. I whipped it for a long time in an attempt to make it light and airy. It was delicious. However, some of the commenters on the recipe said it was pretty small, so to double it if you're trying to ice a larger cake or 24 cupcakes. I doubled even though I only made 16 and ended up with way too much icing. So what did I do with tons of leftover icing? I made carrot cake cupcakes!

Yeah yeah yeah, the piping job isn't so great. But I was on June duty while frosting them and in a hurry.

Waste not, want not. And be without sweet treats at play date not. But that's something for another post.

Favor of Flavor

Chocolate-dipped almond biscotti favors for Jaye's baby shower

Step one: Dip.

Step two: Drizzle.
Step three: Package.Step four: Eat the ones that turned out ugly.

Pretend like you didn't mess up several on purpose.

All while wearing a baby.

The Holidays, Finally!

Slowly but surely it begins to feel more like Christmas around here.

I'm not sure if it's been the 75' weather or some other reason, but it really feels like Christmas snuck up on us this year. We put up the tree pretty early on but didn't even find time to put the ornaments up until last week!

But for my work holiday potluck I volunteered to make my favorite holiday cinnamon roll cookies. I almost lost my motivation (making these is a two-day process) but I rallied and finished them off while my mom came over to visit.
A pain in the butt to make, but pretty and so delish!

And we even got some fog!Fog is almost unheard of in Arizona on account of how dry it normally is. But waking up to this sight was a welcome change.

Tonight, with Christmas fast approaching later this week, we finally got some presents wrapped and placed under the tree!

I can't wait to go out to Indianapolis and Danville next weekend to see all of the family and really celebrate the day!

p.s. Please vote in my new poll!

Also, the Bakery has been updated!

Cake balls and other weekend activities

If you guessed from the one-word teaser at the end of last post that I was going to be posting about cake balls, you're right! (All the rest of you - get your mind out of the gutter, perv!)

I got together with a three lovely women this weekend to make some Christmas-y cake balls to enjoy and share.

To make cake balls:
1. Bake a sheet cake.
2. Crumble cake into teeny bits with food processor
3. Mix crumbs with some kind of binder - I used frosting
4. Roll mixture into balls
5. Dip balls into melted chocolate
6. Decorate
7. Let harden
8. Enjoy

Between the four of us we must have made more than a hundred balls. I wish I would have taken a picture of them all lines up on the wax paper to dry! Nevertheless, here is a small sample of the wares:
Speckled ones - Funfetti inside (my contribution). Dark chocolate and white chocolate - red velvet inside (Cindy's creation). Some of the peanut butter covered ones have strawberry inside and some have chocolate peanut butter (Jaye and Anni's). And the red one has mint oreo inside (also Cindy). These are so moist and delicious!

We also went over to the home of two of our favorite people this weekend - Remi and Cole and their smiley baby Smith. There was food, laughter, birthtalk and scorpion hunting.

That's Michael with the black light (see this post for more explanation) and Cole with the poker thing.And there was also some hanging around in ridiculous outfits while the menfolk jump-started our car, which needed a new battery. Remi's solid explanation involves giving us a little belly dancing show to utilize the belly dancing kit I got her for Christmas. My outfit is less easily explained because this is just how I looked after bundling up to do the scorp hunt. However, the Santa Sweatshirt was a joke. Kind of.

Halloween Sweets

Hello, and a very spooky and happy Halloween to you!

As you may remember, I signed up to bring cupcakes to the Halloween potluck at my new job on Friday. I spent about 3 hours on Thursday night mixing colors, dipping, frosting and otherwise decorating said sweet treats.

I made spiders,
Pumpkins,
Mummies,And, yes, I made the brains.

And made a total of about 50 cupcakes. So with the exception of keeping a dozen at home for when I saw the family this weekend, I was planning on taking all of them to the potluck. Michael asked how many he could take to his work. I originally snorted and said, "How many cupcakes have you been slaving over for the past three hours?!" He retorted that it would just be really nice since his work wasn't doing anything special and they'd all really appreciate them.

So I gave in and sent him to work with a dozen and took about 25 to work with me. Well, there was a call to bring all food down to the potluck ahead of time, and when I brought them down there wasn't anyone else there. There was, however, a whole table full of desserts including sheet cakes and lovely store-bought cupcakes (next to which I set my poor little homemade ones). At the potluck there was no going around saying who brought what (way too many people).

Here's the thing, guys. I don't make cupcakes to get compliments. I don't need people to "ooh" and "ahh" over them, but I really do like a little acknowledgement, you know? Just a little something that says, "I can see that you spent a lot of time of these. They're nice." But no one even knew that I'd made the cupcakes. Oh well.

I called Michael to see if he'd given the cupcakes away.

He said that they had been a big hit! Everyone had thought they were cute and supposedly one person even took a picture of them. Might he have been exaggerating to make me feel good? Maybe. But it certainly worked. I was so glad I'd given him those stinking cupcakes that I was going to be so frugal about. And the people I'd made them for didn't even know it! Funny how things turn out, isn't it?

A safe and fun evening to everyone!

I tip my High Hat to you, sir!

When my friend Remi invited me over to make cupcakes this weekend, of course I said yes. What I didn't know at the time was that she was professional status when it came to making cupcakes - especially in that she aims high. We didn't make any measly boxed cupcakes, we made gourmet cupcakes.

(When I say "we," I mean she, her sister and their neighbor Logan. I spent most of my time supervising [read: watching])

We made red velvet cupcakes from a cherished family recipe. We also made High Hats, which were mistakenly referred to as Tall Hats, Tall Boys and High Boys for the rest of the day. HIgh Hats are made in three steps. First, the rich chocolate cake. Then you make a stiff marshmallow-like substance that you pile onto the cupcake with a piping gun. After letting them set for a while, you dip the tops into melted chocolate (melting the chocolate was really the only thing I did for these cupcakes - and they still let me take some home, bless!). What you end up with is a decadent cupcake that looks like one of those dip cones from Dairy Queen. These were so good, but also very rich.

We also made red velvet cupcakes from a cherished family recipe. We made both norma-sized and mini 'cakes.It was a great time, and I'm truly grateful that everyone let me take cupcakes home even though I really only melted some chocolate and sifted the flour. JP, Michael and Kai were also grateful because they got to sample the wares that night!