Good thing my birthday only comes once a year

I made two cakes last week. The first one was to celebrate my and a coworker's birthdays, which are only one day apart.





It’s a vanilla cake with raspberry cream filling and vanilla buttercream. I made all of the flowers myself from royal icing. It was my first time using royal icing to make cake decorations but the results were beautiful, and it was surprisingly easy to work with. My writing-with-icing skills need some work, though.

It was also my first time making lilies, but I made some roses and drop flowers, too, which in the past I've always made with buttercream icing.



I made the lilies, drop flowers and roses about 11 days in advance to let them dry out before putting them on the cake. The royal icing dries hard as a rock so it’s great for making decorations in advance.

To go with that cake, I made some mini chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and pink tinted coconut.




The other cake that I made was made for my family birthday dinner.


It’s chocolate cake covered and filled with chocolate buttercream, and it's decorated with KitKat bars cut into their individual segments (each bar has 4), assorted candies, and gingerbread people, which were part of the batch of gingerbread cookies that I showed you the last time I posted. It’s also known as a candy barrel cake and it’s pretty simple to make. Mine has the look of a family of gingerbread people taking a dip in a candy-filled hot tub or swimming pool as opposed to a barrel. The rainbow hued ribbon wrapped in a big bow around the cake helps to keep the KitKats in place.

I tried to use leftover pink buttercream to pipe on a bathing suit and cap on the gingerbread baby, and a bikini on the gingerbread mother as last-minute additions before adding them to the cake, but their swimming outfits look a little rough.




I used gummy bears, Whoppers, cookies ‘n’ creme Hershey’s Kisses, and Peanut M&Ms to decorate the top of the cake, and Smarties to decorate around the bottom, but you can use any candy you like.

I also made some Gingerbread Stuffing to go with chicken for my birthday dinner using a modified version of Nigella Lawson’s original recipe. Rather than buying the gingerbread pre-made, I made the gingerbread myself from this highly rated Old Fashioned Gingerbread recipe that I found on AllRecipes.com. I made the full gingerbread recipe but only used half of the finished baked gingerbread for the stuffing recipe as half weighed about 500g, slightly more than the amount indicated in Nigella’s recipe. I also changed Nigella’s recipe by using only half a pound of bacon, adding cranberries (soaked in hot water first to plump them), and toasted chopped walnuts. It was so good. It's like cake with bacon in it that you eat with gravy! Ridiculous.

I made mini raisin buns last week, too.




My buns never, ever look like buns. They start out in their raw doughy forms looking like buns, and no doubt they genuinely aspire to be buns, but they seem to settle into sturdy little lumps after they come out of the oven.

My autumn induced baking frenzy now appears to be over for this year. I hope. It's a good thing my birthday only comes once a year but I suppose it's my own fault for deciding to bake and decorate two cakes at the same time. I still have two more cakes to make in December, not to mention the 38,972 cookies that I have to decorate. After that I'll need a break from baking. I've earned it.

Luckily, I have good company in my kitchen. Oh, I forgot to tell you that I never bake alone! Here’s a picture of my constant kitchen companion, the Swedish Chef of The Muppets fame.


He just sits there on top of a recipe box on my kitchen table muttering jibberish and saying, “Bork! Bork! Bork!” occasionally. At least, I like to pretend he does.

It's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas

Christmas is just around the corner. I can smell it! It's sort of a strangely scented mixture of gingerbread and fear. I can’t decide if Christmas is around the corner waiting to bring me joy, peace, and cookies, or if it's hiding in the shadows and waiting to club me over the head with a baseball bat. The thought of Christmas being upon me wouldn’t be so scary if I could stick to just one holiday craft or baking project, but once I get started, I can’t stop.

Case in point: I’d been trying to finish up my Christmas ornaments but then I got sidetracked by a clever idea to make small decorative gift bags to put them in. I bought a couple of packs of candy/treat bags at the dollar store with the intention of using them to package fudge, but I took one of the boxes apart at the seams and saw that it would make a simple template for handmade gift bags.


