Cakes for book club

I belong to a local book club and I'm pretty much known for two things: 1) Never reading the book 2) Always showing up with cake.

And it's not that I'm not a reader. I read all the time - at least a book a week, sometimes more. But sometimes the book they've chosen doesn't appeal to me or other times I already have a stack of books on my TBR (to be read) pile that the book club book doesn't make it to the top of the list by the time the club date rolls around.

I should mention that there have been a few times where I actually read the book, but more times than not, I haven't which always cracks up my friend Melanie.

But, back to #2, I always show up with cake.

If the book is something I can easily replicate, I do the cake in the theme of the book. If it's not, I show up with a delicious treat anyways.

Last night's book was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Yes, I had every intention of reading this book. Seriously. I really wanted to but I've been swamped the last few weeks and the only books I've had time for have been audio books so I could manage reading while doing the dishes, etc.

But true to form, I showed up with cake.
I hadn't done a carrot cake in a while so I made one but cream cheese frosting does not decorate well. It doesn't smooth out like the buttercream but it tastes soooo good! So although her back wasn't smooth, it worked out.

For the dragon, I rolled out fondant and decorated it with my food coloring pens and then cut around it. At first I was going to pipe it all onto the cake but as time ran short, I chose the fondant route and I was quite pleased!

Okay, the next book club isn't until August and I'm really going to try and read the book this time. But I can't make any promises...

Not Quite a Manapua, But Still Delicious

My husband loves Manapuas, the steamed buns filled with pork. While eating one the other day, he noticed on the packet that the company also sells them filled with chicken and mushroom or a sweet potato variety. We thought those varieties sounded delicious but we'd never seen them where we lived. A quick call to the company confirmed what often happens in our area - they don't sell them here.

We couldn't get the thought of bread filled with chicken and mushroom out of our minds, so we decided to make a version of them. I made a batch of french bread dough and rolled out small circles.

Combining mushroom soup, cooked chicken, and veggies in a bowl, we used a cookie dough scooper to put small amounts into the circles of dough.
We carefully folded the balls up, making sure the filling was securely inside and left them to rise for thirty minutes. The recipe made about 25 balls of dough, but I only took a photo of one tray.
After twenty minutes in the oven at 400 degrees, they came out looking and smelling delicious.
And voila, chicken and veggies in mushroom sauce, inside a ball of french bread.
It was a nice meal for the hubby and I to make together as we usually don't cook at the same time. The only downside to this creation was that the bread rolls were too good. So good that we kept eating and only when we realized we had eaten nearly a whole batch of french bread that usually lasts us several days, we were already beyond stuffed.

Mixed Berry & Apple Pie

This pie is amazing. And I'm not just saying that cause I made it. The combination of the mixed berries and the apple is divine - especially hot from the oven!

The recipe is originally from Martha Stewart but I feel she often makes things a little more complicated than they need to be. So I adjusted it and also added my mom's pie crust recipe. :)

PASTRY (makes enough for a pie base and top cover)
2 cups flour - sift into bowl
2 tsp baking powder (omit if you are using self-rising flour)
1 Tablespoon sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup solid Crisco (not the oil in the bottle)
1/3 cup butter
4-5 Tablespoons ice cold water

Sift the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt into bowl.
Add the Crisco and butter (or 2/3 cup butter or 2/3 cup Crisco if you are out of one of them) and rub into the flour with your fingers until all blended.
Add the ice water.

You can also do this in the food processor. Put the dry ingredients in and add the Crisco/butter. Pulse till they are blended, then add the ice water through the funnel while you pulse.

Split into two balls - one for pie base and one for the cover. Make sure to have lots of flour on the board and rolling pin when rolling.

PIE
1/4 cup plus 2 Tablespoons granulated sugar
2 Tablespoons cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 large granny smith apple, peeled and sliced into very thin slices
3 cups of mixed berries (I used a bag of frozen berries, defrosted)
1 ounce (2 Tablespoons) cold unsalted butter cut into small pieces

Preheat oven to 375.
Whisk together sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon and salt in a large bowl. Add apple slices and berries and toss to coat. Pour filling into piecrust. Dot the filling with the cut up butter. Place top of pie crust over the mixture. (I like to do strips cause it looks pretty). Sprinkle a little more sugar over the top.
Bake for 35-40 minutes until brown.

