Elfavated

Last year my aunt and I decorated some kind of awesome elf cookies for Christmas:

They were kind of fantastic.  But this year's elves were on a whole other level:

 

Bake Your Feelings

Baking is a great way for managing a whole bunch of different emotions.

Today I give you two.

1) Guilt.  Here are the cookies and truffles I was guilted into producing for a fund-raising at bake sale at work.  Note: If you don't want to participate in work bake sales, it isn't advisable to post photos of your baked goods on your cubicle wall.

2) Love.  My friends had a baby. She is awesome.  She is, in fact, cute as a button, and her parents were deserving of some cookies to celebrate.

Eat More Cake

By far the most popular thing I have ever produced are Love and Olive Oil's chocolate chip cookie dough truffles.  Co-workers referred to them as crack.  They completely disappeared from S&D's wedding dessert buffet.  So, when they put out a cookbook, I was all over it.  One of the first things I tried were their cookie dough stuffed cupcakes with cookie dough icing - seriously, there is cookie dough beaten into the buttercream.  It was a good thing the recipe only made 12.

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.