If you ever need you house to smell nice...

Make some of these! :)

I love making biscotti. There's something about patting the little lump of dough into a loaf, taking it out of the oven and slicing it while still warm, eating the soft ends and crisping the rest of the slices...it's one of my favorite kitchen processes. (Right up there with canning jam and browning meringue, haha!)
Last time I made biscotti it was more of a springtime crunch: orange cranberry. This time I went for something cuddly and fragrant. You know how you feel when it's raining outside and you pull a quilt out of the dryer fresh and warm and you wrap yourself up in it and breath deep? I wanted to make biscotti that tasted (and smelled) the way that feels. Like a cocoon of contentedness.

Mmmm...
And the best part? It's low fat and low sugar but still tastes all snuggly warm!

Want the recipe yet? Sure you do!

• 
  
• Spiced Caramel Biscotti
• Makes 42
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup white sugar
• 3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 eggs
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon each of nutmeg and ground cloves
• 
  
• Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Grease cookie sheets with Pam spray or line with parchment paper.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the oil, eggs, sugar and vanilla until well blended. Combine the flour, spices and baking powder, stir into the egg mixture to form a heavy dough. Divide dough into two pieces. Your hands will get pretty sticky. Try to resist flouring them or the dough. Use a rubber spatula or wax paper to help form each half into a roll as long as your cookie sheet. Place roll onto the prepared cookie sheet, and press down to 1/2 inch thickness.
3. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes in the preheated oven, until golden brown. Remove from the baking sheet to cool on a wire rack. When the loaves are cool enough to handle (you still want them warm so they don't crumble), slice each one crosswise into 1/2 inch slices. Place the slices cut side up back onto the baking sheet. Bake for an additional 6 to 8 minutes on each side. Slices should be lightly toasted and crunchy.
4. If you would like, you can drizzle them with caramel sauce but this add calories and makes em a bit sticky. Of course, this didn't stop me at all. ;) On goes the caramel! 
5. 
   

Happy munching!

Pina Coladaaaaaa!

So.
I'm getting ready to cater my very very first wedding ever! I am 8 parts excited, 12 parts nervous. I'm hoping that soon the excitement rises on the excitometer and the nervousness kinda ebbs away.
I usually find that worrying about something is
a. no help at all. Sleeplessness is always a bad thing.
b. laughable after it's all over. I always do better than I expect.
A few weeks ago I was able to go to the bride's shower, meet her grandmother, her aunt, cousin, and all her friends. They were all nice pleasurable people that love Amy very much. I gave her a kitchen utensil set and also 2 dozen of these babies:

Pina Colada Cupcakes! 

Her and her mom adore coconut, but they also picked that flavor for the wedding cake itself so I didn't want to just make coconut cupcakes for the shower. I had some cherries and canned pineapple so hey. HEY! Pina Colada, right? right!

According to the popular opinion these were AMAZING!! Amazing with an extra zing...my mom actually took home three extras from the shower and she never has seconds (she is a figure watching ninja...)

They were all over facebook the next day. I probably got a little too prideful about em, if I have to speak truth. But my last two experimental batches just didn't turn out too well so I was very very happy. 

The only thing I would change about it would be to add a little more Rum extract. I adapted my recipe from Glorious Treats. I didn't think Cream cheese frosting would hold up as well (it tends to get soupy) So I made a batch of coconut butter cream. THAT was my favorite part. mmmm....Oh. That and eating the leftover dried pineapple pieces. They're like candy! 

Of course, these awesome photos were taken by my ever lovely and talented sister, Laura. She just bought an Olympus something or other (I really don't know anything about cameras. But her's is like magic.) and so she really put it to work. Laura can make any camera pump out great looking photos, but Lucy (that's the new camera's name) puts her into the supernatural category of photography. :) 

Chocolate Donuts!

Every Sunday when my mom organizes the kid worship at church, she offers donuts to the team to compensate for asking them to get to the church building at the crack of dawn. (Ever wonder why the word "dawn" definitely rhymes with "YAWN"? Yeah, I know. Why didn't you notice that til now?)
Usually she ends up running late because she has to drive down to Safeway and get a box of average looking and tasting donuts. She hates it. Like, really really abhors detests HATES it. It's the worst part of her morning. So I took it upon my baker self to make homemade donuts for everyone. It was a win win win situation. I get to spend all night (and some parts of the early morning) in the kitchen, my mom wouldn't have to drive to Safeway and pick the least-stale box of donuts and thus avoid late arrival at church, and everyone would get to eat homemade donuts!

These should make about 3 dozen (plus donut holes!). I don't have a donut cutter so I just used a biscuit cutter and then a pastry tip turned upside down to cut out the middles.

• 4 1/2 c flour
• 4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 c sugar
• 2 Tbs unsalted butter, melted
• 1 c milk
• 1 tsp vanilla

1. Sift together the dry ingredients.
2. Beat eggs with sugar until light.
3. Add butter, milk, and vanilla.
4. Add dry ingredients and mix until a soft dough is formed. Do not over mix, it will make your donuts hard and stiff instead of fluffy.
5. If dough is too soft to roll, chill it for half an hour.
6. Roll dough out 1/2 inch thick on a floured surface and cut with donut cutters.
7. Fry in hot oil until golden on both sides, turning once. (I'm guessing the oil was about 350 degrees, I just eyeballed it because my thermometer is broken.)
8. Remove from oil with a slotted spoon, hold over hot oil for a few minutes to drain, and then finish draining on paper towels.
9. Top/decorate them however you like! I shook them in a bag with cinnamon and sugar or powdered sugar for the church goers. We also made a chocolate glaze with cocoa powder, sugar, and milk and topped them with chocolate jimmies. You could cover them with nuts or rainbow sprinkles too if you wanted. :)

Cupcake Challenge: Inspire me Cupcake

Week two!
I'm still excited about the cupcake challenge, but this is the second week in a row that the cupcakes haven't turned out right. The first (Cherry Limeade) I blogged right away about the cupcakes and yes, for the first day they were awesome! But when I put them away and tried them the next morning it was like eating playdough! >:P Blech. They got super chewy and hard and gross. I was significantly fallen.

