Giveaway Winnner Announced!

The winner of the slow cooker is:

Cherry:  ooh, I'd love this slow cooker! let's see.. my idea for a challenge would be to wait a few minutes before eating something impulsively like chips or cookies. rather, try being more aware and ask yourself whether u really need to eat that.

Slimkicker will email you for details to give you the slow cooker.  Congratulations Cherry!

Angry Birds Triple Chocolate Cupcakes and a Giveaway!

One of my bosses requested some Angry Birds Cupcakes for her son's birthday party.  I found a delicious recipe I really wanted to try from Annie's Eats.  They requested chocolate cupcakes and vanilla cupcakes.  I decided to triple the chocolate because....well I don't need a because.  It is obvious why I tripled the chocolate.  It would be weird if I didn't triple it.  Right?

I made cookie toppers for the cookies and used the royal icing transfer technique to make the birds.  I was short on time and couldn't wait for the icing base to dry on the cookies, so I iced the cookies and got to work on the transfers.  They dried at roughly the same time and then I assembled the best looking toppers onto the cookies.  Which is fortunate because some of them were remarkably less cute than others. 

Gorgeous!  I love this frosting technique, especially when putting a flat topper onto the cookie. 

I also made a batch of vanilla cupcakes, and I used the recipe from Glorious Treats.  She went through a huge process to find the perfect recipe, and I am happy to report, they are really good.  Very easy recipe to follow and very reliable results. 

Triple Chocolate Cupcakes barely adapted from Annie's Eats
Please note that the ingredients are separated with directions for each part of the cupcake.  I find it easier to bake when I can refer to the ingredients near the directions.  Please look at all of the ingredients before you go shopping!

Ingredients for the cupcake portion:

• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder [I used Hershey's.  Annie recommends Dutch-process cocoa powder]
• 3/4 cup hot water
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 1/4 teaspoon salt [Annie recommends coarse salt, I used Trader Joe's Sea Salt]
• 3 sticks unsalted butter [does not need to be room temperature]
• 2 1/4 cups sugar
• 4 large eggs at room temperature
• 4 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 cup sour cream at room temperature

Directions for cupcakes:
Preheat oven 350.
Prepare cupcake pan with liners.
Whisk cocoa powder and hot water together in a small bowl until smooth.
Whisk flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together in a medium bowl.
Combine butter and sugar over medium heat in a medium saucepan.  Stir occasionally until butter is melted.  Remove from heat and pour mixture into the bowl of a stand mixer with the paddle attachment. 
Beat butter and sugar mixture on medium low for 4 to 5 minutes or until the mixture is cooled. 
Mix in eggs one at a time and beat well after each egg.  Scrape sides of bowl. 
Mix in vanilla and cocoa mixture and beat until incorporated. 
Set the mixer to low and add in half of the dry ingredients, then half of the sour cream, and then the rest of the dry ingredients, and then the rest of the sour cream until just combined.
Fill cupcake liners 3/4 full.
Bake 18-20 minutes or until you insert a toothpick into the center of the cupcake and it comes out clean.  [Annie recommends to rotate pans halfway through baking.  I never remember to do this, oops]
Cool cupcakes in the pan for 5-10 minutes and then cool completely on a wire rack.

Ingredients for ganache filling:

• 8 ounces semi sweet chocolate, finely chopped [Annie recommends bittersweet, but I don't like dark chocolate.  Also, I used a food processor because I'm too lazy to chop chocolate.]
• 1 cup + 2 tablespoons heavy cream 
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature, cut into 4 pieces

Directions for ganache:
 Chop chocolate using a food processor.  Or a knife and cutting board. 
Put chocolate in a medium bowl.
Heat heavy cream in a small saucepan to boiling. 
Remove boiling cream from heat and pour over the chocolate.
Let it stand for a minute undisturbed.
Grab a whisk and stir the mixture gently.
Once smooth, add butter pieces one at a time until incorporated.
Thicken the mixture by either putting it into the refrigerator or freezer, mixing every 5-10 minutes.
Remove once no longer runny.

