K's Baking Party: Cookies & Cake

I've said it before, but I'll say it again - no birthday party is complete without cookies! At some point in the planning process of K's birthday party, the cupcake started to emerge as a theme. As a result, I decided to incorporate cupcakes into the cookies as well. Unfortunately, I don't have a cupcake cookie cutter, so I had to make do with what I did have - a scalloped diamond and a ruler.

I started by rolling out my cookie dough and cutting straight edge. Using the more rounded half of my scalloped diamond, I cut out the top half of the diamond. In case you want to make your own cupcake cookies, I think the same result could be done with a circle or oval cutter instead of the scalloped diamond. It might even be a bit cuter.

Using the ruler, I cut another straight line, and then a second one about 3cm above the first.

I cut that long rectangle into smaller rectangles roughly the width of the top cupcake bit.

Then I sliced them inwards slightly, to make them look like the base of the cupcake (note: the one on the right had not yet been cut).

On the lined cookie sheet, I placed the top and bottom as closely together as possible, but they didn't connect perfectly.

No problem at all - I just used my finger to smooth out the line a bit.

They ended up looking like this before baking.

Look at the little army of cupcakes!

I mentioned before, that I really didn't have a whole lot of time to spend on this party. Cutting and piecing together the cupcakes took a good amount of time and I assumed that decorating them would as well. To save myself some time, after about 16 cupcake cookies, I just cut the rest of the dough into scalloped circles.

Once the cookies were baked and cooled I wrapped them up and put them in the freezer for about a week. A few nights before the party, I got them out, thawed them and got to decorating. Just like the real cupcakes, I only used white and yellow icing. This seriously cut down on prep time and kitchen mess. I started with the "frosting" part of the cookie. To reinforce the line I wanted to try to cover most of it with one color of icing. I did a little swirl at the bottom and then went straight up and over the top, to make a rounded, slightly wavy triangle. Then I filled it in. For the first few, I put the sprinkles on right away, but I found that it looked better if I gave the icing a bit of time to harden slightly before putting on the sprinkles.

Once the tops were done, I went to the bottoms. These were done in yellow - again starting with the outline and then filling them in.

 

Once they were completely dried, I piped on vertical lines to mimick the cupcake wrapper. For the scalloped circles, I did half of them in yellow, the other half in white. Half of each color got sprinkles, the other half got a "4" on them. In a final detail, I piped tiny dots around the edges of the circles to highlight the scalloped edge. (I did a really awful job of taking photos for this party. So, yes, this is the exact same photo from above, but I thought it would be easier to see the final details if I showed this photo again.)

Next up was the cake. Ahhh, the cake. I was so super dissappointed in it. I wanted it to be a huge cupcake, but it ended up looking like a pot of white flowers. Boooo. The good news is that once it was cut and plated, it looked adorable and tasted even better.

I don't have a giant cupcake tin, so I just did what I could with round tins and a knife. I started by making a full vanilla cake recipe and a half of a chocolate cake recipe. Then I sliced each of the cakes in half horizontally to give me six rounds to work with. I started with the bottom of the cake, stacking the layers one on top of the other, vanilla, chocolate, vanilla. Then I put a small bowl on top and using a toothpick sketched out a line about 1cm away from the edge of the bowl.

Following my line, I sliced down and out diagonally to give the cupcake base the correct shape.

Then I took the layers apart, separated them with the buttercream and re-stacked them, upside down. I did the same idea for the top of the cupcake, but I cut the shape so that it was rounded at the top and then went straight down. This was a mistake. In my head it was much better than the pointy cupcake top the pan bakes into, but I was wrong. The pointy top would have been way better. Live and learn, right?!

Then it came time for the crumb coats. I did the top and bottom separately since the six layers would have been too tall to fit into my fridge.

Once the bottom half's crumb coat was hard, I busted out the yellow buttercream for the base. I first just focused on getting a fairly even coat on the bottom.

 

Then I dragged an offset spatula from the bottom of the cake, up to the top to create something that looked like wrapper folds. As you can see, I left a tiny space between each vertical drag. I love how the bottom turned out.

