Unicorn/Pegasus Cookies

So remember the Parry Gripp birthday party? To go with the theme we made themed cookies– Neon Pegasus and Space Unicorn.

I used the same cutter for both– a unicorn cutter– and made a few adjustments for the pegasus cookies, cutting off the horn and adding a wedge-shaped piece of dough for a wing. My standard chocolate cutout recipe worked out fine– the slight spreading made the cookies less prone to breakage anyway.

I mixed up a batch of glaze icing to decorate with, separating out a portion to stir in some cocoa and black food coloring to make the dark chocolate glaze for the pegasus cookies. The rest got tinted in small batches to make all of the colors. A single batch of glaze icing was enough to cover 28 cookies with some to spare.

I accented the icing with some edible glitter– also for the space unicorn helmets I mixed some silver luster dust with vodka and painted them for some extra shimmer.

These weren’t perfect replicas, and the piping wasn’t the neatest, but they were at least recognizable and pretty cute!

 

 

Baked No-Knead Yeasted Donuts… Okay but not great

The other day I was reading my daughter a bedtime story that had a particularly tasty-sounding description of brunch, featuring fluffy omelettes and sugar-dusted donuts. For some reason the latter caught her attention, and before I knew it I was promising to make sugar-dusted donuts of our very own!

Of course, I really don’t like the hassle of deep-frying, but I find baked cake-style donuts to be not particularly donut-y, so I searched the internet for a recipe for yeast-raised baked donuts. Preferably with a minimum of kneading, because I didn’t want to have to break out the stand mixer. Eventually I found one that looked pretty good— it had a two-stage rise, one at room temp and one overnight in the fridge, and could be baked up in the morning. Reviews were decent. So I gave it a shot.

Autumn Cupcakes

Okay, so first things first– I’ve got to admit that these are a shameless cheat. They’re technically my Pumpkin Pecan Chip muffins with frosting, not cupcakes. But really, once you’ve added white chocolate chips to muffins, they basically become cupcakes by another name anyway, right? And the topping makes all the difference, I promise you!

To take these muffins over the top into cupcake territory, slather them with a brown sugar/cream cheese frosting, then top them with candied ginger and toasted pecans. The combination is amazing– creamy, crunchy, spicy, and everything you’d want in an autumn dessert!

Candied Lemon Pound Cake

Remember all of the candied lemon peel I had left over from my lemonade concentrate? I had to do something with it, so I decided to bake cake. Cake is always the answer. I decided to go with a pound cake, because I figured that the crumb would need to be fairly dense in order to support the chewy chunks of peel. And what’s a lemon cake without a lemon syrup to soak it in? And a glaze? Talk about gilding the lily…

The finished cake is incredibly moist and tender, and the syrup and glaze combine for a slightly crackly outer crust that immediately gives way to a melt-in-your-mouth icing, full of lemon flavor. While the cake doesn’t slice neatly– too soft and moist– it’s really delicious, and even better the day after it’s baked. Plus, due to the moisture and the glaze it’ll keep,  uncovered at room temperature, for at least three days without drying out. Probably longer, but I didn’t have any left to check after three days!

Almond Puff Loaf

I’m a sucker for pastry, especially at breakfast, so when I came across this recipe for King Arthur Flour’s Almond Puff Loaf, which promised a delicious, multi-layered pastry in only a few simple steps, I knew I’d have to try it out. It starts with a base that’s halfway between a biscuit and a pie crust, and it’s topped with choux paste to provide some serious puff. The process reminded me a little of the Gateau St. Honoré, but the finished product was very different– probably because of the different ingredient proportions.

I also decided to add a layer of almond paste between the two doughs, to really amp up the almond flavor– I would highly recommend it to anyone seeking to try this recipe, along with using apricot jam, which pairs perfectly with the almond.