Assembly:
Use a cupcake corer or a knife to cut out the center portion of the cupcake.  [Annie recommends a cone shape].  Keep the top part of the cupcake center to cover up the ganache center.  Eat or discard the rest.  [I baked these with a friend and she ate the cupcake centers while I filled the cupcakes.  Kinda unfair, right?]
Spoon some ganache into the hole and cover with part of the cupcake center.
Cover the the top of the cupcake center.

Frosting Ingredients:

• 14 ounces of semi sweet chocolate, finely chopped [Annie recommends bittersweet here too, and I prefer semi-sweet.]
• 9 ounces of cream cheese, room temperature
• 9 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
• 3 cups powdered sugar
• 6 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder [Annie used dutch-process]
• pinch of salt [according to my measuring set, that is about 1/16 teaspoon of salt]
• 1 cup + 2 tablespooons sour cream 

Directions for frosting:
Chop chocolate using a food processor or a knife and board.
Melt chocolate in a bowl over a pot of water on the stove. 
Remove from heat and allow to cool until barely warm.
Beat cream cheese and butter on medium high in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, until pale and fluffy, 3 to 4 minutes.
Mix in sugar, cocoa powder, and salt gradually. 
Beat in the melted/cooled chocolate.
Mix in sour cream.
Continue beating until smooth and well blended.
Frost cupcakes right meow. 

Top with mini cookies with adorably and painstakingly decorated Angry Birds. 

Giveaway time!  Who wants to win a slow cooker?

SlimKicker would love for you to win one!  SlimKicker is a online calorie tracker that takes all your diet + fitness goals and turns them into a level-up game. You upload a picture of something you'll reward yourself such as a new handbag, and when you reach a certain number of points, they''ll remind you to reward yourself with that. SlimKicker also has lots of coupon codes such as Oxy-Powder coupons.
The giveaway will be the same format as the last one.  Please comment, with your email address, a fitness or health challenge idea.  The challenge from the last giveaway was pretty cool, one reader suggested we eat a different colored vegetable every day for a week. 

This giveaway is open to US residents only [sorry!] and will run one week.  SlimKicker will choose their favorite comment and they will send you the slow cooker, so please do not forget to include your email address. 

Here is a link for another giveaway they have going on.  This giveaway is for a Bowflex gym, which is pretty sweet!

Good luck!

Angry Birds Cake

 My sister's birthday was last September and she had made a humble request months earlier...an Angry Birds cake.  With a flying angry bird.  And a castle.  And flames.  Oh and all of the characters. 

 Sounds like fun?  I'd love to?

 I secretly complained but she did give me an iPad, so I felt like it was a fair trade.  She found a cake online that she really liked, so I recreated it to the best of my ability.  I am especially in love with these two birds. 

My base for all the characters and the castle were homemade rice krispy treats.  I covered them in homemade fondant and let them dry for a day.  I tried to make all the characters and the castle the day before so I could focus on the cake the day of her party.

 I hand painted all of the castle, the fire, and the wood grain effect on the side of the cake.

   

These guys were so fun to make!  Characters are very challenging because everyone knows what they look like, so if they are even a little bit off, you won't give the right effect.  

 Oh, and I made 76 different collages.  I shared my favorites here.  It seems kinda redundant, since a lot of the pictures were featured by themselves, but I couldn't part with these. 

Besides, if anyone wants to recreate this cake, they will have plenty of pictures to choose from!  That really helped me when I was making it.  I recommend setting aside a separate day for all the pieces.  It will reduce your stress later when you try to make the cake. 

Some issues I had with this cake were:

Trying to figure out how to make the red bird look like he was flying through the hole.  He was so heavy!!  I ended up using a bent coat hanger and a few toothpicks.  I had some wires but the bird was too heavy.

I tried some ridiculous things with this cake.  One layer was full of oreos and the other was full of frozen dollops of cookie dough.  The end result was not as tasty as I had hoped.  It made the cake kinda porous and it didn't make as good a base as I'd hoped.

