World's Best Peanut Butter Cookies

 

 

My husband is a cookie fiend and his very favorite are peanut butter.  I think we've all made the packet mixes and they're not bad if you want some cookies quickly, but I've been searching for a while now for a really good, 'from scratch', peanut butter cookie recipe. 

 

I finally found my starting point:  http://www.cooks.com/recipe/587yl4e0/the-worlds-best-peanut-butter-cookies.html   Thank you "William III"!

 

 

I took this recipe and played with it & played with it and came up with my own rendition:

 

Ingredients:

1 stick butter

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 egg

3/4 cup Jiff Creamy Peanut Butter

1 1/4 cup flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 - 10oz bag Reese's Peanut Butter chips

Additional 1/3-1/2 cup granulated sugar (for rolling)

 

Method:

Cream the butter, sugars and peanut butter together. Add the eggs (one at a time) and the vanilla and mix well.  Sift the flour and baking soda together and slowly add to the creamy mixture.  Once the dry ingredients are incorporated add in half the bag of peanut butter chips.

 

Roll into 1 inch balls and then slightly flatten the balls into thick disk shapes.  Roll the disks in the additional granulated sugar (top, bottom & sides) and place on cookie sheets about an inch apart.

 

Bake at 350 for 10 1/2 minutes.  This size and cook time will give you 3 Dozen nice, chewy cookies.  If you like your cookies crispier, you'll want to cook them for 11-12 minutes and this recipe can easily be doubled for events or sharing!

 

 

 

 

These are now my husband's favorite cookies and he's quite the Peanut Butter cookie connoisseur!

 

 

Enjoy!!

 

 

 



 



Ginger's "Popstar" cake

My daughter is a "Barbie Princess and the Popstar" nut! 

For her 6th birthday I created this cake to go with her 'Popstar' party.

 

I got some ideas online and altered my version of the cake to go with the "Barbie Princess and the Popstar" colors.  One of the things I found online that I liked was the idea of draping the cake stand with fake jewels.  Easy & super cute! I didn't even have to purchase anything for it.. just used one of my daughter's play necklaces and it really dressed up the cake stand.

 

We went with chocolate on chocolate ... every 5/6 year old's favorite... right?!

 

 

Once the cakes cooled I did a buttercream crumb coat.

 

 

My new favorite recipe is marshmallow fondant!  It's easy to make, easy to work with and it actually tastes good!  I've never tried a fondant I liked before making this one and now I'll never go back! Some marshmallows, a couple of tablespoons of water in the microwave, add some powdered sugar and you've got a yummy fondant!

 

 

Being the amateur baker that I am... I've found the easiest way to cover imperfections in the edge/base of your cake is adding a cute border (small balls, ribbon/bows, etc...).

 

I cut a six out of pink fondant and used a star shaped cookie cutter to make the stars for the bottom tier.  I wanted to incorporate Barbie into the cake but didn't feel confident in creating something out of fondant or buttercream so I printed out a color picture of Barbie and her 'Popstar' friend and used it as the cake topper.

 

 

The finishing touches were some music notes and "Ginger" written using black frosting. 

 

 

And here is my little Popstar about to turn six years old!!

Happy 6th Birthday Gigi!!

 

 

 

 

 

Woodinville Falcons Football Cake

Well, it's that time of year again... time for football season to end.  = (

I volunteered to make the cake for my son's "end of season football party" and ended up with the cake pictured above.  I did a quarter sheet chocolate cake on the bottom with buttercream icing.  Blue on the side, green 'grass' on the top using Wilton tip# 233, and a white shell border (blue, green and white are Woodinville colors). For the football, I used the Wilton football cake pan, did a vanilla cake, and covered it with marshmallow fondant.  White fondant for the laces and a green fondant "W" (for Woodinville) which I outlined with white buttercream icing. 

I was happy with the result, but the best part was watching the team of twenty-one 10-13 year old boys huddle around the cake with their phones taking pictures.  That was a great compliment!  Until next year...

GO FALCONS!!

