I am Thankful For...

I am so thankful for my family, my friends, and my fur kids. I am a lucky girl.

A Happy Fall; Wordless Wednesday

Basket Cake

This is the cake from my Wilton Cakes II class. This class was interesting because we learned how to make royal icing flowers. I had never really worked with royal icing before, but it was totally crazy because royal icing dries hard and then you can keep it for a long time. All of the flowers on this cake were prepared during the previous four weeks of class. We made apple blossoms and daisies, pansies and daffodils. The culmination of the class was to make a cake that looked like a flower basket. The basket weave was also an interesting task. It kind of looks complicated but in reality, it's quite easy. However, it is terribly time consuming. That tiny cake above took almost 45 minutes to basket weave. When I got home from class, I told my husband that I would have to really love someone to make them a basket weave cake.

Sea Salt Carmels

For some reason, fall seems like the time of the year for making caramel. Part of it is residual from Halloween and part of it is preparing for the Christmas season. I have only ever attempted making caramel one other time, and it did not go so well. Recently I purchased The Field Guide to Candy, and now visions of sugarplums dance in my head (well truffles and caramels anyway). Candy making has always fascinated me and scared me at the same time. Oh, sure, I will make fudge at Christmas but tempering chocolate and pulling sugar have been quite intimidating. The chocolate tempering still needs work, but the sea salt caramels worked like a dream and tasted even better.

Panic

My baby sister is getting married in March. She is a total carboholic. She and her fiance decided to have a bread bar as appetizers for their reception. And she wants me to make the bread. Holy cow. I said yes like an idiot, thinking that it would be a fun challenge. What? Bread for 240 people that looks and tastes awesome enough for a wedding. What was I thinking? Her finace is in the military and is home for the weekend this weekend coming up so my mother and I decided to make some bread for them to kind of choose what they like and what they don't. I made potato bread, Challah, breadsticks, garlic bread, Norwegian rye bread and prezels. My mom and I together whipped up zucchini muffins, oatmeal rolls, savory cheese bread, parmasan bread, and corn muffins. That is a lot of bread! We are still trying to figure out the best way to present it. We are not sure if we should make loaves or rolls, if we should go with bread baskets or a dramatic presentation of everything on the table. We still are unsure of what we want to put on the breads. I am going to make a variety of flavored butters and cream cheeses, but beyond that we are drawing a blank.

Yay Cake!

My cake decorating skills totally leave something to be desired. My ability to make a layer cake is shameful. Also, because I bake, I am now the dedicated baker in my family, regardless of the fact that cake that I make looks like garbage. So I decided to take a cake decorating class. Because every time I would bake a cake I would scream and cry and my husband refused to come into the kitchen. Now I had two choices for decorating classes: one at Michaels (craft store) or one through the community college. Turns out they were both Wilton classes so I guess it did not really matter which I chose.

I just finished Intro to Cake Decorating. It was so much fun. I really loved it. I was really bad at it, but I really loved it. There is just something exciting about finally learning how they make that buttercream rose. The class was four weeks long for three hours one night a week. We did not learn anything that will probably have me leaving my day job anytime soon, but the girls in the class were fun and creative and the teacher was great. We made a cake for our last day and honestly its the prettiest cake I have ever made. I felt like I hadn't learned that much until my husband commented on how far I had come. It made me happy, like that cake might not be totally out of my relm. I immediatly signed up for Cake Decorating II. I think that it will be good for me to continue on this cake experiment.

The cake I made is lemon cake from a box (gasp) but I have not been ready to branch out that much yet. I figured if I can get a handle on some decorating skills then maybe I can branch out to homemade cakes. I made the lighter lemon curd filling that I found on Baking Bites. Its a fantastic lemon curd that is super easy with a whole lot less fat than any other lemon curd I have tried. Its basically become my go to lemon curd for everything from a quick lemon mousse to a pie filling. The frosting is the class buttercream, which really means that its shortening buttercream. I like the shortening buttercream to work with, it's very consistant. However, I like the taste of real buttercream better.

Wilton Class Buttercream
1 cup vegetable shortening
2 tablespoons milk or water ( I use lemon juice to cut the sweetness a bit)
1 tablespoon meringue powder (totally optional, just makes things a bit stiffer)
1 teaspoon clear vanilla (I use regular because it is what I have)
1 pound powdered sugar (about 4 cups)

On the Wilton.com website they have a slightly different buttercream recipe that is made with 1/2 butter and 1/2 shortening. I have made this icing before and it is pretty good, but it does get crunchy. It is fairly easy to work with though. Soon I hope to start baking my cakes from scratch and trying different icings.

Bread Machine Bread

The bread machine is a strange beast to me. I have never made anything in a bread machine. I always thought that it was a fine machine, but nothing I was interested in. To me, its about the process. It's seeing the dough come together, feeling the smooth elasticity in the kneading and the shaping of the dough.

However, there was a contest I was a bit interested in and one of the categories was bread machine white bread. So, I dug through my mother's cabinets and found her bread machine. I read the directions and decided to whip up some traditional white bread. It seemed easy enough. Pour the ingredients into the pan, push the buttons, wait three hours and I will have fantastic bread. Lo and behold, beautiful fluffy white bread emerged from that machine. I was stunned. Why didn't people make bread in bread machines all the time? I mean, making bread from scratch takes time and effort, but bread machine bread makes itself. If you are having people over and don't have time to whip up a batch of scratch bread, just toss some ingredients in your bread machine and go. My husband and I cut into it and a soft fat piece of perfect bread came off. Then another. Then the third cut and clang. The knife isn't going through this perfect soft bread. What is going on? We flipped the bread over and the little beater bakes itself in to the bread. What? How are you supposed to have perfectly shaped loaves of bread if you have to cut a huge chunk out of the bottom?

Well, we did cut a chunk out of the bottom and it was still white and fluffy. It tasted good, but it lacked the depth of some of the bread that takes me all day to make (or two or three days). I think that I will continue to use this bread machine, for whipping up a loaf of bread in a hurry. But I still enjoy the process of making the bread, possibly more than eating the bread itself. So I will continue making my bread from scratch.