Monkey First Birthday Cake

Hellooooo? Sorry I've been away for a while, but I hope some of you are still sticking around :) It's been quiet here on the blog for the last couple of weeks, but I at least have a couple of things to show for the time I've spent away. Last time I wrote on here, we were getting ready for Thanksgiving. Joe and I went to St. Louis to spend Thanksgiving with Joe's family and we had a great time! His grandparents drove in from Wisconsin and it was nice to hang out with all of them for a few days. We even hit up a few black Friday deals for some Christmas gifts. We had to come home on Saturday morning after Thanksgiving so I could finish up this cake for my friend's son's first birthday which was planned for Sunday. I made the jungle baby shower cake for this same friend last fall so I was more than happy to make the first birthday cake too! We get to see the baby, Aiden, pretty often and he and Joe are buddies.

I started the cake process before Thanksgiving. The cakes and fondant could be made ahead of time, and I froze the cakes, so that saved me a lot of time on Saturday. The top tier is banana cake with cream cheese icing and white chocolate ganache under the fondant. The bottom tier is chocolate cake, icing, and ganache under the chocolate fondant. I also made a little banana cupcake with chocolate icing for the birthday boy, but he was not interested in eating it haha!

I had a few little bumps along the way of making this cake, and just about swore that I'd never make another cake again! The fondant was just giving me an unbelievable amount of trouble. I worked up until the last second to get it finished before we had to leave for the party. In the end it turned out fine and everyone seemed to love it. The leftovers even showed up at work the next day since my friend with the baby also happens to be a coworker! Here are a couple more pictures of the cake.

After the relaxing holiday and the stressful cake weekend, I had to leave first thing Monday morning for Corning, NY for a work trip. The area we were in is just south of the Finger Lakes and it was very pretty. Unfortunately I either got food poisoning or a 24 hour stomach flu the night my coworker and I arrived because I was pretty much out of commission all day Tuesday. On top of that, my coworker had a sinus infection going on, his bag got lost by the airline on the way to New York, and then we had to get up at 4:00 AM on Wednesday to catch our 6:00 AM flight! Needless to say, it was not exactly an enjoyable trip.

After one more night of recovering from my stomach problems on Wednesday, I had to gear back up for another big cake project! I'd previously agreed to make a big cake for our work Christmas party that was last night. I spent Thursday night, Friday night and ALL day yesterday working on this cake (which I'll save for another post). Aaaaaaand that's why I haven't blogged in 2 weeks :)

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving too and that you've had a slightly more relaxing time since then as well. Although with Christmas right around the corner, you've probably only been getting busier. I'll post soon about the cake I made for work, and I'm also still planning on putting up the recipe that you could use your leftover turkey for, even though I know it's a little late. Oh well, maybe you froze some...

Have a great week!

Apricot Almond Coffee Cake

It's been a little quiet here on the blog for the last week or so. I was in Virginia for a few days on a work trip, then I laid low at home and relaxed for a couple nights after that. Last night we had a couple of our good friends over for dinner and games, then we all headed to a local comedy club for a show. It was really fun but I can definitely tell I'm getting old because my friend Shayna and I both started falling asleep at the comedy club! It wasn't because the comedian wasn't funny, we just couldn't keep our eyes open! Talk about not getting out much...haha

Today I'm looking forward to the short work week, and of course, to Thanksgiving! I love any holiday that involves a big tasty meal! (Which is basically all of them, right?) I spent part of my day today making my contribution to the Thanksgiving food, though I hadn't actually planned on doing it today. There was a little bit of a mistake when I started this recipe today. I bought the ingredients to make 2 batches of this cake, one as a large bundt cake to bring to Thanksgiving, and one to split between 4 mini, disposable tube pans to give as gifts to our neighbors. It wasn't til I was about ready to bake the cake that realized something was just not right. The batter was way thicker than I remembered it being the last time I made it. So I looked back at the ingredient list and realized that instead of 2 sticks of butter, I added 2 cups of butter (4 sticks). Ugh. I ended up just adding all the other ingredients a second time and mixing it all together. Luckily it seemed to work just fine! This cake was one of our favorites growing up, and it's great any time of day. Since it's called a coffee cake, it obviously qualifies as a breakfast food. But it could also be a dessert or a snack cake since it even has fruit! (Apricot preserves are totally fruit.) I don't have any "process" pictures because my camera battery died, but that's probably a good thing since I messed up the process anyway. Here's the recipe!

