Alyson

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Spice Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing

I recently made cupcakes for our Navidad Nacho Noche — our annual Christmas celebration over a nacho dinner with Betsy and a couple other friends. Betsy’s bf requested non-chocolate cupcakes, and in the spirit of Christmas, I decided a spice cake would be great, topped with – what else? – cream cheese icing.

For the cupcakes, I used the hand mixer to cream together 10 tablespoons of butter and 1 cup of packed brown sugar. I added 3 eggs one at a time and beat well after each one.

In another bowl, I whisked to combine the dry ingredients: 1 3/4 cups of all-purpose flour, 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, 1 1/2 teaspoons of cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon of ginger, 1/4 teaspoon of ground nutmeg, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt.

While mixing with the hand mixer, I alternated adding the dry ingredients and 3/4 cup of sour cream. I filled a dozen paper-lined cupcake pan cups. I added some chopped walnuts to the leftover batter and filled another cupcake pan – about 5 more cupcakes. (Some people in my group don’t like nuts, ahem ahem, Betsy.) If you want nuts in all your cupcakes, I’d suggest 1/4 cup of finely chopped nuts of your choice.

I baked the cupcakes at 350 F for about 15 minutes — the toothpick I inserted came out clean.

I cooled them overnight and frosted them with cream cheese icing the next day.

How Sue Sees It:
– My friends said they really liked these, but I don’t know if they were just being nice. I actually didn’t like them very much. They were not very sweet, and I have something of a sweet tooth. The cream cheese icing was MUCH sweeter than the cupcake, so that made them worthwhile for me. If you like your desserts a little less sweet, you’ll probably like these. Though once I decided I could call them muffins and have them for breakfast, I liked them better.
– The cupcakes with nuts in them looked better than the ones without. They rose a little higher, while the nut-less cupcakes were flat and smooth on top. Weird.

Tags: Christmas, cinnamon, cream cheese icing, Cupcake, ginger, muffin, nutmeg, spice cake

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Categories Christmas & Winter, Desserts, Food
Author Alyson

Double Chocolate Cookies

19 Dec

What’s better than chocolate? More chocolate! A good chocolate cookie is hard to come by, but these are pretty delicious.

I whisked to combine (you know I don’t sift) 1 cup of all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup of cocoa powder, 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. I set that aside and dumped 8 ounces of semisweet chocolate chips and 1 stick of butter into a glass bowl. I melted them in 30-second intervals, stirring in between, until smooth.

I poured the chocolate and butter mixture in a large mixing bowl and added 1 1/2 cups of white sugar, 2 eggs, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla. I beat it with the hand mixer on medium until it was well combined. I switched it down to low speed and slowly mixed in the dry ingredients.

The batter was really runny and difficult to work with, so I put it in the fridge for a little while. I wanted uniform-sized cookies, so instead of spooning them onto the parchment-paper lined cookie sheet, I rolled the dough into balls and placed them about 2 inches apart. (An ice cream scoop would work great — I probably should get one of those.) I did have to bake them in multiple batches, and chill the dough again in between preparing trays.

I baked them for about 15 minutes, rotating halfway through. I pulled them out when they started to crack on top. They looked beautiful arranged in a circle on my red snowman platter, and judging from the number of tiny children who kept grabbing them off the table at the party I took them to, they tasted great too!

How Sue Sees It:
– If I make these again, I would melt only half the chocolate chips. I would leave the other half whole and stir them into the batter at the end to make chocolate-chocolate chip cookies.
– Tip: If you drop the batter when it’s room temperature or warm, the cookies will spread quickly while they bake and be thinner and more crunchy. If you chill or freeze the batter first, it won’t spread as much, and they will be thicker and less crunchy.
– These cookies are nice and flat, so they would be ideal for decorating. Try making a few stencils of holiday shapes and then sprinkling confectioners sugar on the cookie using a fine sieve. It would make for a cute snowman or Christmas tree outline.

Tags: Chocolate, cookie, sweet

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Categories Desserts, Food, Seasonal & Holiday
Author Alyson

NCSU Cake Pops

19 Dec

My brother graduated from NC State this past weekend! We’re very proud of him, so my older sister and I made celebratory cake pops. (For a full recipe, see my original Halloween Cake Pops post.)

We used red velvet cake (from a cake mix) and cream cheese icing (homemade). I thought if I made the icing from scratch, I could reduce the amount of sugar and it wouldn’t be a diabetic shock on a stick. But then we got to talking, and I got distracted, and I just made the icing as usual. No big d — I like them super-sweet, and I’m the baker.

