Cake Break

I needed a break from cake so lately I've been making non-cakey treats

I forgot to take a picture of it, but I made White Chocolate and Macadamia Rocky Road squares. It's funny because what originally inspired me to make these squares was the picture of them on the original recipe site, but mine weren't quite as pretty. I made a few tweaks to the original recipe.  I toasted the macadamia nuts and pistachios (or “smishsmashios” as I like to call them) in the oven first to enhance their nuttiness. Instead of dried cranberries, I used dried cherries that I snipped in half with kitchen scissors. I also used unsweetened coconut because that’s what I had on hand.

The only problem I had with this recipe was the proportion of white chocolate to the other ingredients. I used chocolate chips rather than baking chocolate, which was probably the wrong thing to do. I think it needs about one-third more white chocolate chips (so 180g + 60g = 240 g) in order to get it to set up right.

(I always call pistachios "smishsmashios" because it reminds me of the Ghost of Christmas Present/Willie the Giant in Mickey’s Christmas Carol who can’t pronounce pistachios.)

Still in keeping with my Cake Break, for my birthday supper tonight, which is to celebrate my birthday tomorrow on November 25th, I made two types of brownies: Oreo brownies and chocolate chip cookie dough brownies.

For the Oreo brownies, I mixed some chopped Oreos into the brownie batter. Once the brownies were baked and cooled, I made half a recipe of Wilton's vanilla icing (the same one I always use for cake decorating) and mixed in chopped up Oreos. After spreading the Oreo frosting onto the brownies, I pressed a few pieces of cookie into the top.

And here are the cookie dough brownies.

These are just regular brownies with walnuts that, after they cooled, were frosted with a chocolate chip cookie dough frosting, which was made according to this recipe.  I used half vegetable shortening and half butter, regular sized chocolate chips, and I doubled the vanilla.

I used brownie mixes rather than make them from scratch. I find that the boxed brownies mixes always give the best results. I’ve tried several brownie recipes from scratch and they never turn out right.

And finally, because I didn’t want a total Cake Break, I made birthday cake fudge, also known as cake batter fudge.

It gets its name from the fact that it uses boxed cake mix in the recipe. I followed this recipe but I added an extra bit of milk (about 2 tablespoons) and a half teaspoon of clear vanilla extract.

I didn’t think I could find a new favourite fudge recipe but cake batter fudge totally takes the cake. No, let me rephrase that: It takes the cake and the fudge. All of it! It takes all the cake, all the fudge, and everything there is and ever was times infinity it's so good.

I think the only way to improve upon it would be to add gumdrops to make….GUMDROP CAKE FUDGE! Oh, man. That’s the sort of dangerousness that comes from thinking. I'm going to stop that now before I get myself into trouble.

Waiting for Spring to Spring

It's so cold this morning here in my office/craft room. Strangely, though, it feels as if winter never happened. I don't remember much about it. That's not to say that it was a good one or that it passed quickly; it was just unremarkable. And it's not as if we're having a great spring or anything that's wiping out the memory of winter. It all feels sort of...unremarkable. And yet here I am, remarking about the unremarkableness of the changing of the seasons so far this year. I'm waiting for Spring to start springing so that I can say that it has officially "sprung." If it has sprung, it has fallen flat on its backside. I guess I should stop wishing for snow days and just put away my sweaters already. Maybe that would help.

I've kept myself busy over the past few months, though. For one thing, I made some little felt magnets, which take more time than I could ever have possibly imagined. So cute yet so tedious. I made these during the winter and only just thought to take a picture of them last night.



They’re stuffed with polyester fluff so that they’re a bit plush. To get a sense of their size, the birds are about 2.5 inches wide, and the cup of tea is about 1.5 inches high. I mainly used clip art that I found online of things that I wanted to make and then resized them, printed the images, and traced the outline of those templates onto the felt. I modified this template to make the birds.



In late March, I made a 6-inch chocolate birthday cake for my father with raspberry jam filling and covered in chocolate buttercream and marshmallow fondant, which I made according to this Wilton recipe. It was my first time making fondant, and even though I only made one quarter of the recipe it turned out great.



In an attempt to make Spring feel like it was here, or at least on its way, I made mini chocolate spring cupcakes decorated with vanilla buttercream "grass", Hershey’s mini chocolate Eggies, fondant flowers, and flower sprinkles.



For Easter, I made more mini cupcakes. I made the marshmallow fondant again and used cutters to make chicks, bunnies, flowers and leaves.



And finally I made an Easter cake. It’s vanilla with raspberry jam filling and covered in vanilla buttercream.The pink icing had some raspberry flavouring added.



For some reason, the buttercream that I made didn’t turn out quite right and I wasn’t able to ice the cake to a smooth finish. In all my cake baking and decorating busyness, I likely forgot to put in the final cup of icing sugar and inadvertently made the consistency too soft. I tried to make the top look like a sky but I ended up putting a pink border around the edge to cover up the rough icing edges. Oh well. The little fondant birds don't seem to mind.

Christmas 2011: Part 2

And now, after Part 1, it's time for Part 2 of my Christmas 2011 busyness in which I outline the other goodies that I made to eat and/or give away as gifts.

A Chocolate Butterscotch Rocky Road Fudge Wreath.




