Birthday Party

So, after all those trials about which birthday cake to make, it came time for the actual party. I made a big spread, much too big for the amount of people there, and of course forgot to take a picture of the whole thing. Here is part of it at least:

I had chips and salsa, chips and a few dips, cheese and crackers, fruit salad, veggies, pigs in a blanket (pigs in blankets? how do you pluralize that?) and cupcakes! 2 kinds of cupcakes, to be exact. Chocolate with chocolate frosting, and maple with maple frosting.

The chocolate definitely was the winner. The baby ate 1 of each, but whatevs. You only turn one once, right?! Next year, I will just plan on chocolate though, to save myself trouble. Anyways, who am I kidding? Nobody wants to eat stuff that isn't chocolate.

Birthday cake, test 2

A girl at work gave me the incredible idea of making cupcakes instead of a real cake. I decided to try it out for test number two. I took the recipe for a maple cake (from 'Bon Appetit' of course) and made cupcakes out of it. I just randomly picked a time to start testing to see if they were cooked through. I think it worked well and I decided that this would be the winner for the party, but K is giving this recipe a thumbs down. The only thing he doesn't like is the frosting though, because it is cream cheese based, and he hates that. Now I don't know what to do. My options are to make these and another kind of cupcakes so people can choose, just make another kind altogether and ditch these maple ones, but I think K may be the only person on the planet to hate cream cheese frosting..... hmm.... to be continued, I guess.

Birthday cake, test 1

In a little over a week from now, my baby will have his first birthday... yikes! So, as you would expect, I am baking the cake instead of buying one. Since I didn't really start baking until about a year and a half ago, and I haven't ever made an actual cake, I decided I need to do some testing before the big event. This is test one. I didn't have very high hopes for it, but decided to try it just in case. It is a vegan chocolate and orange cake. Recipe out of 'Bon Appetit', again. I got a subscription for Christmas and am putting it to good use!

I didn't quite know how a n eggless cake would be, or how it could even be done, but surprisingly, there weren't that many unusual ingredients in it. In fact, I pretty much had everything I needed, except for the vegan "butter".

The cake looked really good, all frosted and everything.
After conducting a scientific taste test, K and I decided it wasn't bad. He liked it better than I did, but really, my main complaint has because I am not a big fan of chocolate and orange. Why didn't I leave the orange out seeing as I knew this ahead of time? Don't ask me! Anyway, the cake was kinda crumbly, but moister than we expected. And the frosting was a nice consistency, and kind of hardened up, which we both liked. This cake isn't going to be the birthday winner, but it was a fun test.

Chocolate Chip Cookies 2.0

Inspired again by "America's Test Kitchen" I decided to try out their claim of a better chocolate bhip cookie. Better, you say? That's what I thought too. Their changes included, less butter, but you turn most of it into brown butter, using an egg plus a yolk instead of 2 eggs, using more brown than white sugar, and to NOT USE Tollhouse chips. Can you imagine? Their taste tests showed Ghiradelli 60% cocoa chips were the best. So I did just what they said. I think my butter was a little less brown than they were going for because I chickened out, but other than that, the same. The cookies were good, but in the taste department, they didn't have much on the regular old recipe. The way these cookies shined is in the texture. They were perfect! A tiny bit crunchy on the outside edges, but really soft and chewy on the inside. Oh and they are thick. Whenever I make the regular recipe, the cookies tend to melt out and be extremely thin and then crunchy. I don't mind this, but it was better for them to not be that way.

Muffins

I think I may have mentioned before that while I can cook like crazy, I never really baked until relatively recently. I think when I was pregnant is when it really started, because all I wanted to eat were baked goodies. Now I have added muffins to my repertoire. I was inspired by an episode of "America's Test Kitchen". They have yet to fail me on perfect recipes. These muffins were no exception. Perfect!
They have a few tricks. One is to use buttermilk. Another is to make a sugar and lemon zest topping to put on the muffin tops before baking, which gives them a super good, crystalline wonderfulness. The main trick though, is to make a condensed fruit jelly to mix in to the batter, besides just having the whole blueberries. You cook down some blueberries and a little sugar and then swirl it into the batter once you have that poured into the muffin pan. This makes for the best muffins we have ever tasted!
On my second go-around (we don't want to waste the excess buttermilk!) I found that I didn't have enough blueberries left to make both the jelly part, and have the whole ones in the batter. So I made the jelly out of raspberries instead, and still used blueberries for the whole fruit. This set was even better than the first!
We have enough buttermilk left for one more set of muffins, and I am definitely making the mixed berry version again. Good job Test Kitchen!

Breakfast deliciousness

Over the holidays, I was going crazy with treats and snacks and yummy stuff. One thing that I was doing every weekend for a few weeks was making a wonderful treat for breakfast. One week, it was pancakes. I tried to make them more healthful by using whole wheat flour. This may have been negated once I poured a gallon of syrup on top though...

Anyways. Another time I made cinnamon rolls. However, they ended up a slight disaster. They look nice, but after I frosted them and got plates for K and myself, I found they had magic middles. In the process of cooking them longer, it turned the frosting into a weird crunchy mess. We still ate them, of course, but they weren't as good as normal.

The third weekend was a real mess. I decided to make biscuits. In my rush to make them because I was already starving, I may have accidentally used baking soda instead of baking powder. It turns out this isn't a passable mistake. They ended up straight in the trash! That is why there is no picture. I guess I could have taken one of them in the can. Dang, missed opportunity

Cinnamon rolls!!!

Oh lord. Cinnamon rolls are the best thing ever. I could eat the whole pan myself. Sometimes I get a bee in my bonnet and just have to make them! And my husband sure isn't going to complain if I do!

So the recipe I have calls for making the dough in the bread machine, and then going from there. In our house, it is K's job to make the bread, so I am not that great with the machine. A lot of times he will help with this part, but this particular day he was busy fixing cars. Anyway, excuses over. The point I am trying to get at is the dough wound up kinda weird. I wasn't able to roll it out as much as I was supposed to, which made for some wonky end rolls.

Once cooked, and with frosting of course, you couldn't tell. And obviously we taste tested the whole batch to make sure they were okay. They were.