Happy Halloween!

Make yourself some delicious sugar cookies today…or just pig out on all that candy! But, I would certainly go for the sugar cookies!

 

I hope everyone has a safe and Happy Halloween!

Sometimes you feel like a nut…

I decided I wanted make something special for my mom. She is a great gal and always deserves something sweet. Its odd that the title for this post is “sometimes you feel like a nut”, and I am making something for my mom. She is a little nutty, and I always laugh the hardest when I am with her. For a while now I have thought about making some Almond Joy cupcakes for her, as one of her favorite candy bars is the Almond Joy.

We made a plan to meet last Wednesday, and I was going to present her with her treat.  I baked the cupcakes, and shortly after got the sad call that she was sick. No more meeting, and still all of those cupcakes. I decided to finish them off, as a practice run. The Momma deserves the best anyway!

I used Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes recipe for coconut cupcakes, exchanging almond extract for the vanilla. I wanted to give a nice almond flavor. I also used a cream of coconut, since I had it on hand, and lessened the sugar.

For the frosting, I used Martha’s dark chocolate frosting, but added cream of coconut, and some extra powdered sugar to thicken it up a bit. I have to say, it was delicious. I love frosting.

I toasted some coconut and topped the cupcakes with some sliced almonds. They were really cute, and tasted pretty good too. I think next time I will do half coconut extract and half almond extract in the cupcakes, just because I LOVE coconut.

 

  

Next post, I will try to remember to include pictures along the way. I always forget that part!

I made a cake!

For some reason, its 3:00 in the morning, and I am up. Don’t ask why. I don’t know. Crazy dreams. Stuffy head. Thinking of a million things all at once. Alas, I thought I might make my visit with insomnia a bit productive and share my exciting news…

I made a cake! A big cake! For my boss! For their business’s 20th Anniversary!

I got a call on Thursday around 5:00, to make the cake for Saturday, which was a bit of a challenge. But I am always up for a challenge. We chatted briefly about size, flavor, design, and came up with the idea to make what I thought would be best! Ha!

I scrambled to the bank at 5:15 to get cash for the cake supply store that closes at 5:30, making it with oh, 5 minutes to spare. I grabbed a cake pan (hooray), some fondant, and ran to the grocery store to pick up caking ingredients. And then I ran to another store, and another store! Dang it for everything not being accessible at one store. I even when back to the store after one round of baking, because I ran out of ingredients. I should have planned better, but who needs to plan? I was baking a cake! For my boss!

On Friday, I frosted the cake and covered it in homemade marshmallow fondant (see CakeJournal for an awesome tutorial). I brushed the cake with a silver glitter (it looks a little dirty in the pics), and then began the painstaking labor of cutting individual letters for the studio logo. Oh, but it was so fun!

With the help of my husband, we assembled the letters for the logo. Then, I piped the letters with fondant icing writer that I HATE and will NEVER use again! It clumped up (the official term) about every five seconds!  But alas, I managed to make it look semi-acceptable.

And the final product:

 

Congratulations Studio 10! I hope there are 20 more years ahead!

Banana Split, Goddess Style

Over the weekend, Matthew and I had some friends over for dinner. I love to bake, but I also love to cook. When I cook, I always accidentally make a ton of food, so dinner guests are especially appreciated in this house.

For dessert, I wanted to do something on the lighter side, as the cuisine of the evening was Mexican. But, chocolate was requested. Traditional chocolate, aka brownies, cake, aren’t so light. So I thought outside of the box, just a bit. Mexican Hot Chocolate…chocolate and cinnamon… bananas and chocolate… bananas and cinnamon. Ooo, cinnamon bruleed bananas with little ice cream quenelles and a chocolate drizzle!

Yes, that was my actual thought process.

So, I made them. And it was so easy, and so fast. I made a homemade chocolate sauce with 60% Cacao Ghirardelli chocolate, a little cream, a little butter, and a little water to thin it out. Usually, the chocolate would clump up once the water was added, but fate wasn’t that cruel to me on Saturday (I had already destroyed three martini glasses that I was planning on using for serving…don’t ask).

Then, I made the bananas. Oh, yummy bananas. I cut them into spears (or eighths if you prefer) and covered them in cinnamon and sugar. Then, I torched ‘em!

 

Just a side note- I love my culinary torch! Thank you Matthew!

 

Now, a banana split needs ice cream of course. But I didn’t want big clumpy scoops. Because I watch way too much Iron Chef America, I had seen quenelles being made a few times and I thought I might try my hand at them. Basically, you take two spoons and shift the ice cream (or sorbet, cream, mousse, etc.) between the two until it creates a football shape. You can apparently do it with one spoon too, but I am a visual learner (dancer by day). So, I went with two spoons.

The dessert turned out to be pretty much delicious, or at least my guests were kind enough to lie about it if they were bad. But I liked them, and had more as a late night snack. 

 

Tasty Traditions

This past weekend, we were able to listen to our Church’s Semi-Annual General Conference. For two days, we get to be spiritually fed and uplifted as we hear from our wonderful leaders.

These weekends were some of my favorite while I was in college. I was usually invited to watch the meetings with friends and their families. I was able to share some of their “Conference Traditions” and be a part of a family when I was far away from my own. Aside from sporadic note taking, accidental naps, and conference bingo, the top tradition was always partaking in a delicious breakfast of some sort!

Now that I have my own little family, consisting of me and Matthew for now, I wanted to start a little tradition myself. I have fond memories of making cinnamon rolls with my grandma, and not so fond memories of the disasters as I tried to replicate them (usually flat, hard, salty, nasty bread!) But they are a special, yummy treat that I have determined to be our own Conference breakfast.

I have always attempted to replicate Grandma’s bread recipe, but its never quite as good. So I decided to look up a few refrigerator roll recipes (so that I could let the dough rest overnight, and sleep in a bit) and combined a few to make my own.  After letting the dough rest overnight, I rolled it out to about 1/4 inch thick, and generously buttered the top, all the way to the edges. I wanted to make these rolls a bit more rich with cinnamon than normal, so I used 5 tablespoons of sugar  and 2 tablespoons of cinnamon to cover the buttered dough.  After rolling the dough, I used waxed dental floss (unused, of course!) to cut the dough to about 1 1/2 inch rolls. The dental floss doesn’t press as firmly as a knife and makes a cleaner cut. 

I let the rolls rest for about an hour, and baked them for 20 minutes or so.  I let them cool a bit and then topped them with a buttery powdered sugar glaze. They were soooo good! I just wish everyone could have come and had some! But instead, I stuffed my face, and added a few extra rolls to my sides!

Here is some cinnamony delight that won’t add any extra rolls to your tummies…lucky!