What was kind of a problem though — I was still talking, and did not think about the fact that a batch of homemade icing is much larger than what comes in the can, and I just dumped the entire thing in with the cake. It was a little much. We rolled the balls successfully and set them to chill for 15 or 20 minutes. But when we went to dip them in the candy coating, they kept falling off the stick — too much icing. We had to freeze them first in order to coat them without them completely falling apart. It worked well enough, and it saved the batch, but still not ideal. When I bit into one, the other half fell of the stick, so it was a little messy.

They looked and tasted amazing though! We took the red velvet/cream cheese cake pops and coated some in white chocolate, some in red candy coating, and some in dark chocolate. Once they were set, I painted black NCSU symbols on the red pops, and my sister painted red NCSU symbols on the white pops.

I had to hit the road before they were done, but she kindly finished up all the pops and arranged them in a great presentation! She chopped up a styrofoam block and arranged the chunks in a large, clear bowl. She poked the cake pops in there so it appeared like a large ball coming out of the bowl. To cover up the green styrofoam, she arranged red tissue paper in the bowl. It looked amazing!

How Sue Sees It:
– Everyone loved the cake pops, and the bowl arrangement looked like a fantastically tasty centerpiece on a red, white, and black Wolfpack table.
– Red velvet and cream cheese are always a great combo! Add the icing a little at a time until you achieve the proper consistency. You can always add more later if you need to.
– As much as I’m a Tar Heel born and bred, it was fun to try to figure out how to make a Wolfpack-themed cake pop. We actually tried to make a couple of wolves — Bakerella has a werewolf on her Trick or Treats post — but they looked awful. We gave up on those when my nephew asked me, “What’s that monster!?” If anyone manages to make a convincing wolf on a cake pop, please let me know how it’s done.

Tags: Bakerella, cake, Cake Pops, candy, Chocolate, decorate, graduation, NC State, NCSU, Wolfpack

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Categories Desserts, Food
Author Alyson

Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Icing

18 Dec

I’ve made two carrot cakes with cream cheese icing from scratch by request in the past couple months, and if I don’t make one for my dad soon, he’s going to be sad. Maybe he will get one as a Christmas gift next week. In the meantime, here’s the story:

I set the oven to 350 F, which was a mistake. I was nowhere NEAR to being ready to put the cake in the oven, so the oven just ran for an hour. Electricity suck. Oh well, it kept me warm. ANYWAY…

I greased a bundt pan. I like to bake cakes in bundt pans because it makes for a prettier and fancier presentation without any extra work. Problem is, I didn’t grease it enough, and I probably should have floured it too. I’ll remember that next time. The cake cracked a bit when I took it out. Still looked and tasted great, though.

I first set about grating 2 bunches of carrots. It took quite some time, but was kind of fun. Hold the carrot like a pencil at an angle to the grater and work at it until you get a wide, flat carrot end to work with. Then it’s easy to grate it from there. 2 bunches of carrot turned into almost 4 cups of grated carrots, which is what the recipe called for. I probably could have used a couple extra carrots — they were a little puny, being winter and all — but it was good enough.

I also went ahead and chopped up 1 cup of walnuts. Here’s a little tip for chopping nuts: Instead of making a mess by dumping them on a cutting board and trying to chop them with my horrendous knife skills, I sealed them in a zippered plastic bag and beat the hell out of them with a soup can. It chops up the nuts pretty well and is pretty fun in an anger- and stress-relief sort of way.

I whisked together 2 cups of all-purpose flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, 2 teaspoons of baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon. The recipe said to sift them, but as I’ve said about sifting before, it’s boring and takes too long. Whisking is good enough.

In another bowl, I whisked together 2 cups of white sugar and 4 eggs until it got thick and pale in color.

Then I stirred in 1 cup of vegetable oil and then mixed in the dry ingredients on low a little at a time. I folded in the grated carrots and the chopped nuts. After it was all mixed up, I poured it into the bundt pan and made sure it was spread evenly.

I popped it in the oven for somewhere between 40 and 45 minutes. I took the waiting time to clean the carrot bits off the kitchen floor, and then I took a shower, since I found carrot bits in my hair.

Once a toothpick came out of the cake clean, I pulled the cake out. I flipped it onto my cake carrier pan and let it cool overnight — it was getting late.

The next morning, I whipped up some cream cheese icing and covered the entire cake. I topped it off with some more walnut pieces.

