The Unclaimed Cake

I am nervous!

This began about two weeks ago when my coworker asked for suggestions of where to find a cowgirl-boot-shaped birthday cake for her daughter.  Me, loving baking and eager to find an excuse to bake a project (not just a snack!) - I have offered to bake the cake.

I went out to different stores to try to find a boot-shaped cake mold,... but of course there is no such thing!  Party City had Hello Kitty (which I was tempted to buy anyway), Michaels had Dora the Explorer, Berings had very nice regular boring shaped pans, and same with Bed Bath and Beyond.  Why is it that in the state of Texas I can't find a cowboy boot shaped cake mold?  Seems like I should have been able to find it at any random gas station or grocery store.

So I revamped my plans and bought a giant rectangular baking pan to make a giant sheet cake that I can cut into the shape of a boot myself.  That worked out really well and now I have a lot of cut-off cake I can pig out on!

What I did not expect was that I had to run out to the store five times during the baking process because this being the first time I made a sheet cake I was not prepared for the amount of food I needed.  I used eight sticks of butter just in the icing.  I baked the Red Velvet Cake recipe I usually use for my boyfriend's birthday cake, and it makes a large three-layer cake that a family of 5+Me would take days to finish - and I found out I had to make double THAT amount in order to make a two layer sheet cake!  Don't take me wrong, I am not complaining, I really enjoy baking!  I am just saying, be warned of what you need if you ever plan on baking a sheet cake.

Cake crumbles when you ice it, so I like to put a thin layer of icing to "prime" the cake before I ice it so that you don't see the crumbles on the cake.  But sliced cake (because I had to slice it into a shape of a boot) really REALLY  crumbles.  So I actually had to ice the cake in three different layers.  Then on the top I made a glaze with icing sugar, meringue powder, and food coloring to decorate so that it looks nice and pretty and shiny!  I did not go with fondant because I personally do not like the taste of fondant and neither does anyone I have spoken with... But I have to admit fondant does make a cake look very pretty!

So why the "Unclaimed Cake"?  Because my coworker was supposed to pick it up today, I do not have her phone number, and its already 7pm.  Has the cake been abandoned?  My first pretty-cake project... has it been given up on?

How I Love King Cakes

http://www.etsy.com/listing/86479220/large-king-cake-with-cream-cheese

I acquired my love for King Cakes when I went to visit my Louisiana born-and-raised boyfriend in Baton Rouge during Spring Break 2007.  It was right around Mardi Gras, and we saw the stacks of King Cakes at Whole Foods while grocery shopping for a romantic picnic we were having on the LSU lakes later that night.  Honestly, I thought it looked disgusting!  I usually hate cakes with white icing and THEN artificially colored sugars on top making the cake WAY too sweet.  But he told me the history behind King Cakes and stressed the importance of me at least trying it in order to have a full Louisiana Mardi Gras experience.

The thing is, after Christmas decorations come down, people start decorating and anticipating Mardi Gras.  During this in-between-holiday-time, King Cakes are the thing to share with your friends and family!  Inside every King Cake, there is a little Baby Jesus - whoever gets the Baby Jesus in their slice of cake has to bring the next King Cake!

Long story short, we brought the King Cake home - the messy looking, overly sweet looking, flimsy paper box of grocery-store cake.  "I just want a tiny sliver..." I am pretty sure I shivered a little before tasting it.  But guess WHAT!?  Even the grocery store version of this cake was awesome!

http://www.etsy.com/listing/86479220/large-king-cake-with-cream-cheese

Its not REALLY a cake you see:  Under the sugar and icing is a crunchy-on-the-outside-but-soft-on-the-inside braid of bread (also called the brioche).  The bread is not very sweet at all - in fact, if you eat it on its own its almost bland.  The bread is actually six strands of bread braided together with cinnamon sugar shoved in between the strands.  Then the cake is topped with a white icing and then the colorful sugars.  The end result: not overly sweet!  The perfect dessert.

Whats even better is whats in between!  You can choose different fillings: different flavored jellies or CREAM CHEESE!   Clearly I think the cream cheese filling is the way to go.  The tanginess and saltiness of the cream cheese just adds a whole different complexity to the sensation on your taste buds.

Oooooh yummy!  And to top it all off, there is the little Baby Jesus inside.  Traditionally, the Baby Jesus is not plastic, it was a red bean!  Whoever got the bean was the "King of the Ball!" and got to throw the next Mardi Gras Ball!  But seeing as how "balls" are still so popular, the modern thing is that whoever got the bean gets to bring the next King Cake!

