Butterfly and Flower Cookies September 19, 2008

Last week I made some sugar cookies for some middle school girls.  I colored my cookie dough with gel paste.  I did find that the colors faded some in the oven so I had to make the dough darker than I thought I wanted it.  On the far right you can see a pale purple cookie.  The dough was the perfect color before baking.  After the first ones went through the oven, I added more color.

Here are the cookies drying.

Here are the cookies packaged, I put one flower and one butterfly in each package.

According to one 6th grader, “These are stinkin’ awesome!”

Cappuccino Icing September 8, 2008

I use a modified version of the Wilton recipe for my buttercream.

For medium consistency:

Cream together: 3 sticks butter, 1/2 c. shortening, 1 Tbsp. vanilla, 2 Tbsp. water

Slowly mix in 2 pounds Dominos brand 10x confectioners sugar

For the cappuccino icing, I added 4 scoops of instant cappuccino mix.  I also added a little more water to make it creamy enough to spread but I’m not sure how much extra I added.

This will made enough to ice and decorate a double layer 10″ cake.

Vote September 7, 2008

A few months ago I submitted a cake to a baby shower website for a contest.  The contest is now up.  Here is my cake: http://www.baby-shower-guide.com/baby-in-a-pea-pod-cake.html.  You can only vote once and I’ll admit that there are several better cakes, but feel free to vote for my cake anyway.

It’s too bad I didn’t know the contest hadn’t started yet, I had another cake that turned out much better that I could have entered.

11 Minute cake September 7, 2008

Here is the picture I promised:

Normally I send my practice cakes to the Ronald McDonald House, but the week before I had promised my husband a cake for work.  I had planned to make a cake celebrating the first football game of the season, but it turned out horrible.  I didn’t take a single picture for fear it would end up on cake wrecks.

So when I made the cake above, I sent it with him.  I mixed instant cappuccino mix into the icing and it was delicious!

When Matt got to work, he dropped the entire cake upside down in the parking lot!  It smashed everything, but it still looked OK, according to him.  He stuck it in the kitchen along with a note explaining it was dropped and to eat at your own risk.  It was gone by 10:30!  People were coming from other floors to get a piece.  I guess I’ll be making that icing again.

I had made some lowfat brownies awhile back and since then one lady in the office has thought all my desserts, including the one above were low calorie.  She was really disappointed to learn that none of them were.

Here is another practice cake I made recently:

My sister has a degree in photography and is trying to teach me from across the country how to take better pictures.  I am having trouble not using my flash, but the colors do turn out better.  I guess I need to read the owner’s manual for our camera.

Yes you can… September 2, 2008

…torte, ice, and put borders on a cake in 15 minutes.  Actually 11 minutes if you have everything ready to go.  I’ll post pictures later.  I could have done it neater but I wanted to see how quickly I could do it.