How Sue Sees It:
– Grate the carrots before you turn the oven on. It takes a while. Also, if you’re going to make a carrot cake from scratch, take the time to grate the carrots. Otherwise, just use a box mix. If you try to use pre-shredded carrots, the kind you can buy a bag of, the carrot chunks will be too big.
– If your cake breaks, just put it back together and frost it — no one will notice. When someone goes to cut or move the cake, you can pretend that it cracked in transport, or that they did it. (Hopefully my friend Cathy, the recipient of this cake, isn’t reading this right now.) To avoid this problem, make sure you grease and flour the cake pan really well, even if you’re using a nonstick pan. Better safe than sorry.
– If I plan to frost a cake, I like to go ahead and put the cake on the platter I will serve from, and frost it from there. It’s nearly impossible to move a frosted cake without messing it up.
– It’s a good idea to put something on top of a dish that represents what’s inside it — in this case, the walnuts. It not only gives people a clue of what they’re cutting into, but it also serves as a warning that there are nuts inside — really important when nut allergies are so widespread and can be severe. Similarly, I’ll top a quiche or something like that with a few bacon crumbles so that it’s very obvious it’s not a vegetarian dish.
– This cake is deelish — sweet and very moist. I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you’re counting calories, you can always substitute apple sauce for vegetable oil.

Tags: bundt, carrot cake, cream cheese icing, walnuts

Comments 2 Comments
Categories Desserts, Food
Author Alyson

Cream Cheese Frosting

18 Dec

I think I got my love of cream cheese frosting from my mom. After you make this once, you will put it on everything: carrot cake, red velvet cake, chocolate cake, cookies, anything. It’s that amazing – super easy, quick, and deeelish.

I combined 2 packages of softened cream cheese and 1 stick of softened butter (1/2 cup), and I blended them with the hand mixer till it got creamy. Then I mixed in 1 teaspoon of vanilla and then gradually stirred in 2 cups of sifted confectioner’s sugar.

Here’s a little trick though: I actually don’t worry about sifting the sugar. It takes a long time, and I get bored easily. Instead I just dump it right in the bowl and blend it with the hand mixer for a little bit longer. The extra blending makes sure there’s no sugar lumps, but also I actually prefer it that way because it gives it a slightly lighter, whipped texture instead of so heavy and creamy.

What’s the best thing you’ve put cream cheese frosting on? I’d have to go with my carrot cake. Yum!

Tags: basic, butter, cream cheese, easy, icing

Comments 9 Comments
Categories Desserts, Food
Author Alyson

Snowflake Cookies

16 Dec

It has been unusually cold in North Carolina, with temperatures in the 30s and snowfall in early December! Very strange, but also a perfect setting for these gorgeous snowflake sugar cookies.

Of course, after my notorious Cookie Fail, I relied heavily on Betsy’s cookie expertise for this batch of cookies. We started with a basic sugar cookie recipe.

After a lot of practice, we got in a good rhythm: Betsy is good at rolling and cutting, and I’m good peeling and placing on the pan. I usually am not big on purchasing specific kitchen tools that do fancy things because I think most baking can be accomplished with basic kitchen items, but I will say that the large spreader from Pampered Chef came in handy. It’s designed to be used to spread icing on large cakes, but it worked really well to slide delicate snowflake shapes off the counter top and get them to the baking pan. Just flour it a little and it works like a charm.

After baking and cooling about 6 dozen cookies (yes, it took forever), I set about with decorating (which took another forever).

We whipped up a batch of royal icing and added some whitening cream to make it extra-white, instead of kind of a dull, unappealing cream color. Betsy loaded it into an icing bag with a tiny tip for me, and I got to work. Royal icing hardens into a solid layer when it comes in contact with air. It takes a few hours for it to harden completely, but it gets difficult to spread evenly within minutes. So working relatively quickly, I did one cookie at a time. To make sure I got a neat overall cover, I first traced the snowflake outline and then filled it in. I held it still with a wooden skewer so I could move a little more quickly. Then, using a pair of tweezers, I added light blue sugar pearls. Play around with different patterns and get creative — it’s fun!

I made two different patterns with the white icing. Then we made another batch of royal icing and colored it with light blue dye and a little bit of whitening to lighten it to the right shade. I decorated another 2 dozen cookies with the same patterns as the white cookies, but with light blue icing and white sugar pearls.

While I worked on those, Betsy decorated the rest of the cookies with sugar sprinkles. For a dozen cookies, she used a paintbrush to coat each cookie with a layer of piping gel, which only looks disgusting. Then she poured silver pearlized sugar on top, and that’s it! Quite simple.

For another dozen cookies, we wanted them to be blue, but the blue pearlized sugar was way to bold next to the light blue royal icing. So Betsy mixed a little blue food coloring into the piping gel and then decorated it the same way — paint it on the cookie and then cover with silver sprinkles. It gave a very pale blue shine, almost like glass, underneath the silver sprinkles. Very subtle and beautiful!

