Valentine's Ice Storm Breakfast

We had an Ice Storm on Feb. 13. We were at work and my friend had her daughter with her due to a snow day, she was facing a very long commute home in the deteriorating conditions. So we all hoped on a bus, leaving my friend's car behind, and came to my house for the night. We watched some cartoon network and made some cut-out cookies (which I did not get a picture of). A desire for Green Eggs & Ham was voiced several times throughout the evening.
I had no ham, but plenty of green food coloring and a heart shaped cookie cutter.
Personally, I coudln't stomach the green eggs so I went with the natural yellow.
We made it in to work on the 14th to deliver our cookies to everyone and spent at least an hour digging her car out.
I can't wait for spring!

Conversation Hearts Mini-Cakes

This is a pourable fondant project from the Wilton Site that I tried out.
Basically you bake a cake in a jelly roll pan and then cut out heart shapes. Ice with some buttercream and then pour colored fondant over the cakes. Finally you write the sayings in red icing. Sounded easy enough.
Since it is Valentine's I made these with extra spicy Gingerbread cake for the BF.
Also I had buttermilk left over from the baseball cake. The colors didn't quite turn out to be the pastel shades I was aiming for, but they are still pretty cute. The cake was delicious, the icing was a little sweet for my taste, but they were a big hit with everyone. Especially my surprise overnight visitor on the Valentines Eve.

BUTTERMILK GINGERBREAD
1/4 cup softened butter
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup molasses
1 1/2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoon ground ginger
2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground caradamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 cup buttermilk

Line jelly roll pan with parchment paper leaving a 1 inch overhang for lifting the cake out later. Then spray the parchment with baking spray containing flour.

Combine butter, sugar, egg, and molasses and beat with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Mix flour well with soda and spices. Add alternately with buttermilk to molasses mixture, beginning and ending with dry ingredients. Pour into jelly roll pan. Bake at 3500F for 30 minutes.
(If you don't want to use this recipe for this project reduce the buttermilk to 1/2 cup and use a 9 inch pan.)

Allow cake to cool and remove cake from pan using the overhangs of the parchment paper. Use a heart cookie cutter to cut out little heart cakes.

Quick "Buttercream"
for the first layer of icing I just beat together 1 cup of powdered sugar with 1/2 cup of butter

Pourable Fondant

Ingredients:
6 cups confectioners' sugar, sifted (1 1/2 lbs.)
1/2 cup water (4 ounces)
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1 tsp vanilla
gel icing colors


Place sugar in saucepan. Combine water and corn syrup. Add to sugar and stir until well mixed. Place over low heat. Don't allow temperature of fondant to exceed 100°F. Remove from heat, stir in flavor and divide in Icing Color. I attempted to generate pink purple and pastel green, but they weren't quite pastel. To cover cake, place cake or cookies on cooling grid over a drip pan. Pour fondant into center and work towards edges. Touch up bare spots with spatula. Let set. Excess fondant can be reheated.

I used purchased red gel icing to write the words, it didn't hold up after a day or two. Royal Icing would have worked better, but I wasn't sure if I could get it red enough.

Buttered Pecan Cookies

I gave up chocolate for lent and instantly started craving buttered pecans. I came up with this recipe by replacing the chocolate chips and walnuts in a chocolate chip cookie recipe with butterscotch chips and pecans. The butterscotch and the pecans go so well together -just like in butter pecan ice cream. Next time I would chop the butterscotch chips to get them more distributed through the cookie and actually add even more nuts, and possibly chop a little less. Maybe that is just because I am on a huge pecan kick, I don't know.
These are so good I though surely someone else had thought of this before, but in a quick Internet search I didn't find anything like this.

3/4 cup Crisco
1 & 1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar
2 Tbs milk
1 Tb vanilla
1 egg
1 & 3/4 cups flour
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking soda
1 cup butterscotch chips
1 cup pecans, chopped

Award Winning Brownies

Last fall I won a brownie bake-off at a local chocolate festival. So I figured this 'signature' recipe of mine should be one of the first I include in this blog. Basically these are extra chocolatey due to the use of Hershey's Special Dark cocoa and I used the recipe for the filling of my grandmother's nut tassies and spread it over the top of the brownie batter. These really are good - I knew I had a winner when I brought the test batch into work and not only were they gone - my office mates dug into the box I was planning to take to the post office for a friend. These were also featured in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

I will add a picture next time I make a batch.

1st Place Brownies

Brownies
2 sticks butter
2 c sugar
2 tsp vanilla
4 eggs
¾ c Cocoa
(Hershey’s Special Dark)
1 c flour
½ tsp b. powder
¼ tsp salt
Nut topping
3 eggs beaten
3 Tb melted butter
3 tsp vanilla
2 ¼ c brown sugar
¾ tsp salt
3 c finely chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350
Grease 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking pan


Melt butter in microwave, cool to room temp.
Stir in sugar and vanilla.
Beat in eggs one at a time.
Beat in cocoa.
Beat in flour, baking powder and ¼ tsp salt
Pour into prepared pan

Combine all ingredients for nut topping except for walnuts and mix thoroughly. Fold in walnuts.
Drizzle nut topping over brownie batter, being careful to completely cover edges. Some of the topping will leak over to create a caramelized bottom on the brownie.

