It’s been a while…

I’ve been so busy these past 6 months that I haven’t really had time to update this thing. I also had the misfortune of having my laptop crash and so I lost all of my photos of my birthday cake and my Christmas cookies and treats that I made last year.

Luckily, I still have a few photos of my Christmas Eve cake that I had saved in my email account that I can share with you.

The winter house cake was a traditional cherry pound cake with vanilla buttercream icing. I baked the cake in Wilton’s stand-up, 3D house cake pan. I made the wreath from royal icing and decorated it with sprinkles before letting it dry and attaching it to the cake. The green garlands around the door and windows were made from buttercream piped directly onto the cake and decorated with various sprinkles to look like ornaments. The snowman and the hedges were made from Rice Krispies treats molded by hand and covered in royal icing. The snowman and the icing snow on the cake board were covered in coconut to make them look fluffy. The evergreen trees were ice cream sugar cones covered in green royal icing that was piped using a star tip. I used chocolate pebbles to create the step in front of the door and for the border around the snow-covered flower beds. Originally, I wanted to dust icing sugar over the trees and the hedges to look like freshly fallen snow, but I decided against it because dusting powdered sugar never works out quite right for me. So, I left it as is. FYI, that's my Christmas tree in the background of the photo.

And here is my father’s birthday cake that I made a couple of weekends ago.

The pig pen cake is a two-layer, 8-inch brownie cake with chocolate ganache between the layers, decorated with chocolate ganache, chocolate cookie crumb "dirt," green vanilla buttercream "grass," and a pretzel fence to look like a pig pen. I made a gate for the pig pen by gluing pieces of pretzel together with royal icing and then letting it dry on a piece of wax paper. I made the pigs, vegetables, bees, ladybugs, and flowers from homemade marshmallow fondant. In case you're wondering, I made potatoes, carrots, apples, corn, cabbages, and pumpkins. Notice the pig at the top of the pen who dove right into the mud to get at his grub. All you can see are his leg, bum, and ears sticking out.

I also made some Easter brownies.

These are chocolate walnut brownies covered in a layer of chocolate ganache and decorated with homemade marshmallow fondant flowers and leaves, assorted sprinkles, and Hershey’s Eggies.

It's likely that I won't have much time to update for the next little while. For some (stupid?) reason, I applied and was accepted to another master's program. So, my cakes and cookies will be few and far between, but I'll be twice as master-y as I was before.

Christmas 2011: Part 1

Because I am short on time but long on baking and crafting updates during this hectic week before Christmas, I’m going to do my best (and probably fail miserably, anyway, despite my best intentions) to be brief. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m giving away my felt ornaments, cookies, and other treats as gifts this year, and I also made some treats for holiday social gatherings. I have a few pictures to share so that you can see what I’ve been talking about and working on.

Felt cupcakes and gingerbread houses, which I packaged in my handmade paper bags.



I designed the templates for the cupcakes myself. I used a gingerbread house pattern from the book Fa La La La Felt but modified it slightly to make peaked roofs on some houses.

Shortbread cookies. I made classic rounds and fingers, little Scottie dogs, and some chocolate chip shortbread bites.


Shortbread cookie dough is really hard to work with, mainly because the classic recipe that I used called for just flour, sugar, butter and a pinch of salt, so there wasn’t much to bind it all together. Maybe I need to play with the proportions a bit the next time or add a drop of cold water so that everything stays together when the dough is rolled out.

Cookies decorated with royal icing. I made chocolate sugar cookies (Christmas trees and blue snowflakes), sugar cookies flavoured with fresh orange zest (mittens and doves), and gingerbread snowflakes (the pink ones).



Some cookies have a shimmery look from the Wilton Pearl Dust that I brushed on after the royal icing dried and hardened. Pearl Dust is one of my favourite decorating products ever, and I now have the colours white, green and pink among my baking supplies.

I also used this cute Wilton Gingerbread Village Cookie Pan to make houses from the orange sugar cookie dough and the gingerbread cookie dough.


