The Wedding Cake

For those who do not know (if there are any of you left), I made my friends Anna and Ray's wedding cake for them. It turned out waaay better than I could have ever expected and I hovered around it like a mother bird all night long. It tasted pretty good too.

The cake was yellow with chocolate buttercream on the bottom and chambord buttercream on the top. The cake toppers are chocolate Mii's, which looks remarkably similar to the bride and groom and the fruit is all fresh.

The Baby Naming Cake

I am a little confused because I thought I had posted a few weeks ago about my new niece, Magdalena Rose, who was born on July 11th and is probably the most adorable thing in the world, with the possible exception of myself as a baby, but I guess I was wrong.

Anyway, my brother and sister-in-law are now the proud parents of the aforementioned child and had a baby naming celebration today to, well, celebrate. I made the cake (shocker). This was a two-fold cake. On one hand, it was supposed to be a lovely cake for baby Maggie, on the other hand, a test run for the wedding cake I'm making at the end of the month. It ended up very pretty and I learned a lot about egg whites and their reaction to 248 degree sugar syrup. I'm not sure it was my most successful from-scratch baking endeavor, but people seemed to eat it nonetheless and I have had no reports of emergency room visits. I used a recipe for a Victorian sponge cake out of some cookbook that makes me thing I should just use the Paula Dean 1-2-3-4 recipe for everything from now on. It was filled with chocolate Italian Meringue Buttercream which didn't set quite right and frosted with a very interesting frosting recipe that calls for granulated sugar, butter, flour and milk. It also involved my first foray into the world of royal icing, an venture that will not soon be recreated (needless to say there was a lot of swearing in the kitchen on Friday).

Anyway, as I said, it looked pretty:

The Baby Shower Cookies

We had a baby shower for Sara at work who's due two days before my sister-in-law and is walking around looking like she's ready to drop at any moment, or potentially beat the crap out of the next kid who pisses her off with nine days left in the school year.

I made these cookies from store-bought dough (which is why they expanded oddly) and the amazing, new cookie cutter section at Sur La Table. There were originally bottles, bears, carriages and rattles, but the rattles came out looking beyond phallic and were not fit for public consumption in the least.

The New House Cake

My friends Kim and Rob just bought a house in Medway. Supposedly that's somewhere south of Boston, though, to be completely honest, I'm not 100% sure it a. really exists and b. is in Massachusetts. All I know is you have to go on rte 109 for a long time and there are horses on rte 109, maybe cows as well.

Anyway, they bought this house so I made them a "Congratulations on your new house!!!" cake. The cake looks nothing like the real house, but the picket fence seemed necessary. The shingles are made out of chocolate bar pieces, which is extremely clever (if I do say so myself).

The best part was all the people walking by who said congratulations when we were waiting for our table at the restaurant and that now the entire restaurant staff loves me because we left them the leftovers. The worst part was that everyone I know seems to get really cranky when they haven't eaten and it's impossible to get a table in the Boston area because the Celtics are in a playoff game and we like places where they serve beer and have TV's. I'll just say that the roof was gone long before the rest of the cake...

The S'mores Cookies

I don't have a picture for these because I was too tired to take one last night and they're all eaten at this point, but I just have to post about them because they were SO yummy!

There was a posting on Tastespotting the other day for S'mores cookies and I thought they sounded delicious and that I should try them. When I looked closely at the recipe though, I wasn't super impressed so I did some hunting around on the interwebs to see what I could find. In every recipe I found they kept talking about how the marshmallows dried out and everything got hard. One person even said she baked the cookies plain and then pushed in the chocolate and marshmallows when they were still hot, but that sounded like too much work too me. All the other recipes used graham cracker crumbs and I decided that was the problem. There began my first attempt at experimenting with baking...

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Ingredients:
3/4 c butter (softened)
1/2 c white sugar
1/2 c brown sugar
1 egg
1 t vanilla
1 3/4 c flour
1/2 t salt
1/2 t baking soda
splash milk
1 c milk chocolate pieces (I used mini Hershey's kissing from the baking aisle)
1 c graham crackers crumbled into small pieces (but not into crumbs)
1 c mini marshmallows

Cream butter and sugars until smooth. Add egg and vanilla, beat until combined. Combine flour, salt and baking soda and add to creamed mixture. Beat thoroughly. I decided to dough was too dry here and added a splash of milk to loosen it up a bit. Fold in chocolate, graham crackers and marshmallows.

Scoop a teaspoon's worth of dough onto parchment covered cookie sheets. The cookies come out best if you shape the dough into balls. Bake for about 13 minutes.

Since this was an experiment, it wasn't perfect and some of the cookies broke on the way from the cookie sheet to the cooling rack. I'm not sure why, they might have needed to cool more or less on the sheet before being moved. It also might have had something to do with the distribution of graham crackers, marshmallows, etc. in the dough lump. It worked out alright though because the broken cookie pieces taste just as good as the whole cookies (if not better).

They were REALLY yummy, especially where the marshmallows melted and caramelized at the edges.

The Chocolate Cups

For the Mother's Day/Birthday Luncheon I made these chocolate cups I saw in a Wilton cupcake book. There were tasty, but a bit of a putchke. I used silicon cupcake cups, but in order to get them out in one piece, I had to spray the cups with non-stick spray before putting the chocolate in, but that made it so the chocolate wouldn't spread around and stick to the sides of the cup. When I finally got them out in one piece they definitely weren't as pretty as the ones in the book. All-in-all, it's done and they were tasty, but I wouldn't do it again, I'd buy the ones in the store for $9.99. I filled them with strawberries and mint, that was good.

The "Too-Many-Birthdays-in-May" Cake

In some sort of evil plot by the gods, pretty much every female I'm related to has a birthday on the days surrounding Mother's Day. My grandmother is May 9th, my sister in law on May 11th and my mother on May 12th. I figure my other brother is only allowed to get married if he finds a woman born on May 10th.

Because of this slightly unnatural phenomenon, I threw a Mother's Day/Birthday luncheon for my 12 closest friends and family members (there were 11 family members and one friend, which doesn't say too much for my social life). I made a coconut cake using the same Paula Dean recipe I used before, but just used coconut milk and no shredded coconut (which made the cake super moist, but not really coconut-y) and frosted it with the most amazing semi-solid marshmallow frosting stuff in the entire world and then decorated it with mini chocolate curls. I decided simple was better and stuck with the single flower.