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Ok, this recipe needed a “do over.”  A huge part of the online bak­ing com­mu­nity is about shar­ing, that’s a large part of why we do this: a shared love of food and cook­ing it.  We all see recipes and foods online or in cook­books that we like and it’s per­fectly fine to go ahead and make them and then to write about your expe­ri­ences.  But, and here’s the point… I saw this recipe for yummy cook­ies on Caroline’s Choco­late & Car­rots blog and thought I’d see how they turned out since I have more than one friend these days who has a reac­tion to flour prod­ucts but still likes a sweet, baked treat.

In my haste yes­ter­day to:

1. Gather up two dogs to take them to the vet for shots
2. Wash my car and vac­uum the inside in 105 degrees
3. Go to the post office, video store, bank, City build­ing, library
4. Get Star­bucks
5. See what Hobby Lobby had on sale
6. Buy lunch
7. Gro­cery shop for our healthy eat­ing lifestyle change
8. Go to the gym
9. Do some work for a client or two (need money from time to time…LOL)
10. Remove the cov­ers from both air con­di­tioner con­densers to clean them and help Hubby(and about destroy both in the process),

I hit the “pub­lish” but­ton on my Word­Press post instead of “save draft” which inad­ver­tently posted a half baked arti­cle which didn’t give any credit to Car­o­line and her recipe at all.  Luck­ily for me, she was very under­stand­ing and polite about it… Sorry Caroline..

Any­way, here is the recipe and they are really great cook­ies so you must bake them!

One of the first things I do before I bake is set all my ingre­di­ents out and all of the equip­ment I’m going to be using… This is called mise en place or putting every­thing in it’s place. You can read more about that term here…

Mise en place — putting it all in order ready to bake!

Method

• First off, pre­heat your oven to 350°F (180°C) (F to C temp con­verter here)
• Pre­pare your bak­ing sheets with sil­i­con mats or sprayed parchment
• Com­bine all dry ingre­di­ents into a bowl (flour, cocoa pow­der and salt)
• Fold in 3 egg whites and then vanilla
• Only beat until mix­ture is moist and fudge brownie like.  If it’s too dry then add an addi­tional egg white.
• Fold in choco­late chips
• Using a table­spoon, place cookie mix onto pre­pared bak­ing sheets, leav­ing room as they will spread. (I got 12 on a half pan sized bak­ing sheet)

On the tray

Bake for approx 14 mins or until the tops begin to crack. They will have a shiny gloss fin­ish to them.

Fin­ished Cookies

Haha… my first embed­ded video..

Points to consider:

If you are using a con­vec­tion oven adjust the tem­per­a­ture down by about 25 degrees and you can usu­ally reduce your bake time by a minute or two.  Keep an eye on your cook­ies as all ovens vary a little.

Many vari­ables can affect your bak­ing… humid­ity, alti­tude and the age of your prod­ucts.  For exam­ple, the older the flour  is the drier it can be, there­fore often requir­ing the addi­tion of more liq­uid than nor­mally called for just to get it to the right con­sis­tency… don’t panic, there is NO FLOUR in this par­tic­u­lar recipe, this was just an exam­ple of a variable.

Enjoy and happy baking!

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My hus­band men­tioned that he’d seen a Paula Deen recipe for pink lemon­ade cake.  I thought that sounded really nice and would be a great Sum­mer­time dessert.  After look­ing at Paula’s recipe online and the com­ments by users who had found it “too dense” “too this” or “too that” I decided to run with her basic flavour idea but to tweak it and hope­fully turn out some­thing really nice.

This is what I did.  It’s really easy and very tasty.

Pink Lemon­ade Cup­cake Batter

I took a box of white cake mix and pre­pared it as directed on the box except that I don’t like to use oil in my cakes so I replaced the 1/3 cup of oil with an equiv­a­lent 1/3 cup of nat­ural, unsweet­ened apple sauce.  To the mix I then added three heaped table­spoons of the Coun­try Time Pink Lemon­ade drink mix and also added a dash of Mada­gas­car Vanilla and about a table­spoon of lemon zest.  I decided I wanted my cake to be more pink than the pale colour it was cur­rently so I added a dash of pink food colour­ing until it was pink enough for me.

