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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:"Turkey" Cookie

This is supposed to be a leaf: "Leaf" Cookie

The acorn actually came out looking half decent:"Acorn" Cookie

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.

Fall Cookies... More like Fail Cookies

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.

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Simple Blueberry Cobbler

21 Nov

For my Dad’s surprise 50th birthday party, we threw together a super-easy blueberry cobbler. We actually ordered 30 gourmet cupcakes for the birthday bash, but fruity baked desserts are my dad’s favorite, and as my family knows and won’t ever let me forget, I’m a Daddy’s girl. So blueberry cobbler was added to the menu.

I dumped 3 cups of fresh blueberries, 3 tablespoons of sugar, and 1/3 cup of orange juice in a 9″x9″ baking pan and mixed it all together. While I mixed up the insides, Betsy mixed up the dough. First she mixed up the dry ingredients in a small bowl: 2/3 cup all-purpose flour, 1/4 teaspoon baking powder, and a pinch of salt. She set that aside. She put 1/2 cup of softened butter and 1/2 cup of sugar in a large bowl and beat it with the hand mixer till it was kind of fluffy. The dough was pretty thick. Then she beat in an egg and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract. Okay, probably more like a teaspoon — a little extra vanilla is always a good thing. Then she gradually added in the flour mixture until it was just combined.

Blueberries + Dough = Blueberry Cobbler

Now that the dough was ready, she just dropped it on globs on top of the blueberry mixture. We tried to spread it out a bit so that it covered most of the blueberry mixture, but we didn’t want it to be spread out in a complete layer over top of it. It’s supposed to be a little lumpy.

Dropping DoughFinishing the dough

Then we baked it for 35-40 minutes. The topping turned a nice golden brown and the filling was a little bubbly. Unfortunately, I don’t have a final product picture! We were a little busy making the Mini Party Quiches and we forgot to photograph our beautiful Blueberry Cobbler! But according to my dad, it was really good.

How Sue Sees It:
This is a super easy and delicious dessert to whip up. It does bake for a while, but the prep is pretty simple, so wow your next dinner guests with a classic blueberry cobbler. Be sure to have some vanilla ice cream on hand to serve with it!

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Mini Party Quiches

20 Nov

Can you tell we like things mini? Mini things are so cute!

Last weekend my family and I threw a surprise party for my Dad’s 50th birthday. Once I got my baking assignments, I called Betsy, and we got together that morning to put together a couple dishes. We made a simple blueberry cobbler, but the mini quiches were the highlight, and we made a TON of them. Quadrupling the recipe may have been a little overboard — there were plenty leftover — but we wanted to be prepared. We made two different varieties: a bacon cheddar quiche and a spinach, tomato, and swiss quiche. Deelish!

We began by mixing up the fillings and setting them aside.

  • For the bacon cheddar: Betsy cooked up 10 slices of bacon, let them cool, and then crumbled them up. I mixed 1 8-oz block softened cream cheese, 4 T milk, 4 eggs, and 2 T dried garlic flakes into a large bowl, and beat it with an electric mixer on low until it got relatively smooth. I stirred in 2 cups grated extra sharp cheddar cheese and set the bowl aside. The bowl of cheese mush looked pretty disgusting, especially sitting next to a plate of bacon bits.
    Milk, eggs, and cheese... yum!Gross Cheese Mixture
  • For the SpinTomSwiss: I chopped up 1 1/2 hot house tomatoes and a couple handfuls of spinach and set them aside. Then I mixed 2 8-oz blocks softened cream cheese, 2 T milk, 4 eggs, and 2 T oregano into a large bowl, and beat it with an electric mixer on low until it got relatively smooth. I stirred in 1 cup grated swiss cheese and set the bowl aside. This one looked disgusting too.

Now for the tricky part. We greased some mini muffin pans and set them out. I un-popped a tin of crescent rolls, spread them on the counter, and mushed the scoring lines back together so it would be one big square instead of divided into the triangles. Betsy used a circle cookie cutter and cut round pieces of dough that I shaped into the mini muffin pan.Cutting DoughWord to the wise: Leave the dough in the fridge as long as possible before you take it out, and work quickly with the dough once you open the tin. The dough seizes up really quickly. We tried to roll out the leftover dough and cut it again, and it was REALLY hard. The dough becomes really elastic, so when we tried to spread it into the muffin tin, it just shrunk back up on itself. If you have an extra couple dollars to spend, I recommend just buying a couple extra tins of crescent rolls and tossing the old dough. We re-used a little bit of the dough, then got frustrated and threw it out. So in the end, it took about 3 tins of crescent rolls to make the base for 48 mini quiches.

Dough Cups
So once we lined all the muffin tins with dough, I filled them up.

