Happy Halloween!

After listening to my stream of complaints about my ancient computer that's refusing to get with the times and recognize any USB devices including my camera, a very wise (or very annoyed) friend recommended I just go to Walgreens and make a CD for just a few bucks. Huh. Now why didn't I think of that? Genius! I'm not completely in love with the kiosks that are available at the store, and neither was the poor woman trying for almost an hour to scan her pictures and get a CD made that was ahead of me in line, but once I got everything loaded up I was able to walk away with two CDs full of over 1000 pictures for about three bucks. Can't beat that. So why am I telling you all this? Because all the past few weeks that this blog has been sitting idle, I have been baking, cooking, and generally coming up with evil schemes while angrily staring at my stubborn computer, and now I'll be able to share with you some of what I've been up to starting with these Halloween Cookie Pops!

A good friend's little girl is turning one tomorrow and in honor of the occasion my friend is throwing a HUGE party for all family and friends within a reasonable driving distance. She's making a ton of decorations and food and asked me to make 75 cookie pops to include in the party favors. Since the birthday is the day after Halloween, she wanted a fall theme and pumpkins sounded perfect. Besides, everything is just THAT much more fun to eat when it's on a stick, don't you think?


I've made sugar cookies before, I have a great recipe and I make them every year around Christmas to include in the cookie boxes I give out, but because I always go a bit crazy, I never have time to really decorate them, so aside from a small attempt at Valentine's I've never actually made iced cookies before. Determined to make the very best icing that would not only look good, but also taste good, I again went hunting on the net and I found a great post for cookie pops on this fabulous blog: Our Best Bites. Her story about finding the perfect recipe echoed my own goal so closely that I decided to give her sugar cookie recipe a try along with the icing. And let me tell you, they came out great. I was a little nervous when I tried one straight from the oven as it was a bit dry, but they blossomed overnight and when I tried another cookie the next morning while testing the dryness of the icing, the cookie was tender and deliciously buttery. Success! Plus the addition of a bit of lemon extract to the icing gave it a nice hint of flavor that transformed the simple sugar cookie into something really special.

I ended up making over a hundred of these and after packaging up the prettiest ones for my friend I took all the rest to work as Halloween treats, where they were devoured with only one small fist fight over the last cookie, so I would HIGHLY recommend you find some time, head over to Our Best Bites for the recipes, make a batch or two of these cookies, decorate however you like, and share with a friend over a cup of tea. Tea optional.

Oh, before I go, in the spirit of Halloween, and since I can't exactly hand out candy to all of you through this site, I'll give you something else that I found recently, yet another awesome blog! Yes, it seems I've become an international serial blog stalker and no blog is safe from my prying eyes! Bwahahaha! Ahem. Anyhoo....where was I? Oh yes! The awesome blog! This lovely lady has taken recipe sharing to the next level by adding witty stories and colorful illustrations, and you better believe I'm putting her book on my Holiday Wish List. Click on the illustration to go to her site and join me in my unbridled adoration:



Enjoy and Happy Halloween!!!

Peachy Keen

Can I just start by saying that despite many years of faithful service, I have come to hate my computer? It's kind of like living with a temperamental toddler who will play nice one day and throw a tantrum and refuse to acknowledge the outside world the next. Right now he's in a "mood". He's determined that he is the center of my world and that none of the other so-called "devices" exist or deserve his attention. In short, he's refusing to recognize almost any of my USB devices, including my printer and my camera. I even tried to trick him by trying to upload pictures using a little memory card converter I had lying around, but no dice. So while I have a ton of pictures building up, I can't get any of them onto this computer to share with you. You know what this means? Time to start saving up for a sleek, sexy, and completely complaisant new laptop! That'll show this old clunker!


Speaking of sexy...and please forgive me if this gets a tiny bit risque, but doesn't this look like a tushie to you? It's completely possible that I've been staring way too long at this food porn site, but then I dare you to go there and not get lost for at least an hour. I double dog dare you.


I realize that I might be just a smidge juvenile here, but when I was looking at this picture, I had to giggle and when I had to give it a title I had bright neon flashy signs in my head saying "downward dog". As in the yoga position? anyone? okay, it's just me then.

This was one of 9 perfectly over-pampered peaches that were delivered to my office from Harry and David, and while they were probably the most expensive peaches I will never buy, I will accept a gift of them any day. It was perfectly juicy and sweet, and it was obvious that it was never exposed to a stern word, let alone the cruel cruel world, before it was lovingly dressed in the gauzy tissue and cradled into that cushy box. It never even guessed that it was on it's way to it's demise at the hands of strangers. Such a bittersweet story...slurp...excuse me, I have to go wash my hands and get rid of the evidence.

Monkeying Around

I had an order this past weekend for a little boy's 1st birthday with a monkey theme. I love Curious George and I loved the color scheme that they had (yellow/brown/blue), so these were very fun to make. They wanted a bunch of cupcakes and a little "smush" cake for the birthday boy and the flavors would of course be chocolate/banana.


I happened to be shopping at TJMaxx a few days previous and I found several adorable milk bottles filled with colorful candy bananas which, along with some sprinkles, worked perfectly for half the cupcakes.


