Christmas Cakes by Jen

"Christmas Cakes by Jen." That's what the sign on the wall at my work says. I decided a week ago that I would try to sell a few Christmas Cakes at work to make a bit of pocket money. Optimistic in my selling power, I put 12 spaces on the order form as I thought that I would be doing well to get that many. I am selling 8" Decorated Christmas Cakes for $35 each and this is obviously a bargain as in the space of a week I have have received orders for 15!

Needless to say, I am madly preparing myself to bake and decorate this many cakes. So far I have baked 5 and have another 4 ready to go in the oven over this weekend. I need to do something each day to make sure that I keep up with demand. I'm hoping to decorate them all next weekend, so they must all be baked by then.

The exciting thing about all this? I said on my form that I would be taking orders up until the 9th December. So I still have another week of potential orders! Who knows how many cakes I will end up selling by the end of the week! I am truly thankful that I said COD and pick up only, I would hate to have to deliver them all!

Cookies for a Cure & Gingerdead Men

I've decided that cupcakes are so last year. I have discovered decorated cookies and I love them! I think they are gorgeous and some of the ones I have seen are so intricate that they scare me. I have begun following a couple of bloggers on Facebook who do these cookies on a regular basis and I am head over heels in love with them. You can check them out here Bubble and Sweet and here Sweetopia. I am not the most confident person when it comes to working with icing, so this is a bit of a stretch for me. Luckily there are some great videos over at Sweetopia that have given me a head start on the decorating with royal icing. I also thank Bubble and Sweet for some great tips with recipes to follow and advice on using the fondant icing.

My SH and I have been trying to cut out sugar from our diets at the moment for health reasons, so I have been backing off the baking. This is all well and good, but I have to bring something to our Girls' Night In at work on Wednesday night this week. The other night I browsed the internet to find some Pink recipes that I could make that were relatively easy to make. I came up with Pink Marbled Meringues and Cookies for a Cure. Yay! I had a legitimate reason to bake some cookies now.

The first thing I decided to make was the meringues as I figured this would be an easy recipe as I make pavlova all the time with great success. I followed the recipe exactly, and they were a fizzer! The meringues took on a golden colour on the outside and they were undercooked inside. I have decided that I am never going to follow another recipe for pavlova or meringue again. Mine works, and I should have trusted myself to begin with. So saying, I made a second batch, my way, and they were awesome! Exactly how I envisaged them turning out. The recipe is the same as my pavlova with a few drops of red food colouring swirled through it. Then I dropped small spoonfuls of the mixture onto baking trays dusted with cornflour.

The cookies were next, and I used a recipe that I found over at Bubble and Sweet. It is the easiest cookie recipe to make and cut. I am really happy with how well they turned out. I chose a simple design, a heart shape, covered with white fondant and then a pink fondant ribbon on top. They are super delicious too, which is making it really hard for me to leave them safe inside their Tupperware container!

The other batch of cookies I made are very different from the first batch. I don't remember exactly what prompted my online search, but I was looking at cookie cutters and came across this little guy and just had to have him! I decided to steer clear of gingerbread as the base for these cookies, opting instead for a chocolate sugar cookie. Again, I found the recipe on Bubble and Sweet's blog. I decided to use Dutch cocoa instead of the regular cocoa I normally bake with as I really wanted a dark chocolate biscuit. I am so very impressed with this recipe and how easy it is to use. These are my gorgeous Chocolate Skeleton Cookies.

The skeletons are filled in with Royal Icing.

Yay for Birthdays!

I must be the slackest of slack bloggers. It's been nearly a month and a half since my last post in here. In my defense though, it has been the craziest of times for us. September sees my two eldest children through their birthdays, as well as school holidays, and Fathers' Day. Then in October it is my nephew's birthday and most importantly of all, MY birthday!

I have been very lucky this year to have some money put aside for myself. This never happens as I always end up spending it on my kids, or the garden (I love putting new plants in the garden, it's such a good feeling!). This time however, I was determined to spend it all on me. I have always dreamed one day of owning a KitchenAid mixer but the price is prohibitive. At $799 rrp ($AU) I didn't have enough to get one from a major store like Myer or David Jones, so I started researching online to see if I could get a better price. In the end I could get close, but not close enough. Which is when my SH stepped in and said that he would put in the remainder and give it to me for my birthday! Yay for Birthdays! Anyway, my Super Hubby is also a Super Shopper and he managed the best price yet from one of our local whitegoods suppliers, E & S Traders Moorabbin - $650!! I am now the proud owner of Rosie, my beautiful Empire Red KitchenAid Mixer.

I have already used it a couple of times now. My first task was to try out the chocolate cake recipe that my family all use. I have been struggling to get a cake to rise using this recipe and yet anyone else who makes it has no problem at all. I have cake envy! Well with my new mixer the cake was a success! Obviously my old mixer has been on its last legs for some time now. It is 15 years old and has well and truly worked itself into the grave. I also managed to whip up the most gorgeous Chocolate Pavlova from my Maggie's Kitchen recipe book. This was a hit with my family from a taste perspective, but the actual recipe needs to be tweaked as it spread when it was cooking and went very thin in the middle. Not at all like my pavs normally turn out. I'll show the picture here, but not the recipe until I try it again and get it right. I have spoken to someone else who has made this particular pav recipe and she had the same problem, so I know it's not my error in this case, there must be something with the recipe that is not quite right.