Apricot Almond Coffee Cake
From Southern Sideboards, a Jackson, Mississippi Junior League Cookbook


1c. butter
2c. sugar
2 eggs
1c. sour cream
1t. almond extract
2c. flour
1t. baking powder
1/4t. salt
1c. sliced almonds,divided
10oz. jar apricot preserves

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

- In the bowl of a stand mixer (or in a large bowl and using a hand mixer) cream butter and sugar until fluffy.
- Beat in eggs to the sugar and butter, one at a time.
- Fold in the sour cream and almond extract.
- Mix together the flour, baking powder and salt, fold in also.
- Place about one-third of the mixture in a greased and floured bundt pan. Sprinkle ½ cup of almonds and spread half of the apricot preserves over the batter.
- Add the remaining batter. Top with the remaining almonds and preserves. Bake at 350 degrees for one hour or until done.
- Cool on a rack for about 15 to 20 minutes before turning out onto a plate.

* When filling the mini pans, I found it hard to spoon the batter in without getting it all over the sides. So I scraped all the batter into a gallon ziploc, then cut off a corner so there was about a 3/4" opening. I then squeezed two rounds of batter into each pan and smoothed it out with a little spatula. It made the whole process so much quicker and easier.

* Recipe may be varied by substituting vanilla for the almond extract and a mixture of 1 cup chopped pecans, 4 tablespoons brown sugar and 2 teaspoons cinnamon for the apricot preserves and almonds.

I was really excited to finally use these little disposable pans since I got them several months ago on clearance. I've seen ones like it at baking stores and even Michael's or Hobby Lobby. They're great for giving things like cakes without having to worry about getting your pan back. The cakes just BARELY fit in the little Thanksgiving treat bags that I got yesterday at Hobby Lobby. Oh, and Hobby Lobby already has all their Thanksgiving stuff marked 80% off, so I got a pack of 20 bags for only 40 cents! I'm a complete sucker for holiday themed treat bags for some reason. I've got tons of them, but this time I actually used them! haha

I guess that's it for tonight. I seriously cannot express how excited I am to only have 2, maybe 2.5 days of work this week! It's gonna be sooooo great! I hope you all have a nice short week too and a very Happy Thanksgiving! I've got one more post planned for between  now and then with a recipe that could help you use up some left over turkey, so be on the look out!

Chocolate Sheet Cake and The Pioneer Woman

I mentioned in my last post that I had a little brush with blogging fame. One of the blogs I regularly read is written by the Pioneer Woman (Ree Drummond) and she blogs about her life on a cattle ranch and all the delicious food she makes for her family and ranch hands. Since starting her blog, she has turned it into a career and now has two cookbooks, two children's books, and a Food Network show. One day on her blog, she was talking about her upcoming book tour for the children's book she just released, called Charlie and the Christmas Kitty, and it just so happened that one of her stops would be in Kansas City.  (Charlie is their basset hound that has quite the personality.) Since I already had one of her cookbooks, I decided that I had to go meet her and get it signed! Joe was out of town last weekend so I didn't mind spending a few hours waiting to get my book signed.

I went down to the Plaza, bought my ticket (which included a copy of the new kids book) and waited for the Pioneer Woman to arrive. She came out on stage and gave a short presentation before beginning to sign books. What I didn't realize was that the signing would be done in the order of when the tickets were bought. Mine was 316! I waited for about 4 hours to get my 30 seconds of time with Ree, but I guess I can say it was worth it. She was very sweet and I told her that I love her blog and make her bruschetta all the time and everyone loves it. Then she signed my book, we took a picture, and I went on my way.

And since I'm telling y'all about the Pioneer Woman today, I figured I could also share a recipe from her blog and cookbook. The recipe is for a large chocolate sheet cake that I've also heard referred to as a Texas sheet cake. It is a simple, delicious, chocolate cake topped with a simple, delicious chocolate icing. I might have under cooked by a little, but it still all got eaten when I brought it into work. Here's the recipe:

Chocolate Sheet Cake
From The Pioneer Woman

For the Cake:
2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 sticks butter
4 heaping tablespoons cocoa powder

For the Icing:
1 3/4 sticks butter
4 heaping tablespoons cocoa powder
6 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 pound powdered sugar
1/2 cup chopped pecans (optional)

- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
- In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar and salt. Stir together and set aside. (I also added powdered buttermilk to this since I wasn't using regular buttermilk.)