Seattle Seahawks inspired birthday cake

My friend Stacy decided to throw her boyfriend a surprise 40th Birthday party! He's very Seattle oriented and very into the Seahawks so we scoured the Internet for ideas and came up with this:

I started out with three 8-inch chocolate cakes for the base and two 6 inch chocolate cakes for the 2nd tier. Next I did a buttercream crumb coat to get it ready to cover with the fondant.

I ran into a small issue with the fondant on the bottom tier that I didn't notice until after the fact.  It seemed you could see the shape of the layers/filling under the fondant.  After some thought I think I rolled the fondant too thin for that layer.  The last cake I made I barely had enough fondant to cover so I think I was overcompensating a little and in an effort to make sure the fondant would cover the cake I think I got it a little thin.  I noticed that I didn't have this issue with the top tier (it was rolled a little thicker) so I'll need to be more careful next time.

We did dark blue & neon green stripes on the bottom tier (Seahawks colors of course).

Then for the top tier I did "Happy Birthday Donti" out of fondant.  I used an exacto knife to cut out the letters.... much harder to do that than I was expecting.



Then on the sides & back of the top tier I did blue & green footballs.

I also did a blue fondant "4" and a green fondant "0" for the top of the cake, but they weren't hardened enough to put in the cake before Stacy picked it up (plus I wouldn't have wanted her to travel with them in the cake anyway... better to stick those in at the last minute).  So at this point the cake is travel ready... hopefully she's able to use the "40" cake topper pieces.  If so (and there's a picture) I will post that later.

So... lessons for this time around:

• Fondant pieces:  Yes, they can really take a LONG time to harden.  If you want them hardened in time for your event... make them a few days in advance or use an additive like gum paste in your fondant (I've heard it makes the fondant harden much more quickly
• Covering your cake:  Although it's important to have enough fondant to cover your cake... it's also important to roll it thick enough to be a really nice/smooth surface.. watch your thickness!!

So, hopefully next time the cake will turn out even better!!

And P.S. ..... Happy 40th Birthday Donti !!

Parisian themed Eiffel Tower cake!

When my good friend asked me to make the cake for her bridal

shower I have to admit that I was a little terrified..... 

A bridal shower is so special and the cake should be extra special too.  I met with her sister to discuss the theme for the shower and see if I could come up with any ideas that would fit the theme (that I would feel comfortable making).  The theme was Paris and the color was "Tiffany Blue"... so I started googling away for ideas. 

The only cake ideas that I found (that I liked) all involved fondant... *sigh* I've never worked with fondant before.  I've had fondant at weddings and always thought it was nasty... so why learn to work with something that tastes so gross??  I've always thought that the main reason for using fondant was to get that perfect looking cake and I've always tried to make sure my cakes tasted good/moist first and looking cute was the secondary priority.  But if I'm going to attempt this cake for my friend then I should do fondant ... which means lots of research (and a couple of trial cakes).

The first trial cake I did was my daughter's birthday cake (the Ariel cake shown in an earlier blog post).  I did two tiers, fondant to cover the layers and used buttercream to pipe the accents.  I learned a lot doing that cake and thought, "I can do this!".  Then a friend of mine suggested that I try marshmallow fondant since I'm not a fan of the taste of fondant.  I found a recipe for marshmallow fondant and it turned out to be really easy and it tastes great.  Super/sickly sweet, but good.... much better than the store bought fondant.  The recipe I used can be found here:  http://candy.about.com/od/fondantcandyrecipes/r/mm_fondant.htm

I found it easy to make and easy to tint... you just add your tint to the melted marshmallow before adding the powdered sugar... then you don't have to worry about it being uneven.  So the next 'trial' cake was a simple two layer chocolate cake covered with marshmallow fondant (just to try out the recipe and try working with it).  It was a hit... the kids (who don't like regular fondant) ate it up!

Next came the research (how to stick fondant accents to the fondant covered cake, etc..) and making the cake topper.  From the ideas I found online for a Parisian themed cake a lot of them had Eiffel tower cake toppers.  Not only did I not want to spend upwards of $30 on a cake topper, but the cutest one I saw was a hand made/craft item.  It seemed easy enough.. so off to the store for supplies.