Enjoy!

A Pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving

This week we stocked up on all the items we would need for our Thanksgiving. I know what you're thinking - we must be super efficient or super excited. Well, possibly a little of both but mainly it was because we live on an island, and once an item is gone, it's gone. We didn't want to risk having our turkey without cranberry sauce or that green bean casserole without french fried onions.

We had to go to a few different stores to get everything and while at our final stop, there was a deal for a $4 turkey if you spent over $20. Glancing at our cart, we had over $20 worth of ingredients so we picked up another turkey. We'd already bought one earlier that day, but we couldn't pass up the deal. Two turkeys... and a week to go till Thanksgiving. What would you do?

We had a pre-Thanksgiving meal. Yep, we cooked a full turkey dinner complete with stuffing, garlic mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, candied yams, Molokai sweet potatoes and apple pie. I don't think of this as detracting from next Thursday - I consider it more an extension of the holiday. :)

My favorite part - the apple pie. I love making desserts but this was my first time making a pie. It came out great!
And even though it was my first time making a pie, I decided to be adventurous and do a fancy top. Next time I know to space the strips out a bit more so they are all even. I'm kinda missing one on the end there but not bad for a first run.

The pastry recipe was from my mom and the apple pie was courtesy of the hubby's grandmother. I was a little concerned when I called her for the recipe as she just said it was a bit of this and a bit of that. She does it all by eye and doesn't measure anything anymore. But I must have done pretty good cause the pie was delicious. I just have to remember what I did for next time!

Introducing the puppy cake!

When I made the horse cake two weeks ago, my 12 year old neighbor asked for a cake of her dog for her party this past weekend.

Making the horse had been good practice and I felt pretty confident about making the dog, a Shepard with one blue eye, one brown. In fact, I was pretty excited to try the shape again as I had learned a lot when making the horse.

The beginning went great. I baked the cake in loaf pans, stacked them together and used chocolate frosting as a middle layer and as a glue to keep the pieces together. Then I shaped the cake, carefully cutting with a bread knife to get the desired shape, pictured below.
Using a star tip and vanilla and chocolate buttercream, I began decorating. Then the humidity set in, making the buttercream too soft. October is usually a great month where I live, with cool temps and rain. But the tradewinds decided to stop this week and we were left with high levels of humidity and heat. I began my routine of putting the cake in the fridge for 10 minutes at a time. This worked for a while until I opened the fridge and saw that the entire muzzle of the dog had fallen off and was now lying on the bottom of the fridge - with a white frosting trail on every shelf.

I originally had the nose resting on the feet with a gap below - a major flaw in the plan. The frosting made the cake too heavy and it collapsed and fell forward.

Looking back, it was pretty funny and I should have paused to take a picture of the fridge and the nose at the bottom with the body at the top, but I was so concerned about the time that I immediately focused on fixing the problem.

Fortunately I had cake left over from the shaping so I cut off a large square piece and placed it on the cake board in place of the nose. It made his head look bigger, but also made him look like he was resting his head between his paws and not on them.

I quickly decorated it with the buttercream and the nose turned out great! I know now to be wary of design flaws for the next time.
The eyes and nose were made out of fondant and decorated with my food coloring pens.
My neighbor was thrilled and the cake was a big hit at the party. I think I'm getting the hang of these shaped cakes! I have blog requests for a tortoise and a camel. Stay tuned. :)

A Horse is a Horse...

My neighbor turned 12 this past weekend and is an avid rider, spending most of her free time at the barn. I offered to make her a horse cake as the hubby and I were going over to their house for dinner on her birthday and she eagerly nodded. Her favorite flavor: Chocolate. Great, chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream. That was the easy part.

I was stuck on how to do it. I first thought about doing a sheet cake in the shape of a horse's head, but that wouldn't be a challenge.

