Stiching and Bitching and Baking

When you are in college and you live within walking distance of all your friends, life is amazingly simple; however, when you don't live close enough to see your friends every single day, sometimes you need to make excuses to see them.  My favorite excuse is a party for which I bake obscene amounts of food. I discovered rather quickly that a good way to get people to want to come to your parties is by making sure that they want to eat everything that you ever make because it tastes amazing.... it seems like a pretty good rule to live by.

My sister, also being a culinary genius in her own right, and I went a little overboard with this party...

She made amazing baklava!  It was incredibly delicious and I continuously had to make sure that she was getting the credit she deserved for such a wonderful creation :-)

 

(It isn't the best picture... but the lighting in my house is kinda lame...)

I made Lemon Ricotta Cookies (which were very interesting and soft), Italian Cream Cupcakes and an Italian Cream Cake in the shape of a fish... I love that fish pan.

The other exciting thing that I made was Root Beer Float Cupcakes!

 

(This also isn't a very good picture... I should have moved the ketchup bottle...lols)

I had tried another Root Beer Cupcake recipe before, and personally, while other people thought it was ok, I didn't like it as much as I had hoped I would... The cupcakes were overly moist and they didn't taste like Root Beer.  I wanted to try again, so I altered a recipe that called for Root Beer Schnapps and Root Beer by just using Root Beer and Artificial Root Beer flavoring.

Here was the original recipe, I found it here: Root Beer Float Cupcakes

1 cup root beer schnapps

1 1/2 cups old-fashioned style root beer (like A&W or Dads)
2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups dark brown sugar
1 cup butter
2 eggs
3 cups all purpose flour
1 Tbs. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt

This is how I altered it:

 2 1/2 cups old-fashioned style root beer (I used IBC because I felt like buying something in glass bottles)

2 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tbsp. root beer flavoring

2 cups dark brown sugar
1 cup butter
2 eggs
3 cups all purpose flour
1 Tbs. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt  (I actually forgot the salt, and they were ok, but I would recommend not forgetting the salt if you made them...)

 

If you went to the site where I found the recipe, you will notice that my cupcakes do not look like their cupcakes... this is because I wanted to go for a more Root Beer Float feel with a thick dollop of vanilla whipped cream frosting on top.

For the whipped cream frosting, all I did was beat some heavy cream, vanilla extract, and a little bit of powdered sugar... I don't like my whipped cream frosting to be very sweet.

The most exciting part of these cupcakes, however, was the fizz!!!  I had decided that I felt the carbonation in a Root Beer Float was really important.  In order to duplicate that, I cut the tops off of the cupcakes, filled them up with pop rocks, put the tops back on, and covered them with frosting.  It is probably better to do this after the cupcakes have been sitting out for just a little while and have lost a bit of moisture... the pop rocks don't pop as much then before you put them in your mouth.

 

These were fairly awesome :-)  I would definitely make them again. Also, in case anyone was wondering, they did legitimately taste like Root Beer, and the Cherry Pop Rocks blended quite nicely with the flavor... I think Cherry would probably work best.

If a bakery were actually a bar...

One night, I woke up from a very odd dream  In this dream, I was making a cake that was very tall and was shaped like a heart.  This wasn't odd.  What was odd was the fact that I had subconsciously decided to frost this cake with strawberry frosting on the inside of the cake and mint frosting on the outside of the cake.  I hadn't ever thought of this combination before.  But, fortunately, this idea stuck with me.

Several days later, I discovered the perfect cake to complement my strawberry and mint frostings.  Lime cake.  The fact that this didn't come to me earlier is a bit appaling since my favorite fruity feminine drink is a Strawberry Mojito.

The lime cake recipe I used turned out very moist and delicious!  It used buttermilk, which I think complemented the flavor very nicely.  The recipe also called for lime zest, but I didn't have a zester, so I just chopped up tiny pieces of lime peel and it still turned out wonderful.  I also made mini-cupcakes instead of regular sized cupcakes.  I think this really concentrated the flavor and made each bite of cupcake taste that much better.

The frostings were definitely what I focused on since they were literally the "stuff of dreams" and they were fantastic!  The mint frosting was really easy.  I made a buttercream frosting to which I added a bit of mint extract and a tiny bit of food coloring.  The strawberry frosting wasn't as easy.  I wanted to use fresh strawberries.  And I did.  But the strawberry puree was a little too runny and I didn't get it to a frosting-like consistency; however, it was very much like a strawberry butter and it was quite tasty as it was.

In order to get the cupcakes you see here, I cut the tops off the cupcakes and put about a teaspoon and a half of the strawberry butter on the bottom half of the cupcake then replaced the cupcake top.  On top of each cupcake, I piped some mint frosting then topped the each with a quarter of a strawberry and a mint leaf.

I don't think that it is immodest to say that these cupcakes were probably one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten, let alone created.  If I were to make these cupcakes again though, I might try to see if I can draw more inspiration from the actual cocktail and add some rum.  Or maybe I'll just eat it with a shot on the side.