Ingre­di­ents so far:

1 box of Moist White Cake Mix

3 egg whites (no yolks)

1/3 cup nat­ural, unsweet­ened apple sauce

1 & 1/4 cup of water

3 heaped table­spoons of Coun­try Time Pink Lemon­ade drink mix pow­der (not diluted)

1 tsp of Mada­gas­car Vanilla or Vanilla Essence

1 table­spoon of fresh lemon zest

Coun­try Time — Pink Lemonade

Pink food colouring

(Bak­ing purists are prob­a­bly rolling their eyes at my sug­ges­tion of using a box mix and then the addi­tion of pink food colour­ing.  It worked for what we were doing here so I’m ok with it.  If you aren’t, there are plenty of from scratch white cake recipes out there to delight your pure lit­tle baker’s hearts.)

Even though I have a pas­sion for bak­ing we try not to keep too many good­ies in the house because we both could stand to lose some weight.  So we send our good­ies off to work with my hus­band and I’ve heard his cowork­ers think this is ok.  Since they are headed for the office I decided to make cup­cakes as they are far more man­age­able than need­ing to find a knife and plates for carv­ing up a larger sin­gle cake.

Next I cre­ated a tasty com­ple­men­tary frost­ing.  I pretty much always go for my basic cream cheese frost­ing and just change it up a lit­tle to suit what it is that I’m making.

Frost­ing:

Crust­ing cream cheese buttercream

5 heaped table­spoons of Coun­try Time  Pink Lemon­ade Drink Powder

Pink Lemon­ade Cupcake

After the cup­cakes came out of the oven and cooled I frosted them with a gen­er­ous swirl of but­ter­cream and some sugar sprin­kles just to make them shiny.  So that’s it folks.. really a quick and easy recipe and per­fect for sum­mer meal­times or snacks.  Enjoy!  And remem­ber if you have any ques­tions don’t hes­i­tate to email me.  I try to answer all emails even if they may take a cou­ple of days to get you your response.

~ Colleen

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Red vel­vet, while syn­ony­mous with Valen­tines Day and now pop­u­lar for wed­dings, is just plain gor­geous to look at.  To be totally hon­est, red is my absolute favourite colour and any chance I get to wear it, look at it or eat it I do.  Not that many red foods around when you think about it… and I don’t really eat very much red meat.

Sooo let’s get busy and make some deli­cious red vel­vet cook­ies to be enjoyed and shared all year around.  But wait, just think how cute they would be for Christ­mas or Valentine’s Day as well!

This recipe calls for Dutch Processed Choco­late.   So what’s the dif­fer­ence between that and reg­u­lar unsweet­ened cocoa pow­der you ask?   First off, Both types of cocoa pow­der are unsweet­ened and there­fore bit­ter when tasted alone.

Ok, on to our recipe:

Ingre­di­ents:

3 1/4 cups (355 grams) all pur­pose flour
1/4 cup (75 grams) unsweet­ened Dutch processed cocoa pow­der
1/2 tea­spoon salt
1 tea­spoon (4 grams) bak­ing pow­der
1 cup (227 grams) unsalted but­ter, room tem­per­a­ture
1 3/4 cups (350 grams) gran­u­lated white sugar
2 large eggs
2 tea­spoons pure vanilla extract
3 Table­spoons of Red Food Col­or­ing.. I used the gel type

For Red Vel­vet Cookies:

1. In a large bowl whisk together the flour, cocoa pow­der, salt, and bak­ing powder.

2. In the bowl of your elec­tric mixer (or with a hand mixer), beat the but­ter and sugar until light and fluffy (about 3 to 4 min­utes). Add the eggs, one at a time, beat­ing well after each addi­tion. Add the vanilla extract and beat until combined.

Add the flour mix­ture and beat until you have a smooth dough.

