Champagne Cupcakes

Just a quick post before I hit the road to Cape Cod and do my best to beat this snow! I had seen a few recipes for "champagne cake" and couldn't think of a better dessert to bring to our New Year's Eve party tonight.


I got the recipe from Sandra Lee, the queen of cocktails, and the cupcakes taste great, but there really isn't much of a champagne flavor. I don't mind, it's just fun to say they're champagne cupcakes. I didn't add champagne extract to the frosting as Sandra recommends, I just used plain ol' vanilla, but for half of them I mixed in some raspberry jam and a little pink food coloring since raspberries and champagne are such a classic combination.


To add some glitz to the white cupcakes, I printed out a sheet of "2010" written in a font I liked, put it under a piece of parchment paper, traced the numbers by piping melted white chocolate, and then added pink sparkling sugar galore. Once they dry, you simply peel them off the parchment paper and stick them into the frosting.


No idea why I went for a pink theme, but I guess the raspberries inspired me. Looking back I might have chosen a simpler color palate -- blackberries and silver maybe? But these are certainly still festive (and delicious).


Cheers to a happy and safe New Year's!! See ya in 2010!

Champagne Cupcakes (courtesy of Sandra Lee)

1 box white cake mix
1-1/4 cups dry champagne
1/3 cup vegetable oil
3 large egg whites
1 can vanilla frosting
2 tbsp red raspberry jam
24 raspberries
White chocolate candy melts
Pink sparkling sugar

- Preheat oven to 350 degrees and line cupcake tins for 24 cupcakes
- Beat cake mix, champagne, vegetable oil, and egg whites together for 2 minutes
- Divide batter evenly into cupcake liners and bake for approximately 20 minutes (or until cake tester comes out clean)
- Divide frosting into 2 bowls and mix the jam and food coloring into 1 half, leaving the other half white
- After the cupcakes have cooled, frost them and decorate as you wish!

For the chocolate 2010's (I did this ahead of time):
- Print out a sheet of the numbers "2010" in a font and size you like
- Put the paper on a cookie sheet, and cover with parchment paper
- Melt white chocolate according to package's instructions and transfer to a pastry bag with a small tip
- Trace the numbers onto the parchment paper, making sure all of the numbers touch each other so that they can be picked up in 1 piece
- Sprinkle with sugar/sprinkles while still wet
- Place in the fridge for 5 minutes to dry, and stick 'em on the cupcakes when they're ready!

Chocolate Hazelnut Mousse

I had great intentions of serving this mousse on Christmas -- I was going to make it into more of a cake using fancy pirouette cookies standing upright as the outer crust. But I was tired of baking (gasp!) by the time Friday rolled around and thus somehow we survived on only apple pie, the cupcake wreath, and sugar cookies. I still had all the ingredients though, so I rethought the recipe to fit the next big holiday: New Year's Eve!


This was my first time making mousse, it was really fun to use my mixer to make the whipped cream and then gently fold in the chocolate-hazelnut mixture using my knowledge from Ina and Martha.


I served the mousse in martini glasses (a new gift from Ryan to my parents!) to be festive. They are really the perfect size for a dessert like this and dress up this extremely simple recipe.


The mousse is topped with chocolate shavings and toasted hazelnuts, and those pirouette cookies got some use as well. Very cute and delicious!

Chocolate Hazelnut Mousse

1-1/2 cups whipping cream
1/2 cup Nutella spread
2 tbsp hot water (not boiling)
2 tsp instant espresso
Dash of Kahlua
6 Chocolate-hazelnut pirouette cookies
Chocolate and chopped hazelnuts for topping

- Dissolve instant espresso in hot water in a medium sized bowl
- Add the Nutella and Kahlua, beating until smooth
- In a mixer, whip the whipping cream until it forms stiff peaks
- Gently fold the nutella mixture into the whipped cream until the color is uniform
- Divide mousse into serving glasses (I think martini glasses work great!)
- Add toasted hazelnuts (to toast, just stick them in a 350 degree oven for about 10 minutes), chocolate shavings, and pirouette cookies for decoration

Thanks, Santa!

I must have been a good girl this year:


This is quite a machine. It weighs like 100lbs and sounds like it belongs in a garage more so than a kitchen. But oh is it wonderful! My parents actually gave it to me early to help with all my holiday baking, so I've been basking in its glory for a few weeks already. I had to fight my dad a bit to get the yellow (he HATES the color), but anyone who knows me well would say that any other color Kitchenaid just wouldn't be right.

Open wide!


Thanks Mom and Dad! Love you lots!

