Merry Christmas

Christmas season just makes me want to bake stuff whenever I have time. I whipped up these gingerbread cupcakes for fun today. I must say I am impressed with the recipe I found. I was also impressed with the $1.50 stand I found at the thrift store this week ;-) But back to the cupcakes, they cooked up beautifully with a few modifications I read in the reviews.
Gingerbread Cupcakes
Makes approximately 1 dozen cupcakes
Recipe modified from the Food Network

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup unsulphured molasses
• 1 large egg, at room temperature, lightly beaten with a fork
• 1/4 teaspoon orange extract
• 1/4 teaspoon lemon extract
• 1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tablespoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon fine salt
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/2 tablespoon baking soda
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  

Directions

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.

In a large bowl, whisk together the oil, sugar, molasses. Add the eggs and whisk until smooth. Add orange and lemon extract.

In another large bowl, whisk together the flour, ground ginger, cinnamon, salt, and cloves. Whisk the molasses mixture into the flour mixture until evenly combined.

In a small saucepan, bring the water to a boil. Remove from the heat and stir in the baking soda and baking powder. Whisk the hot water into the batter until just combined. Transfer the batter into the prepared cupcake liners. Bake at 325 for about 18-22 minutes. After they have cooled top them off with cream cheese frosting (I added a little lemon juice to my cream cheese frosting for a little kick). Garnish with crystallized ginger and enjoy!

So yummy and very moist. It's not a very strong gingery cupcake which I actually prefer. I think this would be good any time of year - not just the holidays.

Merry Christmas! May your holiday be restful... just like my dog Rocco!

~Cara Lee

Holiday Party

This weekend my BF and I headed down to Chesapeake, VA to see his cousin's Christmas light display (I kind of refer to his cousin as the Clark Griswold of Chesapeake, VA - see video I posted ;-). We also went down to attend his and his wife's holiday party. I decided to contribute some sweets since you really can never have enough during the holidays.



So for the party I made a cake and some cake pops. This was my second attempt at Bakerella's cake pop creation. Flavors: red velvet, chocolate and chocolate peppermint. As for decor, I stuck to basic sprinkles. They took forever to make but I was happy with the result overall - much better than before.
For the cake I had this really cute basic winter wonderland idea in my head. But it did not execute as nice as I wanted. I brought all my materials to their house and assembled and decorated there, but I still felt out of my element I guess. Not to mention I had a huge gaping hole in the fondant and had to patch it up. It was so frustrating. I just wanted to pay tribute to his cousin's Christmas lights and winter. This is what I ended up with.... not my fave cake, but it was presentable. Most important: the cake tasted good and was moist ;-) Flavors were: vanilla almond cake with vanilla SMBC and chocolate ganache as well as red velvet with cream cheese frosting. Hope everyone is having a happy holiday season... can't believe how fast the month is flying by!

Holidays are in full effect

Well it's December 1st, and the holidays are in full effect. Hanukkah starts today and only 25 more days until Christmas! I have yet to shop for anyone (sorry guys! lol). As my grad classes are winding down for the semester I decided to make some cupcakes for one of my classes that is ending today (any excuse to try a new recipe creation).

I decided to make cran-orange cupcakes. I made some last year, which were pretty good. But I wanted to tweak the recipe a bit. For the cake, I made a yellow cupcake batter and added fresh orange zest. Then I cooked the cranberries first with water and sugar (like you would cranberry sauce) but left them whole and drained the excess juice when cooled. The cranberries are then folded gently into the batter. For the frosting, I'm hooked on the SMBC (swiss meringue buttercream)! The cream cheese frosting I did last year was good, but can be so sweet with an already sweet cupcake. So I did a white chocolate SMBC. To top it all off they are garnished with sugared cranberries and a fondant holly leaf.

Very happy with my result this year. Hopefully my classmates will enjoy them too :) Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays

It's not Christmas without a baking. I pulled a Sandra Dee today and made semi-homemade brownie cupcakes. I don't like to use mixes too much anymore, but I grew up on them and I have a weakness for box mix brownies! I made the cake-like recipe, chopped up some Hershey's candy cane kisses, put them in liners, then made homemade white chocolate peppermint swirled frosting. I'm quite impressed :-)

HAPPY HOLIDAYS 2009

Christmas Spirit

I'm finally feeling "Christmas Spirit" this year with only 3 more days til actual Christmas. County schools were canceled, so my friend (who's a teacher) and I finished up our shopping and baked cookies all day. We baked sugar cookies with royal icing and two kinds of drop cookies. I'm not a cookie connoisseur BUT I believe I am the queen of adding different things into batches (anything from different nuts, chocolates, whatever I can find) and calling it your own. We did a chocolate cookie with mint chocolate chips and then a peanut butter cookie with peanut butter chips and Christmas m&ms. I have NOT been able to stop eating them!! *Cookie tip: put a piece of plain bread in with your cookies to keep them soft :-)

If you're looking for some cookie recipes:

Alton Brown's Sugar Cookies
(good for more delicate sugar cookies but I definitely recommend adding either vanilla or almond extract. I also added some fresh vanilla bean to ours. Let them cool on the pan before removing them)

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies
(I modified it by adding the mint chocolate chips to half the batch. The other half I chopped up Hershey's candy cane kisses and topped those off with peppermint sugar)

Peanut Butter Cookies
(I modified these by using the Christmas color M&Ms instead of the chocolate chips)

Holiday Cupcakes

My dad ordered two dozen cupcakes for his work party. He said any flavor, so I decided on red velvet w/ vanilla bean cream cheese frosting and the Irish stout cupcakes (same ones I made last week). They turned out so cute when I topped them with the homemade fondant holiday decor I made.

Ready for delivery!!