Easy Raspberry Breakfast Rolls

Okay, I admit that this isn’t really a project. It’s too easy to count as a project. But the results are tasty, and I learned something useful, so I’m posting about it anyway.

The other day I got out a can of refrigerated crescent roll dough and the half-can of raspberry pie filling I had left over from my “Raspberry Swiss No-Meringue Buttercream” (wow, that’s a mouthful), and put them together to make some breakfast rolls. Simplest thing ever– just plop a generous spoonful of pie filling onto the dough, roll it up, and bake until golden brown. Top with a drizzle of powdered sugar glaze and voila– something tasty.

Birthday Castle Cake

So far you’ve seen the progress photos for my daughter’s Birthday Princess dress, but what’s a princess party without a castle cake? I knew I had to make one, so I started collecting fondant cutters and images of pretty cakes several months before they’d actually be needed.

After much vacillating I decided to make it a two-tier round cake with two towers at the base and three on the top tier. Since there was plenty of leftover cake last year, I kept the same sized pans as before– 7″ on the bottom (three layers) and 5″ on the top (two layers). Color scheme would be white, pink, and purple, and I’d decorate it with climbing roses and lacy crenellations.

Fair warning, this is not a tutorial post– the process was so involved that I just couldn’t take the time to get pictures of every step and post recipes and instructions for all of the components. I may do individual posts on some of the techniques, though. So for now just sit back and enjoy the pictures and general instruction summary!

Spooky Mummy Cookies

For Halloween this year we had some of my daughter’s friends over for pizza before they all went out trick-or-treating together– not being content to leave well enough alone with regard to sugar consumption, for some reason I decided that what they really needed was cookies to munch on before setting out on their candy quest.

Not just any cookies, though– of course they had to be themed. I thought about doing a standard iced cookie recipe, perhaps making spiderweb patterns using the same technique I used on the peanut butter fudge ice cream cake, but then I remembered a tutorial I’d seen a while back about making webs from melted marshmallows. and knew that I wanted to give it a shot.

Rather than stick with spiderwebs, though, I decided to go a different route and make mummies (since they are apparently my daughter’s “spook of choice” this Halloween season when it comes to scary stories).

Mini Animal Donuts

It’s no secret that I adore cute food, and cute food that’s been miniaturized is automatically cuter than the original. So when I saw these cute-tastic Japanese animal donuts, I immediately tried to think of ways to make them myself, only extra-adorable. That’s where my mini-donut maker came in.

Another one of my kitchen unitaskers, the mini-donut maker churns out ridiculously precious little donuts, 6 at a time, without all that frying. No, the donuts don’t have the classic texture of a fried donut– firm to the initial bite, then giving way to pillowy softness– but they’re perfectly respectable baked donuts, and did I mention they’re cute?

I’ve made these with regular boxed cake mix before, but the soft fluffiness of the cake made the donuts one-dimensional and boring– plus, the relative thinness of the cake batter made the little donut wells more difficult to fill properly. I’ve learned that boxed pound cake mix actually works best for mini donuts– it’s thick enough that it can be easily piped into the donut wells, it rises to just the right height to make a nice rounded donut, and the pound cake flavor is pretty close to a classic old-fashioned donut, which is my favorite. Sure, I could make my own pound cake mix from scratch and use that, but these are so small and will be coated with so much sugary icing that no one is going to notice the flavor of the cake– at least not the difference between homemade and box mix.

Anyway, so I mixed up the cake mix per the box directions, piped it into the heated donut maker, cooked for 3 minutes (2:30 if you want them extra-soft), and pretty soon I had a big batch (about 6 dozen) of tiny donuts. On to the decorating!

Spring Watercolor Cookies

The other day I was hanging out with my daughter and she asked if she could paint something. Now, I could’ve gotten out the craft paint and the paper (and boy, do we have a lot of both), but for some reason that didn’t appeal. So I decided to bake cookies.

How do these two things relate, you ask? Why, we were going to paint on the cookies, of course!