I bought a Martha Stewart Crafts Designer Paper Pad (so pretty!), traced around the template onto the paper, and then cut it out with scissors. I then used the bone folder/utility knife to score and fold the paper in all the right places, just like the original bag.




I made a bunch of bags using different patterns of paper. You can see in the photos above how the tabs are built in to the design and will fit together to form the bottoms of the bags. If you’re wondering why the bags have those funny peaked tops with notches in the sides, that’s the tab that tucks into a slot that I cut on the back of the bags to keep the top of the bags closed.

I used the contrasting scraps of paper to make tags, which I cut out with different types of pinking shears and glued on. I used a silver pen to add a holiday greeting. Then I glued the bags together using the Martha Stewart craft glue and let them dry before tying small red ribbon bows and gluing them on with a glue gun.



Finally, I used a small Recollections (that’s a Michael’s brand, I believe) snowflake punch to make silver embellishments. The great thing about the paper pad that I bought was that it included a silver finish sheet and a white pearl finish sheet, and I used those to make the little snowflakes. The finished bags are approximately 6.25" high (with the top flap folded over and tab secured in the slot on the back), 3" wide, and almost 2" deep.





This is my first real experience with paper crafting. I always swore that I would never get into scrapbooking type activities but I am starting to understand why people enjoy playing with paper; it’s so fun and addictive. I used Martha Stewart products because they were both beautiful looking and on sale at Michael's, and they were easy to use. However, I have no experience with other brands so I’m unable to offer a fair review. I can tell you that the Martha Stewart Crafts Utility Bone Folder is multiuse tool, which is convenient and clever with the way that the tools all fit together. It’s not too sturdy, though—the tip broke off when I applied pressure to score the paper. I think I’ll get the regular bone folder for more heavy duty work.

I’m very happy with the way the bags turned out, though. They’re almost prettier than the decorations I’m going to put in them.

Now on to my baking. Because I have several baking projects lined up during the next few weeks that require gingerbread men of varying sizes for decorations, I decided to make them ahead of time using this Martha Stewart recipe. I doubled the recipe so that I could make extra cookies in different shapes. The only other change I made was to use half ground ginger and half ginger root grated very finely. The recipe makes really great cookies with just the right texture. They're not overwhelmingly gingery in taste but they smelled amazing while they were baking.






I used a variety of cookie cutters, some new and some old, to make different shaped cookies. The red gingerbread man cutter and the pinkish heart cutter on the bottom right were ones that my mother had when I was little. The bubblegum pink cutters are actually for cutting out fondant shapes and came with a Wilton cake decorating kit.

You probbaly noticed the star cookies with the cut-out centres. I asked myself, why stop at plain old gingerbread cookies when I can make gingerbread chocolate-hazelnut sandwich cookies? So, that’s what I did, but I made them in the style of linzer cookies. I love the look of linzer cookies with their little cut out windows that allow you to see the filling inside and the dusting of powdered sugar snow that surrounds them.




Instead of raspberry jam or other fruit preserves, which is more traditional in linzer cookies, I used Nutella. The combination of gingerbread, chocolate and hazelnuts is so Christmasy and delicious.

 And here are the assembled sandwich cookies:



The powdered sugar isn’t really necessary—again, it’s what you do with linzer cookies, and it makes them look pretty and seasonal. The worst part is that the sugar can blow around and get into your cut-out windows, ruining the effect. The sandwich cookies would be just fine without the dusting of sugar. The messiness is totally my fault, though. I was a little heavy handed with the dusting. I also need a finer meshed strainer because the one I used was too big. A less aggressive approach wouldn't hurt, either. I need to learn to gently tap the strainer and not whack it because I'm in a hurry to shove cookies in my mouth. Patience is not one of my strengths.


Finally, here’s my plate of “reject” cookies, the ones I didn't want to share because they were a bit ugly, messy, burnt, and gooey from the extra Nutella oozing out around the sides. But I enjoyed them more than a bit. Yum.