Cherry Danish Pastries

My grandpa's birthday is today, and about a week ago he mentioned that his favorite baked goods are Danish pastries. After talking to my mom I learned he digs cherry stuff too, so for his birthday I have made him cherry Danishes, according to this recipe from allrecipes.com.

First of all, when I read through this recipe for the first time, before I'd gathered my ingredients or anything, I knew this recipe might be beyond my skill level. That's probably not being modest enough, honestly. Still, I like to give myself credit, and I figured I wouldn't tell my grandpa I was making these so that if they turned out horribly and I had to throw them away, he wouldn't be disappointed.

It's not a necessarily difficult recipe to follow - the instructions are clear, and it's fairly simple in regards to ingredients - but it is labor-intensive, and a bit of haste is required when dealing with the butter/flour mixture...but we'll get to that.

So I started out by adjusting the recipe to make 12 servings, rather than 36. My grandpa has multiple health issues and, though I'm sure he'd love to receive 36 Danishes, I know I'd feel bad if he had a heart attack or something because of it. However, the adjustment was only made to the ingredients. The recipe remained for the original serving size of 36. In most recipes this wouldn't be an issue but this recipe calls for certain amounts of ingredients at different times, so I had to do a little math (which has never been my strong suit).

So here's what I came to. In step 1, it says to cream together the butter and 2/3 cup of flour. For my 12 servings batch, however, I creamed together the butter and 3 tablespoons plus 1 3/4 teaspoons flour. Figuring that out was relatively easy.

In step 2, it says to mix the dry yeast and 3 cups of the remaining flour. After doing some math, I figured out that I needed to mix 1 cup of my remaining flour to the dry yeast. That left me with 1 2/3 cups of flour for the rest of the recipe.

After kneading my dough, it became firm and pliable with about 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup of flour still left over. Not wanting to make my dough too tough, I discarded it and left my dough to rise.

Upon pulling the cold butter sheets out of the fridge to fold into my dough, I found myself having to scrape the butter off of the wax paper rather than it coming off in the nice, simple sheet it was supposed to be. Still, this wasn't a big deal as I just spread the butter mixture around with a knife. To me there seemed to be a LOT of butter - when I pressed the edges to seal in the butter and rolled over it with my pin, butter oozed out the edges. I tried as well as I could to keep it contained but there was just so much, I had to let some of it go. The butter coated the cutting board I was using as a surface and got all over my rolling pin, a problem I somewhat remedied by placing a sheet of wax paper between the dough and my pin.

The butter seemed to be absorbed by the dough during its thirty-minutes stints in the refrigerator, at least some of it was. It was still pretty buttery when I got it out to place the filling. For filling I used Smucker's Cherry Preserves. It took me a minute to figure out how much to put without putting too much or too little. Then I folded over two corners to make it pretty. And for a final touch, I brushed them with egg whites for a nice shine.

How they looked before they went into the oven.

Beautiful, right? Wrong. The heat of the oven must have made the butter too slippery or something, because when I pulled them out of the oven (after 8 minutes), they looked like this.

How they looked when they came out. Blurghh.

I was about to damn the whole project but my mother, always an optimist, convinced me to press on. In the end I'm glad I did, but at the time I was rather depressed.

I added a bit more preserves to each one, hoping to save at least a few of the least-crappy looking ones for my grandpa's birthday. But then I remembered the icing.

This recipe, which I found simply by typing "danish pastry icing" into Google, made perfect icing. To apply it to the pastries, I cut the tip off a gallon baggy and drizzled it back and forth across each one. For such a simple recipe, this icing is tasty - and totally saved my Danishes!

See for yourself.

I was so happy. They still didn't turn out the way I expected them to look, but I'm not complaining - at least they turned out somewhat pretty.

Not too bad, after all.

As for the taste, we took one of the ugly ones and split it amongst ourselves. I thought the pastry was bland, especially for all the effort I'd put into it. It wasn't very flaky either, although that could very well be directly linked to my skill level. Oh, and something else - the recipe specifically said NOT to grease the pan, so I didn't - but the bottom of a few of the pastries stuck to the pan.

We'll see how my grandpa likes them. I'll update this once I have his expert opinion.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dunkers

So my husband has been out of work with a kidney stone. He's been feeling really low for a while so when he asked me to make him cookies, I could hardly refuse. Even though he asked me at two in the morning.

So I used My Baking Addiction's recipe for Cookie Sticks. I omitted the peanut butter and peanut butter chips since I don't like peanut butter cookies and added a bunch more chocolate chips.

