An evolution of cookie decorating

I guess I really started investing in making fancy baked goods with decorated sugar cookies.  It started off as just one project, and then I started learning more about it, and thought I'd be able to develop my skills at it.  I would say at this point, I'm probably at an intermediate level.  I wish I had pictures of the very first cookies I ever made, but I didn't know that it would be a "thing" back then.  But these below are some of my very first cookies:

They looked pretty cute for the occasion, but they weren't anything fancy or complicated.  

Since my humble beginnings, I've learned quite a bit about sugar-cookie decorating.  A lot of people ask me how I get the icing so smooth, and to be honest, it's much easier to just refer those people to this online tutorial to watch the video.  It makes more sense to watch a video than try to explain it in words.  

I use a super simple recipe to make the royal icing, which is what this smooth kind of icing is called.  It takes just three ingredients: 

3 ounces tempered egg whites (the egg whites you buy in the cartons next to the regular eggs are just fine)

4 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon of your favorite extract (I usually use almond extract, but lemon and vanilla are my other standbys)

Put the eggs in a clean, completely dry mixing bowl.  Using the whisk attachment, beat the egg whites until they're stuff enough to hold a peak when you stop the mixer - about 4 to 5 minutes.  Change to the paddle attachment and add powdered sugar and extract. Beat at a high speed until the icing turns glossy (this usually takes around 10 minutes).  From there, add water teeny tiny amounts at a time until you get the consistency you want.  Divide up and add your colors.  

For outlining and detail work, you want the frosting to be thicker so it doesn't seep.  You may need to add a little more water if it's stiff, but only do it a drop or two at a time.  I always add my colors first, then make sure the consistency is right for outlining and add about half of the color to a piping bag fitted with a 1 (for very fine details) or 2 sized piping tip.  Then I add more water, a drop or two at a time, until it reaches the "flooding" consistency.  I fit a piping bag with a size 3 piping tip and then add the frosting to that.  One tip is to stand your piping bags in a cup or bowl so that you don't get colored icing all over your counter or table.  (I'm sure you can guess how I may have learned that trick!)

Watch the online tutorial on the Wilton web site to see how to outline your cookies and fill them in with the flood icing.  

Once you have the base color down, let that dry, and then you can go back and add other details.  I don't usually wait overnight to add details, but if you are adding a darker color on top of a lighter color (black on anything, for example), the darker colors have a tendency to seep into the lighter colors if the lighter color isn't completely dry yet.  So you'll want to give the lighter colors a longer time to dry if you're adding darker details.  

And here are a couple of my most recent cookie projects.  One was for a baby shower this past fall, and the other are little Christmas light cookies from the past holidays.  As you can see, I'm still not great at getting an even surface, but as I've gotten more experience, my cookies do turn out a lot closer to what I envision when I start them!  :)  

Early Cake Decorating!

This is a throwback post to some of my first cakes that I made when I started.  You can see that I've come a little ways since then.

First off, is this UVA basketball-inspired cake.  This was made at the request of a friend as the groom's cake for her wedding.  It was also my first actual cake that I decorated, and I was pretty nervous.  I had some ambitious plans that didn't quite materialize the way I had hoped.  I tried baking a round cake THREE times before I gave up at midnight and went to the grocery store to buy ingredients to make Rice Krispy treats which is what I ended up using for the ball shape.  (But on the plus side, who doesn't love Rice Krispy treats?!)

The important lesson that I learned here?  Make sure you both grease and FLOUR your cake pans before you fill them with your cake batter.  Thankfully, the bride was satisfied with the way the cake turned out.  She knew she was sacrificing some cake-decorating expertise in order to get the cake-flavors that she wanted.  Apparently, none of the local bakeries were willing to make a Guiness-flavored cake!

Next up is this cute little snowman cake.  Again, this was an experiment with using melted chocolate candies to make the little snowmen.  I had another very gracious friend who let me experiment with this technique on a birthday cake for her mother, who just happened to love snowmen.  This was a direct rip-off of a cake from the Bird on a Cake blog.  If you compare the two, I'm sure you'll see who the expert on this is.  ;)  But not too shabby for a first-attempt!  I will say that in order for this to work well for you, you need to be able to move pretty quickly.  The chocolate hardens pretty quickly as it cools!  Definitely check out the Bird on a Cake blog, though - she's got lots of great ideas and tutorials on how to make them happen! 