 

Finally it was on to the top. :( After the crumb coat was dried, using the biggest star tip I own, I piped stars all over the cake. I left about 5cm from the bottom empty to make it easier to move the cake onto the base the next morning.

Instead of using the same white buttercream to join the top to the bottom, I made a delicious ganache. I thought it would add a bit of visual interest to the cut cake. I also thought it would kick up the tasty factor a bit - I was totally wrong on the shape of the cake, but I was so, so right about this decision!

 

Once I put the top onto the bottom of the cake, I finished up the piping. I didn't even take a photo of the finished cake. I totally forgot. I think had I been more proud of how the cake looked, I would have remembered, but what can you do? On top of the finished cake, I put a yellow "4" candle, but I moved it to K's cupcake for the blowing out of the candle bit. The main reason that I moved it, was because I knew the cake would take a good amount of time to cut - there were 17 adults to cut for. I thought it would be pretty lame to have K blow out his candle and then 30 minutes later, finally eat the cake. 

 

So, about 30 minutes before singing the old "Happy Birthday Song", I got to cutting the cake. I LOVE how it looks cut. I think the black and white stripes look so super cool. Good thing, because I was seriously bummed by how the cake looked pre-cutting. Many of the guests commented on how beautiful the cake looked (post-cutting), but even more commented on how good it was. Wahoo!!

 Seventeed slices of cake? Don't mind if I do!

Healthy (?) Brownies

I wrote last week about how we had 17 people at our house two weekends ago, 9 of whom were kids. In addition to the two cheesecakes I made, I thought a batch of brownies might go over well with the kids. Around the same time I was planning my desserts, a friend of mine of Facebook asked a general question if anyone had ever made brownies with spinach in them. What? I looked online and found that Jessica Seinfeld had a recipe from her "Deceptively Delicious" book for brownies with spinach and carrots in them. The recipe was online, so I figured I would give it a try.

I made my spinach puree. At this point, I thought about just stopping the madness and finding a new recipe. T is close to starting solids, I could just freeze the puree for when he needs it in a few weeks.

The carrots were already steaming, however, so I figured I might as well keep going. But yikes, this did not seem like a good idea to me. I followed the recipe closely, only substituting butter in for the margarine.

As I mixed it all up, it did start to resemble brownie batter, but I just couldn't get the bright green and orange out of my head.

I baked them up regardless, and let them cool down completely before trying one (as per the recipe). In the end, I just wasn't all that impressed as they didn't seem brownie-like to me. I had Y try one, he said it was fine. K seemed to like them just fine as well, but I am left unconvinced. At the party, only one or two were taken - the cheesecake was obviously better.

 

It's not that they tasted bad. For the most part you couldn't taste the spinach, although I did feel something tasted strange in there. The consistency was also a tad off for me. But most importantly, given that there is 1 cup of purees and then the pan is cut into 12 (I did mine into 16) pieces, I wouldn't really consider these a way to get in the veggies. With 16 squares cut, that equals out to a whopping 1 tablespoon of vegetable puree per brownie. That's not really worth the lack of deliciousness to me.

 

That being said, I am lucky in that K is a little veggie monster. His favorite food is asparagus, closely followed by brocolli. He doesn't care much for pork or beef, but he loves every other protein imaginable. I guess if my kid wouldn't touch a veggie, I might make these again, but for the meantime, I think I will stick to my full fat, full sugar, nothing-healthy-at-all brownies ;)

Halloween - K's Party

Today we hosted K's Halloween party. As you may recall, the party was meant to be earlier in the week, but then K got sick so we rescheduled for today. This is probably a blessing in disguise, because these kids were so wound up, I doubt many of them got to bed at their normal bedtime. Having the party on a Friday night is probably better than during the week.

We ended up with six three-year olds, two one-year olds, and T for a grand total of nine kids (counting T is a bit cheating, I suppose). I'm beat. This post, just like the post from the party a few days ago, is going to be a huge one full of photos!

Let's start with the food! I decided that this party would have a bit of a monster theme going on, so I started with some monster sugar cookies. I used my regular recipe, but to make things a bit easier I only did three colors of frosting.