I was also browsing the web looking for inspiration for monkey decorations when I stumbled upon this fabulous blog that not only has the cutest designs ever, but it has the most fool-proof step-by-step instructions on how to make all sorts of different toppers: The Frosted Cake 'n Cookie. While I didn't have any fondant lying around, I figured sugar paste would work just as well.


Half the cupcakes were banana with a chocolate buttercream and the other half were chocolate banana with a banana buttercream. I think I'm going to work more on the banana cake before I share the recipe, but the chocolate banana recipe I found at Joy of Baking was absolutely perfect! The cake was a combination of both, so a layer of banana, a layer of chocolate with banana buttercream inside and vanilla buttercream on the outside since I wanted the pale baby colors to show.


I didn't bring my camera when I delivered the goodies, which is too bad because my friend fromTruly Smitten was doing the decorations and everything looked gorgeous! Look at these cute cupcake toppers she created:


And she was nice enough to send me these pictures to share with you, including a picture of the one she saved for herself and took home for later :D

La Belle Paris

Whew, it's been a busy month. I've had several cake orders, crazy busy work days and a furiously hectic week in Paris, but I'm determined to get more then one post a month up, so I promise to try and be better.


What can I say, Paris was everything I remember and a thousand times more. The last time I was there was over 10 years ago on a student exchange program and I barely got to see anything outside of the old medieval looking school in Lyon. During our short trip to Paris I remember kidnapping our teacher with a handful of other students to see the Louvre, while the rest of the group stood in line for Madam Tussuad's Wax Museum. But this time I was going to do things differently. This time I was taking my sister and this time I was going to let her go nuts, which basically means that in the traditional spirit of our family vacationing style, we were going to see absolutely everything. Time restrictions and physical abilities be damned. We walked up and down the city a dozen times over, faithfully following Rick Steves' Paris 2010, in a frenzied pinball machine fashion stopping only to eat and even then reluctant to stay still afraid we'd miss something. We climbed Notre Dame and saw the city through the eyes of the famous gargoyles. We went to the top of the Eiffel Tower (after a picnic on the lawn up front with a baguette, a bottle of wine and an impromptu visit from Ratatouille's cousin).


We walked up Champs Elysee past le Grande Palais, le Pettit Palais, Les Invalides, to Arc de Triumphe and climbed to the top of that too.


We walked up through Montmartre, visiting the homes and hangouts of all the famous painters, and back down to the still famous Moulin Rouge.


We walked through the food markets, drooled at the windows of every pastry shop, patisserie, boulangerie, charcuterie, and every other kind of "erie" you can imagine.

And I've come away with a few questions, like why can't we have fresh Crepe stands in Chicago?


I mean look at this Grand Marnier one right here, it was the absolute perfect thing to eat while sitting at a small table resting and people watching.



I think the world would be much better with more of these. Next thought: escargot can be absolutely divine if prepared properly:


And I'd eat a lot more salads if they were accompanied by a warm slice of melty honeyed goat cheese:



And finally, American bakers need to spend more time taking french pastry courses. Have you ever even heard of a Cherry Tiramisu? I am definitely going to try and recreate this little beauty:


If you want to see more pictures, I'm still going through them and uploading them, but you can find the rest of them here, and you can expect many more macarons from me in the future :)

Out of the Box Fun

Normally I'm against box cakes. I prefer to pour over the recipe books, pick out the best one, hunt for the best ingredients, carefully measure everything and marvel as all the separate pieces are transformed into something fragrant and beautiful. But this time I decided to just have some fun. I've been ogling Bakerella's ingenious Cake Pops for a long time now, promising myself that one day I'll give them a try. Last Friday was that day, since that's what I decided to bring to my friend's baby shower. I rushed over to a friends house having filled a large box with all the supplies and got right to work. It took less than 5 minutes to whip up a batch of Duncan Hines chocolate cake batter, pop it in the oven, set the timer and settle on the couch to catch up with my friend. Once the cake was done and cool, it was actually somewhat therapeutic to sit with a bowl on my lap and reduce what my friend lamented was a perfectly good cake into crumbs. You can go here for the full instructions, but here are a few things I learned while making these:

1. Don't add the whole can of frosting to the crumbs. Add 3/4ths and see if it's enough first or your mixture will be too soft.
2. Don't make the balls too big. Walnut size or a bit smaller is perfect.
3. Make sure you have the right size cookie cutter all set and ready to go...otherwise you'll end up shaping them by hand and they'll look more like mushrooms then cupcakes.
4. Use candy coating if you want them to look like Bakerella's. I'm against it on principle, so I used semi-sweet chocolate for the bottoms and colored white chocolate for the tops, but they were both too thick to make a nice smooth thin coating, so my pops don't look like hers. For my first try, I decided I was okay with that.
5. If you get tired of dipping before all the balls are coated...you can just wrap them up and pop them in the freezer...they make great snacks for later :D

They were a hit at the shower and I hope you do try making them, especially if you have kids around. You can let them decorate these however they want and since it's straight out of a box, you'll get to the fun decorating part pretty quickly. Next time, I'm going to try the Hello Kitty ones. Aren't they adorable?