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".