Another Heads Up:

The Bread Baking Day Celebration Breads round-up is posted. Check out all of the delicious spring-y celebration breads there!

[EDIT]: Also, the Strawberry Seduction Round-up is up now too! Check it out!

Daring Bakers March Challenge: Dorie's Perfect Party Cake

Ahhh, Daring Bakers, how I love thee. This month's challenge was a recipe from Dorie Greenspan, the "Perfect Party Cake." This cake is light, fluffy, and perfect for embellishment with berries and buttercream. It is made with lemon zest and a little bit of buttermilk, so there's a nice tangy undertone, which only enhances the sugary goodness of the whole cake.

I am still working on being a cake decorator. As it stands, I'm decidedly not going to be, say, featured on Ace of Cakes any time in the near future. I can decorate a mean cookie, but when it comes to cakes, I freeze up. I'm working on it though. So my cake, which was filled with raspberry preserves and swiss buttercream, and topped with buttercream, gum paste flowers, and fondant bunnies, is a little sloppy looking. I love love love the Daring Bakers, though, because I posted about my difficulties, and I got all kinds of advice and support. So the next cake is gonna be awesome:







I actually spent Spring Break planning this cake. I made the gum paste flowers on Tuesday, the bunnies on Friday, and the cake that Sunday. I brought it in to rehearsal for my actors that Monday--and it was a hit. I highly recommend checking out all of Dorie's recipes--there's group of bakers who do "Tuesdays With Dorie," where they bake a different recipe and post about their experiences with it every Tuesday. It's kind of awesome.

Anywho, I'm off to finish editing my thesis...more soon!

Kay

Just a Heads Up...

The Novel Food Round Up has been posted! Go check it out!

Adventures in Marshmallow Fondant...

I have so much whipped strawberry pastry cream in my refrigerator. I don't know what to do with it! I made it for the strawberry shortcake cookies and used maybe three tablespoons tops. I could make about 20 more batches if I wanted to.

Now that I'm finished with my thesis, I'm feeling a little purposeless. Yes, I've been making phone calls and finalizing plans for my post-graduate life, but there are still large chunks of time, where all I can think to do is to kick my roommates out of the kitchen and just bake.

I had some homemade marshmallow fondant in the fridge from an experiment last weekend, as well as the aforementioned whipped cream, and so it seemed that the obvious thing to do was to make (Chocolate) Strawberry Cream Pie Cupcakes. And since strawberry pies usually have graham cracker pie crusts, I had to make graham cracker cupcakes. With lots and lots of cocoa powder.

The fun thing about these cupcakes (one of the many) is that I substituted finely crushed graham cracker crumbs for the majority of the flour. There was a fairly protracted baking time, at least in terms of cupcakes, but so worth it. Besides, I wasn't in a rush.

Once the little lovely cupcakes had cooled, I cut out the centers and filled them with that whipped pastry cream, which, might I add, is thick with pieces of fresh strawberry and fresh strawberry juice:





Yummy. So I still had some fondant that needed to be molded into something happy, and, since it's finally spring here and Easter is on its way, I decided to be corny and make happy little Easter bunnies. My roommates came home from class and found me on my knees, pressed against the counter, adding details to the bunny faces with a toothpick. I think they think I'm nuts. Fortunately, they're right. And the bunnies came out well.

Then I realized that the bunnies needed some grass in which to hide their fondant eggs, so I had to make a stiff butter cream frosting and dye it green. For grass.

The result was great. I'm not a decorator by ANY means...but I'm really proud of these really happy spring cupcakes.

(Chocolate) Strawberry Cream Pie Cupcakes






And the best part about all of this? My long-lost friend Nina came to visit Gainesville last night, and the bunnies were there to mark the occasion!

I'm submitting these guys for the Spring Funny Cuppy contest...so we'll see how that goes!

Kay

Best Recipes....EVER.

I cannot even begin to describe how good the two recipes you are about to read taste. Just...wow. Really.

So, let's start with yesterday's cupcakes, which I made for this month's Cupcake Hero contest. As soon as I heard that this month's special ingredient was marshmallow, my mind began to whir. I had no desire to do a rocky road or some sort of spring themed marshmallow-y cupcake. I wanted to do something different. And then I thought,"What flavors go well with marshmallow?" The answer? sweet potato. The result of an afternoon of experimenting in my kitchen was an extremely sticky, absolutely sinful, spiced Sweet Potato Cupcake with Marshmallow Creme Filling. Oh god. The responses from my friends ranged from "Oh my god, this is by far your best recipe ever" to contented silence because their mouths were full of cupcake. I'm SO happy with this one. The marshmallow creme was a pain in the rear end to work with, but the end result was worth the sticky hands and the insane clean up.


Say hello to my sticky little friends...




Today's kitchen adventure was even more rewarding than yesterday's, and that's saying something. I finished the first draft of my thesis at 3:30 this afternoon--and I was in the need of a little catharsis. I ran to my kitchen and flung open the refrigerator door. I was confronted by a carton of strawberries, which were so gorgeous and ripe and waiting to be baked into a cookie. Thus was the Strawberry Shortcake Cookie born. A regular strawberry shortcake is made by putting whipped cream and fresh strawberries between a pastry or a scone. My cookie is a very soft sugar cookie filled with a whipped pastry cream and fresh strawberries.

I had a hell of a time making the whipped cream, mainly because I don't have a mixer and have to whip the cream by hand. But it was so worth the effort. When I brought the cookies to rehearsal this evening, I watched my friends' eyes grow big and bright as they took their first bites. These are the best cookies I've made to date, I think. And I still have a ton of whipped cream left. I'm thinking that I'll have to make at least another batch. At least.

Strawberry cookies forever!