Cheers to Yarn!

http://www.etsy.com/listing/89435235/toms-inspired-knitted-slippers

No I have not given up blogging or my hobbies surrounding HandMadeByEle.  I have been sick and living on the couch with regular visits to the bed, doctor, and pharmacy.  For that reason, I have not been feeling well enough to compose and stare in front of a computer screen (even though its really beautiful).

Now, still sick, but feeling relatively okay and very unproductive from 1.5 weeks of sitting on my butt I am going to write a short posting while holding down my sick feeling by sipping on homemade ginger ale sweetened with brown sugar and love (because the ginger ale was made by my lovely boyfriend).

So while waiting 15 minutes for my prescription to be filled at the pharmacy, I decided to do some therapeutic healing therapy: shopping around Walgreens.  Since I was anticipating needing some prolonged couch time, I decided to buy a cozy blanket, some knitting and crocheting needles, and 13 balls of different colored yarn - yes, I decided in those 15 minutes of waiting that I am going to start a new hobby and I am going to like it.

So I watched a video online and learned how to crochet.  I don't understand how you read the crocheting patterns and with my headaches I do not feel like reading about how to decipher how to read those patterns, so I picked up my Tom's shoes and decided to crochet in the shape of my shoe and adding and subtracting stitches where I see fit.  I think it turned out rather well.

For the sole, I sewed together 4 layers of pink cotton - so these are Tom-inspired slippers.  I wonder if there are places were I can buy a regular rubber sole to attach my own shoe onto?

Overall, I would say they are a success.  Only thing is, when they are knitted, they feel more loose than the Tom shoe fabric, so next time I will make my the shoe slightly smaller than what I usually wear.

My Santa's Workshop

http://www.etsy.com/listing/88296188/gingerbread-santas-workshop

Oooh I spent many hours making this!  One of my proudest gingerbread work yet.

This one of the sides.  I used colorful twizlers for the roof!  Extremely adorable.

The is the other side.  Stacks of present with a gummy roof.  I love the heavy snow at the roof base.

This is the back side.  Snowflakes on a pink rooftop - how much merrier could Christmas be!  And I love the miniature Christmas ornaments that are on the front and back of the house!  I found them at Michaels, they were actually wine glass ornaments but I unbent the metal loop and used it as an ornament hook to hook around the house instead!  Adds a little something to the house.

<3  <3  <3

Homemade Gingerbread Men

http://www.etsy.com/listing/88109756/gingerbread-hawaii-couple?ref=v1_other_1

Enough of that store bought stuff!  Time to make some gingerbread on my own and make some ornaments!

I started off by trying to find a recipe online for a tough cookie that would hold up even if I dropped the ornament.  But after the highly-rated recipe gave me a giant pot of crumbly dough, I decided to do my own thing.

I am proud to say that my recipe created tough cookies perfect for ornaments: I had left some cookies outside for 2 seconds thinking it would dry faster there than in my kitchen.  I put them outside, went inside, and though "Oh no, the neighbor leaves his dog outside and she might smell it and come eat it." I turned right around and surely enough the golden retriever was biting at one of my tree ornaments.  The ornament got wet but remained intact.

AND it truly smells deliciously Christmassy!




So here is the recipe:

Ingredients:

- 1 cup shortening

- 1 cup sugar
- 7 cups flour
- 1 tablespoon cocoa
- 1 1/2 tablespoon cinnamon
- 1 1/2 tablespoon nutmeg
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 cup molasses
- 1 cup dark corn syrup
- 1/2 cup water if necessary
- cookie cutters











Directions:

1. Cream shortening and sugar in a large bowl or a big pot.

2. Add flour, cocoa, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, molasses, and dark corn syrup into the mixture and mix well.  Instead of 1 1/2 tablespoon cinnamon and nutmeg, you can do 1 tablespoon each of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ground cloves.  Now you have to get your hands dirty and just knead the Christmassy dough with your hands to get it nice and clumped together.

3.  Lastly, add the 1/2 cup of water gradually as necessary to form the dough into a giant clump.

4.  Wrap the dough up in wax paper and refrigerate until cold (roughly 3 hours).

5.  Preheat oven to 350 F.  Line cookie sheets with aluminum foil.

6.   Remove the dough from the refrigerator and use a rolling pin to roll out the dough into an even 0.75cm thick layer.

7.  This step may seem a little different from usual cut out cookies:  Use a cookie cutter to cut into the layer of dough, leave the cookie cutter in the dough and remove the dough around the cookie cutter.