You just press the dough into the cavities in the pan and when the cookies are baked, the outlines of the house features are baked in to the cookies, which makes them easy to decorate. I decorated the houses with royal icing, sprinkles and small candies.

In total, I made about 5 dozen decorated cookies, and about 2 dozen shortbread cookies. Most of the cookies that I made were given away but I reserved some for Christmas. It’s so easy to put a bunch on a holiday-themed paper plate, curl a bit of ribbon, and make it into a pretty gift.


Rather than use the cellophane on the roll to wrap up the cookies, I used a plastic gift basket bag. I bought a pack of the right-sized bags for my paper plate at Michaels in the gift wrapping section, put the plate in the bottom of a bag, filled it with cookies, and then cinched it closed with the ribbon. Easy peasy, especially when you’re tired and covered in royal icing and cookie crumbs and so not in the mood to wrestle with a roll of clingy, stubborn cellophane.

I also made snack mix, which consists of spiced pecan and walnut halves (I doubled this amazing recipe that I found on AllRecipes); 1 bag of Ocean Spray Craisins, or you can substitute an equivalent amount of some other sweetened dried cranberries or even cherries, or any other dried fruit that you like. I bet candied orange peel dipped in chocolate would be nice, too, but then you’d have to make the candied orange peel ahead of time. Here's a photo of the nuts and cranberries mixed together.


I packaged a small amount of snack mix in individual serving-sized plastic bags and made the tags from the same paper from the pad that I used to make the ornament gift bags. I put about a ¼ cup of the nut/cranberry mixture into each bag and threw in a few mini reindeer, gingerbread man, and star cookies that were made using a teeny cookie cutters when I made my bigger cookies. I finished each bag with a few store-bought milk chocolate-covered pretzels. Then I came up with the clever name “Heather’s Snack Mix” to write on the label.



Yeah, the muses did a great job of inspiring my original snack mix creation but they really let me down in the snack mix-naming department. Oh well.

Cookies and Cream fudge made from this Eagle Brand recipe.



I only made a third of the recipe due to its serious habit-forming properties. The combination of white chocolate and Oreos is extremely addictive. This pan of fudge, seen uncut in the first photo above, was made for a work Christmas party.

Chocolate and Butterscotch fudge made from another Eagle Brand recipe.


I made half the recipe and added crunchy toffee bits to the top as the butterscotch chips were kind of clumpy and wouldn’t melt completely smooth, so I wanted to camouflage that a bit. Toasting the walnuts before chopping them and adding them to the melted chocolate base gives what would normally be a simple sweet fudge a more complex flavour. It’s kind of a boring looking two-layer fudge when it’s just on a regular plate but it looks much more impressive in this snazzy green snowflake tin, which I filled with two layers of the fudge and then gave away as a gift.



My Christmas tree cake, which was also made for the aforementioned work Christmas party.






It’s a two-layer vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream filling and is decorated with vanilla buttercream. I used Smarties, mini gingerbread man cookies, silver dragrees, and snowflake and star quins as tree “ornaments.” The star on top is actually a mini gingerbread cookie that I covered in gold buttercream. I added a few yellow star quins as an afterthought because the icing made the star look too lumpy.

And here is the link to see my gallery of my Christmas tree and festive living room decorations. Before you go and watch the slideshow, I want to draw your attention to one thing in particular:


It's my Chip and Dale ornament that I bought in Walt Disney World when I was there last December. When I was little, I loved the Disney Christmas cartoon where Pluto chases Chip and Dale around Mickey's living room as Mickey is busy decorating for the holidays. The two chipmunks get into the Christmas tree and walk awestruck around the branches amidst the bright lights and shiny bulbs, admiring the colourful view. I can still vividly remember watching that and longingly wishing to be small enough to walk around inside the branches of a lit Chrsitmas tree. I'd give anything to be able to walk around inside my tree this year, which, in addition to all of my sparkly, funky, and sentimental decorations from Ye Olden Tymes, looks especially pretty with the new "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" tree skirt that my mother made for me.