I started by making a ton of little eyes out of royal icing. I did these last week so they had plenty of time to dry out. Once they are dry, they just pop off the parchment. Simple. I did them in a variety of shapes, some with the pupil straight, others where the pupil is off to the side.

Once the cookies were all baked, I divided them into three groups to make the frosting bit easier. I didn't end up with all of one color and I didn't even have to think about it. I also separated the eyeballs by size so that adding them to the cookies would be simple.

 

It was pretty fast to get these all decorated since it was just one color for the entire cookie. All I had to do then was add a few eyeballs here and there. 

 

To make them a tad bit more interesting, I took a toothpick and made spikes on some of the cookies. Once they were fully dry, I added black mouths and a few of them even got little teeth.

They looked so cute as a little set. The kids ate these up like nobody's biz. The moms kept commenting on how cute they were. Success!

 

The other food that I made for the party was monster brownies. I thought it would be fun to have pre-frosted brownies with some little toppings so that the kids could make their own monsters. I started off by making some brownies. I used a new recipe, but to be honest, I didn't love it, so I won't bother sharing the link. 

 

 

They taste fine, but that delicious, delicate, crunchy layer on top got really thick. This made them really difficult to cut. Thank goodness I had planned on frosting them.

 

 

Also, they were super sweet (and that's saying a lot coming from me). Because of that, I made the frosting on the not-very-sweet-side. I did a cream cheese frosting with 226g of cream cheese, 42g of butter and just one cup of powdered sugar. Then I colored the frosting, again doing three different colors, and frosted all of the brownies.

 

  

Since there were nine brownies, but only six kids (of partying age), I did up three monsters as examples.

 

 

I think this was my favorite part of the party. The kids were so funny making their little monsters. K used only yellow on his, but then decided to add some brown hair.

 

 

Another boy spent ages making his face and then when it was all done, he took a big handful of coconut, put it right on top, and said, "haha, I covered his face." One little girl didn't do too much to her brownie, but just loaded her plate with M&Ms and other candies. They were cracking me up!

 

 

 

Aside from brownie decorating, I thought it would be fun to do a little craft. I wanted something that would be easy and quick. I came up with little painted jars. I often save glass jars just in case I need it for something and luckily I did, because it meant I was able to do this craft with the kids.

 



A few weeks ago, I tested this out to see if it would work and lo and behold it did. I put a few drops of acrylic paint into the jar and then added a few drops of water.

Then I put the lid on and shook it up a lot.

Eventually the whole jar got covered. I found, however, that with the lid on, the paint would slide down the edges of the jar. So, I would shake it up, open the lid and let it dry out a bit. Then I repeated that about a million times until the paint was fully dry. Once they were all dried out, I drew little faces on them and that was that. While I didn't take any photos at the party, this ended up working out well. It was quick and easy and the kids seemed to have fun drawing on the faces. That being said, we didn't open them to let them dry. Moms can deal with that at home.

We also did the ghost bowling. It wasn't very structured at all, as the kids seemed to have a difficult time with it, but it was cute nonetheless. After they knocked down all of the ghosts (they just kept throwing the ball until all of the ghosts were down), they got a candy necklace, extremely similar to the ones my friend made.

 I got a roll of cellophane wrapping and cut it into six strips. I started by putting a little tape divider right in the middle.

Then I added a piece of candy, put another tape divider, then did that again.

Then I went to the other side and did the same. Finally, I put in the two end pieces and used a different patterned tape to connect the ends together.

Then I made five more of them.

Just like at the last party, the kids seemed to like these. After everyone had left, the doorbell rang and it turned out that one of the boys forgot his and wanted to come back to get it. What a bunch of cuties.

The party was full of crafts, games, food, and playing, but I am pretty sure K's favorite part was when he was sitting with his best friend (first love??), eating snacks and playing with each others' feet.

 

And just like that, Halloween 2013 is over. I always think that I'll make sugar skulls for Day of the Dead as well, but that has yet to happen. Next year, perhaps?