This week I made Rocky Road cupcakes. Like last week, I followed a recipe from the internet...
I think I might have to stop doing that.

These weren't as bad as the last batch, but they weren't very good either. The cake itself was really dry and hard to eat. When they first came out of the oven they were like brownies so that was good. It's just when they had cooled they lost that brownie trait and became crumbly bricks. :(
I think in the future I'll use my own chocolate cake recipe because, quite honestly, it kicks some cupcake booty.
Decoration wise they were magnificent. Topped with a chocolate ganache, melted marshmallows, and chopped nuts...everyone that ate one ate it because they LOOKED delicious, not because they actually were. ;)

So already, even on week two, I'm learning things!
1. You aren't going to get it perfect the first time through. You'll have to go back, tweak things, work it through and put elbow grease into your recipes to make them as good as you want.
2. If a blog is cute and everyone raves about the author/photos/cuteness factor/creativeness it doesn't necessarily mean that their product is actually good. It could end up being really sucky.
3. If at first you aren't happy, get back up and turn on that kitchen aide again. You'll always be good at baking something (Like homemade donuts for instance!)

Cupcake Challenge: Week 1

Here I am looking at cupcakes on the internet, lurking in cupcake shops, watching cupcake shows on tv, I even dreamed about cupcakes this week! (I'm serious... Me, my sister and her boyfriend were all part of this cupcake squad and we were dressed like these kick butt spies with all these gadgets like headsets and stuff. And the cupcakes were beyond awesome and everyone was all "You saved the day! It's amazing!" and we were all "We know...we know...we are the cupcakes squad of awesomeness.") I'm a little obsessed with cupcakes. SO! First week into my cupcake challenge, I was rip roaring ready to go...

And for this week I chose to do one of the recipes I've been saving for summer...Cherry Limeade Cupcakes! It was going to be either these or Rocky Road, but Cherry Limeade won by vote. (Ok, so the only people who voted were me, my sister, and my brother...but hey)

 I decided to use the recipe from Annie's Eats as a sounding board, tweaking a few things here and there. You can get the recipe and see her delicious cupcakes at her blog, www.annies-eats.com. I especially liked pouring lime syrup over the cakes to give them that extra boost of flavor.

Me and John Mark split one right after they came out of the oven (we didn't even wait for them to cool all the way!) and there wasn't a crumb left. THAT is awesome because neither I nor JM actually eat cupcakes that often. We don't have big sweet tooth cravings like my mom. ;)

This cupcake was super tasty! It was very very tart, but the frosting was just the right amount of sweetness to balance it. In fact, it tasted a lot like it's namesake drink. The cake itself was one of the the moistest cupcakes I've ever eaten. It was similar to a superb pound cake.

Had to have a glass of the original, of course...

*coughcough*crazyproudofmyphotographyskillsforthispicture*coughcough*

Malted Milkshake and Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes

I really love cupcakes. I love thinking about them, looking at them on the internet, making them, decorating them, writing down recipes for them, eating them...I just really dig them. So of course, when I got an order to make not one kind of chocolate cupcake, but two, I didn't complain.
I actually had so much fun I thought to myself that maybe I'll just be a cupcake only bakery. No more cookies or cream puffs or loaves of bread...and then I remember how delicious half and half cookies were and how giddy I get watching cream puffs rise, and kneading dough? *sigh* Naw, I'll stick to being an all around classic bake-everything-I-can-get-my-hands-on bakery.

Chocolate Friends Forever... 

Perfectly puffed domes! 

All finished!

Before getting sprinkled with jimmies.

I'm proud of this photo. I'm getting better guys! I just need a decent camera that isn't 10 years old!

Getting a groove on.

I've been baking (in large quantities) since Wednesday. That's four days! I've baked four days in a row, but not stress baking like this. Things I have baked in the last four days:
-24 loaves of bread
-20 cheesy olive tomato focaccia.
-18 Red Velvet White Chocolate cupcakes decorated with baseballs and paw prints for the Paw Sox little league's end of year party.
-Half a dozen cherry filled Cream Cheese Red Velvet cupcakes
-A custom cake order. 14 inch blueberry cake with cherry cake and almond buttercream. It was decorated with a rippling American flag, the Navy ensigma, and the phrase "Go Navy!". It was for a going away party for a young man going into, you guessed it, the Navy.
-Half a dozen Earl Grey Citrus Cupcakes
-Dozen Chocolate Milkshake Cupcakes
-10 Peanut Butter Chocolate Cupcakes
-62 Cranberry Orange mini Muffins

I've kinda gotten into my groove...my days have this wacky, but enjoyable pattern that I follow. It goes somewhat like this:
Wake up a little later than I had planned. Contemplate taking a shower, usually opt not to because I have woken up late. Check email quickly to make sure no one has ordered any more cakes or anything. Find myself surfing tumblr or facebook. Reprimand myself for wasting time on the internet. Run around getting errands done/dishes clean/ etc. Get started on the baked goods for the day. Quit at about 2 to stuff my face full of lunch. Continue baking. Quit at about 5 or 6 when I'm about 3/4 of the way through my baking and crash/sleep/render myself unconscious til just before dinner time around 8:00 or 8:30. Clean up the kitchen a bit, eat dinner, and finish the last of the baking, pack up and try to clean up again...usually ending around 11 or 12.
So I'm a little bit like a baking zombie! It's great. :)