I didn't factor in the overall weight of the finished project and the cake started to sag.  Since making this cake I have learned the wonders and general magic of ganaching a cake before covering with fondant.  It makes a tough and sturdy base to work on. 

Here is the link for the original cake artist.  Her work is amazing!

Overall this was a very challenging but fun cake to make and everyone at the party loved it.  It did give me a heart attack to see my brother and sister THROWING THE ANGRY BIRDS THAT I SPENT SIX HOURS ON.  Sorry, I'm still a little...unsettled by that.  I'm used to people being more hesitant to eat "the art" that I make, so it was definitely strange to watch my family tear the cake apart and throw it at each other.  Which is, I guess, the whole point behind Angry Birds.  BUT STILL. #rantover

Thanks for reading guys, have a great week!

Avenger Cookies

I LOVED the Avengers.  I watched it three times in the theater, and that was almost not enough for me.  It is a particularly special movie to me because of my deep adoration of Joss Whedon.  I love everything he creates and I get really excited when he gets more projects.  He has created some of my favorite shows of all time:  Buffy the Vampire Slayer (if any of you hate on me for this, I will DISOWN you!) and Firefly.  He also worked on Dollhouse, which I thought was really cool, and I wish the network and let him have more control of it.  ANYWAYS, he is pretty much the best director ever.

It was so satisfying to see how many people loved that movie.  My love and I didn't see eye to eye on Joss Whedon being the most perfect director ever for the movie before it came out, but thankfully, we did after we saw it.  It felt like a personal victory.  I guess it is, because the more successful he is, the more projects he'll be given, and the more I get to enjoy his work.  Go me!

These are the other half of the cookies I did last week for my friends.  I am giving them the cookies tomorrow and I hope they like them!

 This is my favorite cookie.  EVER.

 Hand painted. Like a boss.

 Well, with the help of Illyria. 

 She's cool too.

 They are going to color these cookies in with edible food coloring markers. 

Until next time, dear readers. 

Who knows when that will be?  I have the most random posting "schedule" ever.  Basically, I just want to leave you guys on your toes.  Oh, its been a month since you've last heard from me?  And then, BAM, two posts in a week. 

I spoil you guys.

Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien!

 George Takei alerted me to a very important date today:  JRR Tolkien's birthday!  I fell in love with the Lord of the Rings a few years ago and I have since read it several times.  It is a complete world that I can dive into and be lost in for hours.  A few months ago, I read the Hobbit for the first time, and I loved that as well.  I have a pretty horrendous commute to work and I have the books on a USB.  I really recommend listening to the audio book, the narrator is phenomenal. 

Some awesome friends of mine wanted cookies for Christmas, and one of them asked for Hobbit themed cookies.  I knew that it would be too difficult for me to capture the Hobbit characters purely through royal icing, without making them seem too cartoon-ish.  I decided to paint on the cookies instead, using paintbrushes that are reserved solely for food, Americolor Gel food colors, and GFCF cookies with royal icing piped and flooded, which I then allowed to dry for +8 hours.

I found some images I really liked and used Illyria to help me paint onto the cookies.  I painted Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield, Smeagol, Gandalf the Grey, the three trolls, and the Ring.  I wanted to use color in all the cookies, but I feared I would lose detail if I added color.  Instead, I am going to bring some edible food markers for my friends to color in the cookies with.

GFCF cookies have been very frustrating for me in the past, but these were a breeze to make!  I used a box mix, vegan buttery (????? I feel like that sums up my emotion....butter-y?) sticks, rice milk, and some vanilla extract.  It rolled out like a dream on my new Roul'Pat (thanks Crystal!).  I used a pizza cutter to cut out various rectangle shapes (because I am too cheap to buy cutters) and they baked beautifully.  Usually this mix makes some crumbly cookies, but I have to say, the buttery sticks worked great!

Lilaloa recently challenged other cookie decorators to forget about color.  I hope she likes the first three cookies! 