Bake at 350 for 40-45 minutes until toothpick comes out with fudgey crumbs.
For neatly cut brownies, score the brownies shortly after removed from the oven.

Cool completely, then finish cutting.
Yields 24-30

Baseball Cake (Fondant Experiment)

Is it just me or do you think you could make beautiful cakes like the ones on the food network too...if only you had gone to culinary school instead of college...and you didn't work full time...alas, I decided to venture into the world of fondant anyway.
This is probably the best coconut cake I have had - but we are here to talk about fondant first and foremost.
For my first attempt I choose an easy shape - a baseball. I made the fondant several days ahead - a no-fail recipe from Peggy Weaver

http://whatscookingamerica.net/PegW/Fondant.htm
Sorry I can't get the link to work.


I baked the cake in a round pyrex casserole dish, cooled it overnight, then seperated the cake, filled it with cocounut filling, and iced it with a thin layer of buttercream. This is what is recommended on every website and I also saw it done on the foodnetwork - so it must be true - ice with butter cream first before applying fondant.
I rolled out the fondant on cornnstarch as directed - but it stuck. So I ended up rolling it out on wax paper and then transfering it to the cake - which was on a plate that was just the right size. I let the fondant hang down and adheared it to the cake then trimed the bottom. It was easier to work with than I thought, but my cake still had minor imperfections. I smoothed over blemished in the surface with wet fingers and that worked well. As for the strings - I intened to buy that spray can of red icing (betty crocker) and draw them on. However, a new product is on the market (also from Betty Crocker)- a form of food spraypaint - and it comes in the same can as the spray icing - only smaller. So I accidently purchased that. It worked out to be serendipity becuase I just cut the laces out of rolled fondant and spray painted them red. The whole project worked out much better than I had anticipated - which doesn't happen very often.
The cake tasted great I must say - I didn't eat the fondant part - but those who did said it was good.
For the fondant recipe see Peggy Weaver's site - I am no expert! I encourage you to try this - it really isn't that hard.

Coconut cake:
1/2 cup butter (room temperature)
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
2 cups sugar
5 egg yolks
1 teaspoon soda
5 egg whites
2 cups plain flour
3/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup of coconut milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
Cream butter and shortening with sugar. Add egg yolks. Sift flour and soda together. Add alternately with buttermilk and coconut milk beginning and ending with flour mix. Beat egg whites until stiff. Fold egg whites into batter gently so the batter is as light and fluffy as possible.
Pour into greased/floured pans or cassarole dish. I used Baker's Joy spray that has flour in it - I love that stuff!

Coconut filling:
1 cup frozen fresh coconut
3/4 cup sweetened condensed milk
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
1 tablespoon coconut milk
2 large egg yolks, lightly beaten

Combine milk, butter, and creamed coconut in a small saucepan over medium-low heat; cook, stirring, 3 to 4 minutes. Whisk one-third of the hot milk mixture into egg yolks. Return mix-ture to saucepan; cook, stirring constantly, until it is the consistency of pudding, about 5 minutes. Remove pan from heat. Stir in coconut. Let cool, I press saran wrap onto the surface so that no 'skin' develops on top. Refrigerate - I make a day in advance.

I had extra coconut milk, sweetened condensed milk, and buttermilk when I was done.
I hate to throw all that away, if not for the wastefulness then because I don't want to make a special trip for coconut milk next time I make this cake. So, I freeze it. What I do is open a small sandwhich size Ziplock into a coffee cup. I pour the milk into the ziplock and seal it, pressing out any air and it is ready for the freezer. It is really nice to have aliquots of buttermilk in the freezer because it makes great muffins, pancakes, biscuits, and cakes - but i never just happend to have some in the fridge.

Spicy Gingerbread Hearts (Sprtiz Cookie)

The BF loves gingerbread and 'windmill' cookies, so I adapted the spice combination to this heart shaped cookie for Valentine's Day. I purchased whole nutmeg, cloves and cardamom. Which I grated or ground with a mortor and pestle. Next time I may increase all the spices to so that this cookie will taste more like a "windmill" than gingerbread. Recipes I have seen for 'windmills' call for one and a half tablespoons of mixture of ‘speculaas kruiden’; a mixture of the 5 spices featured here.
I used the attachemt that makes the heart shapes it has three openings that are petal shaped.



Gingerbread Spritz

1 cup butter or margarine, softened
1/2 cup molasses
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ginger
pinch cardamom

In mixer bowl beat together butter or margarine, molasses and brown sugar. Add the egg and vanilla extract; beat well. This mixture may separate.

In another bowl, thoroughly stir together the flour, baking powder, nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, cloves, ginger, and cardamom. Add to creamed mixture. Stir until thoroughly mixed. Cover and chill 1 to 2 hours.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

This is difficult dough to work with. Use only a small amount at a time and keep the rest in the fridge. Fill the cookie press and press cold dough onto a warm ungreased cookie sheet for best results. I used my Silpat.
Bake for 7 to 10 minutes or until set, but not brown.