This Takes the Cake!

I noticed today that I've got quite a backlog of photos, due in part to the photo frenzy that spring always sparks for me and in part to not having my computer for several weeks. Hence, a mid-week post dedicated solely to baking!

I love to bake on holidays, even 'minor' holidays like St. Patrick's Day. Some years are more elaborate than others, but this year I decided to just make cupcakes. But not just any cupcakes...rainbow cupcakes! Alas, no pot of gold.

I don't have the kind of food coloring that makes really lovely saturated colors, so mine were pastel. I whipped up a basic white cake and split the batter into 6 separate bowls. Each bowl was given a different color.

Then, I dropped spoonfuls of each color into the cupcake liners.

When baked, they looked more psychedelic than rainbow.

I frosted them with a simple white buttercream and topped them with green sprinkles.

They were really, really delicious. I think I've found my go-to white cake recipe. Score!

The recipe made around 20 cupcakes. About 1 minute after I took this shot, the left-hand leg of the cooling rack I was using folded and half of them slid off the table and onto the floor...frosting side down. Splat.

At least I had some Irish soda bread to ease my suffering!

A week later, I decided to make some Yoda cookies for Todd, who was getting together with some Star Wars friends. Showing up with cool cookies = instant popularity boost, right?

I was inspired by Sweet Sugarbelle's tutorial for Yoda. I am clearly not as talented as her, though, so mine weren't quite so nice!

I took a spider cookie cutter and stretched the body out a bit. Perfect Yoda face. With royal icing, thinned to a piping consistency, I outlined the face and made a grid for the forehead. You're supposed to fill in alternate sections of the grid and let them dry to give them more definition. Outlining and filling in certain sections, waiting for them to dry, and filling in other sections took a REALLY long time.

I made some royal icing eyes on the face using quick drops of frosting...really easy. Then I filled in the rest of the face, but I wasn't very happy with how it looked...especially with icing encroaching upon the eye space.

I ended up pounding down the surfaces of the old eyes with the blunt end of a chopstick, taking a perverse pleasure in my task after so many long hours bent over my decorating space. To cover the gaping cavities in Yoda's face, I made lots of royal frosting eyes on wax paper and set them over the holes with icing 'glue'.

Piped icing covered any remaining evidence. At last...complete!

Part of the problem for me, I think, was that I decorated so many Yodas.

Not ten, not twenty, but rows and rows of them...enough Yodas to haunt my dreams for weeks to come. Shudder!

I chose a more pleasant topic for my Easter cookies...spring!

Royal icing chicks hatching out...

...simple dots...

...swirly lines...

...tulips...

...and sheep!

The sheep were my favorite. I only had a stegosaurus cookie cutter so I had to improvise.

They're so cute!

I boxed them up...

...made little Easter tags...

...and got them ready to send to out-of-town friends and relatives!

And today...I made this.

I'm really proud of it! Recently I'd seen a tutorial for making fancy-looking icing roses with a simple twist of the wrist and a Wilton 1M icing tip. Sometimes at night, while waiting to fall asleep, I went over it in my head, practicing. I became obsessed, telling Todd, "I have got to try to make those roses." A friend of mine is due to give birth any day, and I'd just seen a recipe for a strawberry cream layer cake, so I had the perfect excuse to make a cake for a friend and try those icing roses. Yay!

Make a mound, make a swirl, and you've got a rose! It may look complex, but believe it or not, it only took about 10 minutes to decorate the entire cake.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are SIX sticks of butter in that cake if you include the frosting. One and a half pounds of butter. It weighed a ton!

And, because the house smelled so good after the cake was delivered to my friend...and because I didn't feel like doing my real work...and because it's spring and I still had some strawberries left...I made another one.

Because I hadn't planned on doing any fancy swirly roses, I added a brick of cream cheese to my buttercream to complement the strawberries.

I've never had a strawberry cream cake before. The taste was very subtle and mild. The addition of the cream cheese and extra whipping with my KitchenAid gave the frosting a fabulous, airy texture.

Really good!

Todd's birthday is in two weeks, and I think I'm going to tackle Martha Stewart's six layer salted caramel chocolate cake with real drippy caramel and fudgy frosting between every single layer.

I can't wait.

Hope you have a sweet week!

From Winter to...Summer?!?!

My computer is still not back from the repair shop, and I've got well over 1,000 photos on my camera from the past few weeks. I broke down and uploaded some of them onto Todd's computer. It's hard to believe that just over two weeks ago, we had snow on the ground!

But spring came rushing in, and...summer? It's going to be 91 degrees this week! The windows have all been thrown open. Tabitha spends her days on the windowsill, nose tilted into the breeze.

She's got some company there!

All at once, my crocuses came up.

The sudden heat shriveled them, but for a while, they were majestic.

I love crocuses.

My daffodils are blooming, too!

Weeks early, purple, pearly lilac buds are pushing through their enclosing green leaves.

All the hydrangeas are budding out.

Tulips are everywhere!

The mild winter means a surplus of insects this summer. This young mosquito must've hatched out recently. He's a young male - note the feathery antennae.

I ordered a little treat for myself to celebrate the warm days. It came two weeks ago.

The little brown package was tied up with string and accented with a little acorn...felted wool body and a little acorn hat! So cute!

Voila! Naturally-dyed, wool roving-covered rocks...embroidered with some of my favorite flowers. Morning glories, asters, and lilies of the valley were flowers that my grandmother grew in our little garden. I love having them around...they're so cheery.

