Cookies -

 

Saturday was filled with the joy of cookies and great company. My dear friend Kristin and her beautiful family came to visit. Specifically to mess up my kitchen and not hers, but also cheer me up a bit. It's been a rough few weeks and I needed a little Obermeyer love in my life. As you can see from the photo of Mrs. Gingerbread above we were quite creative in our cookie making. And, no cookie decorating fest would be complete with out a child under the age of 5 using brightly colored icing over white-ish carpet. (no worries she didn't spill any)

 

The sugar cookie recipe turned out beautifully - with soft puffy sugary wonderfulness. The recipe can be found on All Recipes.com  http://tiny.cc/sugarcookie

 

Kristin was also kind enough to bring a selection of cookie cutters - since I didn't have any. Here is an example of one of the more ... creative cookie cutter shapes. They are candle sticks -- get your mind out of the gutter.

The icing recipe was super simple - 1 cup confectioners/powdered sugar to 2-3 Tablespoons milk whisked until smooth. It/when it dries out a bit add a dash of warm water. Color with food die (I prefer the gel kind, it is not nearly as messy as liquid.

The Gingerbread Cookies gave us a bit of a fight. I turned to my all time favorite Cooks Illustrated
http://tiny.cc/gingerbreadcc for the first time I think I'm a bit disappointed. We followed the directions to a T - but the dough wouldn't release from the parchment paper. So, we improvised and mostly just made round cookies. I was quite surprised - their recipes are normally fool proof. Next time I might floor the paper before rolling to help the dough release.

Finally, I had slaved over French Butter cookie dough on Friday, hoping to have the most adorable chocolate swirl cookies. They were the driest little cookies ever, they were NOT sweet, and overall a complete disappointment in cookie making. That said - they were traditional french butter cookies, crumbled well, and I guess weren't supposed to be sweet American cookies. So, while I was disapponted and wasted 15 dollars worth of ingeredients some French guy would have loved them. My husband, Kristin, Jeff, and I all did not. Next time I'm using the sugar cookie recipe. I'll post the recipe when I perfect it :)

Carrot Cake Cupcakes

I promised my Uncle Dave I would make him some cupcakes for his 65th birthday on Thursday but, I thought I better do a test batch this weekend just to be sure they aren't terrible.

As I was trolling the aisles of the local Kroger today, I almost bought a Carrot Cake Mix... until the phrase "Carrot Flavored Pieces" quickly lead me to return it to the shelf (as did my sister, who was on the phone telling me I had to make them from scratch). So, instead of buying a mix, I used my Cooks Illustrated iPhone app (FREE!) to look for a carrot cake recipe. Luckily, it turned out that I already had all the ingredients I needed at home.

I started baking "process" as soon as I got home, by shredding the carrots in my stand-up food processor (warning: carrot juice will stain your white plastic kitchen gadgets, but I found Mr. Clean Magic Eraser works wonders on this).  After shredding the carrots, I hauled out my full sized food processor to combine/fluff the eggs and sugar.  I was kind of surprised the recipe called for a FP ... but the bottom of the recipe had directions for using the Stand Mixer.

By this point, it looked like an orange tornado had cut a path right through our previously clean kitchen.

Once the mix was prepared I quickly tried to look up a method to calculate the proper time for cupcakes (vs sheet cake), gave up and guessed at 15min (it took 20).

Three batches of cupcakes later it was time to start the icing.  It seemed to go well at first, and after following the directions I added a VIA instant decaf coffee packet for an extra kick -- (Dave's party is going to be a Starbucks and the SB manager suggested trying the VIA in the icing). It tasted DELICIOUS and after just one more minute whisking it was supposed to be light and fluffy and ready to decorate.  That is, until I turned around to straighten up the kitchen and left the icing whisking in the mixer....

With in just a few minutes it looked curdled and I was devastated.... luckily, I happened to stock up on cream cheese last week (it was on sale) and I had JUST enough powdered sugar left for another batch. Unfortunately though, I couldn't risk using the last two VIA packets - since I still needed those for the birthday party batch.

I decided to try piping the frosting which went ok, but next time I'm going to use the larger tip so I can get a larger dollop of icing on each cupcake (and to avoid clogging).

In the end it was a lot of work, some of which was unnecessary, but overall, the cupcakes were delicious, spicy, and had great texture.

Spiced Carrot Cake by Cooks Illustrated - http://tiny.cc/carrotbd

Leaning Tower of .... Lemon Cake?

July 4th weekend is full of pitch-ins with the family. This 4th of July, Jordan and I were invited to a family flag raising to honor his Grandpa & Grandma Whitt who served in WWII and Grandpa Thompson who served during the Korean War. We were asked to bring a desert and side dish -- so I went all out and used this opportunity to try a cake recipe from cooksillustrated.com. It took approximately 7 hours from start to finish ... and was worth it!

Lemon Layer Cake -- doesn't it just look like heaven... Until you see the recipe -- There are 3 parts to the recipe. 1) Lemon Curd - Filling 2) Cake Batter 3) Icing Then you must carefully assemble the entire thing.

The Lemon Curd - Filling went pretty well, the Cake Batter was fun to mix (and would have gone a bit quicker if I had pulled out the milk and eggs ahead of time so they could have been at room temperature when I wanted to get started. I was going to wait until Saturday morning to assemble and make the icing - but since we happened to be up till 2 am watching a redbox movie I thought - what the hell, I'll give it a go. . . big mistake.

I had never cut a cake in half (horizontally) but I had my big tupperware bread knife ready to go. While I butchered the first one making the bottom layer only 1/4 an inch thick, the second cake went much better. I decided to put the tiny layer near the top and began assembly. The first two layers went together without a problem...but then came the butchered layer -- and well it seemed to go ok, so I added the rest of the filling and the final layer of cake.


I was rinsing dishes when Jordan walked in to admire my work .... he then kindly let me know it was falling apart -- I shot him a dirty look and told him it was fine... fine until he pointed out that the third layer had torn in half and was sliding down and it wasn't just a bit of lemon curd oozing out of the layers like I had assumed. I grabbed the cake at the sides and shoved the layer back in place while frantically yelling at Jordan to grab the "stick thingies" (skewers) out of the top left drawer. We were both laughing uncontrollably but he some how managed to find the sticks -- and then, of course, he insisted on snapping a photo before (much to my chagrin) jabbing them in the middle of the cake. Needless to say, I then asked him to move them to the edges to help hold the cake in place.

I decided that was enough and to put the cake in the fridge for the night so I could just deal with it in the morning. Luckily, it was all in one piece. I still needed to make the Icing -- which seemed like it was going well until I realized I had used 2 large eggs and not 2 large egg whites and had to start over. The second batch tasted delicious! I iced the cake hiding any drooping layers and carefully loaded it into the car. Some how it made it all the way to Grandma & Grandpa Whitt's with out falling apart or touching the glass lid.

http://tiny.cc/lemoncake2

editor's note: besides jabbing the sticks in the middle of the cake, I did make some positive contribution by squeezing the lemons for the filling and creating a crapton of lemon zest (which Jennie totally forgot to use). Just wanted to point out that I'm not completely worthless :)