Van Gogh Starry Night Cake

Here is my tribute to Van Gogh's Starry Night. Yes I cleaned up my dickerdoodles submission so August can take the cake to work without getting fired. See you can't even tell it was x-rated just a few minutes ago.

Dickerdoodles Submission- X-rated Baking

It's dickerdoodles time again on Penny Arcade's website.  Last year I entered my "Penis Mightier Than The Sword" art piece. Though it did not win, it did get posted on the internet. This year I made cookies (sugar cookies because real snickerdoodles spread like crazy) and made a vanilla cake too. It was a lot of fun mixing the icing colors. I made two types of icing- a shiny one for frosting the cookies and a more matte one for frosting the cake. And yes the artist is Van Cum. I am using my baking and art degrees.

Holiday Treats- Sugar Cookies, Peanut Butter Reindeer, Mini Peanut Butter Cups, Chocolate Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies, Candy Cane Cake Pops, and Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

 It was a busy baking week. The boys and I made sugar cookies during the week. I baked a cake Friday night. Saturday I made frosted and decorated the cake, frosted cookies, baked chocolate mint chocolate cookies, made the cake pops and baked banana muffins for Sunday's breakfast. Then on Sunday Israa cake over and we baked peanut butter reindeer cookies and made mini peanut butter cups. It was so much fun.

Zucchini Apple Muffins

The boys wanted to bake muffins this morning. I like it when they eat their veggies for breakfast.

Fleur De Sel Caramels (Taramels)

I'm not a big fan of caramel candy but I do love these soft caramels. They are rich and buttery, sweet and salty. I made several batches of them last year for gifts. I usually use kosher salt but this time I used fleur de sel which is a delicate salt hand harvested from the top layer of evaporation ponds. It dissolves on the tongue quicker. The boys helped me cut and wrap the caramels this year.

Chocolate Cherry Nut Cake

This was a very spontaneous cake. The boys and I went over to our friend Israa's house. We didn't have any recipes around or internet access. The recipe on the bag of flour was for spiced apple cake. I altered it by lessening the flour and adding cocoa powder, adding dried sour cherries in place of the raisins, using butter instead of applesauce, and lessening the spices. We added a variety of nuts and seeds, dried cranberries and chocolate chips to the batter. We baked the cake in two smaller pans instead of the square pan the recipe called for and reduced the baking time. This cake turned out moist and full of nutty goodness.

Sage Cornbread Mini Muffins

Dagan Picking Sage Leaves

Sage Eating Sage Muffins

Mini Muffins

This week the boys made sage cornbread muffins. We used the sage from our window sill which we grew from seeds. We didn't have much and the leaves we did have were really small so we supplemented the fresh with ground sage. I thought the taste of sage brought a unique earthy element to an ordinary cornbread muffin. These were light, spongy and more cake-like than ordinary dense cornbread.

Pumpkin Orange Cinnamon Rolls

These cinnamon rolls were moist, warm and flavorful. There's pumpkin and orange zest in the dough and orange juice in the cream cheese icing.
When I made these, I mixed up the batch of dough, placed it in a bowl, covered it with plastic wrap and then set it in a slightly warm oven to rise. After an hour I looked in on it and it had risen so much that it was hanging down the side of the bowl and resting on the baking rack. The dough was so puffy that when I tried to put it into the cake pan, I had to squish it in to fit. Then it rose some more and lost a lot of its cool cinnamon swirl shape. Next time I will let it rise in a huge bowl and bake it up in a 9" pan instead of an 8".

Coconut Macadamia Brownies

I brought some unsalted macadamia nuts back with me from our trip to Hawaii. I wanted to use the flavors of coconut and macadamia nuts in a dessert and I love Mounds candy bars. This was made from an almond joy brownies recipe but I used macadamia nuts in place of the almonds.

The brownie layer was super moist and fudgy. The coconut layer was rich and chewy. The milk chocolate layer was smooth and sweet. The chopped macadamia nuts on the top added crunch. I would make these brownies again. They are more time consuming than brownies from a box but they are complex in flavor and highly addictive.

