First Sugar Cookie Attempt

Okay so I know I said I wouldn't be doing another post until I got a few other things done and was back at school....

BUT everything is almost pretty much in order and I just drank a huge mug of french vanilla coffee...and decided to do a post!

What is french vanilla coffee?

1 spoon of Nescafe instant coffee
3 spoons Tim Horton's French Vanilla Powder
Hot boiling water
Tons of sugar

yummm....I thought I might throw a Lindor chocolate truffle in there...but too bad I ate them all :)

I thought I would ring in the new year (a little late) by talking about a project I tried in 2011 summer and haven't touched since.

After creeping Sweetopia's blog and watching this tutorial video on her royal icing daisy transfers about 50 times, I decided to give it a try myself.

I was too intimidated to make the royal icing from scratch so I bought the Wilton mix...and this was also before I had my stand mixer.

Naked Cookies..teehee

I used this basic sugar cookie recipe. 

For a first attempt, I would say that I didn't do too bad. There were a tonne of downfalls like the cookies being too thin, not getting the right consistency for icing, having way too much icing left over and go to waste, ugly daises...well now that I think about it, maybe it wasn't such a successful attempt!

But she made it look so damn easy!

And from this project I've realized that I cannot ever be a surgeon because my hands are super shaky...well that and some other reasons but let's not get into that.

There were a tonne of steps to the cookie decorating process and since it was my first time I was super slow too.

So many little bumps :( Such uneven circles!

I'm not much of a cookie eater...I kinda prefer cake (surprise surprise)....but the cookie decorators I occasionally (and by occasionally I mean obsessively) stalk inspire me to try it out for myself. 

So this year I'm going to take another stab at cookies....maybe not be too over ambitious with the design and just start with basic things like actually baking the cookies properly and making the icing.

I also wanna try out a whole bunch of new cupcake recipes!! Top of the list? COCONUTS!

Happy Baking!

Do Not Resuscitate Cake

Readers of my blog...I come to you today from a place of failure and embarrassment.

Often times, I am so caught up in doing new things and succeeding that when something like this happens, I am shaken to the core...THE CORE.

I call it, the Do Not Resuscitate cake.

It started off like any normal cake would have. I lovingly measured out the ingredients...gently combined them in the bowl...carefully added the water...cautiously mixed it all up.

Then I poured it into my 8 inch pan and popped it in the oven with dreams of a happy healthy brown chocolate baby....I mean cake.

10 minutes later, I was opening the oven door to what appeared to be the purple thing from ghostbusters and an exploding volcano....TWO exploding volcanoes. I didn't even bother to take a picture...it was that depressing.

It was overflowing and there was a gigantic solid thing protruding out of the middle which looked very much like a certain body part but I'm going to keep this space PG...so I'll leave it to your imagination.

I didn't even fill it that much...it was just a TAD over the mark I usually fill at.

So anyway....my roommate and I made the executive decision to take it out, empty some of the batter and pop it back in.

20 mins later I opened the oven door to find what appeared to be a landslide in my cake. It had completely sunk in the middle...like absolutely completely. I didn't even know what to do so I just sat down and did some heavy breathing exercises while my roommate tried to convince me that it wasn't that bad...yeah right! Who was she kidding!?

That's why its called the Do Not Resuscitate cake...we should have let it go the first time.

Have you guys seen the video of the bride having a crisis and cutting her hair while her friends convince her that it doesn't look that bad. It was like that....exactly like that..

I've gone through little problems through my various baking projects but a complete failure like this hasn't happened in a long while.

Had I lost it? Was this baking thing a momentary, temporary phase of my life that is now dead and gone?

But even though it looked terrible and horrible, it still tasted amazing...gooey and moist and rich and chocolatey. So we sat there and ate this failed cake out of the pan while bringing my baking self esteem back up.

Nevertheless, I am back on my baking tip and made some of my best creations yet!

Moral of the story; sometimes, no matter how right you do things, the result is a complete mess and you find yourself just shit outta luck. Don't give up. Find a lesson in the experience and if not...have a good laugh and move on.

Happy Baking!

Whipped Cream Frosting:Take 1

Frosting for cupcakes seems simple enough. However, there are many variations of different types of recipe and its kind of hurting my head trying to decide which to use for which cupcake. I thought I would try a basic buttercream first but upon perusing through a few recipes decided not to. Maybe its the cheap-o side of me that cries at the price of butter, or the side of me that doesn't really like a lot of frosting to begin or maybe just the fact that all the professionals on Youtube seem to be doing it with a stand mixer and I just have my measly hand mixer *pouts and runs into a corner to cry*

So anyway, my sister wanted me to make some cupcakes for her class pot luck and we decided to do a simple chocolate cupcake with a whipped cream Oreo frosting. I love whipped cream and who doesn't love Oreos? I figured I would just throw all the ingredients together and beat away until the cream was....well...whipped. Biggest. Mistake. Ever.....okay maybe not ever...but still pretty big.

