Day 3!

Baking fiesta day 3! I only got to make 1 thing today, but I think it's gorgeous-looking. :) Do you know the book Hello! Cupcake; by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson? There's this cute cupcake decor for Christmas with cupcakes iced and decorated as snowmen and trees. As you should already have guessed, I'm making that today!

If you look on Google, it's actually pretty hard to find a normal, plain vanilla cupcake recipe with no cream or extra pizazz added. It took me a while. Finally, I found one. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients for Cupcakes:
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup white granulated sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup buttermilk

 

 ****These bake at 350F. Makes 12 regular cupcakes, 24 mini cupcakes.****

The directions are really simple; basic cake method. 

1. Sift together dry ingredients in separate bowl. 

2. Cream the butter with the sugars together. Mix in vanilla and add eggs in one at a time, beating well after each addition.

3. Add the flour mixture and the buttermilk alternately to the egg mixture, starting with the flour and ending with the flour. 

4. Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes for regular cupcakes and 10 minutes for mini cupcakes.

OK, so I didn't have buttermilk on hand. If you don't, just put in about 3/4 of a tablespoon in a measuring cup, then fill it with milk all the way to the 3/4 cup line and let it stand for at least 10 minutes after you mix it.

LOL a bit messy...

For this cupcake project, you need 9 large cupcakes and 7 small cupcakes, or you can adjust the number for the height/amount of trees or snowmen you want to make

CUPCAKES!

Make sure the cupcakes are completely cooled before you start decorating them. Now on to the icing:

I found this most delicious buttercream icing on the internet, from allrecipes.com. Here it is:

Ingredient for Icing

 

1/2 cup butter, softened

1/8 teaspoon salt

4 cups confectioners' sugar

1 egg, beaten

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 tablespoons milk  

It's really easy: Cream the butter until soft. Add salt and half of sugar gradually, blending after each addition. Then add the egg and vanilla; blend well. It should look like this:

Add remaining sugar, alternately with milk, until of right consistency to spread, beating after each addition until smooth.The final product should look like this:

The final product is a bit yellowish, but it's pretty pale. If you want, you can substitute the egg for two egg whites, or for a stiffer icing, use two egg yolks. The double egg yolks will give it a more definite yellow tinge to it. Now it's time to decorate the cupcakes!

For this you'll just need some coconut and decorative candy, green food coloring and a piping bag with a tip.

Make the snowman first. Here are the cupcakes you need to make the snowmen:

Look at that random iced one

You should have enough to make 2 tall snowmen and one medium snowman. Ice a large cupcake and dip/sprinkle the top with coconut.

Then ice a second large cupcake and dip it in coconut. But this time, put icing on the bottom of it to 'glue' it to the bottom cupcake. Then take a mini cupcake and decorate it's face with sprinkles, candy, gel or something.

Does it look a bit constipated to you?

For the head of the snowman, just 'glue' it on it's side so it looks like a snowman head. Then decorate it. I rolled out some soft candy for the scarf and arms, used icing for the buttons and the chocolate kiss on the top sort of looks like a hat.

C'mon, it looks hatty enough!

Make another one the same as this, then make another one, except take out the middle part for a shorter snowman. Set the snowmen aside. Time for some TREES!

Tint your icing a good shade of green and fill your piping bag with a star-shaped tip.

Just a plastic bag with a plastic tip

BUT the tip is STAR shaped

Now go ahead and 'glue' the trees together. One tall one, 2 medium ones and one baby one. The baby one is just one mini cupcake, so don't worry about that. Make sure you glue them on together first.

 

Now just pipe little star shaped spikes around the edges:

And it should look like this:

Make your other 3 trees, and decorate them if you want. All I did was put a reeses pieces on the top, it looked good enough. Arrange them somewhere, so they look nice.

 Final Product!!

Delicious-looking?

Aw!

Aren't they the cutest things? 

That's all I made today. It took a pretty long time too, and now we're completely out of milk. *Gasp!* I was going to make bread pudding, but the recipe needed 3 cups of milk. :( And I made the bread for it all and everything. Hopefully, I can go shopping tomorrow, last minute xmas shopping too. :P Well, see you!

Day 2!