These didn't last long.

They turned out nicely, a little tougher than I prefer my cookies but not crunchy by any means. I'm just weird and like my cookies and brownies gooey. :)

As you can see, the cookies being cut into strips made dunking into milk much easier and convenient. My husband was pleased.

Vanilla Cake with Vanilla Frosting

My son recently turned one, so for his birthday I decided to go with an UglyDolls theme. Their website is here, if you haven't heard of them - they're super cute and I've been a fan for forever it seems like. I got one of the stuffed animals when I was in high school and when he was born, he seemed to take a liking to it. I knew before he was even born that I wanted to do a monster theme for his first birthday party (yes, I'm one of those moms who plans everything out years in advance...) but until about two weeks before the party, I didn't know I was going to focus specifically on UglyDolls.

Anyway, my point is, I baked his cake from scratch and arranged the creature called "Big Toe" in fondant on top of it. This is Big Toe -

 I assume he is called Big Toe on the basis of his shape?

 

 

- and this is my cake.

Not quite as spectacular as I had envisioned, but oh well - it was for a one-year-old.

 

I used this recipe from Sweetapolita for Fluffy Vanilla Cake with Vanilla Bean Frosting. As always, I made a few variations, although I didn't make as many this time.

 

It is supposed to yield an eight-inch two-layer cake, and I made it instead as a 9"x13" sheet cake. The second variation I made was one of convenience - the recipe for both the cake and the icing calls for sifted flour and confectioner's sugar. However, the only sifter I have barely holds a cup, so it's ridiculously time-consuming to sift so much flour. I'm hoping someone will gift me with a decent-sized sifter this Christmas - hint hint.

 

So in lieu of sifting, I whisked the dry ingredients for a good while, hoping it might help my cause. I knew this would affect the fluffiness of the cake, and I was right. The cake was denser than most cake but not in an unappealing way.

 

In my opinion, the icing was a bit too buttery tasting. I followed that recipe exactly, substituting vanilla extract for the vanilla bean as the recipe advises. It just tasted too buttery to me.

 

Here is a close-up of the fondant Big Toe (that sounds kind of gross).

 

Cute, right?

I used Wilton fondant, color mist, and icing colors to create this little guy. He was thicker than I'd planned but it was my first attempt at fondant and I was feeling kind of stressed about the party being in an hour. The color mist, though convenient, had a rather unsavory taste that I wasn't too keen about. But it served its purpose of turning the fondant blue. For the nose, I rubbed on some red icing color. I did the same with the black bits.

I made a separate cupcake for my son to eat/destroy, so here's a picture of that.

His cupcake, on his cool robot plate.

 

We put a few blue sprinkles on it for decoration and then plopped a big "1" candle in it.

 

The cake went over well, only one piece was left over and it was devoured shortly thereafter. It seemed to be a hit, but next time I'll hopefully have a nice sifter, so it will be even better.



Golden Butter Cupcakes with Almond Flowers

This is another one of those posts that I will use to focus on my decorating, rather than my baking. Using a picture I clipped out of a magazine a while back, I made a batch of cupcakes and decorated half to look like flowers, using sliced almonds. These were made for a Labor Day party.

I used a box mix for these cupcakes - Betty Crocker's Super Moist Golden Butter Cake Mix. I made 24 cupcakes using the box's directions, but I ended up only decorating 13 for the party. Once they had cooled, I began decorating.

For the plain ones, I used Duncan Hines' Frosting Creations. If you haven't seen these, they are very cool. They offer all types of flavors - bubblegum, cherry vanilla, mint chocolate, orange creme, and several others. I used chocolate almond. Thus, I had seven chocolate almond frosted cupcakes. Still six to go.

For these six, I frosted them with Duncan Hines' Cream Cheese frosting. Then I took two bags of sliced almonds and, by sticking them into the frosting in concentric circles, created flowers.

Aren't they pretty?

 

 

You may notice that, in the very middle, I have placed almonds with the skin still intact on one side. This creates a distinct center that helps the illusion of a flower. 

The whole batch.

 

 

These went over well, though I think some people were afraid to bite into the ones with almonds. They do look rather spiky! ;) They are more for accent than anything, really. I was happy with the way these turned out. 

Chocolate Cake with Buttercream Frosting

It seems like there is always something going on with our family.

Once again, I have fallen behind on my posts due to circumstances outside the blogosphere. Illnesses in the family have slowed down my baking so luckily there's only two posts I need to catch up on. Hopefully I'll be getting back in the groove soon.

