Funfetti-tastic!

You may be catching onto a pattern here... I like to make birthday cakes. Well, I like to make any cakes, really. But birthdays give me such a handy excuse to make a cake. This time, it's Amanda's. And her requested flavor of cake? Funfetti! So that's what I made (from scratch, of course).

The cake turned out beautifully. Three layers of fluffy white cake, sprinkled through with colorful dots.



The icing, however, turned out to be a debacle and a half. I found a recipe for Italian Meringue Buttercream, which I thought sounded amazing. I had made a Swiss Meringue Buttercream before that I absolutely loved, so I thought this would be perfect. Boy was I wrong. Everything was going along just fine, right up until I added the vanilla. Then my beautiful smooth icing began curdling right before my eyes. From vanilla! I was shocked. I was appalled. I wanted to cry. (I had been having a bad run with icing as it was before this...) I thought maybe, just maybe, it was because it was too warm (the end of summer, warm kitchen from baking the cake), so I thought I'd throw the bowl in the fridge overnight, then whip out the lumps in the morning. To my dismay, those curds were not going to smooth out, no matter how long I beat them. Even after consulting others, I still can't figure out what went wrong.

So now on to plan B: good old fashioned buttercream. But regular buttercream is rather yellow, due to the butter. This simply would not due for my perfect white cake that was supposed to have a perfect white frosting. So on to plan C: fake buttercream. Which required another trip to the store (without a car, so walking in the morning heat). Get there, gather my ingredients, get home...find that somehow, the cashier managed to leave out my butter extract. What?? How do you have buttercream frosting without butter flavoring?? As it was, I didn't have time to make it back to the store (nor did I have the patience) if I wanted to get a crumb coat set on the cake before icing it. So I had to make do with just the vanilla and almond. The result was indeed beautifully white, and tasted rather like Oreo-cooking filling. And even after all my frosting issues, the final product was, if I do say so myself, quite a cute little cake.



Oh, and what to do with all the leftover frosting that happens to taste like Oreo cream? Why, make (giant) homemade Oreos, of course!

Flavors of Fall

For B's boyfriend's birthday, I volunteered to make a cake (okay, so begged was more like it...have I mentioned I view baking as a form of therapy?). Surprisingly, it wasn't too hard to get my way. However, trying to settle on a cake was less than easy. He's a great guy, but one of the worst decision makers ever on certain topics. Coercion eventually got a "nothing too sweet" parameter from him. Finally, B and I managed to work through enough options to get him to actually choose something. (As I love to try new and interesting things, I have literally hundreds of cake recipes saved to try, so I really needed help in narrowing it down). The final verdict: Pumpkin Spice Cake with Orange Cream Cheese Frosting.



It was a perfectly spiced, not-too-sweet, slice of fall-flavored heaven. And the nuts were actually an amazing addition to the cake with both flavor and texture.



And of course, had to top it off with some hand-crafted marzipan pumpkins dusted with gold pearl dust! (And yes, those are flecks of orange zest you see in the frosting...yum!)

Portia Cureton Cookies

Or as I like to call them, Lady What's-Her-Face cookies (Amanda only had to tell me the proper name about a thousand times before I remembered). Amanda is the master (or I suppose that should be mistress?) of these delicious cookies. She takes the time to roll and cut out dozens of them, a chore that can take hours in the quantities we tend to make. (To be clear, I don't intentionally duck out on the work...she just always started these while I was still at school.) And then came the fun part: we break out the buttercream, sprinkles, and whatever else we think will be useful (which, if you're Andrew, includes red pepper flakes) and start decorating!

These cookies are made for holidays, so there are only so many holiday-themed shapes we have to work with. As you can see, we tend to get a little, um, creative after a while. Halloween wasn't too crazy:



As you can see, we were taking it quite seriously, everyone studiously decorating away.



Though in the end, we did have Mr. Potato Head and a hemorrhaging brain (hey, you can only make so many pumpkins before you try for something else).

St. Patrick's Day, however, was a different story....



Perhaps it was influenced by the beer bottle cookies, that we started getting creative quickly, or maybe just by that time in our 3L year, we were at a point of lunacy. Either way, we have Darby O'Gille (complete with pennies over his eyes), Conan O'Brian (or an Oompa Loompa, depending on who you ask), "No Man [gummybear] Is An Island", and the gummy bear representation of Envy...