- In another bowl, mix the buttermilk, eggs, vanilla and baking soda. Mix with a fork and set aside. (I mixed 1/2 cup water in to take the place of the buttermilk, per the instructions on the powdered buttermilk container).

- In a medium saucepan, melt the butter and add the cocoa.

- Whisk together to combine. Meanwhile, bring 1 cup water to a boil.
- When the butter is melted and the cocoa is mixed in, pour the boiling water in the pan. Allow to bubble for moment, then turn off the heat.

- Pour the chocolate mixture into the flour mixture. Stir together for a moment to cool the chocolate, then pour in the egg mixture.

- Stir or whisk together until smooth, then pour into an ungreased jelly roll pan (11"x15") and bake for 20 minutes.

While the cake is baking, begin making the icing since you'll pour it on right after taking the cake out of the oven.

- Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium-low heat. Add the cocoa powder and stir until smooth. Add the milk and vanilla. Add the powdered sugar and stir or whisk until smooth. If using pecans, add them after mixing in the sugar. After taking the cake out of the oven, immediately pour the icing over the cake. Try and pour it evenly to avoid having to spread it around. If needed, use a spatula to fill in any gaps. Let cool, and enjoy!

This cake really is delicious and you may find yourself just standing over the pan with a fork. I'm just warning you! I hope you all have had a nice weekend and wish you an even nicer week :)

Two Halloween Cakes

I know it's well past Halloween now, and honestly I didn't even want to put these on here because they're not my best work. But I figured It would be best to show all my cakes, not just the ones that I'm actually happy with. I had high hopes for both these cakes, but the time that I gave myself to make them was not nearly enough, and I ran into a couple other problems as well. First up the pumpkin cake.

I used 2 bundt cakes. The top was spice cake with pumpkin filling and the bottom was chocolate cake with coconut filling.

I wanted to make a cake for Joe to take to work for Halloween. This cake should have been simple enough since I've made a similar one before. The only difference was that this time I decided to cover the cake in fondant and that is where my main problem was. I just could not get it rolled out smooth! I kneaded it for what felt like forever and it still didn't soften up very well. So when I tried to roll it out and place it over the cake, it kept cracking. After three tries, I decided that I didn't care if it cracked. I'd just patch it up as best as I could. The color of the fondant was also a little off, and the cake didn't show the ridges as well as I'd hoped, so I ended up hand painting the entire thing. In a last ditch effort to make it look somewhat like a pumpkin, I formed a stem and vine (a really ugly vine) out of fondant and hand painted them too. Then I painted on a face and threw my hands up in surrender!



See the cracked and folded fondant? yuck. Not quite as yucky as that snaky vine though, haha!



The assembly and decorating of that cake was all done on Monday night, which left me ONE night (Tuesday) to bake and decorate a cake for my work's potluck on Wednesday. I'd been planning on a 3 tiered cake; 9", 7", and a 6" pumpkin. After my failed pumpkin on Monday, I was not looking forward to trying again, especially since I'd be using more of the same fondant that was giving me trouble. But I persevered and baked my cakes, made the icing and started the assembly. One good thing about both these cakes is that I was using some filings I had frozen from when I made the cupcakes for the wedding cake tasting, so that was a little bit of a time saver.

I had a much easier time with this pumpkin, but didn't take any process shots.

The orange fondant actually worked pretty well this time, but another problem popped up. I decided to make a Swiss meringue buttercream since I thought I could get a sharper edge on the cakes. The problem was that when I tried to dye part of the icing orange, it would NOT turn bright orange! I swear I dumped 1/2 a small bottle of good orange food coloring into it and it just wouldn't go past pastel orange. I don't know what the deal was. I also couldn't get the yellow to turn a nice bright color, but that I could deal with a little better than a pastel orange. Anyway, I worked around it and just used the pastel orange as my crumb coat. In the end it worked out ok and I just added some candy corns to hide my cake seams. I ended up being pretty happy with it and everyone at work seemed happy as well. I guess that's enough complaining for tonight. If you made it all the way through, then thanks for reading and I hope you have a great night!