And finally, here's a sweet owl cake that I made for a different baby shower last year.  My original plan was NOT to put fondant around the sides, just to put it on the top as a background for the owls, but the frosting I made did not come out to the consistency that I wanted, and my fondant circle covering the top of the cake was a little lopsided, so I needed to improvise.  These little strips of alternating colors did the trick!  Add in a white boundary of buttercream to hide how uneven the edges were, and you're set! 

So there you go.  Some of my earlier work.  For those of you that maybe are just starting out, maybe this will help you set realistic expectations?  The real key to making these projects successful is a combination of patience and an ability to improvise when things don't go according to plan.  Hopefully, you'll have gracious friends that won't hold it against you!  And my philosophy is that even if it doesn't look the best, as long as it tastes good, you're in good shape!  

Easy Chocolate Truffles

Anyone else love fancy chocolate candies but have a heart attack every time you actually think about buying them because they're so expensive?  It COULD just be me, but I think most DIYers like to save money.  Lucky for us, you can actually custom-make your own truffles for a fraction of the cost it would take to purchase them.  And it's SUPER easy once you know what you're doing! 

First of all, these are the materials you will need: 

• Wax paper
• Shallow bowl or dish
• Pan for simmering water
• Double boiler (or a small bowl that will nestle into the pan you're using to simmer the water)
• Small steel scoop (if you care about keeping the size uniform)
• Food chopper or processor
• 12 oz. chocolate chips (any flavor, but use a high quality chocolate)
• 1/3 cup heavy whipping cream (use a little less if you're using white chocolate)
• 1 tsp. of your favorite flavored extract
• Your favorite coating (nuts, sprinkles, powdered sugar, cocoa powder, etc.)

A couple of things to keep in mind when working with chocolate.  First, start with a high-quality chocolate base.  All we're really going to be doing is changing the texture and adding some flavor to the chocolate, so start with something that is worthy of the enhancements.  The second important thing to remember is that you want to heat chocolate up very slowly so it stays nice and creamy.  If you overheat chocolate, it starts breaking up and getting crumbly (there's a technical word for this that I can't remember), and then it's basically useless.  So keep the heat low, and be patient and you're good to go! 

The first step is to put a small amount of water in the pan and heat the water until it's simmering (the surface of the water is moving, but it's not hot enough to actually be boiling).  Make sure that when you place the double boiler in the pan, the bottom is not touching the water.  If it does, you'll need to remove some of the water before proceeding to the next step. 

Once the water is simmering, put the chocolate and the heavy whipping cream in the double boiler and place in the pan.  It'll look a little weird, but don't worry!  Stir continuously with a small rubber scraper while the chocolate melts.  Eventually, it will go from looking like a weird, clumpy mess, to becoming smooth like this: 

Once it hits this consistency, you can mix in your extract.  Just to give you some ideas, I've made these with coffee, raspberry, orange, and peppermint extracts so far, and they've all been delicious.

Once you reach this point, remove the double boiler from the pan, and put the chocolate in the refrigerator for approximately 1 to 1.5 hours.  You want the chocolate to set, but not to be hard. 

Once the chocolate sets, remove it from the fridge and you can begin the process of shaping the truffles.  This gets a little messy!

Lay out your wax paper and get your coatings ready to roll your truffles into after you shape them.  I used a few different coatings as shown below including chopped hazelnuts, cocoa powder, and powdered sugar.  The hazelnuts were my favorite, though!  

Use the steel scoop to scoop out a portion of chocolate and then shape the chocolate into a ball with your hands.  Roll the ball into the coating of your choice and place it on the wax paper to harden.  Continue until you're done with all the truffles.  Once I finish coating each of my truffles once, I go back and do a second coating.  I find that this creates a more even coating since a lot of the chocolate will come off on your hands the first go round. 

