Mmm...Nutella

It was a warm Sunday afternoon when my friends and I decided to do some impromptu baking. Our goal: to use up Amy's expired jar of half-empty Nutella. After vetoing various recipes from google for requiring ingredients we didn't have/being too complicated/being questionable (I'm looking at you, Allison. 😉), we finally decided to just make some basic chocolate cake and swirl in some Nutella.

Okay, the swirling in part was less than successful (it tends to glob more than swirl). However, we did get the chance to use the mini-bunt cake pan that my sister and I had given Amy a few years ago for Christmas.

We just filled in the middle with Nutella and I was quite proud of somewhat managing a swirl! (Check out the beauty of that picture up top!)

We also tried stuffed cupcakes and those didn't quite turn out...

The cake is still tasty but the you can't tell where the Nutella is, can you?

We keep saying it but we really should do more baking together in the future. It was a lot of fun!

A Little Christmas Baking

Blackforest cupcakes with fresh whipped cream topped with crushed candy canes. Yum!

Black Forest Cupcakes

The sour cherry crop this year was not as plentiful as in previous years but I still had enough to make a few batches of cherry filling. With a more limited cherry supply, I decided to be ambitious and try my hand at making Black Forest cupcakes. I've never made stuffed cupcakes before so I wasn't sure if the filling was just going to sink to the bottom and end up being soggy. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my technique of layering cake batter, then filling and then batter again actually worked. I whipped up some cream and shaved a Lindor chocolate on top for decoration and then voila! Looked good and tasted good too! The only thing I think I'll change is that next time, I will add a bit more rum but otherwise, I count this experiment as a success. :)

We start with fresh picked cherries. It's a fair bit of work but incredibly satisfying to harvest your own fruit.

I pitted about 8 cups of cherries by hand. A pair of headphones and some pop music is recommended.

Flour, sugar and cornstarch made up the dry ingredients. Pretty simple.

Then you cook everything.

Lovely, bright red cherry filling - yum!

The tricky part about layering batter-filling-batter is trying not to make a mess.

I've learned over time how much to fill the cups so that my cupcakes are not overflowing.

I was quite proud of myself that the filling worked!

After that, the rest is just decoration. :)

Not bad for our 100th post, eh? Yep, that's right - it took three years but we've finally broken the 100 mark. Time for some (cup)cake to celebrate!

For the Love of Carrot Cake...

I have noticed lately that all my posts currently involve some form of food. My papers and punches are collecting dust as I’m spending more of my time in the kitchen with friends. Food is something that brings people together and I find it interesting that during a recent conversation about my friends’ dream homes, every one of them wanted a large kitchen island as a hub for entertaining.

This rather interesting creation should have been posted a long time ago. My friend Casey’s birthday is on Valentine’s day and he once jokingly told us that in the past, it was difficult to find friends to celebrate with him because so often, they are out with their significant others. Well, our church fellowship group was planning on meeting up that weekend to watch sports anyway so Amy, Emily, Tim and I decided to bake a cake to celebrate him gaining another year on his dish. ;)

This carrot cake recipe has been described as “the best carrot cake I have ever had” by more than one person. It was also an excellent way to put more vegetables in the diets of the guys of our group.

Since the gathering was in the evening, our plan was to bake the cake in the afternoon and bring it out as a surprise. Unfortunately, we were off to a slow start and so had barely managed to finish the baking portion before Casey arrived. The assembly and decorating of the cake is a comedic story involving a cramped laundry room, a mess of icing and multiple attempts at breaking away from the group without being noticed.  Oh the things we do for our friends… J

We got this recipe from here. I'm sure this is not going to be the last time we make this!

Deluxe Cake Pops

Mmm...four chocolate cake pops with caramel chocolate filling served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, drizzled with chocolate sauce, caramel sauce and topped with pecan nuts and a crispy wafer. It's a fancy restaurant dessert that didn't have a name but boy, did it taste good! :)

It's Cherry Season!

I have a sour cherry tree in my backyard and there is also one at my uncle's place. Each summer, the trees produce a bumper crop of fruit. Two years ago, I picked over 40 pounds of cherries from my uncle's tree alone! There is something beautifully tempting about those glistening red fruits gleaming in the summer sun. Although it is a fair bit of work, I really enjoy the harvest. Of my family, I'm probably the one who spends the most time perched on a ladder filling bucket after bucket. My grandfather was the one who planted the cherry tree over at my uncle's place many years ago and although he has since passed away, every time I pick cherries I feel as if he is smiling down from heaven. Even a suburban girl like me can understand and appreciate how harvest time is a blessing from God. :)

This is what 10 lbs of cherries look like. Yes, I weighed them. :)

So what does one do with 40 pounds of cherries? I give most of them away to friends and family who either eat them straight, bake with them or make sauces, jams or gelatos (yum!) with them. My sister and I have made our share of pies, jams and dried fruit. One of my favorite things to make is a cherry crisp. I am not much of a baker so this easy recipe appealed to me when I first found it. (Okay, the tempting pictures accompanying the recipe also had something to do with it.)

Recently, I made one to bring to a friend's BBQ. I was actually feeling a bit nervous as I was preparing the ingredients because I hadn't baked this in two years and wasn't sure how it would turn out.

A lovely golden brown. 

I should have taken it out about a minute earlier because there were a few crumbs that were burnt but all in all, looking pretty good.