I'm contributing these amazing little morsels of strawberry goodness to the Strawberry Seduction roundup. Check it out after April 4th!

I'm so happy with these two recipes. Now the question is: will I be able to top them?

Kay

Luck 'O' The Irish...

[EDIT]: BY THE WAY: Check out my head shot photography page. It has been updated! Now, on to your regularly scheduled posting. [/EDIT]

I honestly thought about going for the cliché and baking green cookies. I managed to quell the urge, however. Instead, I went for the next best thing: more beer bread!

Now, here's the thing about beer bread: while the basic recipe is always the same, with every new beer you add to the main ingredients, you change the taste and texture, sometimes entirely. As you might remember, I did make beer bread for Super Bowl Sunday--two different loaves, actually: Black Lager and Honey Porter. I remember the Lager being distinctly better than the Porter, at least as per my roommates and their friends' between-play comments.

But for St. Patrick's Day, I decided to add a little cliché to my non-green bread: Guinness. Oh my gosh, the smell that pervaded my house as it baked....mmmmmmmm. I brought the loaf to my rehearsal, and it was gone within minutes. The bread was so rich and flavorful, I can hardly imagine using any other beer ever again. I don't know how well it keeps that amazing, moist goodness, as even the second batch (baked at the request of my friends) barely lasted more than 20 minutes, but I can only assume.

This bread is definitely worth every second of its long bake time. And, it is quite possibly, the best way to add a little Irish to your St. Patrick's Day.

Guinness Bread







Now, how to do easter without falling into the usual bunny-and-eggs clichés....?

Kay

P.S. I'm taking part in this month's BreadBakingDay, which you can read about here. Yay for March celebration breads!

A Perfect Day for Bananafish (Cookies)

I believe very strongly that fiction has the ability to change lives--in fact, I've had my life changed by several authors, whose works I continue to read and reread whenever possible. Among them are included: Norton Juster, who wrote The Phantom Tollbooth, which made me first fall in love with the power of the English language (and decide that I wanted to be a writer); Kurt Vonnegut, whose Cat's Cradle I encountered at a very difficult spiritual time in my life and learned that I was not alone in my feelings of cynicism and (then) almost hostile agnosticism (which came from a mixture of feelings of abandonment by god and shock at being duped into believing all my life); Mikhail Bulgakov, whose The Master and Margarita is still, to this day, my absolute favorite work of fiction; and Tom Stoppard, who wrote The Real Inspector Hound, which inspired me to become a playwright and The Real Thing , which is one of the most simply complex and powerful pieces of theatre I have ever encountered.

So when I saw the Novel Food round-up being hosted by Champaign Taste and Briciole, I had no idea how I could a) pick a piece of literature that has had a profound enough impact upon me to inspire a recipe and b)write a recipe that could represent a work that means something to me. But I've been thinking long and hard about it, and it came to me this past weekend: J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."

"Bananafish" is not a novel, but a short story, which is the first of his published Nine Stories. The first time I read it, I cried. It's one of the most powerful short stories that has ever been written...and yet it is so simple, so utterly honest that it has enchanted, and continues to enchant, me completely. After "Bananafish," Salinger wrote the novellas Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymour, as well as the novel Franny and Zooey, which all revolve around Seymour, the young man who spends his last day on earth on a beach helping a little girl look for a bananafish. Among other things.

I don't want to give anything away, because I highly suggest that you find a copy of this story and read it. Then read it again and keep it somewhere that you can grab it whenever you feel the need to have your reason for being alive reaffirmed.

Until then, enjoy my Perfect Day for Bananafish Cookies:






The cookies are a sort of variation of the checkerboard cookies, although they're SO much softer and, I think, much tastier. The banana flavor is not overpowering by any stretch of the imagination; in fact, my roommate, who says she's not a fan of banana flavored anything, loves them.

It took a long time to make the cookies, because a) they're refrigerator cookies and had to be frozen before the dough could be manipulated and then refrozen once they were shaped, and b) I had to find a way to make the fish shape stay when I wrapped the chocolate banana dough around the regular banana dough. It was a struggle--I went through two different variations of the banana cookie recipe before I was satisfied--but SO worth it.

"On the sub-main floor of the hotel, which the management directed the bathers to use, a woman with zinc salve on her nose got into the elevator with the young man.
'I see you're looking at my feet,' he said to her when the car was in motion.
'I beg your pardon?' said the woman.
'I said I see you're looking at my feet.'
'I beg your pardon. I happened to be looking at the floor,' said the woman, and faced the doors of the car.
'If you want to look at my feet, say so,' said the young man. 'But don't be a God-damned sneak about it.'
-"A Perfect Day For Bananafish by J.D. Salinger

Kay

Cupcake Hero: Tequila Sunrise Cupcakes!

I can't believe that it's already 22 February. I honestly had NO idea that it was so late in the month. It was odd; I came home from a production meeting for Marisol and then it hit me: CUPCAKES.

I was supposed to bake liquor cupcakes for the Cupcake Hero contest.



I snapped into action about 2 hours ago, running out to purchase some tequila and triple sec. (I was going to do something like a molten chocolate kahlua cake, but, frankly, I'm a little over chocolate right now, since that's all I seem to bake with lately. So I was ready to try something fun and crazy.)

So, here you go--just in time!

TEQUILA SUNRISE CUPCAKES







(and I realize that tequila is more of a "mexico" thing, but that was the only shot glass I had...)


(I hate the flash on my camera, but I wanted a picture that gives you an idea of the true colors of the cupcake instead of the awful lighting in my apartment.)


Hope you like 'em!

Kay

(also, if you missed it, I posted the pictures of my Violet Hour bouquet earlier today AND started a photo blog. So scroll down and check it all out!)