Cupcake Wreath

Merry Christmas everyone! Look what present I'm bringing you today:


For the holidays this year, my wonderful boyfriend treated me to a cupcake themed present. Which among a handful of great things (including a gift certificate for a cake decorating class!) was this:


I have been googly-eyed over this book for awhile, but it's hard for me to spend money on a cookbook when there are so many great recipes and modes of inspiration for free online. That's where boyfriends come in. He bought me the Pioneer Woman Cooks, and now this lovely cookbook to add to my collection. I wasn't planning on making any cupcakes for the holidays, but once I flipped through this book, I just had to try one.

On the cover, the authors claim this book is full of "irresistibly playful creations anyone can make". I was a bit skeptical, given the intricacies of some of the cupcakes, but I was shocked to find out just how easy this impressive looking wreath was to make. The chocolate leaves are just so cool!


Making these leaves only involves painting melted chocolate onto mint leaves, letting them dry, and then simply peeling them off. So cool! And they taste kind of minty too. The berries are red peanut M&M's and the bow is unfortunately not edible but if you had the time/patience I'm sure a fondant bow would look great.


Okay, enough blogging -- time to get back to cleaning the house and getting ready for dinner! Have a fun and safe holiday everyone, and go see Avatar at some point - it's really, really good :)

Cupcake Wreath (Adapted from "Hello, Cupcake!")
1 box yellow cake mix
1 can cream cheese frosting
1 bag white chocolate candy melts
1 bunch of mint leaves
1 bag Peanut M&M's

- To make the leaves, clean and dry the mint leaves and melt the white chocolate according to the package's directions
- Use a paintbrush to paint white chocolate onto the top of the mint leaves and lay them on a lined cookie sheet to set
- Refrigerate them for at least 10 minutes before using (you can make these in advance before making the cupcakes)
- Prepare cupcakes according to package's instructions, and bake in silver liners
- Use up to 12 cupcakes to make your wreath (I used only 8 -- our grocery store only had 1 package of mint leaves, so I made my wreath smaller than the cookbook recommended)
- Frost cupcakes and decorate edges with sparkling sugar if you wish
- Arrange leaves on wreath and use extra frosting to secure the M&M's

Snowflake Sugar Cookies

I did it -- I made sugar cookies decorated with royal icing. After weeks of research on the different recipes and techniques, I finally buckled down and created these:


I'm very happy with how they came out, although I wasn't quite expecting them to take a total of like 5 hours, but hey, I'm on break and what else am I going to do. (Maybe catch up on some work, be social and leave my house, wrap presents...nahhhh)


I was very pleased with the recipes I used for both the sugar cookie dough (from i am baker) and the royal icing (from Not So Humble Pie) and highly recommend using them if you plan on attempting these flooded sugar cookies. But make sure you allot a decent chunk of time if you're a beginner like me. I used these cookie cutters to make the snowflakes and I loved them! Even without the royal icing they looked fancy because of the cutouts.


I used a "flooding" technique, which involves first piping outlines with a thicker consistency icing, and then going back with a thinner icing and flooding the spaces between the outlines. I used white for the outlines and a pale blue for the flooding, and then went over with white to add some decorative details. I could use some practice, but at least the anxiety of trying this out for the first time is over!


My parents agreed these might be just too pretty to eat, so I hung a few on the tree as decoration. Someone better eat them eventually though!


Snowflake Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing

For the Cookies: (Adapted from i am baker)
1-1/2 cups butter
2 cups granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 egg yolks
5 tsp vanilla
4 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder

For Royal Icing: (Adapted from Not So Humble Pie)
1 pound powdered sugar
5 tablespoons meringue powder (available at craft stores)
1/3 cup water (plus more for adjusting consistency)
Few drops vanilla extract

- For the cookie dough, beat together butter and sugar for about 2 minutes
- Add the eggs and egg yolks until smooth, and then add vanilla
- In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, salt, and baking powder, and then add the dry mix slowly to the wet until well combined
- Wrap dough in saran wrap and chill in the fridge for an hour (or more)
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees
- Roll out dough and cut desired shapes, placing them about 1 inch apart on a cookie sheet
- Bake for 8-10 minutes, depending on how chewy you like your sugar cookies!
- Transfer to a wire wrack and allow cookies to completely cool before decorating
- For the icing, mix together sugar, meringue powder, water, and vanilla until smooth (about 2 minutes). If icing is too thick, add more water in 1 tsp increments. If too thin, slowly add more powdered sugar. For the outlining, you want the icing to be fluid but still hold a firm peak. For the flooding, add enough water so that a peak will sink back into the bowl and smooth out within 10 seconds.
- Divide icing and color it as desired
- Prepare piping bags and tips (I used #2), and place them upside down in a glass with a wet paper towel on the bottom while not in use so the icing in the tips does not dry out. Be sure to secure the other end with a rubber band or you'll end up with blue icing all over your pants (oops!)
- Pipe the outline first using the thicker icing and let it sit for 10 minutes before going back to flood the rest
- Allow the cookies to dry for a few hours before handling them -- you don't want to ruin all of your hard work!

