Browned butter cake with a cream cheese frosting and strawberry cream cheese filling

 

Here is a cake that I made for my brother, for his Birthday.

My brother, Michael has been obsessed with strawberry cake for as long as I can remember... and for the life of me.. I have no idea why. I don't think that he has ever even had a strawberry birthday cake and I know this because I have celebrated every birthday with him, seeing as how we are Irish Twins, I was born in August of 1987 and my brother was born in September of 1986, making us the same age for almost a whole month. We were in the same grade and had a few classes together and shared teachers, so the teachers assumed that we were twins.

Anyways, so here's what I made.

I made a browned butter cake, that is very much like a pound cake. Since my brother loves strawberry cake or something along the lines, I made a cream cheese frosting, for the filling, I added some chopped strawberries to the cream cheese frosting. 

The cake was really good, very rich and the filling tasted like cheesecake. This was a very good cake. Just very time consuming.

So for a browned butter cake, you need to make browned butter and this is how I did that.

Melt 3 sticks of butter on medium low

 Simmer butter on low until the butter browns, before careful not to burn the butter

 This is what the browned butter looks like in liquid state, pour the butter into a container, and chill until the browned butter is in a solid state

 Solid browned butter

Browned butter cake
3 sticks browned butter (the chilled butter that you made)
1 2/3 cups sugar
2 ts vanilla
2 whole eggs plus 4 egg yolks, room temperature
2 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups milk, room temperature

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Butter and flour two cake pans.

Beat chilled butter with electric hand held mixer or stand mixer for about 1 minute until it softens and becomes creamy.

Add sugar and beat until the mixture becomes fluffy and almost beige in color, about 8 to 12 minutes.

Add in vanilla and eggs and egg yolks one at a time, beating between each addition until fully incorporated and and the mixture looks smooth and glossy, about 1 to 2 minutes.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.

Add the dry ingredients to the butter in 3 parts, alternating with the milk.

Beat the batter on medium speed until just incorporated, about 20 seconds.

Divide batter among the two pans and bake for 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Remove and place on wire racks. Allow to cool for 20 minutes.

 Cream the chilled browned butter until fluffy

 Creamed browned butter

 Add sugar and cream 

 Creamed butter and sugar mixture

 Add the milk, then flour mixture to the butter and sugar mixture and repeat until all is incorporated

 The finished batter

 Cream cheese frosting

6 ounce cream cheese room temp
1 stick butter room temp
1/2 pound of powdered sugar (a little less than 2 cups)
3/4 ts vanilla

Beat cream cheese and butter until smooth,beat in powdered sugar until smooth and then add vanilla and mix in.

An English Toffee Tutorial

This English Toffee recipe has been in my family forever, and it's very good. 

I've tried to make toffee a bunch of times with great success and other times with no success at all. Pure and simple... I'm a terrible candy maker. Candy making is very dangerous. So you just have to take one step at a time and watch boiling sugar very closely.

Here's a tutorial on how to make toffee without burning the house down.

English Toffee

2 C + 3/4 C Brown Sugar

4 Sticks Butter 

1 C Pecans, Walnuts, Almonds, Peanuts.. whichever you prefer

2 C Chocolate Chips 

 Lay down a piece of Parchment on a cookie sheet and add your nuts in a single layer

 

 Melt brown sugar and butter on medium

 I used the ice water method to figure out when my toffee was ready, if you don't own a candy thermometer, you can use this as well. You want the candy to come to a hard crack stage, which is when you add a bit of the candy to the ice water and the brittle candy stiffens quickly and you can hear a snap when broken. 

 

 When the butter and sugar is completely melted you want to boil on low medium heat until the candy reaches hard crack. You want to constantly stir this with a wooden spoon.

 

 I used a timer on my phone to give me an estimate on how long the candy would take to get to hard crack stage, for the future. It took about 18 minutes.

 This is what your candy looks like when it has reached hard crack stage is has officially become toffee.. yay. 