  • Bacon Cheddar:  Sprinkle bacon in the bottom of each quiche cup. Fill each cup with about 1 tsp of the cheddar mixture. Sprinkle a couple more pieces of bacon on top. (This just makes it easier to identify what it is, which is nice visually, but also is important if you have any vegetarians in your crowd.)
    Mmm... bacon cupsBubbling Bacon Cheddar Quiches
  • SpinTomSwiss: Sprinkle tomato and spinach pieces in the bottom of each quiche cup. Fill each cup with about 1 tsp of the swiss mixture.
    Spinach and Tomato CupsBubbling Spinach Tomato & Swiss Quiches

Bake on 375 F for 10-12 minutes. The bread edges of the quiche will start to turn a golden brown, and the tops might get a little bubbly.
Golden Brown Edges

They’re so cute! The bacon cheddar is a nice golden yellow color, and the SpinTomSwiss is more of a white color.

Mini Party Quiches!

How Sue Sees It:

  • The most difficult part of this is definitely working with the dough. If you want them to look nice, like if you’re serving them at a party, then don’t worry about re-using the dough. Just buy extra, toss the leftover dough, and don’t worry about it. But if you care more about taste than looks, just cram the dough down there however you can. Even if the dough kind of sits on the bottom and doesn’t make a cup, the dough will still rise and the egg mixture will stiffen enough that it will still hold a firm muffin shape.
  • And don’t worry too much about over-filling the cups either, unless you’re going for a nice uniform look. It will still hold a muffin shape.
  • Take some time to experiment with your own flavors! The original recipe I found called for bacon and swiss, and I just modified the recipe a bit more to our crowd’s tastes. As long as you preserve the basic egg and dairy components, you can add or substitute pretty much whatever else you want in there.

Betsy & Susie

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Guest Post: Mini Mocha Cupcakes with Chocolate Glaze

3 Nov

Today’s post comes from my BFF Lauren, a.k.a. Betsy Bundt. She’s a whiz in the kitchen, and she loves a challenge. so she’s going to show you how she made these amazing mini mocha cupcakes. 

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While Susie continued to work on the Halloween Cake Pops, my half of the mess was Mini Mocha Cupcakes with Chocolate Glaze. It came from a Martha Stewart recipe I found online. The main cake recipe included a recipe for a coffee syrup, chocolate mousse, and chocolate glaze. Honestly, I didn’t use half the recipes, but instead took inspiration from them. I used a moist devil’s food cake mix because, let’s be honest, they are just as good as baking from scratch. I am of the opinion if you’re going to make something from scratch, like the mousse and glaze for this recipe, then you can cheat in other areas and it’s still practically homemade.

So I started with the cake mix, added the required eggs and liquids, poured into mini cupcake pans (yes, with an ice cream scoop), and popped them in the oven. While they were baking, I worked on the glaze, which was just a thin ganache (and by thin, I mean a thinner consistency than I would use for truffles) and the mousse. 

I was lazy and didn’t want to make the coffee syrup, plus in my experience, it can make the cake soggy, especially if you want them to last for a couple days. So you ask, “But Betsy, the syrup is where the coffee flavor comes from. Did you just make everything chocolate flavored?” No, I adjusted where the flavors came from slightly. I nixed the syrup and instead made the mousse mocha flavored. I added a packet of Starbucks Via instant coffee in extra bold Italian Roast. I added the powder to the cream before I whipped it, allowing it to dissolve as I was whipping. As the recipe continues, I added the melted chocolate and Voila: mocha mousse. It has a pretty strong coffee flavor, but the sweetness of the chocolate makes it really smooth. I popped that in the fridge to firm up a little and moved on to the glaze.

I followed the recipe which was for 92 mini cupcakes and I had about 48 or so because I was thinking, “Hey, you can never have too much ganache.” After the ganache was smooth, I set that aside to let it cool (I let it get close to room temperature).

Meanwhile the cupcakes were done baking and removed from the pans to cool.

After the cupcakes were cool, I cut the tops off to fill with mousse and dip in the glaze. I put the mousse in a pastry bag to easily fill each center. I filled with one hand and dipped the top with the other and assembled.

And the final product. Delicious and rich. I didn’t have any problem feeding them to people. Susie took some to a family function and I took some to work where they disappeared pretty quickly. I even got a compliment that I could take on a local bakery any day with this cupcake. Not too shabby.

Betsy Breaks It Down:

  • This was pretty time consuming, so make sure you have plenty of time when you begin this endeavor.
  • WAY WAY WAY TOO MUCH GANACHE. Even if I did have 92 cupcakes, it STILL would have been too much. Halve or quarter the recipe.
  • If you don’t like a strong coffee flavor, I would recommend a weaker instant coffee. The Italian Roast is really strong.
  • It’s ok to cheat on recipes and adjust for you. I used to have a compulsive need to follow the recipes, but I have loosened up my cooking style and try to experiment more.