...a bathroom door, disco dancers on a record, man drowning head-first in quicksand, a Chesire cat...



...Hannibal Lector, a ventriloquist, a mummy, a man drowning in water, a gummy bear sacrifice, and man-eating gummy bears.

Umm...yeah... Coincidentally, we've never been invited back since taking these to a party. I wonder why?

Snowman Army

(Okay, so in case no one's caught on, I'm catching up from months, and in some cases years, of prior creations, but since I have the pictures I thought I may as well)

Anyone remember the Calvin and Hobbes strips where they made the snowman army and house of snowman horrors?

Well, last Christmas, we decided to make our own snowman army (sans the macabre posing) out of rice krispy treats. Aren't they cute??



We just used standard rice krispy treat...stuff (mix? batter? edible modeling material?), which we found would tend to sink if stacked while warm, so we made the individual balls and "glued" them together with royal icing. We used the same royal icing for the eyes and mouth, and sculpted dyed marzipan into the little top hats and carrot noses. Fruit by the Foot was then cut into scarves. We definitely should have let them harden fully before assembling (and kept them away from the heater overnight), but we managed to keep them standing long enough for the party!

Strawberries and Cream

When B sent out info for her birthday party, she included a less than subtle hint that she would love a strawberry birthday cake if anyone felt so inspired to bake. As she knows just how much I look for any excuse to bake, I was quick to volunteer. Since I knew whatever cake I made would include lots of fresh strawberries, I decided to stay away from a traditionally iced (i.e., completely covered) cake, as we've previously learned just how much fresh strawberries can bleed through icing. The result:



Lovely and light and perfect after an afternoon barbeque. The only slight problem is that with all those layers of strawberries and whipped cream, cutting the cake made things slide a bit at the end. But still every bit as delicious as it looks!

Puppy Cakes!

So confession time: we're the kind of people who treat pets kind of like children. Particularly the chihuahuas. They have wardrobes. They have shoes. They have coats. They get birthday parties, complete with cakes made specially with them in mind - people cakes that have ingredients the pups like (cheese, carrots, apples, etc.) Yes, we are slightly insane.

When Claire turned one, she got a lovely carrot cake.



It has a cream cheese icing and decorated with marzipan carrots and dog bones which were hand sculpted. The bones were also dusted with gold colored pearl dust. I also subbed apple sauce for half the oil, cut the sugar by 1/2 cup, and omitted the raisins.

While the people enjoyed the cake, Claire thought we had all lost our minds:



(Admittedly, we probably had.)

Therapeutic Baking

We tend to view baking as not only a labor of love and a fun activity, but it can also serve as therapy when needed. October 30, 2010, was definitely a time we needed some baking therapy. Why? That was the day we were to receive the letters that would reveal our fate: our bar result letters (for those who do not know, we are both newly licensed attorneys). We had spent three years learning the law, three more months learning the law that we were to be tested on, and two eight hour days of testing. And this was the result of it all. So what to do when waiting on the mailman to deliver your fate? Why bake, of course! With a Halloween party the next night, we decided some "Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin" inspired cupcakes were just the thing.





We have pumpkins, pumpkin patches, Snoopy as the Red Baron, Woodstock, Lucy as a witch, Pig Pen as a dirty ghost, the dude with the hat (I forget who that is), Charlie Brown, and of course, Charlie Brown as a ghost with too many eye holes cut in his sheet.

It was quite the endeavor, requiring half a dozen shades of icing, various tools for outlining and drawing, and most of the day (which is good, as the postman chose that one day to be three hours later than usual), but we were pretty pleased with the results!

Srevotfel Creations

So here are two of our grand creations that exemplify the Srevotfel Pizza.

First up, the Chicken Meatball Srevotfel:



This was made on whole wheat crust and all cheese was reduced fat - going for a healthier version of Srevotfel! This pizza has homemade tomato sauce, slices of homemade chicken meatballs, mushrooms, mozzarella, and is topped with banana peppers. Totally delicious.

Also from that night, we have the Kielbasa Srevotfel:



Again with whole wheat crust and low fat cheese, this pizza has turkey kielbasa, potatoes, carrots, and whole grain mustard. It is topped with swiss cheese and parmesan and served with sauerkraut after it's baked. The sauerkraut really made the pizza. The potatoes, carrots, and kielbasa were originally boiled together with the sauerkraut. This was the winner of the night!