 Carefully pour the toffee over the nuts on the parchment.

 Lay the chocolate chips over the hot toffee so that they will melt

 Wait a moment before you spread the chocolate over the toffee, you want the chocolate to melt and you don't want to get burnt.

 Top with crushed nuts, let the toffee sit for about a half of hour to an hour and get stiff and then when stiff and chocolate is hard, break the toffee into pieces.

Chewy oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

Ah yea, if you could just go ahead and make these, that would be great, mmkay?

Seriously one of the best oatmeal cookie recipes that I've made. This recipe is too good. So go ahead and make them... right now!

You could probably add raisins and walnuts or pecans to this recipe and some cinnamon, nutmeg and clove as well. I haven't tried the recipe with any of those spices because today I just wanted a nice and chewy cookie, with not really anything healthy in it... just butter and chocolate and I wanted an oat cookie for a bit of texture.

I don't know about anyone else, but most of the time that I try to make an oatmeal cookie, the cookie batter doesn't spread much and the cookie is just this dried out lump of spiced dough. For that reason, I'm always a bit worried to try an oatmeal cookie recipe, but I think I have finally broke that oatmeal cookie curse.

A quick tip if you are trying out a recipe for the first time and are not sure if you are going to like it and end up with a million cookies hanging out in your house. I always halve my cookie recipes. So, for example.. this recipe calls for 2 sticks of butter, I would use only 1 stick and instead of 1 C of brown sugar.. 1/2 C and ect... just do a little math. Baking has helped with my fraction skills likes whoa. 

Chewy Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 Sticks of Butter (Room Temp)
1 C Brown Sugar
1/2 Sugar
2 Eggs
2 ts Vanilla
1 1/2 C Flour
1 ts Baking Soda
1 ts Salt
3 C Oats
1 1/2 C chocolate chips

If you want an oatmeal raisin cookie, instead of chocolate chips add raisins and add 1 ts of cinnamon and subtract 1 ts of vanilla.

Preheat oven on 325

Cream butter and sugars until smooth

Add egg and vanilla and mix in, until smooth

In another bowl, sift your dry (flour,baking soda,salt)

Add your dry into the butter mixture.

Fold in Oats and Chocolate Chips.

Bake for 12-14 minutes.

Lofthouse cookie copycat redo

So a while back I tried to clone the ever so famous lofthouse cookie. The recipe that I used didn't really serve the cookie justice.

I tried another lofthouse cookie recipe clone and they actually taste almost exactly like the real cookie. They are very good. I over baked these cookies just a tad,so mind the fact that the cookies aren't perfect. So here's the recipe. 

Cookies

1 French vanilla box cake mix
1/2 cup plus 3 t. flour (mix well into the cake mix)
3 large eggs
1/3 cup oil  

Preheat oven to 325

Mix the above with an electric beater until all ingredients are incorporated.  

Form one inch balls of dough and bake for  12 minutes. 

Icing

1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temp
1/3 cup shortening
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 tablespoons milk (this varies somewhat depending on how thick you want your icing.)
4 cups powdered sugar 

Beat the butter and shortening with an electric mixer until smooth, add the powdered sugar and mix until crumbly and then add the vanilla, milk and food coloring and mix until smooth. 

hydrangea cupcakes

I just moved to Boynton Beach, from Port Saint Lucie. The move was terrible. Four moves in less than a month. So here I am, feeling far from settled. I haven't really been in the mindset for creating awesome and delicious things, my create vision has been lost lately haha.

But I work with a florist and my sister works for the florist and it was the owner's birthday the other day. So after a talk of what we should make him, we decided on just simple cupcakes. The cupcake is hershey's chocolate cake recipe and the frosting is this really nice dark chocolate that I got from Beantown Baker. I made the hydrangeas out of white gumpaste, colored the gumpaste with purple food coloring and used pink petal dust for the center of the flower and brushed a layer of pink glitter petal dust over the whole flower.

