baking on the brain

This Hallowe’en, inspired by this post on She Knows, I decided to make little edible brains.  I followed the original concept pretty closely – white chocolate brains filled with cake balls and a red glaze, changing up the cherry jam for a home-made raspberry coulis, and dying my cake grey for truly grey “grey matter.”

Grey cake:

 

Er, I left some frozen raspberries to thaw overnight to make the coulis, and woke up to find what looked like a massacre.  Kind of fitting for bloody brain construction:

Brains:

Blood:

Final products – the damaged ones were even better. This was my kind of project.

Other Hallowe’en sweet treats included owl cookies:

 

Stencilled cake:

Ghost meringues:

 

Sugar cookies:

 

Yes, Chef.

You know what's awesome?  Adulthood best friends. 

Exhibit A, speaks for itself:

Exhibit B:
Michelle Williams brought BFF Busy Philipps as her date to most of the red carpet events during the 2012 awards season.  Ah-maz-ing.

I just learned that Philipps is a crazy-good baker. Observe:

I'm pretty sure that when Busy Philipps and Michelle Williams hang out, Busy bakes, and Michelle assists - this is a set-up I enjoyed for the last two years while my BFF lived in the same city as me, playing sous chef (she may have also had another job or something.... BORING).  She just moved back to the other side of the country, leaving me to wonder who will help me glue eyes onto cookies or traipse across the province, picking up random baking supplies for me.

The first big project I took on was to make the cupcakes for my friend Erin’s surprise 30^th birthday part.  The plan was to make a giant cupcake-cake, with coordinating cupcakes.  Everything was supposed to be blue and silver, including the happy birthday message I was going to cut out of fondant and paint silver with luster dust……..but the night before the party I discovered that my alphabet fondant cutters were MIA and Rushika bussed across town to pick up a second set for me, helped me decorate, and then drive me into rural Quebec, while I cradled the cupcakes on my lap:

 With unbelievable patience, over the past two years she helped turn this:

Into this:

Seriously.  She worked hard.

She set up this year's Palentine's display while I was madly finishing cooking

She had nothing but good things to say about her misshapen birthday cake, which looked an awful lot like another caketastrophy of mine.

Also, an excellent taste-tester:

It was fitting that on her last days in town, we made cupcakes one last time - devil's food with buttercream.

My kitchen seems a little less sweet these days without my favourite sous chef here to help....

No tricks, just really, really tasty.

It was my friend Noeleen's birthday yesterday, and she loves angel food cake, so I made this for her:

It may not be anything too pretty to look at, and it certainly doesn't resemble a cute woodland critter, or involve some fun word play.  It's just angel food cake (recipe courtesy of M-Stew), raspberry coulis (my mom's recipe), lemon curd (via Baking Bites), and whipped cream, aka THE GREATEST COMBINATION EVER.  Once again my kitchenaid stand mixer has earned its keep, allowing me to lounge on the couch, while it whipped the egg whites into the frothy basis of this cake. This cake makes me wish Noeleen had a birthday once a month. Make this for someone you love ASAP.

Luck of the Owls

Just before Valentine's Day I saw this owl  sweet treat project from Sugar Swings:

However, the owl body was made from a heart-shaped York Peppermint patty, and I figured like many amazing things (caffeinated Crystal Light, Hulu, the Nordic Ware factory warehouse, endless supplies of cheap dutch-pressed cocoa, etc., etc.), it would only be available stateside.  BUT!  I had forgotten the wonder of Shopper Drug Mart, which was selling bags of the patties at a serious discount after Valentine's Day.

Obviously, I bought a few bags, but since Valentine's day had passed, I needed to come up with a new project and given the time of year, St Patrick's Day owls seemed like the obvious choice. Like Sugar Swings, I used M&Ms for the eyes, with the pupils drawn on in edible ink.  Candy-covered chocolates served as the beaks.  And instead of tootsie rolls covered in fondant for the wings, I used yellow candy melts (leftover from the claws of the recent owl cupcake project....) to free-hand draw wings, which I then painted gold with some mint extract and gold luster dust. 

 
Rushika came to help with the assembly line, and we attached all the pieces together with some melted mint-chocolate, and voila: pepperminty cuteness.

Owl Things Considered

Last month I saw these cupcakes from Sweet Custom Treats:

I knew I wanted to make something similar, but I wasn't totally into the idea of pretzels on my cupcake, so  decided that some Ovation Mint Chocolate Sticks would be the perfect replacement.  you probably have had these chocolates before - restaurants used to give them out with the bill?  They look like this:

Tragically, it would appear that these are a "seasonal item" as I went to about 15 different stores looking for them and no one was selling them. I posted on Facebook, seeking help - lots of good suggestions, but none of the leads produced anything. I even went to stores that I figured would have leftover Christmas stock they hadn't gotten rid of (hello, dollar store!), but, NO DICE.  I was ready to give up, when my mom produced some non-Ovation brand version of the sticks bought at various specialty stores across the province:

So. armed with my mint chocolate sticks, I made some Devil's Food Cupcakes and rushika and I got to work.

First, we constructed eyes out of Hershey's Cookies & Cream Drops and some melted chocolate:

Then we iced the cupcakes with a simple chocolate buttercream icing, adding the eyes and chocolate mint "branch,"  as well a  beak - candy previously used for the carrot noses of melted snowmen cookies.

We melted a few yellow candy melts and drew on talons using a #3 icing tip.  GORGEOUS.