After the white cookies hardened completely, Betsy used a large paintbrush (you could also use a blush brush or kabuki makeup brush) to dust on some silver pearl dust. It’s like using glitter makeup with a slight sparkle to it — it’s barely noticeable but adds a nice little sparkling sheen to the cookie.

So this was a relatively short post compared to the others, but don’t think this is a relatively short process. Cutting cookies takes longer than filling a bunch of cake or cupcake tins, and decorating cookies like this — especially with a complicated cookie shape — takes a long time. All in all, this took us about 6 or 7 hours. And that doesn’t count the packaging and presentation time.

When I got home, I loaded 6 cookies — one of each decoration type — into clear plastic bags I picked up at Michael’s, twisted the top closed, secured it with tape, and tied it with a blue ribbon. They made adorable gift bags!

Tags: Christmas, cookie, decorate, royal icing, snowflake, sugar cookie, winter

Comments 2 Comments
Categories Christmas & Winter, Desserts, Food
Author Alyson

My Dad’s Surprise 50th Birthday Party

30 Nov

I didn’t do much baking over Thanksgiving – I ended up being a little busy with work – so in lieu of fresh baking projects, I thought I’d give a little more detail about the surprise party we threw for my Dad earlier this month. My mom, older sister Nikki, and I sent about a trillion e-mails back and forth to organize the whole thing, all while keeping everything under the radar. And we enlisted help from dozens of friends and family members – including Betsy – for prep, food, set-up, and clean-up.

First up: invitations. We invited all our extended family and some old long-lost friends of his and my mom. Work was another issue — I did some digging on my dad’s LinkedIn account, found a name I recognized as a co-worker, and contacted her. I asked her to take charge of inviting his work buddies since I don’t know them, and voila — problem solved. Mom found the most adorable old photo of Dad as a kid, and Nikki created an invitation on Shutterfly.

Next we worried about decorations. Mom booked the Page-Walker House in downtown Cary. It was a great venue — we got the 3rd floor to ourselves, which consisted of a big, open room, a small prep room, and a bathroom. The party room held about 40 people comfortably, which was perfect for us. Mom wanted light blue (my dad went to UNC and is a Tar Heel born and bred) and I wanted fall colors, so we went with light blue, burnt orange, and chocolate brown. It made a great combination. Mom rented a few tall cocktail tables, which Nikki topped with plain white tablecloths tied at the bottom with alternating blue, orange, and brown wide ribbon. We set each table with these awesome $3 candle lanterns we found at Ikea and a few orangey-red fake fall leaves. And we floated a few blue, orange, and brown helium-filled balloons randomly around the room.

Nikki also made great candles for the windows by decorating plain glass votives with an orangey-red fake fall leaf and wrapping it in twine, though her 3-year-old spent all night blowing them out.

The only other decorations were a couple fall flower bouquets (gerber daisies and roses) arranged in short, square vases and nestled among the food platters.

I also made a gift table to collect gifts and host a book for guests to sign. An old friend just happened to give him a corkboard decorated with pictures and mementos from Dad’s youth, so added to the table at the last minute, it made a great backdrop. The guest book, a sign, a couple of the extra leaf votives, and a few bowls of personalized M&Ms (light blue and orange, some with balloons printed on them and some that said “Happy 50th!”) were all that was needed to decorate the table since the gifts really filled it up. And after the party, I scanned images of people’s notes in the guest book and combined them with pictures in the party to make a hardcover book on Shutterfly – a great memento to give to my dad, without the time-suck of making a scrapbook.

So now for the best part: the menu! The biggest concern in planning the menu was the fact that we didn’t have a kitchen. The prep room had a sink and a table, and that was it. So we planned mostly foods that didn’t need to be cooked on-the-spot or kept hot. We did bring in a toaster oven just in case something needed to be heated up, and Mom rented 2 of those server trays with the heat things under them – I can’t remember what they’re called.

Food:
– Chilled shrimp with cocktail sauce
– Party meatballs
– Stuffed mushrooms
– Mom’s spinach dip and chips
– Cheese and crackers
– Bruschetta
– Mini Party Quiches
– Chick-fil-A nugget tray
– Sausage balls
– Deli spirals

Yum! The only issue was that we forgot to light the heat sources under the serving trays, so the mushrooms were not quite as hot as would have been preferred, but everything was still delicious. Note: Those things need to be lit like an hour in advance. Whoops!

For drinks, Mom got 2 huge galvanized tubs and filled one with soda and water and the other with beer. Nikki had also picked up a few bottles of 3-buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s, so with soda, beer, and wine, everyone was happy. Also, a super cute idea: before the party, Mom and Nikki set our family visitors to work decorating plain wine glasses with scrapbooking stickers and rub-ons, so each glass was festive and personalized.

