Back among the land of the Baking

Instead of a lengthy, meandering diatribe that I usually publish first, I figured I would let the pictures speak for themselves, and I would just offer up a little caption to go with it. Here goes:

Starry Night (or Starry, Starry Night) cupcakes - 24 cupcakes with Famous Chocolate Wafer cookies in the holes, decorated with 9 colors of frosting imitating the Van Gogh painting. This took hours but the most fun I have ever had with cupcakes in my life. I only wish I had known to do it on styrofoam so I could have preserved it forever.




Next up, Cat Face Cupcake - decorated using mini marshmallows, mini-chocolate chips, runts, and a starburst (for the kitty tongue). I guess I could have just used icing to pipe in all of the fun details but I enjoyed using the candy tactic. And by the way, does anyone out there realize how tough it is to find black lace licorice? Every cupcake book recommends using it, but no one tells you it is near impossible to find. My poor mother had to go online to a specialty store and by it for me. She is the best.

Second attempt at three-dimensional cupcakes. I made pandas and I put them in a jungle. Their ears are 100-calorie pack mint chocolate cookies. Their noses are made from Hershey's Kissables. Their paws are Oreos with little claws piped on. Their bellies are crushed Oreos. Their lovely jungle setting is paper grass used for Easter bastets.



Ah, St. Patrick's Day 2009 - a day I never hope to repeat again in my life. Once again, food was the saving grace and pretty much the only redeemable part of this day. My blueberry crumble coffee cake was no exception to this rule. Kerri, her hubby, and I all assembled at the Berkley Street compound. Kerri, of course, brought along treats of her own - see her blog for the amazing toffee bars with homemade sweetened condensed milk and her yummy malted milk cookies. This was one of my offerings.

I brought it over warm and waited til it cooled before I drizzled a milk icing over the streusel top. I made too much streusel (never a bad thing) and perused my Martha Baking Handbook to see what else I could do with said streusel. I happened upon a recipe for chocolate babka. I remember hearing the word "babka" referenced in two pop culture scenarios - one, in Perfect Strangers ("When you start to roll de dough, just make sure to roll it slow. If you roll de dough too quick, BIBBY BABKA make yah sick!") and two, on Seinfeld (cinnamon babka was no replacement for
chocolate babka!).

The picture at left does not do my babka justice. I will have to take better pictures in the future of the true promise of this yeasty, chocolatey, baked delight with a crumbly streusel topping. I have been told that this babka could solve the issues of the world. If only North Korea would have a slice toasted up with some butter, they might chill out with the nukes.

These are Kerri and Mom's suggested adaptation of the Elvis cookie. No one seemed keen on banana frosting except for the self-proclaimed Frosting Queen ... ME! But, here are the peanut butter meringue cookies with mini chocolate chips in them. Turned out pretty tasty.

Below are an attempt at white chocolate pretzel cookies. Meg O'Connell, Lunenburg's own Domestic Goddess made these cookies for me during a visit to her house to watch a Hillary Clinton DVD I
procured for Molly's Christmas present. I was amazed at how delicious the cookies were. I begged her for the recipe and she told me it was just a basic chocolate chip cookie recipe with white chips and pretzels in place of chocolate morsels. My attempt was failed. I burned the bottoms of the cookies, plus Kerri and Jay both agreed that there wasn't enough cookie matrix (I had no idea what that was until they clued me in ... and it had nothing to do with Keanu Reeves ... thank GOD!). Plus, no one in my family likes white chocolate. I have no idea where I got the white chocolate gene.

This disappointment to the left was my first cake in cake class (week 2) . Mom and I took a Wilton Cake Decorating class at Michael's to start me on my way to Baketressing for real. Of course, this was directly after the Telluride Debacle and my head never was fully in the cake decorating game. I always had something terrible at home to be worried about. Lo and behold, the cake that I wanted to include two lovely brown chocolate moose became a pink, blue, and green monstrousity. I am not proud of it, but I fed it to Mike for a week as his school lunch dessert.

Week three of cake class was a little more successful. I opted for cupcakes because I just would always run out of time. The structure of cake class was that we would spend an alloted time learning new skills, and would then apply them to our baked goods. I was always the last person walking out of class, and I was always leaving with tips and containers that needed cleaning. I had fun making these cupcakes and I was out of class on time that day.