Odds & Ends Baking

So I have been quite the busy baker bee since my last post. And I thought I would start off with a bang by doing a collage posting of several different things I have made over the last three months.

Here goes...

First, for Mother's Day we had our families over for a nice Sunday afternoon BBQ. I decided Cheesecake sounded like a real winner. So I pulled out an old favorite, Raspberry Swirl Cheesecake with Chocolate Crust and Raspberry Sauce. It was the perfect ending to Mothers Day. I only got one photo (which wasn't even that good) because there were a lot of people starring me down, waiting for their slice.

Next, Mini Brownie Bites, just because Brownies rock! I had bought these really cute mini muffin pans on sale, and hadn't really had the chance to use them. And Brownies are just one of those foods I crave, do you know what I mean? So I mixed up a batch and baked them up in my mini tins and then let them cool on the rack. Once they were cool I just looked at them and thought they are so adorable, they deserve a little decoration. I mixed up a quick batch of chocolate butter cream and piped it on top with my 1M tip and that's all she wrote. Added Bonus - They went perfectly in our lunch boxes for the next few days!

Here we have my husband's coworkers 40th birthday cake. Did I have any advance notice of this birthday so I could properly plan? Nope. I baked, iced and decorated this thing after I came home from work at around 5 o'cock and had it ready to go to work the next day by about 10 o'clock. (Thank goodness for those "buy one get one" cake mixes I stock up in my pantry.) This included coming up with the idea itself. It needed to be funny, but not too cliche, but not too offensive either. Did I already mention I had no notice to come up with this... So I turned to old faithful, the internet, for idea's and I actually got this idea from a picture of a greeting card I came across. It's not fancy, but it's funny, and that was all they really needed, a good laugh about getting old and a big slice of cake!

Finally, my experiment with rainbow cupcakes. Right before I was abducted away from the blogging world, I was seeing these rainbow cupcakes popping up everywhere! And I loved them, who wouldn't? I regret that I do not have tons of photo's of me making these, but I could have used four hands just to make these things alone. I would have needed a fifth hand to take pictures. I didn't have a special occasion in mind, just a hankering for some cupcakes, and to try out some new sprinkles I had just purchased.

So I mixed up the batter as I would for any cupcakes, and then I got out four of those disposable plastic bowls by gladware or ziplock or whoever. I divided up the batter in four parts and then colored them yellow, green, blue, and pink. I highly recommend the first time you make these to not try anymore than four colors. Four colors is PLENTY to work with, don't complicate it with six, its just not worth it! Next, I filled four half-gallon size disposable bags with my colored batter, snipped off the ends and filled the cupcake papers. Gosh, that sounds so easy! Here's a nifty tip, batter is extremely runny, and icing is usually not, batter does not act like icing in a piping/disposable bag! Instead batter just keeps running out of the bag :) So if you want this cool rainbow effect, you have to be very crafty, and have helpers on hand to hold the bags that you have opened while you fill cupcake tins with a different color batter. This isn't so hard as long as you bribe helpers with cupcakes. Like I said before, I could have used four hands for this project.

And here they are all baked up and split open for you viewing pleasure. So go ahead and try making some, they are lots of fun to make and to eat, but be ready for a mess! (Like there isn't always a mess to clean up afterwards anyways.)