I am nearing the end of my 2011 holiday treat and gift making/packaging frenzy. If you’re feeling exhausted just reading about the amount of things I’ve made this year, you’re not alone. The thing is, I enjoy making things so much that it doesn’t feel like work while I’m engrossed in it. It’s not until after I'm finished when I am completely wiped out that I realize how much work I put into everything. But the results are worth it.

Now I only have one cake left to make for Christmas Eve dinner and then I am imposing a moratorium on baking for at least a month. Actually, I sort of already promised someone a St. Patrick’s Day cake. Do you think I can hold off until March? Yeah, me neither.

Halloween Treats and Death by Chocolate

As I mentioned in my last post, I made some Halloween treats last weekend, starting with white and dark chocolate covered Halloween pretzel rods.




These are so easy to make and they look so pretty. My favourite treats to make are the low-effort/high-impact kind. I melted the chocolate in the microwave in a bowl, and then I spooned the chocolate in the bowl over the pretzel rods while allowing the extra chocolate to drip off into the same bowl. Then I decorated the chocolate covered pretzels with a couple different types of Halloween coloured sprinkles. I plan on making a bunch of these for Christmas but they’ll have Christmas coloured sprinkles.

I also made some mint chocolate Nanaimo bars. Here is a picture of the pan before I cut them into squares.


The pattern in the chocolate topping  was created by adding the top melted chocolate layer of the nanaimo bar recipe and then piping alternating stripes of melted white chocolate, and melted green and orange molding wafers on top while the chocolate layer was still warm. Finally, I used the tip of a toothpick to draw lines from one side of the pan to the other, up and down, through the chocolate stripes before putting the bars in the fridge to harden.

And this is what the Nanaimo bars look like cut into squares alongside some of my other treats.


The recipe that I used for the Nanaimo Bars was adapted from a chocolate orange Nanaimo bar recipe, which I intend to try on an other occasion. The bars didn’t turn out quite right—the recipe for both the chocolate top and the filling were off—and so they look a little scrappy with their broken tops, rough edges and filling oozing out.

I need to find another Nanaimo bar recipe with slightly different proportions of ingredients in order to make the top layer and the filling the right consistencies, but the cookie crumb base of this recipe was absolutely perfect. I find that Nanaimo bars tend to have really dry bases but this one was dense enough to stand up to the filling but still a bit chewy, and toasting the walnuts beforehand really allowed their flavour to be distinct and to come through the rest of the crumb base. But even though the Nanaimo bars I made are a bit scrappy and sloppy looking in these photos, they were really delicious nonetheless. They were the kind of cookies that you can’t stop at just one or two. Good thing I brought them in to work for my coworkers.

I also made dark and white chocolate witch fingers, pretzel witch fingers, and chocolate pumpkins with peanuts. These were made with the help of two Wilton Halloween candy molds.


I still haven’t perfected using those Wilton candy molds, hence the air bubbles and the chocolate that looks as if it is overflowing the mold indentations around the finger nails. The witch finger mold is intended for pretzel rods but you can just fill the finger part of the mold with chocolate and omit the pretzel. The pumpkin mold is intended for lollipops, but I just filled the pumpkin cavity and didn’t insert a lollipop stick.

My next project is to make a cake and cupcakes to bring in to the office to celebrate the birthday of my coworker and I--our birthdays are one day apart in late November. Then I’ll be making a birthday cake for myself to enjoy at home, a Christmas cake and cupcakes for our office holiday party, and a Christmas cake for my favourite meal of the year, our family Christmas Eve supper.

Looks like I’m going to be busy! But being busy is good. It helps keep me out of trouble. Athough I don't imagine that there's much trouble I could get into given my relatively tame interests and hobbies, unless that trouble is some sort of cake or chocolate-covered confection related crime. Death by chocolate, perhaps?