8.  Transfer the cookie dough and the cookie cutter together to your aluminum foiled cookie sheet.  Using your thumb, press down firmly  and evenly throughly the cookie to make your cookie extra tough.

9.  Use a chopstick or straw to make a 3mm diameter role on your cookie.

10.  Remove the cookie cutter carefully from your cookie.

11.  Bake 25-30 minutes.  (I baked mine for 30 minutes because my oven is not very good and so I think it is always slightly cooler than I set it to.  But just peek to see how it looks, and it should be done between 25 to 30 minutes).

12.  Let cool on the cookie sheet for 10 minutes before transferring to a cookie rack.  Let cool on cookie rack for 2-3 days to ensure cookie is hardened before you decorate it.

Really, its probably edible if you baked it less long and let it be softer. It might even taste good, after all its made of sugars, syrups, and shortening!

To decorate, you can use different colors of icing - buy it pre made or make it yourself.  I usually just buy it pre made when I do not plan on eating it because it tastes better when you make fresh icing yourself.

Michaels and Party City also has a huge variety of icing sugars:  Little candy canes, mistletoes, little gingerbread men, Christmas trees, colored dots.  You can also use candies:  chocolate chips, M&Ms, candy canes, Jellybeans.  Household items: ribbons, buttons, miniature toys.

They are so much fun to make and look at!  Have fun!

Homemade Popcorn and Handmade Garlands

I love decorating my living room with food things during the Christmas season:  Popcorn garlands, painted gingerbread cookies, strings of colorful Cherios, and candies candies candies!

So the week after Thanksgiving, this is probably what I will be doing on my free time at home:  Making a giant batch of popcorn, and stringing and eating this giant bowl of popcorn while watching Christmasy movies.  This year, my boyfriend and I just started a low-carb diet 2 weeks before Thanksgiving (and then we cheated hugely on it for a week surrounding Thanksgiving), so I limited myself as to how much I ate out of my popcorn bowl!  So far we have watched the first and second Die Hard, Jim Carrey's Christmas Carol, Home Alone 1, and Miracle on 34th Street while putting up and preparing Christmas decorations.

The popcorn garland is super fun to do and it looks so adorable especially if you hang it on your tree along with some Gingerbread cookie ornaments.  I am still working on my ornaments, but those pictures will come later in the season.  But here is how to make homemade popcorn whether you want to eat them or string them!  Its much better than the stuff you get from the microwave bag!  Not as good as movie-theater popcorn though...

Things you need:
- Deep pot with a lid (Heavy pots work better than light pots.  The best tasting popcorn will come out of a well-seasoned cast iron pot; However a heavy cast iron pot will require stronger arms because you have to pick up the pot and shake the popcorn during one of the steps.)
- Canola oil
- Unpopped popcorn kernels
- Butter
- Salt

Directions:


1.  First you pour canola oil to the bottom of your pot - just enough to have a thin layer throughout the entire pot bottom.

2.  Put the stove on medium high setting while you throw in some kernels.  How much kernels?  Just enough to cover the bottom of your pot with a  single layer of kernels.  Now give it a good quick stir with a wooden spoon so that all the kernels are evenly coated with the oil.








3.  Put the lid on!  You should start hearing popping sounds start within a minute.  It will first be slow, then it will go crazy in the pot!

4.  Once you have heard popping sounds for around 20 seconds, LEAVE THE LID ON, put on some oven hits, pick up the pot and shake it up a little.  Repeat the shaking ever 15 seconds or so so that popcorn doesn't stay at the bottom of the pot and get burnt.

5.  Turn off the fire and remove pot from heat once you hear the popping slow down.  Cast iron pots hold their heat better than lighter pots so if you have a cast iron pot you might want to turn off the heat once it gets to 1 pop every 1 second.  For a regular pot you can turn off the heat once you get to 1 pop every 2-3 seconds.  (Its hard for me to say exactly when you need to turn off the heat because it really varies depending on the heaviness and type of pot you are using and how hot your stove is, but experiment with it and you will find that perfect timing for your perfect batch of popcorn).  But once you turn the heat off, don't open the lid yet!  Keep shaking the pot with the lid on until you hear one pop every 5-6 seconds then you open the lid and pour the popcorn out into a bowl.