I found a long wooden bowl at Goodwill ($2!) and stuffed them with moss. I carefully laid the rocks on top. Ahhhh...spring!

On a beautiful spring day recently, we were invited to attend a baptism. I couldn't resist making more cookies. More roses...

Crosses...

Perfect for the late-morning brunch!

I've become a total cookie addict this year!

Only about 1/3 of my photos uploaded on Todd's computer...it didn't take me long to fill up his hard drive! So most of my photos aren't available. But I was glad that the following ones did. Our business, Toy Chamber Collectibles, hit a real milestone! One morning, we were just a little eBay business with a 9,999 feedback score.

The next, 10,000! Woo hoo! Now we're members of the 'shooting star' club! :)

Hope you have a great week!

That's How the Cookie Crumbles

It's almost Valentine's Day, and I love all the fun baked goods and silly cards that come with it. Last year I made a four layer cake with a cake heart hidden inside, and this year, too, I wanted to tackle something that I've always been afraid to try. I wanted to use royal icing, and I wanted to make realistic flowers. I spent some time at Sweet Sugar Belle's website, and that's where you can go for recipes and in-depth tutorials.

First, I mixed up a small batch of royal icing. Royal icing differs from standard icing by incorporating meringue powder. It hardens overnight and you can stack your cookies without fear of icing smudge...a big benefit when you're mailing or giving away packages of cookies.

Royal icing is beaten until it's very stiff.

I took a portion of the completed icing and added some color. Be sure to cover the royal icing you aren't using...it dries quickly!

I put my icing in a Pampered Chef squeeze bottle and used a tip that was wide at one end and narrow at the other.

The directions for making icing roses called for this odd, flat tool that came in my Wilton decorating kit. Ah...so that's what it's for!

Place a dot of royal icing in the center of the tool and press a small square of wax paper onto the top.

Squeeze out a dab of icing, and then use your fingers to twirl the tool in a clockwise motion, simultaneously pushing out a steady stream of icing. Voila! A tiny bud.

Pick a random spot on the side of the bud and lay your tool against it, narrow edge up. Continue twirling and pushing out frosting. Soon, unbelievably, you'll have a rose.

I made pink roses. I made yellow roses. I made blue roses. I made more roses that I could possibly use...but they were so fun and easy to make, I couldn't stop!

Let your roses dry for at least 4 hours. Meanwhile, bake your sugar cookies. Take some royal icing and give the shape a nice outline.

Now you need to water down the icing for the next part. Just enough to give it a "shampoo" consistency. "Flood" the center of your design and use a toothpick to spread out the frosting to the edge. Your edge piping has already hardened and will hold the fluid frosting in nicely.

I was a little stingy with my flooding, because I was afraid that I'd run out. However, I had plenty. Fill in all your cookies and let them dry at least 4 hours. If the icing is really thick, let them sit out overnight.

I decided to try a lace technique with some of the cookies, in addition to the roses.

It didn't turn out like I'd hoped, so I decided to do random designs.

I think they look very festive!

Especially, I love how the roses turned out. I used a dot of royal icing to affix them to the cookies and piped on some leaves.

The big hearts had three roses, but the smaller hearts had just one.

Even the teeny tiny hearts got roses!

My original intention was to make a huge batch of cookies last week, so I could mail them to friends and family who lived out of town. However, with the new dog, my schedule was a bit off, so I had to be content with making a few boxes up for local friends. They looked so pretty, all boxed up.

I stamped a quick greeting (WalMart...$1!)...

...and tied up the boxes with yarn.

It was so fun to do and I'm really happy with the results!

Google Calendar reminded me in early January to start thinking about Todd's Valentine's Day gift. I'd seen a really creative idea online and decided to try it. I'd read about Artist Trading Cards before - decks of cards utilized to make miniature works of art. It went hand-in-hand with the idea I'd read about, which was using a deck of cards to list 52 things that you love and appreciate about your significant other.

I knew this was going to be a time-intensive project, but I had no idea that it would take five weeks to complete! It was a labor of love, though.

I hole-punched each playing card and used a different color of scrapbook paper to cover the face of each one. Two metal rings held the whole thing together. It is one big book!

Each card is a different "work of art"...and I use that term loosely! Sometimes I used magazine clippings to praise an attribute in a silly way, like when I made a card for "your bristly ears"...

...or "your beautiful eyes".

This alligator was made for laughing!

I loved having the chance to tell him how I appreciated the little things, like his dedication to his work...

...or how he did little things for me that I am always grateful for, like making trips to the post office for me.

I complimented his brain...

...and his love of board games.

How could I forget his love of road trips, which I also share?

It was fun to use the little scrapbook things I've picked up over the past year, like this ticket that I made "ADMIT ONE" letters for.

Many cards had free-swinging parts.

And how could I forget Spock?

I made sure to give thanks for his help with the animals...


And so on, and so on. Fifty two cards! The last card, of course, says it all. What else do I love about him?

I am so grateful for him and I appreciate everything he does for me on a daily basis. I never imagined that I'd have such a wonderful husband and I was happy to have the opportunity to let him know exactly how I feel, and how much I love him!

You don't have time to make this for Valentine's Day this year, of course, but this could be a great birthday present! Pick up a pack of cards this week and get started. Have a great Valentine's Day!