Happy Baking!
BB

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Halloween Cake Pops

28 Oct

Last weekend we had two major baking projects going on at the same time, both of which were pretty messy. The kitchen was even more of a disaster than usual, and that’s saying something. While Betsy took the lead on Mini Mocha Cupcakes with Chocolate Glaze, I led the charge on these Halloween Cake Pops.

A word about the cake pops. This was our attempt to replicate Bakerella’s famous cake balls on a stick, and as the BF had a pumpkin carving party coming up at his work,  I decided to make pumpkins for him. The project took forever – upwards of 4 hours – but they were a HUGE hit. They disappeared so fast, people arriving late at the party were fresh out of luck. So if you have a whole day looking for something to do, try this. But if you need something for your kid’s class party tomorrow morning, just bake some cookies. As always, the recipe below is how we made them, which is not necessarily what the original recipe recommends.

Supplies:

  • baking stuff
  • 5″ lollipop sticks
  • orange (vanilla-flavored) candy melts
  • styrofoam
  • black gel food coloring
  • tiny paintbrush

The Process

First, we baked a cake. We used a prepared mix of extra moist devil’s food cake and baked according to package directions. (Trust us, this process is complicated enough, you will thank yourself for using a mix. There’s no need for scratch-made here.) Then we crumbled up the cake into a big mixing bowl (though a cookie sheet may have been better) and stuffed it in the fridge to help it cool faster. Once it was completely cooled, we mixed in about 3/4 of a can of buttercream icing. I may or may not have eaten the rest of the can after Betsy left.

Baking a Chocolate CakeAfter we got our hands in there and got the cake/icing mixture to a nice smooth consistency, we rolled the mixture into balls and placed them on wax-covered cookie sheets. Then I melted just a few orange candy melts (we bought them at A.C. Moore) and dipped the tip of the lollipop sticks (also A.C. Moore) in the orange candy, then speared the cake balls about 3/4 of the way through the ball. Bakerella recommends this little process of candy coating before spearing so that the stick stays put in the cake ball. The speared cake balls went in the fridge to firm up.

Spearing the balls with lollipop sticks

A few hours later, after driving to my sister’s for family dinner, I returned to finish the cake pops. I melted the rest of the orange candy melts and rolled each cake ball until they were completely coated. I thought it was easier to use the back of a spoon to make sure everything was covered instead of trying to actually roll them. If I got a little too much, a few soft taps on the side of the bowl got all the drips off. Then I added a chocolate sprinkle on top for a stem and stuck the pops into styrofoam to let them firm up. The orange candy hardens quickly enough that when the last pop was rolled, I could start painting the first pop.

Coating the cake pops with melted orange candy

I took the jar of Wilton’s black gel food coloring and put a bit into a small bowl. It turns out that black food coloring turns your fingers purple for a couple days and stains jeans, so I would suggest being careful here. I added a tiny splash of vodka until I achieved a good consistency. Then I dipped my paintbrush in and got to work. Vodka?! What?! Yep — this was Betsy’s idea, and it worked out fantastically. You need liquid to make the ink smooth enough to paint with, but water makes it runny. The vodka achieves the right consistency, and as it dries, the alcohol completely evaporates away, leaving the thick paint-like ink behind. Cool, huh?

Making jack-o-lanterns!

Ta-da! They’re done!

Spooky!Pumpkin Patch

How Sue Sees It:

  • Estimating for supplies was difficult. Of course batches will vary, but here’s some numbers that might help if you try to make some cake pops: The cake/icing mixture made 53 balls. One bag of orange candy melts covered 39 balls. I had to use chocolate – which I always keep on hand – to cover the rest. And I greatly underestimated the need for styrofoam. I used a 12″ by 9″ piece of greenHalloween Cake Balls styrofoam to make my pumpkin patch, and rested it on top of a cookie sheet. Spaced about 2″ apart, I only fit 24 pops. Because I was rushing to have them the next day, I didn’t go out for more supplies. Instead, I took the leftover orange and chocolate pops, let them harden, and then served them on a tray in paper mini muffin cups.Colanders come in handy!
  • And without styrofoam, I didn’t have anywhere to let them dry, so I turned a colander upside down and stuck the sticks through the biggest holes.
  • They are soooo delicious and soooo rich! Because the cake is rolled down into balls, it’s very dense. Pace yourself — it’s very easy to eat a few quickly and then regret it. One cake pop is like a whole slice of cake.

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