It is shockingly easy to burn popcorn.  At first you might be leaving it on the heat for too long resulting in burnt popcorn or taking it off too soon resulting in lots of unpoped kernels; but keep playing with it because its worth it!

6.  Melt some butter on the stove or in the microwave (how much?  How buttery do you want your popcorn?!  Generally I use about 3 tablespoons of butter).  Pour the melted butter over your popcorn while gently tossing the popcorn so that the butter is evenly distributed.

7.  Toss some salt in there!  Toss the popcorn to mix.  There are also a bunch of different popcorn flavorings you can pick up from the store (we got a bunch from William Sonoma for Christmas last year from a friend), but just butter and salt is delis!!!

8.  Want to make a garland?  Needle and thread and just string it up!

Thanksgiving Day!

Oh I love Thanksgiving!  I spent it with my awesome boyfriend and his amazing family!

So since I've known his family, it seems like this is their their Thanksgiving tradition:

1.  Macy's parade is on the TV, and we pay special attention to the dog show.

2.  Huge, yummy, crazy awesome, food-coma-inducing lunch:  two turkeys (one fried one roasted), mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole (with the crunchy pecans and brown sugar top), ham or roast duck (sometimes both), marshmallow and mayonnaise casserole, green beans with bacon, pineapple and cheese cracker casserole, cornbread dressing, dirty rice dressing, white rolls, homemade apple pie, store bought pumpkin pie, some other homemade pie.  Did I leave anything out?  Sounds around right for six people right?

3.  Christmas decorating!  So part of this would be decorating gingerbread houses or trains.  I took over the train this year because when I am too stuffed to eat the cookies, icing, and candies, I still love playing with it!

These are the supplies Ms Sherry got us started with =) 

Yes, the gingerbread was pre-made (if you were to bake them on your own you have to ensure to bake them in advance to allow them to cool and harden prior to decorating and standing your train up.  The candy-canes were full of round and oval chocolates - which I did not end up using because they seemed bulky and heavy and I was afraid the icing would not succeed in holding them up.  But otherwise, the gingerbread train kit came with several mints, gummy candies, candy balls, and icing.  I did not personally taste any of this because I was very full already, but I was told the cookies were tasty!

The first car:

Since these are the first cars that I made, there is still some experimenting involved because its been a year since I last decorated gingerbread!  My biggest problem with these first two cars were that my hands were not quite warm enough and thus my icing was cooler than it should have been - meaning it solidifies a lot faster.  In this case, if you do not stick on your candies fast enough the icing will just crack when you place the candies on!  I  quickly learned that I have to "massage" my pouch of icing a little longer so that I have more time to decorate with candies before the icing solidifies. Of course you do not want to warm your icing up too much because if it is too runny it will not allow you to form well-defined lines.

The second car:  

The red and green backgrounds were done with the colored icing sugar crystals in the jar of icing (use a knife to spread a thin layer of icing on the gingerbread and then pat down some colored icing sugar crystals to the area).  The ornaments on the green car were merely pre-made sugar "stickers" that you can stick to your car with icing sugar.  The wheels are once again mints with a candy placed in the middle to make the axle.

The third car

The little Christmas trees on the tip-tops are one of the sprinkles that comes in the bottle of sprinkles separate from the gingerbread train kit.

The presents are once again pre-made sugar "stickers"

Its very tempting to start building the gingerbread house/train/whatever the first thing after opening the packaging but do try to refrain from sticking the sides together to stand up the cars until AFTER you have decorated each side! - Much easier this way because you can look down flat at all your sides while you decorate, and your candies won't slide down before the icing sets.  

After you do finally build the structure and stick it together, make sure you let the gingerbread structure rest in place for a while before you move it.  And If you intend on keeping your gingerbread as a decorating for more than one season (and of course if you have no intentions on eating it), then you can spray it with shellac (you can buy it from the craft store or Home Depot) so that the structure and color preserves.  Make sure you do your shellacking outdoors in a well ventilated area because that smell is not pleasant (nor is it salubrious)!

4.  The last thing in the Thanksgiving tradition: SHOPPING!!!  (on Black Friday... and that is why I did not blog about this yesterday when I actually made this!)  Hope you caught some great shopping deals!  And of course, check out my lil-shop if you like my stuff:  http://www.etsy.com/shop/HandMadeByEle