I made this as a last minute dessert for a small get-together to watch Christmas shows on TV. It was made with leftover odds and ends, like semi-sweet chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, marshmallows, and salted mixed nuts. I added some Smarties to the top for colour. (I’ve been putting Smarties on just about everything lately. I like their colours better than M&Ms.) I made it according (roughly) to this Rachael Ray recipe for a five-minute fudge wreath. It's very simple. I used a 6-inch round cake pan and a can of mushrooms covered in foil and sprayed with Pam to make the hole in the center. For something that was thrown together at the last minute it was really, really good.

It was so easy and so good, in fact, that a couple nights later I made another fudge wreath for a Christmas party thrown by my coworker.


This one is a dark chocolate rocky road fudge wreath. For decoration I made some holly and berries using red Smarties and green spice drops that were snipped in half with scissors and molded by hand to look like leaves. I wrapped it up and made a nice little gift out of it.



I used the remaining rocky road fudge to make a Christmas tree.


Remember my Christmas Tree Cake from my last post? It was baked in two foil tree-shaped pans that came with plastic lids, so I used one of the lids lined with plastic wrap to make this fudge tree. Originally, I only intended to have plain Smarties on top, but then I put on a dusting of powdered sugar “snow” and multicoloured nonpareil sprinkles. It looks pretty either way.


The fudge tree was cut into squares and half of them were put on a small plate along with some big gumdrops to give to a relative. The remaining fudge was kept for my family's Christmas Eve dinner.

I also made Nigella Lawsons’s recipe for bar nuts to make a savoury snack mix to bring to my coworker's party.


I changed a few things in the recipe: I used brown sugar rather than muscovado; rather than plain unsalted butter I used garlic butter that I had made ahead of time for another purpose (unsalted butter, fresh grated garlic, salt, pepper, and parsley); I put in only 1 tablespoon of chopped rosemary; I added a half teaspoon of garlic powder; and my nut mixture was about three-quarters salted peanuts in addition to some pecans, walnuts and cashews, so I reduced the salt in the mix down to a half teaspoon. Before packaging the nuts to bring to the party, I added a couple handfuls of small pretzel rods.

Marshmallow Snowmen.



I based them on this recipe. I used royal icing to put on the black nonpareils for the eyes, halved some orange and black round sprinkles with a knife to look like carrot noses and coal mouths, and used coloured round sprinkles for buttons. Flattened red spice drops were used for the bases of the hats with a green spice drop smooshed on top. I love the expressions on their faces. They look as if they’re trying to make the best of a bad situation by apprehensively singing a Christmas carol together as they await their inevtiable fate of being eaten by a small, hungry child.


I wrapped them up just like the fudge wreath above and the plate of cookies in my last post so that they could be given as a gift to my 5-year-old cousin.

A tray of gingerbread men who, unlike the snowmen above, look genuinely happy to be here.


I made back in November to decorate my Christmas Eve cake, which you'll get to see in a moment. I just wanted to introduce them here to build the suspense! Heh. The tray is an old Christmas tray that my mother had for years and had put away in storage until I rescued it. It's been beaten up a bit and has scratches on it from years of use, but it reminds me of all of my great Christmas memories from childhood, which is why I continue to use it and cherish it.

At the last minute today I decided to make some mint chocolate truffles roughly based on this Kraft recipe, which I've used several time before.



I made the base truffle mixture as directed in the recipe, but I had to substitute chopped unsweetened chocolate and icing sugar because I was out of semisweet chocolate chips. I also added some peppermint flavouring so they're super minty like a candy cane. I covered some truffles in Christmas-coloured nonpareil sprinkles and the others in a sparkly mixture of regular and purple sanding sugar. And like most everything I've made this year, I packaged some and gave them away as a last-minute gift.



Here's my Christmas Eve Cheese Tray, which is becoming an annual Christmas tradition.





I made my olive cream cheese penguins and a cheeseball Christmas tree again like last year. Instead of making a cheeseball igloo, however, this year I made cheeseball snowmen. Rather than use the Philadelphia Herb and Garlic Cream Cheese as I have in past years, this year I made the basic cheeseball mix for the tree and snowmen myself from scratch with softened cream cheese, garlic, herbs, salt and pepper, and toasted walnuts and pecans. The Christmas tree cheeseball has bacon bits and cheddar cheese added to about two-thirds of the mix and is covered in dill with pieces of carrot and red pepper for ornaments. The snowmen are made from the remaining basic cheeseball mix with parmesan cheese and a bit of finely grated cheddar added. They have small pretzel rods for arms, carrots for noses, olive eyes, and red pepper and olive hats. I used small cookie and fondant cutters and a knife to cut stars, half-moons, hearts, triangles, circles, reindeer, flowers, and leaves from cheddar, mozzarella, and marble cheeses, and processed cheese slices.

And last but not least, here is what will likely be my final baking project of 2011. Behold my Christmas Eve Cake!





This cake is based on Wilton’s Very Merry Go Round Cake. It’s a small 6-inch chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling and icing, with vanilla buttercream accents. The cake is decorated with my homemade regular and mini-sized gingerbread men, candy canes, starlight mints, gumdrops, and other festive candies.

And now with nothing left to make or bake or wrap up or fuss over, I'm going to go and enjoy what's left of Christmas Eve by spending time with my family and trying not to obsess over what I'm going to make for next Christmas.

Merry Christmas!