Ocean Preppy Girl Party

 One of my favorite families to bake for requested this party a few months ago.  Yes, embarrassingly enough, I've had these photos shot and edited for MONTHS now, and am finally getting around to posting them.  BUT, I have good news and a foolproof plan for posting more often...but it requires sacrifice all around.  How would you guys feel in donating money monthly to pay someone to feed me grapes and fan me while I edited and wrote these posts?  Take your time.  Get back to me later.  Nooooo rush.  Maybe not grapes though.  Now that I think about it, I'd rather be fed chocolate dipped strawberries. 

 These cake pops were really fun to make!  I used gold sprinkles for the "sand", some white sugar pearls for the "bubbles" and a goldfish for a [drum roll please] goldfish!  I saw these originally on another website, but it wasn't a cake pop, it was a marshmallow pop. 

 I got my hands on an invitation for the party and was able to recreate the theme using Illyria.  [bonus points to anyone who knows who Illyria is without clicking on the link!] 

 I love how soft all the colors are.  The party pack the family chose was super cute.

  My favorite cookie is the octopus, he was so fun!  His arms are all cute and squiggly and it made me feel like a cookie decorating ninja to make him. 

 The whale was also fun to do.  I am getting better control over my icing, but it is always nerve wracking to bake for a party.  So many people are going to see it and eat them.

 This was surprisingly hard to do!  I wanted to have a bubble or 3D effect with the icing, so I did diamonds of the same color first, using Illyria to show me where they go.  But then the lines on top look shaky because it wasn't a flat surface...I think it still came out cute, but these took a long time!  I wouldn't recommend doing a whole set of them, maybe just a few to accent the rest.  Sweet Sugarbelle is the queen at creating this effect, so make sure to visit her.  She has tons of cookies where she breaks down the whole process.

 Ahh, the cake!  This was my first time making little characters out of fondant.  I was so nervous!  The family found  a cake they really liked online, and I did my best to recreate it with some of my own touches.  I am terrible at designing ANYTHING, but I am decent at recreating artwork. 

 Make sure to visit the link for the original cake on the blog Olanos, the artist did a fantastic job!

 Love my fat little octopus.

This picture cracks me up, I love seeing the googly eyes!

I have a few more posts lined up and ready to go.  Hopefully I can average more than once a month. ;)

Oreo Chocolate Cupcakes

These cupcakes are really fun and were a hit at the Labor Day party I brought them to.  I used my favorite chocolate cupcake recipe, Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate Chocolate Cake but added some whole Oreos or chopped Oreos to the batter, per Bakerella's example.  They were so delicious!  I love how Oreos taste after they've soaked and been baked in batter. 

I added crushed Oreos to the frosting, which may not have been wise.  It was really hard to pipe the frosting on so I had to use an offset spatula.  I would go with a different frosting next time and not had crushed Oreos to it.  Instead, I would sprinkle them on top after frosting them. 

Oh well, they were still delicious! I am a chocolate fanatic, but if you aren't, I recommend using a vanilla based buttercream instead. 

I loved the inside!  Aren't they beautiful?

Is it silly to post two pictures that are essentially the same?  I couldn't pick my favorite, so you get both of them :)

Oreo Chocolate Cupcakes with Oreo Chocolate Buttercream

click on the link if you'd like a breakdown on Ziplist.

makes 30

Ingredients:

• 30 crushed or whole Oreos
• 2 cups white sugar
• 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 3/4 cup cocoa [I used Hershey's]
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup milk [I used 2%]
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 cup boiling water

Directions:

1. preheat oven to 350
2. prepare cupcake pan with liners.
3. crush or place a whole Oreo on the bottom of a liner.
4. stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, salt in the bowl of a stand mixer [or medium sized bowl]
5. add in eggs, milk, oil, vanilla. beat on medium for 2 minutes.
6. stir in boiling water.
7. pour into liners until 2/3 full.
8. bake 22-25 minutes

Enjoy!