Today's post comes to us from My Baking Addiction (if you couldn't tell, I've fallen in love with her).  The recipe is aptly named The Best Chocolate Cake. I'd have to agree.

I did not use black cocoa flour, and instead of buttermilk I used regular milk. I made this cake on a whim - my mom's whim, actually. She was craving something chocolate so that's how this all began. Anyway, those are the only variations from the recipe. Now, I am not a coffee fan, but the coffee complemented this rich cake wonderfully - not too overwhelming.

I used one 13x9 pan in which to bake my cake, and it turned out beautifully. Now, if you look at the bottom of the recipe, you'll see her recommendation for icing - chocolate buttercream frosting. I followed this suggestion.

Again, I substituted milk for the cream in this recipe. Also, the first time through I did not see where she plainly stated that melted butter would NOT work in this recipe - it must be softened, not melted. I think this is where I went wrong.

My frosting turned out delicious, but runny. After it set it was better but still not the thick, luscious icing you see depicted on the recipe page.

It sort of pooled around the sides.

 

 

This cake paired with this icing was very rich, but not too sweet due to the addition of coffee. I really wish I had noticed the caveat about the butter, because then it would have been perfect. But oh well.

 

Delish.

 



Tie-Dye Cupcakes

My key lime pie bars might have been the prettiest thing I've made so far, but the subject of this post is definitely the coolest. Betty Crocker's tie-dye cupcakes weren't hard to make, but they did take a little time. Now this recipe is member-exclusive, so if you haven't already signed up for BC's email list, you can do so here.

I followed the recipe's suggestions for colors:  red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Each color was in a separate bowl, so as you can see, this is a recipe with some clean-up involved, as well. Totally worth it though!

So awesome.

They came out of the pan looking awesome already. As you can see, I used white baking cups so the colors could be viewed through the side.

The hardest part was the frosting, and even that wasn't necessarily difficult - just time-consuming. I realized too late that I was out of gallon baggies so for a moment I thought I'd have to frost them the plain, boring way - but then I remembered that my awesome cousin just gave me a bunch of Wilton cake decorating stuff. I took a disposable icing bag and a few icing tips. The recipe calls for a #6, but I used a #14 since I didn't have a #6. As it happened, the #14 was way too small - it took me forever to ice each cupcake, so when it came time to refill the bag, I switched to a #36. Much better.

Definitely the coolest thing I've made so far.

Perfect!

I forgot to mention that I made these for my husband's work meeting. One of his bosses said these cupcakes were the coolest thing he'd ever seen. Everyone who had one had great things to say. And at the end of the meeting, there were none left! Good thing I had taken a few aside for my family the night before.

DC Cake Pops

So today's post is the saga of my DC cake pops. DC, in case you aren't aware, is the comics company that does Batman. I used Betty Crocker's Extra Moist White cake mix. So, like a few of my other posts, this is more about decoration. I coated them with white chocolate mixed with food coloring and decorated them with Betty Crocker's Decorating Cookie Icing.

Cooling, while stuck into styrofoam blocks.

I only have 18 cake pop sticks, and I ended up making about 30. My husband and I improvised and came up with a solution for the other 12 - we'd put them on straws. BAD idea. The cake pops were much too heavy for the straws but I had no other option. We reinforced them by folding straw pieces in half and putting them inside the straws, and that helped - but they were still very top-heavy.

The next problem I encountered was the cake balls were too heavy to be dipped into the white chocolate. They came off the ends of the sticks, even though I had "glued" them together with melted chocolate and let them cool. So I ended up having to "paint" each cake pop, resulting in a totally NOT smooth surface, as I had envisioned.

Again, this is white chocolate, even though it looks like icing. Ugh.

I suppose I am something of a perfectionist, not because everything I do is perfect - definitely not that - but because when I imagine something, and then it turns out differently, I become very agitated. When the chocolate coating on my cake pops did not turn out smooth, I just about gave up on the whole thing. Childish, yes.

But I did end up finishing what I'd started. I used toothpicks to apply the icing and in the end, things turned out alright.

Starting in upper left and going clockwise:  Flash, Superman, Green Lantern, Batman.

Batman was my favorite, and Green Lantern turned out horribly, but I was so frustrated by the end of this project that I didn't even care enough to fix it.

Overall, I'm happy with them. This was my first attempt at cake pops and I ran into several obstacles, but next time, I'll know how to handle them. Although, it'll probably be quite a while before I try these again - the process was quite frustrating and kind of burnt me out on them.