Bottom tier: Chocolate cake w/ coconut filling
Middle: Spice cake with pumpkin filling
Top: Yellow cake with caramel filling

Cinnamon Swirl Pumpkin Pancakes

Okay. I promise that this, THIS is the last pumpkin recipe. Well, probably. I guess I shouldn't really make any promises since as far as I'm concerned, pumpkin is fair game until Thanksgiving. Plus I've still got a few cans of pumpkin in the pantry, so who knows what will happen. The great thing about this recipe though, is that it's really not about the pumpkin. The pumpkin is just a welcome guest at the pancake party. But he's not necessary to make the party a success. The real center of attention is the cinnamon swirl, and it can be invited to any pancake party, pumpkin or not. You can even add it to pancakes made with boxed or bottled mix to make them extra special. That's what I do!

The mix of softened butter, brown sugar and cinnamon, swirled onto the uncooked side of a pancake, then flipped, melts and makes one side of the pancake extra delicious with a perfect crispy ring where the butter kind of fries the swirl. Did that make sense? Just make them and you'll understand.

Here's what you'll need:

not pictured: milk and sugar. oops :)

Pancakes:
your usual pancake ingredients or mix
pureed pumpkin
vanilla
sugar
milk
(I like to add a spoonful of sugar and a splash of vanilla to my boxed pancake mix batter.)

Cinnamon Swirl:
1/2 stick of butter; softened
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/4 t cinnamon (I actually used pumpkin pie spice)

- First, mix up your favorite pancake mix as you usually would. If you're using a boxed mix, then adding about a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla will make them extra light and fluffy. I added about 1 cup of canned pumpkin to mine and ended up adding probably another 1/2 cup of milk to get the batter back to normal pancake consistency.

- In a small bowl, stir together the softened butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. If the butter isn't quite soft enough, you can microwave it for a few seconds, but you really don't want it completely melted. Just nice and soft. Once it's all mixed together, spoon it into a Ziploc baggie and snip the corner off so that the opening is about 1/4" wide.

- When the batter is ready, ladle some onto a heated griddle or skillet set on medium heat. I don't usually butter the griddle since it's pretty non-stick. But you can if you need to.

- Right after ladling out some batter, squeeze some of the butter/cinnamon mixture onto the uncooked sides of the pancakes in a swirl.

- When the pancake batter starts to bubble on the top and the butter swirl looks melty, flip the pancakes as usual. Cook until done then flip them onto a plate so you can see that beautiful cinnamon swirl. Stack them up high, then cover with syrup and enjoy! If you're feeling extra fancy, you could make cream cheese icing to spoon over the top, like you'd have on regular cinnamon rolls :)

Mmmmm, that's the buttery goodness crisping up the bottom of the pancake.

These are sooooo tasty, and even I couldn't quite finish 3 of them! It's such an easy way to fancy up some plain pancakes. AND, they freeze pretty well. Joe had already eaten breakfast when I made these so I had lots of leftovers. If you just put them in single serving baggies, you can pop them in the microwave for 20 seconds or so for a quick snack. They really don't even need syrup since one side is buttery and sugary.

I guess that's about it for tonight. I had a little brush with fame (blogging fame at least) today that I'll tell you about soon. But right now I've going to focus on the LSU, Bama game. LET'S GO TIGERS!

Two Ingredient Pumpkin Spice Cookies

Are you all tired of the pumpkin and fall things on this blog yet? No? Great. Because today I have the simplest fall recipe possible that would be the perfect thing if you have to bring a last minute treat to work for Halloween or something. Of course they'd be good anytime after Halloween as well. And if you REALLY aren't tired of pumpkin flavored things, then I have one other recipe to share with you for some awesome pancakes that could be easily made without the pumpkin. But back to the cookies! These aren't a new idea and I did not come up with them. I think Mom actually told me about these once, but I've also seen them all over the internet. They really do require only two ingredients for the cookies. However, if you want to frost them, you'll either need to make or buy your frosting (I recommend cream cheese icing).

The two ingredients are:
1 box spice cake mix
1 (15 oz.) can of pumpkin

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
The first thing I would do (and I did NOT do this, but should have) is sift the cake mix. I had a really hard time getting the clumps out and it is quite obvious in my finished cookies.

Add the can of pumpkin to the sifted cake mix and stir until it is well mixed.

Still lots of cake mix chunks.

Use a cookie scope or a couple of spoons to drop the batter on to cookie sheets lined with either parchment paper or non-stick mats. Bake for 13-15 minutes.