3. Divide the dough in half and wrap each half in plas­tic wrap. Refrig­er­ate for about one hour or until firm enough toroll.

4. Pre­heat oven to 350 degrees F (177 degrees C) and place rack in the cen­ter of the oven. Line two bak­ing sheets with parch­ment paper.

5.    Remove one half of the chilled dough from the refrig­er­a­tor and, on a lightly floured sur­face, roll out the dough to a thick­ness of 1/4 inch (1 cm). (Keep turn­ing the dough as you roll, mak­ing sure the dough does not stick to the counter.) Cut out desired

shapes using a lightly floured cookie cut­ter and trans­fer cook­iesto the pre­pared bak­ing sheet. Place the bak­ing sheets with the unbaked cook­ies in the refrig­er­a­tor for 10 to 15 min­utes to chill the dough which pre­vents the cook­ies from spread­ing and los­ing their shape while baking.

Note: If you are not going to frost the baked cook­ies, you may want to sprin­kle the unbaked cook­ies with crys­tal or sparkling sugar.

Bake cook­ies for about 10 — 12 min­utes (depend­ing on size) or until they are firm around the edges. Remove from oven and let cook­ies cool on bak­ing sheet for a few min­utes before trans­fer­ring to a wire rack to fin­ish cool­ing. Frost with royal icing, if desired. Be sure that the frost­ing on the cook­ies dries com­pletely before stor­ing. (This may take sev­eral hours.) Frosted cook­ies will keep sev­eral days in an airtight

con­tainer. Store between lay­ers of parch­ment paper or wax paper.

Makes about 36 — 4 inch (10 cm) cookies.

BEST frosted with a cream cheese frost­ing.  I use the recipe on my site here and thin it with some milk to make it more like a glaze if I don’t want heavy frost­ing.  Also, I have rolled out fon­dant into the same shape as the cookie and placed it on top of a thin layer of the frost­ing which gives a nice finish!

For a final fin­ish on my fon­dant cov­ered cook­ies I used an impres­sion mat to make pretty pat­terns.. and then dusted with pearl dust.. there is no limit to what you can do with these or any other cook­ies!  Happy Baking!

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I’m always amazed at lit­tle ones!  How in the world did my then 4yo daugh­ter decide she wanted to learn to play the vio­lin?  While being exposed to lots of music I cer­tainly hadn’t sug­gested she learn to play an instru­ment let alone a clas­si­cal one.  No wor­ries we got her started and away she went with gusto…  Well this post isn’t about music but recently I was asked by my friends to make their 3yo daugh­ter a birth­day cake. Appar­ently she had requested “a rasp­berry on the inside” birth­day cake.  I’d never made one before but love a chal­lenge so this is how I did it.

WARNING — Heavy text as some dummy (me) for­got to take progress pho­tos… but it turned out great so bear with me folks.

First off I thought I’d start with a white cake recipe and add my rasp­berry good­ness to it.

White cake mix or this from scratch recipe…

Ingre­di­ents

• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 eggs
• 2 tea­spoons vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 tea­spoons bak­ing powder
• 1/2 cup milk

Then To make it Rasp­berry Flavoured…

Ok.. great but it had to be rasp­berry flavoured…  I could not for the life of me find fresh rasp­ber­ries that day that weren’t grow­ing fur, so my next best option was a heap­ing table­spoon of rasp­berry jam (jelly) with the seeds for authen­tic­ity AND I added a 1/3 of a sachet of Rasp­berry Jello Crys­tals dis­solved into a half cup of water.

Cake Crumb

I fig­ured it wouldn’t throw off the bal­ance of the cake since it thick­ens as it sets up.  My the­ory proved right and the cake was rel­a­tively dense (with a fine crumb tex­ture like a Madeira or pound cake) but still light and very flavourful.