I won't bother to post the recipe because it didn't work so well. I started to whip the cream after adding in icing sugar and it wasn't really taking a stiff whipped cream form. So then I started to add in more icing sugar. Some sort of divine being should have struck me with a thunderbolt right then because that was NOT a smart idea. Within seconds, the whipped cream turned into cheese. Lets have a moment of silence while we picture my very shocked face......

I don't think it was because I added more sugar but more so because I whipped it too long. As I was frantically searching on Google how to reverse the cheese concoction that I had made, I learned that a) the curdled cheese was here to stay and b) you must stop whipping as soon as you think its ready...don't give it a few more seconds thinking it will help...it won't...it will disintegrate before your eyes.

By this point I had also added in the Oreo crumbs and pretty much ended up with a grey mushy lumpy mess that started to 'weep'. Weeping means that water starts to leak out when the whipped cream starts to separate.

Since I was making this for my sister, I had to get some sort of frosting on them. So I whipped up a new bowl of frosting. Somehow these things always happen to me at night because once again I was up quite late praying and coaxing the frosting to come out semi-decent which it did. It wasn't stiff and didnt hold for piping but it didnt taste that bad. It looked.....weird....but at 1 in the morning, it could have looked like mud for all I cared.

I will definitely be trying this frosting out again. Hopefully, it turns out better. In the mean time, I'm staying away from Oreos!

Lemon Cupcakes: Take 1

The first cupcakes I made from scratch were lemon cupcakes. I guess I should have started with something a bit simpler but my big head got in the way of rational thinking...it tends to happen.

Anyway, I decided to make lemon cupcakes with a lemon cream cheese frosting. A bit ambitious but I spent many hours combing various websites to find a recipe that was simple, not too many ingredients, and relatively easy. I can't remember exactly where I got the recipe from but it was one of the simplest I found. So, shutting down my laptop and picking up my spatula, I set out to make the cupcakes.

Things were going pretty well at first. I followed the recipe to a T. Unfortunately, at this stage of my learning process, I hadn't really read up on how to mix ingredients to ensure fluffy moist cupcakes. The recipe called for mixing up the dry ingredients and then throwing in the wet ingredients and blending away. I thought that the longer I mixed, the more air would get incorporated, and the fluffier they would be and so I went to town with my little handheld mixer.

I pulled them out of the oven and they looked harmless enough. I should have taken the hint when they hadn't risen much. I made another mistake of trying one while it was still hot. I thought they tasted pretty good and was quite pleased with myself. I even started making plans for all sorts of fancy cupcakes with pretty little liners. Talk about counting your cupcakes before they're out of the oven....or something about chickens and hatching....anyway.

30 min later, they starting showing symptoms of dryness, dense-ness, and crumbiness. Yes those are all real words. I proceeded to make the icing, figuring that sugar would cure all! Unfortunately, I didn't think to bring the cream cheese to room temperature and proceeded to have a battle with the lump of cheesecake using my little handheld electric mixer as my only weapon. I don't think I need to tell you who won *blows smoke off finger gun*. I also invested in some cheap plastic tips thinking that if I stuck them in a ziplock bag, I could ice them like the pros. Oh how young and naive I was. 1 hour in and I had made a contraption out of a little purple funnel, several elastic bands, and a ziplock bag. Cake Boss would have cried.

It was late and I was tired and cranky and by this point I just wanted to ice the damn things and get to bed. I iced them as best I could and stuck on a few raspberries. Then I put them in the fridge and called it a day.

The next morning the cupcakes were extremely dense. There was pretty much no air in them and they had a buttery/eggy taste to them. The lemon cream cheese frosting tasted fine but a bit sugary. Regardless, I didn't think the cupcakes were edible at all.  I had to dump the lot out. My soul cried a little. I moped a bit. Sat down with my ego and researched methods, do's and don'ts of baking and was fine the next morning.

So the lesson I learned from this episode as well as this very long post is that if you want it to be simple, you have to be willing to compromise taste. And if you don't put in the time to figure out how your ingredients work with each other, its probably not going to go well.

I'm definitely going to try to make lemon cupcakes again. I will post the recipe once it works out. Wish me luck!