So I tried my first 3D cake. After arranging all of my baking pans in different configurations, I finally decided on baking in two loaf pans and four mini loaf pans.
Slicing off the end of one loaf, I added it to make the rise in the head and a curve in the back.
I frosted each portion with buttercream as I transferred it to a decorated baking sheet. I used wrapping paper but then covered that in plastic wrap - I wasn't sure how the paper would take the frosting. At this point, the hubby and I joked that it looked like an alligator.
From watching various cake shows, I knew I should make the ears out of rice krispies but we didn't have any in the house, so I used cornflakes. They worked okay, but I think I would use rice krispies in the future. Unfortunately at this point my battle with the humidity had begun, so the cake was decorated in 10 minute increments, placed in the fridge between segments.
I used fondant for the eyes, nose, mouth and horseshoes.
Even my cat seemed interested by the strange creation on the table.
It wasn't easy and took all day but I learned a lot and I know the next one will be even better - in two weeks when she's having a party with her friends and has requested a cake like this but of her dog. She also pointed out that the back legs of the dog need to have a round bit if he's sitting down. Oy. :) Watch this space...

Speaking of Cakes...

Here are pictures of the cake I made for the hubby's birthday two years ago. I have better quality pictures somewhere, so when I find those, I'll repost.
The theme of the cake was inspired by the cover of Woman's Day magazine, although I changed it a bit and added a canoe in there too as we canoe frequently.
It took me a few days to decorate all of the teddy grahams with royal icing. I didn't have a cake decorating kit then (as I do now) so all of the piping on the teddy's was done with a toothpick.
All of the surfboards and blankets were created out of Airhead bars and the sand was made out of crushed vanilla wafers. The flavor of the cake was his favorite - carrot cake with creamcheese frosting.

What I didn't factor in was the level of humidity on the day I decorated the cake. The place we lived at the time did not have air conditioning and being that it was a very humid August day, everything did not go as planned including having the frosting fall off in globs. I also had created palm trees for the cake which folded in half five minutes after being placed on the cake. Fortunately I had enough "sand" to cover the mishap and decorated the rest of the cake ten minutes at a time - ten minutes in the fridge, ten minutes out, ten minutes in the fridge, and so on.

Cake decorating has only gotten easier for me from here!

Baby Shower Cake!

One of my closest friends is having a baby girl in September and I was honored to make a cake for her recent baby shower, themed with pink, yellow and white.
Her favorite cake is funfetti so I made two 13x9 funfetti cakes and stacked them together with funfetti frosting in the middle. Then a layer of buttercream frosting to serve as the crumb layer.
The crumb layer locks in all the crumbs so when it is time to put the next layer of buttercream down, the frosting is crumb free.
The start of the baby blocks...
Baby blocks complete. The long sides says BABY and the short sides says 09.
Because the theme was ducks, I bought a small duck mold and pressed pink and yellow fondant into it.
Once the fondant had slightly hardened, I lightly painted the beaks and eyes with food coloring
and placed them atop the cake with some baby roses made out of fondant.
This is the only picture I took of the inside of the cake which was quickly devoured at the shower.
Total number of hours spent on this cake: 12. :) But the mommy-to-be was thrilled and that made it all worth it.

Homemade Pizza

Pizza. It used to be the cheap snack. What happened?

Now, I'm not sure if it is due in part to where I live, but a pizza costs about $20, often up to $30 if you want a few more toppings.

$30? For a pizza? For some dough, toppings and cheese? It reminds me of when salads use to be the inexpensive alternative at dinner, until they became "in" and part of the trend, and now they often cost as much as the main course.

So here in my household, we turned to making our own pizza which not only saves money, but we get exactly what we want. I took a picture of our most recent creation, which is covered with bell peppers, kalamata olives, onions, cilantro, basil, jack cheese, mozzarella cheese and goat cheese.
We usually make our own pizza sauce, starting out with a base of tomato paste, garlic, water and oregano, but recently we've settled on BBQ sauce. It began when we wanted to make a BBQ chicken pizza, but we enjoyed the BBQ sauce so much, that we use it on the pizza even when we don't have chicken on there.

And the dough is delicious. The recipe is from the website of my favorite yeast, Red Star Yeast.

Mix together:
1 cup flour
2 1/4 t yeast
1 1/2 t salt

Add:
2 T vegetable oil (we often use olive oil instead)
1 cup water, with a temperature between 120 degrees-130 degrees

Mix together, then add:
1 1/2 cups flour (we sometimes like to throw a cup of wheat flour in there instead of all white)

Knead for about 5 minutes until dough is smooth.