Direc­tions

1. Pre­heat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour two eight inch round pans or line a muf­fin pan with paper liners.
2. In a medium bowl, cream together the sugar and but­ter. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. Com­bine flour and bak­ing pow­der, add to the creamed mix­ture and mix well. Finally stir in the milk until bat­ter is smooth, the jello crys­tals and the rasp­berry jam. Pour or spoon bat­ter into the pre­pared pan.
3. Bake for 30 to 40 min­utes in the pre­heated oven.  For cup­cakes 20–25 mins.

Rasp­berry Jam (Jelly)

For this lit­tle lady’s cake I made two 6 inch and two 8 inch round cakes to stack.

In between each match­ing pair I spread a fine layer of rasp­berry jam (jelly) and then added rasp­berry cream cheese frost­ing (my orig­i­nal recipe with some rasp­berry jello crys­tals and a small amount of jam added to it).

I placed wooden dow­els inside of McDon­alds straws into the 8 inch stacked cakes and then placed the 6 inch stacked pair on top.

Dow­els

All of the cakes were cov­ered in my crust­ing cream cheese frost­ing prior to stack­ing as they wanted it smoothed to look like fon­dant.  I then cut out about one hun­dred or so pur­ple and one hun­dred or so pink fon­dant flow­ers for dec­o­ra­tion.  This cake was to com­pli­ment a Tin­ker­bell cake topper.

The glit­ter is edi­ble sparkle glit­ter.  The cake was a lot of work but my friends loved it.  Hubby enjoyed the crumbs I had cut off the top so much I made him his very own rasp­berry cake the next day.  It was pretty much gone in an instant.  Don’t for­get to email me if you have any ques­tions.  Happy Baking!

Rasp­berry Cake

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This is the cake I made for my daugh­ter Megan’s baby shower this past week­end.  The cake on the bot­tom was yel­low cake filled with white cream cheese frost­ing and then cov­ered with the same frost­ing coloured blue.  I added balls of choco­late fon­dant to the sides and for the circles.

Baby Shower Cake

The top cake was made using the good old Wilton Teddy Bear pan.  I made this for her first birth­day some 20+ years ago so thought it would be a nice touch for this cake.  The cake is choco­late cake and is iced with a choco­late flavoured cream cheese frost­ing.  The dia­per is thinly rolled white fon­dant made using Car­rie Big­gers’ recipe.  Sorry but I can’t give that to you here because Car­rie sells it on her web­site as one of her prod­uct range.  It’s a great recipe and tastes so much bet­ter than com­mer­cially pro­duced fon­dant.  I am always hor­ri­fied when I see the fon­dant being torn off of wed­ding cakes by folks that have only had the shop bought kind.  The home made stuff is so much nicer and very edible.

Ok, so I have to “fess up.”  Even expe­ri­enced bak­ers and dec­o­ra­tors make mis­takes.  Stu­pid mis­takes actu­ally.  That bear on the top took three attempts before I got it right.  I can’t believe it since I’ve made it many times before but the first time around I didn’t add enough bat­ter to the pan so when bear came out he had NO LEGS!  Um no.  That bear became choco­late cake balls that I put into the party favour boxes for our guests to take home with them, so not a total waste.

With my sec­ond attempt I totally for­got to insert the cone into the cen­ter of the pan which ensures even cook­ing.  Not real­iz­ing my mis­take I took the “per­fect” bear from the pan and then won­dered why his head was cav­ing in.  After a crack formed I could see that the bat­ter inside was still liq­uid and not even close to being cooked.  This poor bear met his demise down the garbage dis­posal.. sorry bear num­ber 2.

So finally at 11:30pm on Fri­day night (the party was the next day) I baked off bear num­ber 3.  You might think this one worked out per­fectly.  Well not exactly.  Prob­a­bly due to the fact that it had been one heck of a busy week I did remem­ber to insert the heat cone this time BUT for­got to spray it with cook­ing spray.  As I pulled it out a crack formed across poor bear’s face.  Thank good­ness for but­ter­cream which I used to patch him up with.

So next time you make a mis­take or for­get some­thing, don’t worry too much, we all do it!

Happy bak­ing!

