Melting Snowman Cookies

There was a time in my life, where I looked forward with glee to snow days. Snow days meant sleeping late, missing school, sitting inside in my pajamas, watching bad movies and seeing the snow plows drive by. Unfortunately today I am an adult older, and huge snowfalls means canceled plans, missing work, commuting woes and other unpleasant things. In fact, I think it's safe to say, that I don't really like snow at all anymore. Except, perhaps, when it comes in uber-adorable cookie form. 

Cupcake Cookies

And the celebration continues. When Racheli had her bridal shower last week, the occasion, obviously, called for something adorable and delicious.

The cupcake cookie cutters (and ice cream cone ones) were a gift from my mom over a year ago. But I'd never really had the occasion to use them, until now.

I used my standard sugar cookie recipe, which has yet to fail me - although I did end up adding a considerable amount of flour to make it workable, so I may be changing the recipe. I worked with three colors of royal icing - pink, blue and pale green. Unfortunately the pictures aren't great, since - as usual - I work in the middle of the night.

I also somehow managed to burn a few of them, which reinvigorated the both loved and dreaded "reject pile," known for causing depression and snacking.

I experimented with the decoration used for the sprinkles on the cupcakes - a variety of sprinkles and candies. The mini m&ms were the most delicious, but didn't look as nice as some of the others. I applied each one individually, just after the icing. I did forget a couple times and to do it and then had to either leave them off, or glue them on with a little more icing.

All in all, they came out really cute, and were definitely less time consuming than writing on cookies. Success!
Next week I am on a (obviously well-deserved) vacation - but hopefully, through the magic of blogger, I'll share a couple things with you while I'm away.

If you're lucky, I'll show you what else I brought to the shower!

Tip of the Day: Though plastic spatulas are great for many things, you really need a sturdy metal spatula for cookies - both transferring them from your workspace to the cookie sheet, and then removing them after baking. Try this one for a start.

Recipe:
Cookies:
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter or margarine, softened
1 cup plus 2 tbsps sugar
1 egg
3/4 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups flour
1/3 tsp baking powder
1/3 tsp salt

Beat together butter and sugar until light and creamy.
Beat in eggs and vanilla.
Gradually mix in flour, baking powder and salt.
Shape dough into 2 balls and wrap in wax paper and refrigerate overnight (or freeze for a couple hours).
Lightly flour your counter or surface, and roll out dough 1/4 of an inch thick.
Cut out as many shapes as possible with a cookie cutter.
Transfer shapes to ungreased cookie sheet.
Reserve the trimmings for rerolling.
Reroll the dough and the remaining dough as many times as necessary.
Bake the cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet for 10 to 13 minutes at 350F, without letting them get brown.
Transfer to wire racks to cool.

Royal Icing:

3 egg whites
3 teaspoons lemon juice
4 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar, sifted

Beat the egg whites and lemon juice together.
Gradually add in the sifted sugar on low speed until smooth.
Stir in food coloring until you acquire the desired shade.
Use immediately or cover and refrigerate or it will begin to harden.

Black and White Cake

When I peered into my fridge to find inspiration for a last-minute birthday cake, I found a little bit of leftover vanilla frosting and a container of chocolate ganache. So I set out to recreate one of my favorite snacks: the black-and-white cookie. In cake form, of course.
A couple months ago I used Paula Deen's 1,2,3,4 cake recipe, and converted the three-layer cake to a two layer one. This time, I needed even more math, to turn it into a one-layer dessert.

I don't like math.

After I managed all my calculations, I baked up the cake in one 9-inch round pan. All was looking good, until I turned it over onto the cooling rack.
Oh no! I'm missing some cake!

Found it....
Since I couldn't quite reattach this part of the cake...I just ate it. So I flipped the cake back over and hoped nobody would notice. After the cake had cooled to room temperature, I stuck it in the fridge for a few minutes to make it easier to frost. This way there would be less crumbs mixing with the frosting.

To create the black-and-white look, I placed a piece of scotch tape all the way down the center of the cake before starting the chocolate frosting. I microwaved the ganache for a few seconds before spreading so it covered the cake easily.

After peeling off the tape, I went for the vanilla (also microwaved), this time a little more carefully without my tape guideline.

The only thing that was left then was to clean off the plate! Black-and-White Cookie Cake - here I come!