Mint Chocolate Cookies

Our friend Israa came over to visit. We whipped up some cookies from whatever we could find in the cupboards. The recipe had no eggs in it which was good because we were able to eat the cookie dough too. We only had a little bit of mint chocolate chips so we added dark chocolate chunks. The cookies were very soft in the oven but firmed up when we cooled them on the rack. They taste great with a glass of ice cold milk.

Giant Halloween Oreos

Tablespoon sized balls of cookie dough spread out to become 4 inch cookies. They were super puffy in the oven but when I took them out, they deflated and became chewy. There is a vanilla icing sandwiched in the middle with orange and black sprinkles.

Pumpkin Muffins

The little pastry chefs helped to make pumpkin muffins for breakfast. They turned out light and fluffy.

Lemon Bundt Cake and Mini Bundts

I was so excited to try out my new mini bundt pans. These worked perfectly with my 6 inch bundt pan to make a full recipe. This recipe used lemon zest, lemon extract and lemon juice along with a little bit of rum. It also has a lemon icing. The cakes were sweet, moist and zingy, a ray of sunshine in the gray windy days of fall.

Lemon Madeleines

It was fun to use my madeleine pan again. The last time I made orange blossom ones and this time I chose lemon. These little cakes turned out light and full of sunny citrus flavor. I combined lemon juice, lemon zest and lemon extract. When I mixed in the butter, it was not room temperature and the batter had a slightly curdled look. But when I baked them, they turned out fine. I had a hard time figuring out what to do with the tops of them. I considered glazing them with lemon icing, dipping them in white chocolate, and dusting with powdered sugar. In the end, I just went with the classic powdered sugar which still showed off the shell shape and was not sticky or hard to stack.

Pavlova

In our homeschool, we studied New Zealand last month. One of their famous desserts is pavlova. It is made by whipping egg whites and sugar until it is light and fluffy and then baking it in the oven. The result is a marshmallow like center with a crispy outside. It is rather sweet but tasty when combined with whipped cream and fresh berries. The little pastry chefs and I had fun combining ingredients, using the stand mixer, spreading it into the pan and watching it bake. They also made the whipped cream, and assembled their own parfaits.

While cracking our eggs on the first attempt, a little bit of yolk got in. It didn't whip up nicely but rather stayed flat and soupy. We tried again with fresh clean egg whites and the meringue did whip up fluffy.

Spumoni Macarons

 I love spumoni ice cream especially from the Old Spaghetti Factory. I thought I'd take the flavors, chocolate, cherry and pistachio and make macarons this week. These macarons have chocolate and pistachio shells and are filled with a cherry Swiss buttercream.  I also made chocolate cherry macarons.

Macarons are finicky. As you can see above, the one on the right was overbaked and turned out a little brown. The one in the middle was underbaked and also didn't sit out long enough to form a firm shell and the one on the right was too big because I didn't trace circles on the parchment. Macarons are affected by temperature of the air, temperature of the oven, recipe, baking time, amount of mixing, age of egg whites, and length of time the batter sits out.

I used a recipe for Italian macarons for the pistachio shells. I used ground pistachios as well as ground almonds. This recipe heats the sugar, egg white and water and then adds it to more egg whites and whip it into a meringue before mixing it into the other ingredients. I used a recipe for French macarons for the chocolate shells.  This recipe combined the egg whites and sugar and then mixed in the other ingredients. It was much easier and yielded better results.

I traced the circles onto the parchment before piping the batter on. The chocolate ones still turned out slightly smaller than the pistachio. I rapped them on the table a few times and let them sit for 30-45 minutes till as skin formed. I read that it's better to overbake them a little than underbake. Underbaking will leave hollow, fragile macarons. Overbaking may dry them out more but it will fix itself in the fridge. Aging egg whites, I leave them in the fridge for a couple of days but if I'm pinched for time I will microwave them for 10 seconds. I've also read that adding powdered egg whites to your recipe works well too. But do not use meringue powder. It's not the same thing.

Melt in Your Mouth Shortbread

This is by far my favorite shortbread recipe. It is from Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. I went there once and the line was really long. People will wait for an hour just to eat their morning buns. This shortbread is easy to make and melts in your mouth. Unlike most shortbread cookies, these are very soft and moist.