As I wrote to a friend in an email: "Baking is an act of faith. You mix all the ingredients, pour it in a pan, say a prayer over it and then put it in the oven. You can't do anything to fix it while it bakes. Then when it comes out, you have to trust that it tastes okay because you can't really cut a piece out to try it before taking it over to someone else's BBQ." Did I actually pray over this while it was baking? You better believe I did. And it ended up tasting great! ;)

Here's the recipe (I found it on allrecipes.com by ARANDYGAIL):

Ingredients for the filling:
4 cups pitted sour cherries
1.5 cups white sugar
4 tablespoons all-purpose flour

Ingredients for the crust:
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup old-fashioned oats
1 cup brown sugar
0.5 cup butter
0.5 cup shortening

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F
2. In a large bowl, combine cherries, white sugar, and 4 tablespoons of flour. Pour into a 9x13 inch baking dish.
3. In a medium bowl, combine the 1.5 cups of flour, oats, and brown sugar. Cut in butter and shortening until crumbly. Sprinkle over cherry filling.
4. Bake in oven for 45 to 50 minutes or until the topping is golden brown.

A Valentine Girl's Night

This angle makes our cake pops look awesome.

It was Girl's Night on Valentine's Day; a lively evening of pizza, cake pops, 90's music and Dutch Blitz :). Us CCCO girls trickled into Amy's house between 4:30 to 7:00 pm and set about making a mess in her kitchen. Her house is wonderfully set up for group cooking endeavors. 

Our resident baker, Amy, made the pizza dough before hand. 

In honour of Valentine's day, we decided to shape each pizza into a heart.

A little attention to detail and we even sliced our salami slices into little hearts. (That salami sure had a lot of kick, Michelle!) 

Piping hot, fresh from the oven!

Throughout, we were alternately singing, lipsynching and dancing to love songs from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s - and discovered that we have all heard these songs sung in Chinese while growing up. Mandarin and Cantonese speaking pop singers really like English slow songs :P.

For dessert, we made cake pops. I learned last night that the original way of making cake pops is to bake a cake, crumble it, mix the crumbs with icing and then form it into balls. I must admit that sounds very dense and not that appealing to me. Several months ago, my mom found this cake pop maker in the clearance section of Loblaws and could not resist buying it. We took it out to use for the first time yesterday and were delighted to find that it's really easy to use and works very well. For a quick recipe, we just used cake mix and club soda.

So easy - fresh out of the box and just plug and go!

This was the tester batch. We weren't sure how much batter to put into each well and so they turned out a little pale and uneven. 

The second batch was a vast improvement.

A pair of chopsticks makes transferring these things onto a cooling rack hassle-free. These cake balls taste best when fresh out of the maker with no icing. (Although decorating was fun...)

This was a great idea for a cake pop holder but I think we will need to weigh it down more next time.  It held for most of the evening and only tipped over once. 

We didn't have any chocolate melts so we had to experiment a bit to create a dip with chocolate chips.

Dipping it, unfortunately, was not very successful.

I tried to use the thicker consistency of the icing to my advantage.

A bit of sculpting...

He's not sure what to think...

But in the end, he's happy to be here :)

As you can see from our first picture, our other designs were far more abstract. They look neat but were a little too sweet.

To Amy, Tracy, Emily, Michelle, Elysia, and my sister, thanks for an awesome evening! As always, we need to do this more often! 

Tastes like Autumn

Besides the changing colours of the leaves, nothing says autumn like the rich flavours of apple and cinnamon! More baking adventures as I attempted to make mini apple fritter muffins. They came out a lot denser than I think they were supposes to, but at least you could really taste the apple.

Original recipe: http://chasingsomebluesky.blogspot.ca/2011/10/apple-fritter-muffins.html

Oh Those Fancy French Desserts...

I have a confession to make. Three weeks ago, I had no idea what was a macaron. I had seen these little sandwich-like things before but I had never eaten one and I had never bothered to find out what they were called. It was our friend, Amy, who suggested that Allison, Emily and I go over to her place for an afternoon of baking and try our hand at making these.

The recipe we used can be found here.

First, we gathered the ingredients. (Of course!)

We sifted the almond flour and then the confectioner's sugar into a bowl.

My sister and I showed off our awesome skills at separating egg yolks :P!

We whipped the egg whites into fluffy peaks while adding sugar.

We mixed the egg whites with our dry ingredients.

A teaspoon of vanilla concentrate.

A few drops of pink food colouring.

We were intent on making our macarons as precise as possible so we traced circles onto the underside of the parchment paper so that we had a template to follow when piping.

Emily shows off her careful and precise piping skills.

A perfect little swirl every time!

All ready for the oven!

And out they come...

Lovely... :)

For a first time, I think we did an excellent job! We were very meticulous in following the recipe and were rewarded with beautifully smooth-topped macarons. They are very delicate, fluffy things, I discovered. For filling, we used up the last of Amy's Nutella for most of them and used different jams for the rest and they were fantastic! Of course we did a photo shoot - good thing you don't eat these while they are hot :P

We got adventurous after the first time. We attempted an Earl Grey flavored macaron with some sort of lemon filling for our second batch.

We went for a light blue colour this time.

We emptied three tea bags into the batter.

I don't think we mixed it properly this time because the mixture turned out thicker.

Unfortunately, the swirls didn't smooth out. 

We made one attempt at a lemon curd filling which we found online. It was a disaster and I am not going to leave photographic evidence that it ever happened. We ended up melting marshmellow peeps and adding lemon extract for a very sweet filling.

With a cup of tea, the second, less successful batch still turned out okay. It was edible and tasty and when it comes to food, that's really the most important thing.

These things are quite sweet and I now understand why they are sold individually at confectionery shops. You really can't eat more than one or two in a go.

Our little group has now gotten bitten with the baking bug and we'll be spending a bit more time in the kitchen in the future.