Let them sit out on the counter for about half an hour until they set, and then you can put them in an airtight container and store in the fridge.  

These are delicious, and look beautiful set out on a platter for any sort of special occasion.  And don't worry, I won't tell anyone how easy they were to make!  :) 

What do you think?  Ready to make your own?  

Corsette Cake

Last month, a friend asked me if I could make a corsette cake for a Bachelorette Party she was helping organize.  After a little bit of research, I thought I could figure it out, so I agreed to take on the challenge.  She sent me this picture from Pinterest, but asked if I could make it in brighter colors like teal and hot pink.  Sounded awesome!

www.craftsy.com

My first step was, of course, to figure out how to get the cake the shape I needed it.  I baked a large rectangular cake in the biggest pan I had, and found some pyrex bowls that were the right size for the bosoms at Bed Bath and Beyond.  I used those to bake two bowl-shaped cakes, and then when they had cooled, I leveled everything off.

To get the right shape on the bottom, I just used a ruler to measure the center of the bottom of the cake, measured an inch and a half on each side, and then measured approximately three inches up the side of each cake.  I placed toothpicks at each of those points, and just made two solid diagonal cuts on each side to shape the bottom.

I placed the round cakes so that the edges of the round cakes touched both the top and outer edges of the rectangular cake.  As you can see, there was a little gap between the round cakes, but that's how you want it!  I then cut the corners of the rectangular cake and rounded up the top to follow the general curves of the round cake.  I was terrified about cutting out the waist, but in a flash of brilliance, I grabbed a large paper place and used the side of that to cut around.  I then flipped the piece of cake I had cut off over and used that as a templace on the opposite side so that both sides were event.  And then, everything got a nice, thick layer of buttercream. 

Now, I used a buttercream recipe that was supposed to crust so that I could go back and smooth it out after I got the base layer down.  But alas, my frosting never crusted.  It ended up being okay, though.  Even though my buttercream wasn't perfectly smooth, I was careful to get large lumps out, so it worked out okay.  

After regrigerating over night, the next step was to get the fondant base layer down.  I'm definitely not a fondant expert, but I do make my own marshmallow fondant using this recipe.  I do this just because I think it tastes better than store-bought fondant.  That said, I tend to have much better luck actually working with pre-made fondant, so it's really a personal choice based on your preferences for taste and your ability to be patient and and not get frustrated.  

After mixing the fondant, I set some aside to color for the details, and then tinted most of it with the teal food coloring.  I then started working the fondant with my hands, adding a lot more powdered sugar to try to reduce the stickiness factor.  I completely covered my entire counter with powdered sugar, and rolled out what I hoped was a thick enough piece to cover the entire cake.  And I immediately started having problems with the fondant sticking to the surface on which I was rolling it out.  

After a few attempts, I findally managed to get a big enough piece rolled out and covered the cake.  I made it smoothly over about 90%, and then disaster struck on the left bosom!  My first instinct was to try to cut around just that piece of fondant, roll out another piece of fondant, and then attempt to just recover that one spot.  But after a couple of failed attempts to roll out another piece of fondant the right size, I thought I'd be able to decorate over it to cover up the worst of it.  

The last part is the decorating.  This is the part that offers the most pop, but it actually took the least amount of time.  I colored some of the fondant black and used a Wilton Fondant Mold to create the black zig zags for the bodice.  I then colored some buttercream with the hot pink and used the large open-star tip in a pastry bag to make the roses around the bosom and the bottom.  I conveniently chose the crack in the left bosom as the placement for the roses and just approximated that line on the right side as well.  As you can see, once all the decorating was done, you couldn't really tell that there were any issues with the fondant.  

As a last step, I colored the last portion of the buttercream teal and used that to create a border around the bottom of the cake to hide all the little cracks and imperfections where the cake meets the board.

Here's a better picture of the finished cake.  Not too shabby for a first attempt!  