Merry Christmas Eve!!

Holiday Monster Cookies

I'm home for the holidays, and couldn't me more excited to just relax, hang out with the fam, and get a lot of baking done! I had seen this post by Bakerella this summer, and knew when it came time for my brother to give gifts to his teachers for Christmas, homemade cookie mixes in jars would be perfect.


I bought 1 quart storage jars that I found at HomeGoods (Joann's and Michaels were all out of canning jars!) and they were perfect for this project. I left out the walnuts just in case anyone was allergic and used Christmas M&M's. I'm not sure these are really considered monster cookies because there's no peanut butter involved, but they surely are monster-sized (and a bit over-cooked in my case)


The jars include all of the dry ingredients, with a tag explaining what to add and how to bake them. I got to put some of my trusty scrapbooking materials to work on making the cards, and just used festive fabric and ribbon to tie everything together.


Scott and I had fun making them, and we hope his teachers enjoy baking the cookies! Just one last shot of the bells because they're my favorite:


Holiday Monster Cookies

For the jars:
Layer 1 = 1-1/3 cups all purpose flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp baking soda, 1/4 tsp salt
Layer 2 = 1 cup cooking oats
Layer 3 = 3/4 cup Holiday M&M's
Layer 4 = 3/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
Layer 5 = 1/2 cup brown sugar
Layer 6 = 1/2 cup white sugar

To add:
1 slightly beaten egg
1/2 cup butter
1 tsp vanilla

- Preheat oven to 350 degrees
- Stir all of the dry ingredients together in a bowl
- Add the wet ingredients and use a large spoon to work the dough together
- Use hands to roll out 1-1/2" balls of dough
- Place on a cookie sheet and bake for about 10 minutes (make sure you set your timer or else yours will come out a little overdone like mine!)

Change the color of the M&M's and fabric and make these for any occasion!

Chewy Ginger-Molasses Cookies

I write this from a very snowy and freezing New York City. After a day of touristy activities including Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and the Stardust Diner with my brother, Dad, and Ryan, we saw Duke crush Gonzaga at MSG. It was a great day, complete with scarves, mittens, hats, and long underwear, and now I'm laying on my friend Marissa's couch in Murray Hill. Instead of going out, we're avoiding the blizzard and opting for s'mores, wine, and movies. I couldn't be happier! So here are the molasses-gingerbread cookies I promised:

I'm not the biggest fan of gingerbread, but these were great. Chewy, soft, with a bit of spice -- I recommend this recipe for anyone who only slightly likes gingerbread. The red and white cuteness in the middle are candy cane kisses that I stuck in after the cookies were baked, and I shook them a little so they hardened flatter.

Delicious, easy, and festive. I love the crinkles and the sparkle too, cute!

Chewy Molasses-Ginger Cookies

1 cup whole wheat flour

1-1/4 all purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1-1/2 tsp cinnamon

1-1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp allspice

1/4 tsp salt

1-1/2 sticks softened butter

1/3 cup packed dark brown sugar

1/3 cup granulated sugar

1 egg yolk

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup molasses

- Preheat oven to 375 degrees

- Mix flour, baking soda, and spices in a bowl

- Blend together sugar, brown sugar, and butter until fluffy

- Add egg yolk, vanilla, and molasses

- Slowly add dry ingredients until well combined

- Roll dough into 1-1/2 inch balls, roll in granulated sugar, and place 2 inches apart on a cookie sheet

- Bake for about 11 minutes

- When cookies are done baking, stick a kiss onto each and press in gently.

Santa Hat Brownie Bites

The dental school had a holiday party last night and in one of the emails concerning the party they said "Feel free to bring a dessert if you like to bake". Even though I got this message the night before, I put my game face on and got creative with the ingredients I already had in the apartment. Since our winter break starts at 12PM today (wahooooooo!), I had a lot of strawberries to eat before I left and knew I could put the little ones to good use:


So cute, and so so easy. I highly recommend you to bring these to any holiday party in the coming days. Your friends and family will go crazy for them, I know mine did! Check out this picture my friend Alyssa snapped about 15 minutes after we arrived at the party (note the clear cake plate I had the Santa hats on):


Those cookies in the back right were mine too, and they were definitely delicious, but not as visually enticing as these adorable santa hats. I'll be sure to share the recipe for those molasses-gingerbread cookies later! Apparently everyone really, really likes strawberries, most of the chocolate covered strawberries are gone too. Unfortunately they are quite expensive this time of year, but I recommend splurging once and impressing your guests!