Hershey's Chocolate Cake Recipe

2 cups sugar
1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cup HERSHEY'S Cocoa

1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1-1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

2 eggs

1 cup milk

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup boiling water

350

Mix all your dry in one bowl, stir until combined. Then add your eggs, milk, oil and vanilla, mix to combine. Then add your cup of hot water and beat for about 5 minutes.

Bake time varies. For average size cupcakes, they took about 20-22 minutes. A round cake would take around 35-40 minutes.

Dark Chocolate Frosting

6 Tbsp butter
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 cups powdered suga
3/4 cup dark cocoa powder
1/3 cup milk

Cream butter and vanilla.

In a separate bowl, combine powdered sugar and cocoa powder. Add dry ingredients to creamed mixture.

Slowly add milk until frosting reaches desired consistency, then beat another 5 minutes creamy.

 

Valentine's Day cookies

Here are some Valentine's Day cookies. I made some chocolate chip (not pictured) oatmeal raisin, and sugar cookie.

For the sugar cookies, I made the dough, rolled the dough out, chilled the dough and then cut out the shapes and baked them. While the cookies were cooling I made the royal icing. I piped the border around each cookie and then I took some royal icing and thinned it out with some water, to make a royal icing flood for the cookies. I then added the thinned out royal icing (flood) and spread it onto the cookies evenly with a toothpick. I let them dry overnight.

That same night I made some chocolate cameos. I bought this really cool candy cameo mold, so I used that as my chocolate mold. I had vanilla bark and chocolate bark. I melted some vanilla bark and used that for the facial features, I took a toothpick and made sure to only fill those areas with the white vanilla bark, then I popped the candy mold into the fridge. I added some pink pedal food coloring dust into the remaining white bark to make pink and then melted some chocolate bark.

After the facial feature layer was firm, I added the background color. I did a few chocolate backgrounds and a few pink. My favorite was the pink. And then I popped the mold back into the fridge. They firmed up very quickly, so I popped them out of the mold and put them into a container.

The next morning I decorated the cookies. I used a few different techniques and I'm happy with how they turned out.

Oatmeal raisin cookies

Cherry blossom themed birthday cake.

Here is a photo of a cherry blossom birthday cake that I did for my sister. The cake was red velvet and the frosting was cream cheese. I had many many many struggles with this cake, from the consistency of the frosting to the leveling of the cakes, to the homemade fondant, to the tearing and cracking of the fondant. I am not very proud of this cake. I did like the way the cherry blossoms came out though.

Marshmallow fondant tutorial

Here's a tutorial on how to make your own marshmallow fondant. The tutorial will save you alot of money, but it is extremely time consuming and may lead to arthritis of the hands.. just kidding.. kind of.




Start out with marshmallows, powdered sugar and water. The shortening is for kneading .

Add marshmallows and water into a microwave safe bowl and microwave, stir, microwave, stir. microwave, stir, until the mixture looks like fluff.

Here is your melted marshmallow mixture

Add enough powdered sugar for the mixture to come together.

Add some more powdered sugar. Keeping on adding until mixture is somewhat malable.

Pour some powdered sugar onto the counter with the shortening and then take the marshmallow mixture, place onto of the powedered sugar. Make sure your hands are completely clean and then coat your hands in a thin layer of shortening, to prevent the marshmallow mixture from sticking to your hands. Then start to knead. This should only take you about.... 4 hours.

I take small sections and add the powdered sugar until I've reached the texture that I want. And then repeat.

My finished fondant, before it has been colored

You will need tons of paper towels. Not a hand towel, because they have lint. A clean paper towel after every hand wash. Wash your hands often, so that the fondant is free of clumps of powdered sugar. I went though a whole roll and I washed my hands about 50 times.

After hurricane fondant. During the fondant coloring process, I kept what I wasn't coloring or working on covered, under a bowl, because fondant dries out very quick. Can you spot Kaspa? Hint, look at the pile of paper towels.

Finished Fondant.