And of course — dessert! We ordered cupcakes from The Cupcake Bar, a company that makes and delivers gourmet cupcakes inspired by cocktails and drinks. Nikki borrowed a friend’s cupcake tower and we had a beautiful display of apple cider, pina colada, and margarita cupcakes. I also baked a Blueberry Cobbler, since fruit desserts are my dad’s favorite.

And once I dragged our old stereo system into the venue and hooked my iPod up to it, there you go — a complete surprise 50th birthday party. The party was beautiful, the food was delicious, and the people were fun. We all had a great time. I had to remind a few people that meeting them when I was 5 years old means I don’t know them and they should tell me who they are before they hug me and ask how my life is, but even that was rather pleasant.

Oh, and the surprise… well, it was half a surprise. Dad expected something was up – there were suddenly tons of relatives in town, after all – but he didn’t know what. He thought we would just have dinner at the house or something. Mom told him that’s exactly what was happening, and told him he needed to get out of the house for a little while to let them set up dinner and “pretend to go along with the surprise.” So she suggested they visit a wine tasting at the Page-Walker House together for an hour or so, then head back home for the party. He was a little surprised when the party was there instead of a wine tasting, and even more surprised to see his work buddies and some long-lost friends waiting for him.

How Sue Sees It:
I don’t think I would change anything about this party. It was a lot of fun, and it mostly went off without a hitch. Even the small things – one food item didn’t cook quite correctly and the burners weren’t lit on time — just didn’t really matter much. A few tips, if you’re throwing a party:
– Always prioritize on the food. That’s what people care about. And, it’s always better to have too much than too little.
– If you can’t find everyone’s mailing address, don’t worry about contacting a few people via phone or e-mail. If you really want to, you can always offer to send them an official invitation in the mail after contacting them.
– Make sure you have enough help. We were not stressed out at all with set-up because we had tons of helpers, including young sisters and cousins to help out with arranging glasses, running for ice, and taking out trash.
– If you have to, triage. Betsy and I were originally planning on making the Mini Party Quiches AND cheese straws. When we realized the quiches would take way longer than expected, we just went with it and axed the cheese straws — we had enough food anyway.
– Happy party planning!

Tags: 50, birthday, buffet, candles, Carolina blue, cupcakes, dad, decorations, father, invitations, orange, party, party planning, scrapbook

Comments 1 Comment
Categories Party Planning
Author Alyson

Cookie Fail

23 Nov

Last week, I had the brilliant idea to make fall-themed cookies to take to a work party so people could decorate them as a fun fall craft. I had the office party planner purchase sprinkles and different colors of gel icing. And the night before, when I got home from a late evening at work and remembered at 9:30pm that I was supposed to bake a couple dozen cookies, I went ahead with my cookie plan anyway.

Since I was in a rush, I went with prepared sugar cookie dough. Maybe this was in itself the entire problem with this plan, but I’m not sure. I rolled out the cookie dough using Betsy’s borrowed rolling pin and got it nice and thin. I had adorable leaf, turkey, and acorn cookie cutters. I tried to cut the dough and move them to a pan, but they were wayyy too mushy. I eventually got frustrated and threw some flour around in an attempt to make the dough more workable. This only resulted in mushy dough and flour everywhere. I managed to get a few cookies transferred to the pan.

This is supposed to be a turkey:

This is supposed to be a leaf:

The acorn actually came out looking half decent:

I grew frustrated enough with the results by 10:45pm — only minutes until my bedtime and I was still in the kitchen — that I gave up with the cookie cutters, rolled the dough back into a log, and sliced it into round cookies. I was worried that the batch with all the extra flour in it would no longer be sweet enough, so after I put them on the pan, I pressed a few orange M&Ms into each of them.

For all my trouble, I ended up with a few misshapen fall cookies and a couple dozen nice-looking, thin, crispy, delicious sugar cookies. A few people enjoyed decorating them at the party, even though they were round.

How Sue Sees It:

If I may say so myself, I am fantastic with dessert — cakes, cupcakes, pies, cobblers, anything chocolate-covered. However… I SUCK AT COOKIES. I have a few more cookie plans coming up with the winter holidays, and I will most definitely be waiting until Betsy has some free time. The lady is a whiz at cookies.
Give people some sugar cookies and icing, and they will be happy. So… cookie kind-of-fail.

Tags: acorn, cookie cut-outs, cookie cutters, leaf, sugar cookie, Thanksgiving, turkey

Comments 4 Comments
Categories Desserts, Food
Author Alyson

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