Cupcake Bouquet

As I have time, I'll go back and add posts about previous projects.  However, I'm going to start with my most recent projects and work backwards until I'm caught up.  And then you can have fun looking at how awful my first projects were in comparison!  :)

First off, I'm not a professional food-preparer.  I started doing this because I had a lot of friends getting married/having babies and was a part of throwing a lot of showers.  Of course, we live in a world of Facebook and Pinterest, so there's a lot of pressure to make everything beautiful.  But having meals catered and purchasing cakes/cupcakes gets expensive.  So that's one of the reasons I started teaching myself how to decorate cakes.

This past weekend, I was part of throwing a baby shower for a friend, and was asked to make some lemon cupcakes with raspberry frosting (one of my faves)!  I'd seen photos of a cupcake bouquets, and I suggested that we try to make one for this shower.  What happened majorly exceeded my expectations!

I started off by generally following the guidelines from the Midwest Living blog.  I purchased a small metal pail at the local craft store, and a friend decorated it with the flowers and ribbon (so cute!).  We used a 7" styrofoam ball and ended up being able to fit about 34-36 cupcakes on that ball.  A couple of tips that I'll mention that weren't covered in the original instructions we followed:

1. Keep the plastic covering on the styrofoam ball.  If you remove it, the styrofoam starts flaking off and that will get all over your cupcakes.
2. We added some decorative rocks to the bottom of the pail to give it some weight.  I was worried it was going to topple over otherwise. 
3. I largely delegated the task of assembling the bouquet to another friend that is very crafty.  She constructed the supportive pieces, placed the cupcakes on the styrofoam ball, and filled in the gaps with the green tissue paper leaves.  She did not actually read the instructions off the blog - I was instructing her on each step.  So when she secured the cupcakes onto the styrofoam ball, she actually held the unfrosted cupcake against the ball and then pushed the toothpicks through the top of the cupcake.  The reason this is important is because the cupcakes ended up being much more secure that way than when I did the trial the way it is shown in the original blog.
4. I made homemade cupcakes and buttercream frosting.  If you're making your own, just make sure that you don't add too much liquid to the frosting - you want to make sure the frosting will not slide off or lose it's shape once you pipe it onto the cupcakes.  
5. If possible, refrigerate the bouquet after it's assembled.  We did not have space in the fridge to do this, but as the frosting warmed up (and it was sitting in front of a window with the sun streaming in), the frosting did slide off two of the lower cupcakes.  Thankfully, they were in the back of the bouquet and it didn't slide off until after everyone had gotten a good look at it! 

Here's our final product!  How'd we do?  I was pretty excited about how it turned out!  

Click here for the lemon cupcake recipe I used.  

And here is the raspberry buttercream recipe I used, only I used seedless raspberry jam instead of fresh raspberries and added a little pink food coloring to get the color I wanted.

Since I knew we were going to be putting toothpicks through these, I skipped the raspberry filling.  

And so it begins

I've kept a few blogs before. But they were all related to specific goals that never seemed to really get accomplished. Largely running related. Since I have a tendency to injure myself, I figured I should probably just give up on those kinds of blogs since it's a little bit of a let down to invite others to "follow you on your journey" and then not be able to make it.

 But don't worry! I'm starting a new blog. And the best part is that this is about individual, discrete PROJECTS! That's right, I don't post anything until I finish the project, so there's no anticipation and no let down!

 I have a couple of things that I really invest a lot of time into thinking about and doing. One of them is running, so I may talk about that some. The other one, which is mostly what I hope to use this blog to document, is kitchen-related projects - baking, cooking, and amateur catering.

My goal is to use this blog to post photos, share recipes, and mostly, remember what I did right or what I should do differently if I ever need to repeat a project. Since I wasn't planning on starting a blog until now, a lot of my initial projects aren't going to be as well documented as you'd normally see on a blog, but hopefully that will improve as I get used to this process.

 Finally, a little about me... I am completely self-taught. Google, Youtube, and Pinterest have been completely responsible for my ability to do any of the things I do. My mother did not like cooking or baking, so this is all through my personal trial and error.

 My motto is to just say yes to pretty much anything someone asks me to do, and then pray that I'll be able to figure it out!