Transfer the cookies to a rack to cool, then top (or sandwich) with icing if desired.

That's all! These cookies are super soft, cakey and oh so delicious. I made them pretty small so every time I ate one I didn't feel too guilty. Of course after eating about 10 in a day, I ended up feeling guilty after all. Below are the options I tried for icing the cookies. The sandwich ones ended up being a little bigger than I wanted, so I iced most of them just on top.

Option 1: Scoop a big dollop of icing on the bottom of one cookie, then top it with another cookie. Excessive? Yes. Did I still eat a couple like that? You betcha.

Option 2: Pipe a little swirl of icing on the bottom of one cookie then top with a second cookie. Much less icing than option 1, but still a pretty big cookie bite.

Option 3: (Seen at the back of this next picture) Just pipe a little swirl on top of one cookie and call it good. :)

We've been staying pretty busy around here. I was out of town a couple days last week for work. On the days I was home, I primed and painted the piano room and now I'm starting to work on the cabinets we got off Craigslist to use as the base of a built-in book shelf in there. It's a little slow going in there and with a ton of work to still do, it might be a while before there is a final result to show ya'll. Yesterday we also added a small flower bed around one of the trees in our front yard and planted a bunch of bulbs. Hopefully they all pop up in the spring! Coming up this week I've got a couple of Halloween cakes in the works. One will be for Joe to bring to work and one will be for the chili cook-off / Halloween potluck at my office. So I'll definitely be showing y'all those. Now it's time for me to go make some marshmallow fondant for these silly Halloween cakes. I hope you all have a great week and a Happy Halloween. Make these cookies! :)

Autumn Leaves Wedding Cake

As I mentioned in the last post, I completed and delivered my first wedding cake order this past weekend! The cake was for a friend from school who contacted me earlier this year about making the cake for her wedding. I baked several varieties of cupcakes for her and her fiance to try and they decided on a few flavors, as well as a style of cake. They settled on a 3 tier main cake, as well as a simple sheet cake that could be sliced in the kitchen to serve more people. The design for the main cake was 3 round tiers (10", 8" and 6"), with vines and autumn colored leaves trailing up the sides. The flavors for the cake were: 10" - spice cake with pumpkin filling, 8" - pumpkin cake with pumpkin filling, 6" spice and pumpkin cake with pumpkin filling. All of the round tiers had cream cheese icing. The sheet cake was simply vanilla cake with vanilla icing.

I started this whole process almost a week before the wedding when I made the fondant for the leaves. A couple days later I went shopping for the cake ingredients and dyed the fondant the colors I needed for the leaves. On Wednesday I baked all of the cakes and made the pumpkin pastry cream filling. Then I filled, stacked, did a thin icing coat on all the cakes and cut out some fondant leaves on Thursday. Friday evening was spent putting a final coat of icing on the cakes, and cutting out the remaining fondant leaves.
 

The plain vanilla cake for the people who weren't adventurous enough to try the pumpkin or spice cake ;) 

I needed to shape the leaves so they wouldn't all be flat and Joe had the idea to lay them over some candle sticks that I had up on the mantle for our fall decorations. It worked out well and between those and draping the leaves over some skewers, I had a good assortment of wavy and curvy leaves. The leaves had to sit out at least overnight to firm up and hold their shape. The final step for the leaves was hand painting each with some gold pearl dust that I mixed with vodka so it could be brushed on. The vodka evaporates quickly and leaves no taste, but it doesn't ruin the fondant like water would.

On Saturday, I put the finishing touches on the cakes, piped on the vines and added the leaves. I worked up until the last minute before we had to leave for the delivery and with Joe's help, we made it out the door on time. We got the cake set up and it stayed standing! When I went back to the reception to pick up my cake stand, it was STILL standing! :) I helped cut the cake, breathed a final sigh of relief, and headed home.

Now, you might be able to tell from the pics that the cake was a little "lumpy". I'm not sure why but after a while my cakes always seem to settle a little and the icing bulges or big air bubbles pop out on the side. Sometimes the icing even buckles and cracks. Right now I don't know how to prevent this, but it was the main point of my stress on this cake (and all my past cakes), so I need to figure out how to fix it soon. Overall, I'm glad I did the cake and the bride and groom seemed very happy with it. I know that it at least tasted good! That's it for tonight. Have a great week!