Tip of the Day: Use a damp paper towel or cloth to clean off the edge of a plate before serving (or photographing). If its just for you - or family - you can always use a finger!

The Fate of the Sugar Cookie Dough

Here I am, faced with four balls of sugar cookie dough, and nothing to do with them. Spring break, home, bored, and with a blank canvas of cookie dough in front of me.
What else could I do but have a cookie decorating party?!
My friends Bina, Miriam and Racheli showed up ready to cut out and decorate cookies to their hearts content, and we hit the kitchen with cookie cutters, chocolate chips, melted white and dark chocolate and various icings.
I unearthed every cookie dough cutter I could find in the house, which included a host of numbers, letters, flowers, a few trains, stars and several huge detailed clowns.
We rolled out the dough, and Racheli immediately stamped out three huge stars, taking up more than her share of dough. She claimed she needed them big "to be able to decorate them." Please.
Here is one of her illustrious finished products:I, of course, when faced with cookie cutter letters felt the need to spell out and decorate my own name:

Bina, on the other hand, was struck with inspiration of some kind, and created her modern art piece entitled "1, 2, 3 Clown":
Thats one of the clown cookie cutters which she decorated with an exclamation point. Because it's modern art. I firmly maintain that her 2 is actually an upside down 5.
I countered her work with an art installation of my own, entitled "Butterfly, 3, Train":
Bina also created a treble clef (right?) out of a modified question mark. And then decorated it rather unfortunately:
We also decorated some before baking, with chocolate chips. I also balled up some of the trimmings at the end and hid some chocolate chips inside. Surprise!
BUT WAIT! Even after all this, there is still some cookie dough left! What will become of it??
Come back here at the end of this week to find out its fate!

Tip of the Day: Store bought frosting can easily be dyed with food coloring to whatever shade you need. For black frosting start with chocolate, and stir in a few drops of black.

Peanut Butter Cupcakes

Aren't they just beautiful? Cupcakes: food's miniature canvas.
Recently my friend Esti - for whom I made Peanut Butter Cookies a while back - had her birthday. What to make? Why peanut butter cupcakes of course! This recipe came from allrecipes.com, another good resource. It was pretty simple to make and they all came out nice and golden brown looking. Next of course, came the decorating. First I frosted these, using half chocolate and half vanilla, so everyone could have their preference. (Esti's is vanilla). Then of course, came those lovely fondant decorations. I had some fondant that i died the pale blue you see here, then I took some of that and added a little more blue to make the darker shade, kneading it in so it was all even and not marbleized. I cut out hearts in three different sizes, I have some fondant cutters but most cookie cutters will work as well, and arranged them in pretty patterns across the cupcakes. Voila!
I know, I know, you're going to tell me that why bother to put the fondant on when you're going to take it off before you eat anyway. Well, I think it looks pretty. Ok? I knew you'd see it my way eventually.

Tip of the Day: When frosting cupcakes without a piping bag, dollop some first in the middle and then use a flat edged knife to smooth it out in a circle motion.

Cookies? Wands? Tuiles?

Whoo boy. These cookies are probably the first (and certainly not last) complete and total disaster on Baking and Mistaking. Come on in, and I'll share with you the story.
Disclaimer: This is a picture of what the cookies were supposed to look like:
(picture from cookbook - Cookie and Biscuit Bible).
I can't show you how they turned out....because they didn't.
Let me explain. These cookies are entitled Striped Cylinder Cookies, and they are a wand-type cookie, which means they are baked as flat rounds, and then rolled up into a wand shape while still warm. Not the case here.
Let's begin. The dough is a simple egg whites, sugar, flour and melted butter mixture. (I'll provide the recipe at the end of the post for anyone daring enough to try - please tell me your experience!)
Once the dough is formed, the recipe instructs you to drop teaspoonfuls onto parchment paper and spread into thin rounds, then decorate with two different colored chocolates (they used red and green, I used dark and white). Done and done.
First sheet goes into the oven.
While they're in, I prepare a couple wooden spoons by greasing their handles, and getting them ready to wrap the cookie rounds around.
Ok, all set.
I pull the cookies out of the oven, gently remove one of the rounds from the pan and attempt to wrap it around the handle.
Yep, you guessed it, this is where it all went wrong. So wrong. The cookies were too thick to really wrap, and barely made it once around the spoon, and all the decorated white and dark chocolate on top began cracking and falling out of the cookie.
But I didn't give up. Oh no, I persisted. I put another sheet in the oven, trying desperately to make them thinner and larger in diameter. But to no avail. Same problems.
Now, with chocolate smeared all over my hands, I attempt to put the last pan in the oven, this time with no attempt to roll them, I merely laid them over a rolling pin to harden, like a tuile.
At this point in my vastly unsuccessful attempt to master a new technique, my friends Miriam and Racheli showed up.
While the cookies were scrutinized and laughed at, there remained on the counter the two small bags of white and dark chocolate I had used to create the decoration that refused to stay on.
What happens when you combine three girls, a sheet of parchment paper and chocolate in piping bags?
Creativity!
We spent about twenty minutes piping our names, flowers, hearts, and some intriguing blobs.
I decorated some cupcakes I had lying around with some of the most promising pieces.
I present to you here, black and white heart:

And here, creepy alien:

Well, at least something fun came of it! Plus, its always fun to experiment - I highly recommend it.

Tip of the Day: Before piping or decorating with icing, frosting or chocolate, test it out on a piece of parchment paper or a plate before hand to gauge the flow of the material, and the pressure you need to get the right line.

Recipe:
Striped Cylinder Cookies:
1 oz each melted white and dark chocolates
2 egg whites
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup melted butter

Whisk egg whites in a bowl until stiff. Add the sugar gradually, whisking well after each addition.
Add the flour and butter and whisk until smooth.
Drop four separate teaspoonfulls of batter onto a baking sheet covered with parchment paper, and spread into thin rounds
Decorate with chocolates from piping bags in zigzag and line patterns.
Bake one sheet at a time for 3 minutes at 375 F until pale golden.
Taking one cookie out of the oven at a time, roll around a greased spoon handle, and leave for a few seconds to set until slipping off onto wire rack to cool.

Good Luck with this one!

1,2, Cake!

Simple and pretty...and pretty simple too, is this chocolate filled and frosted layer cake.

(Sorry for the bad picture)

The cake itself is adapted from Paula Deen's 1-2-3-4 Cake, and there the problems begin. Paula's cake makes a 3 layer cake that you then fill and frost - but I thought that would be a little much for the gathering - and a little much work for me! So I decided if I took 2/3 of each ingredient, I would end up with a 2 layer cake - perfect! This however, involves lots of math - not my strong suit - and resulted in me dashing back and forth between the kitchen and the computer, checking and double checking my calculations, and a solid minute of thinking hard about why the amount of butter seemed wrong, before I realized I needed 1 1/3 sticks of butter not 1 1/3 cups.
Nevertheless, all the numbers added up, and before long I had two 9 inch pans of batter. Now came the baking. Unfortunately, I have just a teeny little oven here, and I couldn't fit them both side by side. Being exponentially too impatient to bake them separately, I managed to fit them in on a diagonal, meaning one cake was a little farther back in the oven than the other. You baking purists are probably cringing at this point, but work with me here. So anyway, I figured I should switch their places in the oven half way through, so one didn't brown more than the other - a daring but dangerous feat. I pulled it off with only one almost drop. Note to self: do not attempt to adjust the dials while wearing oven mitts. You'd think that was common sense, but I guess not so common for all of us!
Once the layers were removed and cooled, the frosting began. I made the frosting from scratch, just a mix of butter, powdered sugar, cocoa powder and boiling water. I'd provide the measurements, but as I peered into the bowl worrying if it would be enough, I added a little bit more water and a little bit more sugar until I prayed it would cover the cake, and have no idea what the actual amounts ended up being. No worries, the amount was just right, and I sprinkled a few white chocolate chips on top for decoration.
Of course, my biggest problem was once again transportation, so without my handy dandy cake carrier I scrounged up a piece of cardboard (I knew saving all those boxes would come in handy one day) cut it down to a square, covered it with foil, placed it on a baking sheet, and covered the whole thing with an upside-down metal bowl to help it stay fresh. Success! Though I probably looked a little strange walking down 3rd avenue with that contraption. Oh well.

Tip of the Day: When frosting a cake, place a dab of frosting in the center of the board before putting the first layer down, to help it stay in place.