Baking day 2. Means 3 days until Christmas! Today was the day where I was sort of out of whack. Still, I managed to bake the stuff I wanted to. Lemon bars and cheesecake anyone?

Actually, lets start with this morning. I was planning to wake up early so I could make my lemon bars in the morning. But guess what? I didn't get up until it was almost eleven. Luckily there was leftover soup (and donuts! :D ) in the fridge for lunch , and then I managed to get the lemon bars in the oven before 12:00. That probably explains why they turned out a bit odd. Are lemon bars supposed to taste over the top OH my GOODNESS lemony? It looked OK. Or at least a bit nicer than disgusting. As my sister loves to say: they looked very interesting.

Yeah, the camera's pretty fuzzy, but you get the idea. I put them on this stand thing made up of plastic cups and plates. Not very Christmasy but sufficient enough.

Some more pictures

Haha, the plate's so messy

Best pic of the three. What do you think?

The cheesecake. Where do I start with the cheesecake. How about the frozen cheese? Have you ever frozen cream cheese before? Well, it turns out they lose an awful lot of their moisture and ends up more like ricotta instead of  a creamy spread-like mix that doesn't crumble into bits when you try to work with it. Well, I used it anyway. To tell you, it worked fine. The cheesecake turned out fine too, I guess. I put it in a 10 inch springform pan, that was way too big so the cake resembles a thick pancake, but it wasn't overcooked; so maybe that was the intention of the recipe poster. It looks marbled because I'm making this double layer pumpkin cheesecake. Too bad it's not supposed to be marbled, because it looks like there were random blotches of white from the layer underneath that resurfaced. I knew I didn't pour it in carefully enough. On the upside, that cake is DELICIOUS. It's like pudding or a custard and it tastes absolutely wonderful. I got it out of it's pan and tasted the bits that got stuck onto the pan, and I think it'll be good once I pipe some coolwhip on top of it. I didn't get any pictures (oh no!) Because I just put it in the fridge and I really don't want to take it out after playing around with the spaces in the fridge just so it could fit.

I actually got my baking goal finished early, so I started learning an awesome new song on the piano... The Pirates of the Caribbean theme song! YEAH! I heard it on youtube and it just sounds amazing. Hopefully  I can learn at least 3/4 of it before the winter break, because after winter break are the finals for all my subjects. But here's the video I listened to:

That is just awesome. Awesomeness wrapped in an aura of pure awesome. Just saying :)

Bye for now!

Christmas FieSTa

Holy Cow. It's 4 days until Christmas. Pretty awesome right? Of course! It also means I need to make a HUGE baking FIESTA. Ah, don't you remember those Christmas' when your mom or grandma made a ginormous load of goodies, so much you couldn't finish it all though the family was made up of cookieholics? My Christmas goal is to recreate that scene. Sorta like that pic on the left. It looks so warm and eatable. I was also hoping to knit some stockings as a gift for the family, but never mind that. I've already started a scarf/stole thing that'll probably take a year to finish at the rate I'm going. A heads-up: the next few posts will probably just be a bunch of stuff I got to make. So it'll be like the four days of Christmas, with baking baking baking!

DAY 1 was today And I managed to squish in 2 things actually. Bread, and Donuts!!

The donuts were a semi-win. They tasted a bit too yeasty, and the glaze recipe was way too runny and the paper towels soaked it up instead. They weren't bad though. They just weren't the best. In the beginning the frying was completely messed up. They were brown and out of shape because I peeled them off the tray I had them rise on. Here's a picture:

Brown, greasy little thangs!

Then it started looking better when I got through my 20 donuts, so the last ones turned out more like this:

Nommable!

Now the glaze was a problem. It was runny, runny, runny as hell. The tray holding my little fried beasts looked like it was soaked in water.

It looks like they decided to go potty

Still, it was light, airy and delicious. Next time I plan to make my own glaze and probably add a bit more sugar to the dough because the whole family is sugar addicts. The recipe I used? Click HERE. Just a tip - these taste like homemade donuts, not those heavenly delicious Krispy Kreme ones. But they're good. And add a teaspoon of vanilla, it helps.
If you're wondering about the bread, I didn't get to take a picture of it. :( But I make the bread as the staple recipe, so you'll probably see it in the future more than you want to.

P.S. Yes, the post below is rather lame. It was my first post though.