Week 12: Piping Technique - Fine tip cookie piping

Well, this challenge was a total fail. First, I don't really have good piping accouterments. Nor do I really want any.  As you may have noticed, I tend to shy away from things that take patience or precision.  It isn't that I'm incapable so much as uninterested.  So, I knew I had to pipe with my crappy plastic, leaking bag and my not very fine piping tip.  Well, we were headed to a BBQ at a friend's house and it was going to be dark out, so no one would be able to see my crappy piping anyway so I went for it. 

I made about 3 dozen sugar cookies and cooled them.

To honor the new spring season I went with yellow and blue frosting and I iced the cookies with yellow as the base. 

I tried making flowers, dots, lines, swirls, and even a really embarrassing attempt at a bird (see it in there?), but they all looked pretty awful.  My frosting was acting weird (separating oddly) so I called it quits after a handful of cookies and just brought the yellow frosted ones to the BBQ.  They tasted fine, but over all I call this challenge a bust. 

Week 8: Candy Decorations - Reese's Pieces Piggies

While the Reese's Pieces aren't a huge part of the decorations, I guess I can kinda count marshmallows too!  Andrew bought me some cake pop pans so I decided to try those in addition to some cup cakes. It took a little modifying to make the decorations work for the cake pops.  It was not super easy to cut the pink marshmallows into tiny snouts.  They turned out pretty cute though!

The cake pop recipe calls for the addition of pudding so the cake mix ends up super thick.  

I piped the cake mix into the pans

 The top of the pan went on and the two rubber fasteners clipped on. 

They over flowed in the oven which looked pretty hilarious.

When they came out of the oven, popping off the overflow was easy and quite tasty :)

They came out with a little saturn ring around the edge of each but it was easily trimmed.

A little melted white chocolate helps the stick stay in.

Once the stick was firmed in, the decorating began!  I rolled each cake pop in the melted white chocolate then had to rapidly affix the decorations.  The eyes are Reese's Pieces, the snout and ears are pink marshmallows cut into shapes. 

Getting the snout right was the hardest since cutting marshmallow is about the worst thing ever.  It sticks the the scissors, it sticks to your hands, and the white chocolate coating dried so fast is was lame trying to get it all situated in time. A little pink gel finished off the snout.

 The cupcakes were significantly easier.   

It wasn't until the last cupcake that I realized I could fold the marshmallows to create the cutest ears!

Week 6: Elegant - Elegant as Sh*t White Trash Bars

OK, so I wasn't particularly inspired by the Brazilian cooking challenge this week. Well, the same goes for the baking challenge. "Elegant" did not exactly fill me with excitement. I watched to see what other people were posting and I noticed a theme - adding silver or pearl balls to normal items to make them "elegant". Ha. It cracked me up so I went about hunting down the most trashy, ridiculous recipe I could find. I give you Elegant as Sh*t White Trash Bars

You begin with 2 sleeves of Ritz crackers and crumble them up into a greased 13x9 pan.

On top, I you drizzle 1 can Sweetened Condensed Milk. 

In the 13x9 you mix it all up with a 16oz bag of some kind of toffee/chocolate crumbles - Heath or Skor perhaps. Press it back into the pan and bake for 15-20mins - or until it is hot a little bubbly. Once it cools completely, the recipe calls for a whole tub of vanilla frosting. WHaaaaaaat? I dislike (if I am being kind) store bought tub frosting.  So, this is where my "elegant" part comes in... I made butter frosting with Bailey's instead of milk to make a wonderfully creamy and rich frosting.

Then, to top it all off and make it super classy and elegant: pearl balls! 

I cut the first few bars into 2"x2" squares and all four of us just about puked upon trying to eat the whole bar.  Don't get me wrong, they are delicious - really, surprisingly good. But, the 1"x1" nugget sized bars were far more palatable. Be prepared for immediate onset of diabetes - I don't guarantee it, but it would not surprise me at all.

Week 4 - Frosting/Filling - Chocolate Avocado Cupcakes with Avocado Frosting

I have always made my own frosting. I can't stand the stuff in the can.  But, I have a pretty standard recipe and I don't mess with it very often.  For this week's challenge I'd had designs on doing eclairs or something else fancy, but we have guests in town and it's been a busy week so I chose to go a bit more low key, but new.  I present: Chocolate avocado cupcakes with avocado frosting. 

The avocado in the chocolate cake part is mixed in with the liquid ingredients.

The batter was far thicker than I am accustomed to with cake batter, but I also forgot that I replaced the vanilla extract with scraping out a vanilla bean.  Even so, I don't think the 1 tsp. of vanilla would have changed the consistency that much. 

The recipe called for the muffin tins to be filled most of the way up rather than the normal half full.

I wish I'd filled them up even a bit more, so they would pop up over the cupcake tin, but they cooked up just right and I couldn't wait for them to cool so that I could make the frosting and taste these suckers!

Making the frosting was pretty easy - just mashing the avocado really well (I used a combo of a handheld mixer and then smashing with a spatula against the side of the bowl),  then mixing with vanilla and powdered sugar. The avocado essentially replaces the butter.  In addition to making a new frosting I've never tried, I also busted out my piping bag and got some practice with that.  I am not great at it, but it was pretty and I like how they turned out aesthetically. 

My wonderful in-laws and my wonderful husband were my guinea pigs and humored me by trying my creation.  The verdict was that the cupcake combo was good - not amazing, but good. We all agreed that doing either the chocolate avocado cake or the avocado frosting would be enough - this combo was a bit of overkill.  In the future I'd pair the chocolate avocado cake with a lemon frosting, or a simple buttercream, or perhaps even a whipped cream frosting.  The avocado frosting could be paired with a nice lemon or white cake.  

 It was fun to try out something new.  And it was in no way a bust - there was nary a crumb left, so it was certainly not disgusting. :)