a little bit savoury | a whole lot sweet
I was in a biscuit making mood recently and although I initially thought of something chocolate, I recalled a cinnamon flavoured biscuit with a funny name and was pretty sure I saw a recipe on one of my favourite blogs.
So I headed over to Sally’s website, Sally’s Baking Addiction, and did a search for Snickerdoodles and a number of recipes appeared. The one I ended up choosing was the soft and thick snickerdoodles, because let’s face it, they look amazing (as does everything on Sally’s blog)!
The post for this week is a little different as there is no recipe to share. It absolutely, positively isn’t because I wasn’t organised to line something up because you know that would never happen… well OK, it does… sometimes.
Instead I am going to share a little bit on how I celebrated my birthday this week under the banner of The Sweet Life. Some of the blogs I follow have a similar thing where they share snippets of their lives with their readers and in the event I do this more, I figured I better have a name for it. Given how the vast majority of the recipes on this blog are sweet, I decided to go with The Sweet Life especially after a very charming French pastry chef wrote these three words in my friends cook book as he signed it (I left mine at home that day so didn’t get an autograph myself… oh well).
So let’s get started with episode one.
As I did last year, I thought I would take a look back and see what you were most interested in on my blog and look at the top 10 posts of 2013. When rereading that post I can see that my goal was to cook more out of my current cook book collection.
So that didn’t really happen and I will have to see what I can do about it this year as I only really did a little bit but not quite as much as I had hoped for. Mind you, it didn’t stop me from buying more cook books (I am just digging myself a deeper hole here I know).
Christmas this year was hosted by the hubby’s parents which we were very excited about. We have hosted Christmas lunch for the previous two years, which was fun don’t get me wrong, but 2013 had its fair share of rough moments which left neither of us feeling very Christmas-y.
That didn’t get us out of a couple of jobs for Christmas lunch which were making the chicken, which the hubby was in charge of, and a cake for dessert to go with my mother-in-law’s Cassata (there is a law that Cassata has to be made each year for our family Christmas or there will be trouble). After changing my mind 500 times about what I was going to make, on Christmas Eve I decided to go with a common theme from this year of cupcake cakes and made a Christmas Tree Cupcake Cake.
For this month’s Daring Bakers Challenge, it was time for me to try something that I had been wanting to for a while now. Whoopie Pies are an American treat which you don’t see much of here in Australia, well at least in my part of the world and are a cross between a cookie and a cake with two of them being sandwiched together by some kind of sweet filling.
For my Whoopie Pies, I originally thought of red velvet given my obsession but as it was the silly festive season I decided to make some Christmas Candy Cane Whoopie Pies instead using a recipe from JoyofBaking.com.
Before I met my husband I had never eaten a Portuguese Tart. There is a woman at our local farmers market who sells different pastries, including these little beauties and he brought one home for me to try. Needless to say I absolutely loved it.
Jamie Oliver has a recipe for Quick Portuguese Tarts in his 30 Minute Meals cook book which we have made a couple of time that uses créme fraîche rather than making a custard and the hubby and I have made those a couple of times as they’re quite delicious. After a recent order of my Oreo Cookies and Cream Cupcakes, I had some leftover egg yolks so I thought I would make a more traditional Portuguese Tarts using a recipe from Bill Grainger.
Over the last couple of weeks I have shown you very tasty marshmallow fondant, how to make a fondant wood grain cake board and the final piece of the puzzle is the cake that it was all made for.
A lovely lady that my mum works with, who also happened to do an amazing job setting up the reception for our wedding a couple of years ago, has a gorgeous little boy who had his naming day coming up and L asked if I would be interested in doing the cake.
After seeing the invitation with coloured pencils and a sketch outline on the photo, I suggested making a cake in the shape of a colouring book and L was very happy with the idea. I then thought it would be a great opportunity to use of the wood grain technique on the cake board as it would be like he was sitting on the floor colouring in.
Now, getting the shape on the day didn’t quite go to plan so I present to you my Wannabe Colouring Book Cake.
Every now and then I come across cakes where the cake board is made to look like floor boards and I have always thought they look amazing. When one of my fellow Australian Cake Decorating Network members posted a photo of their wood grain cake board in the forum a couple of months ago, it was a reminder of how I really wanted to give it a go.
Given my new found love of covering cake boards, I whipped up a batch of marshmallow fondant and attempted my very own, and very large, fondant wood grain cake board.
I believe I have mentioned once or twice my dislike of fondant and the hubby especially hates it. But as it is pretty regularly used in the cake decorating world I need to suck it up and find something that I actually am happy working with and that I actually like eating.
My friend Chuy from Chuy’s Cakes (you may have noticed the link on the right hand side to her blog, but you can also check her out on Facebook – her Farm Cake is one of my favourites) told me ages ago that she makes her own marshmallow fondant so I finally got around to searching the interweb for a recipe to try. You can’t rush these things.
After my mother took some of the Oreo Cookies and Cream Cupcakes into work, one of her colleagues asked if I would be interested in making nineteen of the cupcakes for her daughter’s nineteenth birthday.
When it got closer to the time, A asked if I could arrange the cupcakes in the shape of the number 19. After how pleased I was with how the Golf Course Cupcake Cake, having a go at another pull apart cupcake was something I was more than happy to do and so the 19th Birthday Cupcake Cake was created.