I got black scrapbooking paper, some Tiffany Blue ribbon to make bows and some stick on sparkly beads for 'bling'.  Ben Franklin crafts was nice enough to give me an Eiffel Tower traceable cut-out, but it was smaller than I thought would look good on the cake.  I took that cut-out to Kinko's and just made a couple of larger copies of it for tracing.  After tracing the Eiffel Tower onto the black paper three times & cutting those out I just glued them together to make a stand up Eiffel Tower.  Then I made the bows & added the bows & bling to the tower:

Now time for the cake.  The research I did steered me towards using clear vanilla extract to adhere any fondant accents to the fondant covered cake, so I tried that.  I worked well, the only thing I will do next time is hold the accents onto the side of the cake a little bit longer to make sure they don't slide.

Here are some of the things I learned while doing this cake:

• It's always better to make extra fondant.  I was trying to be conservative and barely had enough Tiffany Blue to cover the cakes.  It would have been better to have made more so covering was easier.
• Accents that you would like hardened (to hold their shape... like bows) are best if made as early as possible (even the night before).
• Buttercream works well to adhere things in tough areas (like the fondant balls around the base of the cake)
• Measure, measure, measure... when the cake is 4 inches on the side and 10 inches across... you really do need your fondant circle at least 18 inches wide if you want it to reach the bottom of your cake! LOL

I feel more comfortable/confident working with fondant now... I will not be making this my new specialty by any means .. it's super time consuming (at least for this beginner)... but I will not be scared to try it again if the cake design calls for it!

The Little Mermaid!

I found some very cool cake ideas online (thanks to Google) and picked out an 'Ariel underseas' type of design for my daughter's 5th Birthday party.  From the images I saw it looked like the cake was iced in a light blue tinted buttercream, but having never worked with fondant I thought I would give it a shot.

I started with my cakes... two 8 inch round chocolate cakes and two 6 inch round vanilla cakes.  I put a vanilla custard filling in between the layers of the chocolate cakes, frosted them with buttercream and covered them with the light blue fondant.  Then I repeated these steps with the vanilla cakes.  I didn't dowel the cakes at all because I'm not transporting this cake, but if you plan to transport yours I would highly recommend putting some wooden or plastic dowels in.

I learned some lessons on this cake:

• Watch your cake trimming... LOL.  When you're hoping to have the bottom cakes a little bit larger than the top layers don't trim the heck out of them!
• When working the fondant before rolling it out... keep kneading it...  I tend to get impatient, but mine could have been worked a little bit longer.  It probably would have rolled a tiny bit easier.
• When trimming the fondant... go easy.  You can always take more off the bottom, but you can't add it back on.
• Shorter nails make working with the fondant easier.  Mine are getting a little long right now and I was constantly worried that I would leave little half moon indents into the fondant.

The next steps were adding the ocean accents using tinted buttercream.  I used Wilton tip 352 to make the seaweed and the awesome part of using buttercream accents.... it allowed me to cover up any imperfections in the fondant.  I had to small tears in the fondant that I didn't have any luck trying to fix so I covered them up with the seaweed! Woot woot!

And the finished product:

I hope my daughter enjoys her Ariel undersea adventure cake as much as I enjoyed making it for her!!



Easter Basket Cupcakes

My latest project.... Easter basket cupcakes.  I scoured the Internet for ideas and decided on two different cupcakes... a rustic, fun basket with a candy handle ....

and a quicker, easier, pre-made basket cupcake wrapper.....

Although I do like how each style of cupcake turned out, I have to say that I'm a big fan of the pre-made cupcake wrappers! They're fun, fairly inexpensive and could easily be re-used.  I got these ones at Michael's craft store and they were very easy to put together and made my cupcake look cute!

To make these I cheated a bit.... Betty Crocker French Vanilla cake mix... followed all the instructions and baked about 18 cupcakes (I like bigger cupcakes).  Then I used Wilton's boxed buttercream frosting.  I do make my own buttercream most of the time, but sometimes find the Wilton boxed buttercream to be a little firmer/easier to work with.  I added green tint to the frosting and used tip # 233 to make the grass. 

Then it's as easy as adding some jelly bean eggs and dropping the cupcake gently into the basket wrapper!