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We’ve prob­a­bly all sang that lit­tle ditty at some time in our lives.  I know we did when we were kids grow­ing up in Aus­tralia.  Bread often plays a major role in hol­i­day and reli­gious obser­vances. The hot cross bun is tra­di­tional Lenton bread, its exact ori­gins unknown. Some say that it has pagan ori­gins, the cross rep­re­sent­ing the moon and its four quar­ters. Anglo-Saxons ate the sacra­men­tal buns in honor of their god­dess Eas­t­ore. When the Romans arrived in Britain, the clergy tried to stop the use of the sacra­men­tal buns, but could not. So they blessed them and gave the cross on the buns a Chris­t­ian mean­ing. Tra­di­tion­ally these buns are dec­o­rated with dough piped across the top before bak­ing, not a sweet icing as is com­monly seen. A thin glaze brushed over the buns pro­vides the added sweetness.

Yield: 30 Rolls

Ingre­di­ents:

Dough
10 ounces Golden raisins
10 ounces Dark raisins
3 ounces Can­died orange peel
2 lb. 4 oz. Bread flour
4 ounces Short­en­ing
3 1/2 ounces Gran­u­lated sugar
10 grams Dough con­di­tioner, optional
2 ounces Dry milk pow­der
2 3/4 ounces Com­pressed yeast
1 Table­spoon Salt
2 Eggs
1 tea­spoon Vanilla extract
1 tea­spoon Car­damom, ground
1 tea­spoon All­spice, ground
2 tea­spoons Gin­ger, ground
1 Table­spoon Cin­na­mon, ground
19 fluid ounces Water

Cross Dough
4 ounces Pas­try flour
3/4 ounce Short­en­ing
3 1/2 fluid ounces Milk

6 fluid ounces Bun Glaze

Method:

1.    Place the raisins and can­died orange peel in a small bowl and cover with hot water. Let soften in the water for 5 min­utes. Drain the water and let the fruit con­di­tion for 2 to 4 hours before using. Set aside.

2.    Place the flour, short­en­ing, sugar, dough con­di­tioner, if using, dry milk pow­der, yeast, salt, eggs, vanilla extract and spices in the bowl of a mixer fit­ted with the dough hook. Add the water and mix the dough on low speed for 3 min­utes until moist­ened. Stop the machine and scrape the bowl. Add addi­tional flour if nec­es­sary to cre­ate a soft dough. Mix the dough on medium speed for 6 to 7 min­utes until it is soft and pliable.

3.    Add the con­di­tioned fruit and mix the dough on low speed until the fruit is well dis­trib­uted in the dough. If nec­es­sary, dust the dough lightly with more flour to help the fruit incorporate.

4.    Scrape the dough onto a flour-dusted work­bench. Cover and fer­ment for 30 min­utes. Deflate the dough and fold it into thirds then let it rest for another 15 minutes.

5.    Divide the dough into 3–1/2-ounce (100-gram) pieces. Round the dough into tight rolls with a smooth top sur­face. Place the formed rolls, seam side down on a paper-lined half sheet pan. Posi­tion them in rows on the tray, 5 rolls by 6 rolls so that the rolls touch when fully proofed.

6.    Proof the rolls with low humid­ity until dou­bled in size, approx­i­mately 50 minutes.

7.    While the rolls proof, pre­pare the cross dough. Com­bine the pas­try flour, short­en­ing and milk in the bowl of a mixer fit­ted with a pad­dle attach­ment. Mix on medium speed until the short­en­ing is well blended and the dough is lump free.

8.    When the rolls have proofed, scoop the cross mix­ture into a pas­try bag fit­ted with a plain tip. Quickly pipe a cross over the sur­face of each roll.

9.    Bake at 375°F (190°C) until the rolls are a rich brown color, approx­i­mately 15 minutes.

10.    Brush the hot rolls gen­er­ously with the chilled Bun Glaze, mak­ing cer­tain they are well coated so that no dry spots appear when the glaze dries.

Source: On Bak­ing — Laben­sky et. al.