Did I mention how easy these were yet? Bake some brownie mix in mini muffin tins, top them with strawberries, and decorate with piped melted white chocolate. Beautiful and impressive, go make them now!

Santa Hat Brownie Bites
Adapted from The Crafty Kook

1 box brownie mix
24 small strawberries
2 cups white chocolate chips

- Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease 1 mini-muffin pan
- Prepare brownie mix according to box's instructions and fill cavities 3/4 of the way full (I had some leftover brownie mix that I just baked off as regular brownies because I didn't have enough strawberries)
- Bake for 25 minutes, or until cake tester comes out clean
- Let brownies cool and use this time to hull and clean the strawberries
- Once cool, place strawberries upside down onto brownie bites
- Melt white chocolate in a double boiler and transfer into a piping bag
- Pipe a ring around the base and a small dot on top -- work quickly, the white chocolate can dry fast and clog up your tip!

2 weeks off from school = lots and lots of baking, keep checking back for yummy recipes!

Holiday Surprise Cupcakes

A few weeks ago I saw square cupcake pans at Marshalls (something like this) and had a vision...


Adorable "presents" for my friends for our potluck dinner last night. My piping skills might not be perfect yet, but I'm blaming the runny frosting on this one (our heat seems to be messed up and the apartment has been almost 80 degrees the past few days). I wasn't going to even attempt piping bows on a weekday, so I used Pull-and-Peel Twizzlers. Again no one noticed the messiness and the cupcakes disappeared very quickly. (Do you still call them cupcakes if they're square? And aren't actually served in a cup? Maybe just mini-cakes, who knows)


I used spice cake mix to be seasonal and cream cheese frosting because it's my favorite, and filled them with a special surprise. My plan was to bite into them and see the "gift" wrapped inside -- cream cheese frosting mixed with nutella and heath bar bits -- but unfortunately this combination of ingredients is a color extremely similar to spice cake, so the filling wasn't quite visible. I'm definitely going to use that frosting on some other cupcakes very soon.


The combination of spice cake and cream cheese frosting was amazing as always, and they got lots of "awwwww's" when i served them.

Happy holidays and baking!

Spice Cake Present Cupcakes

1 box spice cake mix
1 can cream cheese frosting
1 bag Pull-and-Peel Twizzlers
4 tbsp Nutella
1/4 cup Heath bar bits

- Preheat oven to 350 degrees
- Prepare spice cake mix according to instructions and fill greased square cupcake pan cavities 3/4 of the way full
- Bake for 30 minutes, or until cake tester comes out clean.
- While cake is baking, prepare filling by mixing 1/4 of the can of frosting with the Nutella and heath bar
- When cooled, cut holes in half of the cupcakes, reserving a cover for the hole
- Stack cupcakes with holes on top of intact cupcakes
- Fill holes with Nutella-cream cheese frosting goodness (use a knife, not a piping bar or your tip will get clogged, trust me) and cover
- Frost and decorate as you wish!

Gingerbread House

Just a quick post to keep you satiated. And what better way to do that than with pictures of mounds of candy and gingerbread?

Ryan and I had lofty goals of a beautifully constructed house complete with artistic piping and decorations, but things didn't go exactly as planned. He even drew out detailed architectural schematics, but somewhere between the messy royal icing and bulging walls we settled for a less than perfect gingerbread house. That's nothing $20 worth of candy can't fix!

See that gingerbread woman with the Hot Tamale as a mouth? Yea, that's supposed to be me -- quite fitting as I was stuffing my mouth with those things all afternoon.

We used Wilton's Gingerbread Mix and made our own royal icing (2-2/3 cups of confectioner's sugar mixed with a stick of Crisco) to create our masterpiece. Although tedious and stressful at times, we had a great time putting it together and can't wait to try and top it next year. Should be quite the challenge....

Peppermint Bark

It's winter.  There's no turning back.  Temperatures are consistently in the 30s and CT got its first full fledged snow storm this week.  And although I'm starting to experience a little seasonal affective disorder with the sun going down at 4:30 everyday, there's nothing like some holiday baking to make me happy, and fat.

