fuzzykitty

June 27, 2007

Triple yellow cake

Filed under: Food — heather @ 3:04 pm

Last night was my final class for Wilton Course 2!  We completed oval cakes filled with flowers and finished with a basket weave.  Darrell suggested the yellow color in honor of Dave Chappelle and his “yellow cake”.  Going with the yellow theme I had added a little turmeric to the batter to make it a pretty yellow color and also filled the cake with home made lemon curd.

Course 3 starts on Tuesday!   I am also taking a cupcake class next week where we are going to top cupcakes with frosting sunflowers, spaghetti & meatballs, blueberry pies and also learn how to fill them with goodness!

In other news, I made an appointment for a laser vision correction consultation next week!

June 20, 2007

Cornbread & Sugar

Filed under: Food — heather @ 6:22 pm

lowfat choco buttercream

I finally bought the Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World cookbook! It is tempting to bake my way through it because they have a lot of yummy ideas. Tonight I decided to make something quick and easy so I opted for the sexy low-fat vanilla cupcakes (page 41) and topped them with chocolate buttercream frosting (page 144). The cake turned out lightly sweet and moist. It also had an unexpected cornbread-like crumb, which may have occurred because I did not use soy yogurt or soy milk, instead I used real nonfat milk and nonfat yogurt because I had them on hand. I had doubled my buttercream because it makes me sad when I do not have enough frosting to make proper swirls on top of my lovely little cupcakes. This buttercream is very rich and chocolaty, a bit of a contrast to this moist and less sweet cake. I think next time I will try the golden vanilla cupcakes (page 33) or one of the fun recipes.

June 15, 2007

cookie crack is famous!

Filed under: Food — heather @ 11:49 am

I just found out that my recipe for cookie crack was featured in the horoscope section of the Valentine’s Edition for a Bakespace Newsletter and was viewed over 1200 times! I had no clue! Here is what the newsletter said:

PISCES

Cookie Crack: Pisceans love anything that can catapult them into the stratosphere of ecstasy. As a strongly emotional sign, however, they have to be careful that a love of ecstasy doesn’t become an addiction. As this recipe is even called “crack,” Pisceans better watch out!

June 13, 2007

Very Vanilla

Filed under: Food — heather @ 5:08 pm

cupcake

Early last week Linda from Chubby Cheek Girls posted a recipe for vanilla bean cupcakes with vanilla bean frosting she even posted a picture to show us how yummy they looked. I had been looking for a good recipe that included vanilla beans since I got a great deal (I am a sucker for free shipping!) on these vanilla beans from Amazon. If you do buy these please know that the seller JR Mushrooms & Specialties is awesome and that shipping is no longer free; once my order was placed they emailed me to tell me more about the product I had purchased and when I could expect to receive it, they were also available for any questions.

Anyway, Darrell has been gone for a week and a half and I felt like I needed to bake. Its been really hot here and the idea of turning on the oven made me sweat, thankfully we had a scary storm today that dropped the temperature from the mid 80s to the 60s so I turned on the oven and made my cupcakes. While the cupcakes were baking and the frosting was chilling I decided to start my lemon curd because I wanted to fill the cupcakes with it. The recipe was right, the lemon curd was easy… until I messed it up. Somehow my curd cooled off too quickly after it was strained causing the butter not to incorporate into it. So, I tossed the lemon curd and frosted my cupcakes.
This is going to sound weird but I have been thinking of better ways to frost cupcakes recently and was excited to try piping a large rosette rather than a regular swirl. The photo I have included is of that rosette topped with an apple blossom royal icing flower I made last night in cake class.

June 8, 2007

Three years smoke free

Filed under: Holiday — heather @ 1:00 am

no smoking

Today is my 3rd smoke-aversary! According to some of the smoking calculators so far I have saved about $2,737.50 by not smoking in the past 3 years.  I do not miss being a smoker one bit.

June 5, 2007

Destin

Filed under: Car, Food, Holiday, Work — heather @ 6:38 am

Darrell on beach

Since we haven’t been able to sneak away for our annual trip to Playa del Carmen yet, for Memorial Day weekend we took a trip about five hours West of us to Destin, Florida. Destin is a beachy tourist destination on the Gulf of Mexico. The drive was smoky and lame but our hotel was nice. The two real treats of our trip were spending one entire day on the beach under an umbrella relaxing and getting a super yummy cupcake fix at Cupcake Beach!

Since we moved here to Orange Park I had not driven myself off of the island, but this past weekend I drove 80 miles round trip to take Darrell to the airport so he could fly to Nashville, Tennessee to take his Airframe & Powerplant tests to get certified for work. Please take a moment to wish him luck by commenting in his stale blog!