Let it rest for 15 minutes, then roll or pull the dough onto the baking sheet and cover with sauce, cheese, etc. Bake at 425 for 25 minutes.

You don't be disappointed!

Play It Again...

I belong to a book club and every month we meet and discuss the book while eating the goodies that everyone has brought. It was only recently that I decided I should make a cake to go along with the book! I don't know why I didn't think of it before!

This month's book was The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason. It was a good read, about a man traveling to Burma to tune a piano. So of course, I made a piano cake.


The cake was carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. I found the cream cheese frosting slightly harder to decorate with than the buttercream I have been using on other cakes, but it turned out okay! And it was a big hit at the bookclub!

The next book might be a little tougher - Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. But I have till August to read it and plan the cake! Watch this space!

How I spent my Memorial Day weekend...

Okay, well not all of my weekend. But at least Saturday morning.
I baked a cake!
I decided to bake a cake for no other reason than I wanted to.
Just for fun.

You may ask, "Why a bathtub cake?"

The truth was, I really wanted to bake a cake in my breadpan, so once I saw the shape, I thought it resembled a bathtub. The flavor of the cake was chocolate, the frosting was vanilla buttercream and the little duck was made out of fondant.

Wedding Cakes

Our good friends were getting married and I offered to make their wedding cakes for them. I thought it would be a fun adventure, but as soon as I said I would, I started to panic. There was a lot on the line here. These were wedding cakes! After convincing myself that I could do it and a couple of practice rounds, and I started making the cakes - a guitar hero cake for the groom and a white wedding cake for the bride.

The bride's cake was a three layer chocolate cake with chocolate frosting in the middle and covered with vanilla buttercream. Everything made from scratch.
Two out of the three layers ready to go.
After all three levels were together, I applied what is called a crumb layer. This is a thin layer of frosting that basically glues all the crumbs to the cake. This is done so when you do the outside layer of frosting, crumbs won't show. And it was important as it was a chocolate cake with white frosting, and the crumbs would really stand out.
I then frosted the rest of the cake with vanilla butter cream and decorated using a star tip.
For the center, I made some small flowers out of fondant. I have to say, I was quite impressed. I didn't think I could do that!
The cakes were a huge hit at the party and everyone loved them. You can see the grooms cake below which was a lot easier as I happen to have a guitar shaped cake pan and the cake was only one level.
Anyone need any cakes made? I think this could be a new path for me!

Introducing the Maui Cake

I'm calling this the Maui cake and you'll soon find out why.

It all started when our neighbor brought over some bananas from his yard and the hubby said he would like me to make a banana cake. I'd never made a cake with bananas before so I immediately turned to the Food Network. After reading all the reviews, I chose one of the recipes and baked the cake which turned out great!
As the cake was cooling, we decided it would be fun to put pineapple in the middle. I cut the cake in two pieces,
And then covered one side with frosting and slices of pineapple.
I carefully placed the two pieces of cake back together and created a coconut buttercream frosting for the top.

And to top it off, I sprinkled it with shredded coconut.

It was a completely tropical cake - Bananas, coconut, and pineapple - and tasted great! In a way, it was like a pina colada cake!
This experimental baking is fun! I'm going to try some new combinations in the future. And the Maui Cake will definitely be made again in this household!

Pineapple Upside Down Cake (Aluminum Free)

Before I get to the pineapple cake, I'll comment on the aluminum part. I was unaware that baking powder contained aluminum until my good friend Amy pointed it out to me. I immediately looked at my baking powder, and there it was on the ingredient list, aluminum sulfate. I have not heard good things about ingesting aluminum, including a study that it may cause Alzheimer's. That is why I was so relieved to find this:
Bob's Red Mill Non-Aluminum Baking powder. Yay! This was my first time using it so I was anxious to see how the cake would turn out.

And now onto the cake. I'm currently writing a book that happens to mention food (not a surprise) and of course while writing, I started to crave baked goods. I thought about driving to the local bakery - a thirty minute round trip - but thought again and got out ingredients to make something of my own. I had a pineapple and decided pineapple upside down cake would fit the bill.Right after the cake came out of the oven:
And after the "flip."I didn't notice any difference with the new baking powder compared to my old (aluminum filled) baking powder I used in the past. And I have to say, it tastes just as good without the aluminum!