We had a girls movie night last night and I decided to make a little something for my friends, one of my favorite wintery treats -- peppermint bark.

I consider it to be a very sophisticated candy, probably because it's mostly found in stores like Williams-Sonoma, which can make it a very expensive candy as well.  So being the thrifty grad student I am ( ignoring the fact that I went to the outlets twice last week), I decided to concoct my own peppermint bark. 

I was surprised how easy it was to make.  For some reason I figured the recipe would be more complicated than just melting chocolate and sprinkling it with peppermint candy, but there wasn't really much more to it.  It's important to use good quality dark chocolate, but other than that this is also a pretty affordable baking endeavor. 

Keep warm and have a great weekend!  Brrrrrrr look at all that snow...

 
Peppermint Bark

1 cup bittersweet chocolate
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate
2 cups white chocolate 
2 tsp vegetable oil
12 candy canes 


- Line the bottom and sides of a 9x13" pan with tinfoil, smoothing out any wrinkles
- Using a double boiler, melt the coarsely chopped bittersweet and semi-sweet chocolate until smooth
- Mix in 1 tsp of vegetable oil to make the chocolate shiny

- Pour the dark chocolate into the pan, smoothing it out with a spatula to ensure an even layer
- Freeze for 30 minutes, or until hard
- Melt the white chocolate in the double boiler
- While the  white chocolate is melting, put the candy canes in a blender or food processor and pulse pieces are small enough.  Separate out the larger pieces from any powder that was generated
- Once the white chocolate is melted, add 1 tsp of vegetable oil and whatever candy cane powder was leftover from the blender.  I used this to flavor the white chocolate rather than buying peppermint extract ($$!)
- Pour the white chocolate over the dark, smooth it out, and sprinkle the candy cane pieces
- Freeze for another 30 minutes
- Use a knife to break up the bark, or just slam some pieces against the pan to make smaller pieces (I actually broke a knife in this process, so I suggest the slamming method)

Brownie Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Cake

Yes, that is a mouthful of a title. But I don't know what better way to describe this heap of deliciousness:

It is Lauren's birthday today. I wanted to use that Fanci-Fill pan again. I love brownie ice cream sundaes. All reasons to combine the flavors of brownies, chocolate chip cookies, cookie dough ice cream, and chocolate ganache into one mean cake. But yea, mostly because it's Lauren's birthday -- HAPPY BIRTHDAY LAUREN!

Creating this masterpiece was quite an undertaking, and since I was dealing with ice cream here, once it was all put together, I slapped it on a cake stand and ran over to Lauren's apartment to serve it. (I didn't want to freeze the actual "cake" too long or else the brownies would have become rock hard) Here's a picture of dental school's finest ladies in their most fabulous Monday night attire:

Okay, so dental school is not exactly glamorous, but I promise we clean up nicely. By the way, taking self timed pictures is always an adventure, I highly recommend it. So back to the matter at hand....

This cake basically consists of brownies interspersed with chocolate chip cookies, filled with ice cream, and topped with chocolate ganache and cool whip. I don't think I need to elaborate much on how this went over with my friends, I'll just let the food do the talking:

Eat it up fast -- that ice cream has a mind of its own! (Not such a terrible command if you ask me) This was a great way to eat brownies and ice cream and I highly recommend combining your favorite cookie and ice cream flavors in there too.

Brownie Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Cake

FOR CAKE:

1 box brownie mix

1 box chocolate chip cookie mix

1 tub cookie dough ice cream

FOR TOPPING:

1 tub cool whip

1 cup heavy cream

9 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips

- Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease 2 Fanci-Fill pans well

- Prepare brownie mix according to package's instructions and split batter evenly between the 2 pans

- Prepare cookie mix according to package instructions and drop 1 tbsp-sized dollops of cookie dough and evenly intersperse it in the brownie batter (you'll probably have some cookie dough leftover -- just bake them off separately on a cookie sheet!)

- Bake for 30-35 minutes and let cool completely

- To prepare ganache, heat heavy cream until it starts to boil, pour it over the chocolate chips, and whisk until smooth. Chill in the refrigerator as you assemble the cake.

- Remove cake from pans, fill cavities with ice cream, and assemble layers

- Place cake on a wire rack and pour ganache over it as desired. I decorated the top using a 1M tip and cool whip and used melted white chocolate chips dyed green to write "Happy Birthday"

- Serve immediately and enjoy!

I also want to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!! I made her an Almond Joy cheesecake over the weekend that was delicious, but not the most aesthetically pleasing thing I've created, so I decided not to document it. We had a great weekend together with the fam and I don't want her to feel left out -- love ya Mom!