It still looks gorgeous though!

This is the pavlova mixture before I baked it according to the recipe.

Finished and decorated. You can see how it has spread to the very edge of the plate.

 
Anyway, my next post will be up very quickly as I am going to put up all the photos of my craft project that I have been working on this year, so stay tuned!

Kitchen 1 - Jen 0

My SH has taken the kids to visit his family in Yarrawonga for an four-day weekend, leaving me at home for work - and a bit of "me" time. I have enjoyed my weekend, with dinners out , movies, shopping and of course, lots of work (I picked up some extra shifts, yay $$). When I realised that I would be alone for an extended period I decided that I wouldn't cook. At all. Now, you've probably realised that I love to cook. So this was going to be my break. Four whole days without doing more than heating up my Tupperware Rock'n'Serve container filled with tasty left-overs. I have plenty of meals in my freezer, so it should have been fine.

Wrong!

Sunday morning and I woke up feeling fabulous. Breakfast in bed (although I had to make it myself) with the newspaper for company. Then some lunch and some gardening, what a gorgeous Spring day it was. I took myself shopping and to the movies. Red Dog is definitely a "must see" movie! I laughed and cried along with the rest of the audience. I think I must have been high from the great day, because I came home and just HAD to bake.

I pulled out my family recipe book (the one with all the hand written recipes in it) and dug around for one I haven't made in a while. I found my recipe for Coffee Kisses, and decided to make a chocolate version instead. At least the kids can eat them then!  If you get the urge to try these biscuits you won't be disappointed.

Cake Pops - By Request or For One Night Only?

A few months ago I discovered Cake Pops. I thought they were the most adorable things I had ever seen, but had no clue how to make them. I did think that they would be far to tricky for me to tackle because they are so intricately detailed with fondant icing and fancy tricks. I even asked my local cake decorating shop if they were offering classes and the answer was "No, they are too much trouble to be worth it". Suitably put off, I consigned them to the back of my mind. Until two days ago, when a friend of mine popped up on my Facebook with a picture of some Cake Pops she had won. Her comment was "I bet you could make these Jen!".

Challenge accepted!

The first thing I had to do was figure out how to make them. I was clueless, so I went to my trusty research assistant, Google, and asked the magic question "How do I make Cake Pops". Why didn't I do this months ago? All the information was right there, and they didn't look tricky at all! Obviously the fancier ones would be too much for me, but the ones with sprinkles looked right up my alley.

(I have actually encountered some stumbling points along the way, so today's blog is going to be a bit more of a show and tell than normal. I have a number of step by step photos of what I did. Mostly because it is different than I expected. If you want to give these ago, I hope my instructions help you avoid the problems that I had.)

The first thing I needed to do was have all the ingredients ready. I've been watching MasterChef this year, and they focused a lot on the "mise en plus" which basically means everything in it's place. So this is my "mise en plus" for the cake pops.

You will need chocolate for melting to cover your cakes. Here you can see I have milk and white chocolate. You will also need Lolly Pop Sticks to put the cake pops onto. The third thing in this picture is the tub of frosting at the back. If you are using one cake, you will need about half of this tub of frosting. I used Betty Crocker Chocolate Frosting with my chocolate cake. The flavour is great!

Disclaimer: The recipe I followed was from the US. If I was making these again, I wouldn't use the same quantities. What I am going to do instead is suggest that you start smaller and work up to it. There are far too many pops to make with the quantities you see in my picture.

So, as you can see I have two cakes. You are going to need one cake. I've made our standard chocolate cake, but you could use a packet mix if you don't have a cake recipe you make yourself. It doesn't need to be a fancy cake, you are going to turn it into crumbs in the food processor anyway! Other than the cake and the food processor you are going to need a large mixing bowl and a spatula. The bowl you see in the picture would be sufficient for one cake. As you will see in my next lot of pictures, I used a different bowl because the two cakes crumbed were too much for the bowl here.

Once you have the cake crumbs and the frosting ready, you mix them together until they are a truffle like consistency. If the mixture is too dry then it won't form into balls correctly, they will crumble apart. It's very important to make sure you get the right consistency. After I had mixed the frosting through, I kneaded it to get the mix to combine completely.

The cake crumbs with the frosting  - starting to mix them together.

Sorry for the glare (blame the lack of photography skills). This is what the mixture looked like after some kneading.

When you have a lovely mix to play with you can make balls out of it. You don't want the balls to be too large, or they will fall off the lolly pop sticks when you are coating them later. All the tips I read online suggested that you should make the balls about 1 inch in size. I found that 1 tablespoon of mixture was the right amount for me.

After the first couple of tries I got my rhythm going, then the balls were easy to make. I lined some trays with baking paper and managed to get 2 dozen on each tray. As I mentioned earlier, you probably won't want to make the amount that I have made. One cake will most likely generate about 28 - 30 balls.

That's a whole lot of cake balls!

Even without the coating they look pretty yummy!

I would recommend making the cake balls the day before you are ready to decorate them. You need to put them in the fridge after they have been rolled so that they are chilled through before the next step. If you don't, you will find them difficult to work with and they won't stay on the lolly pop sticks as well as you would like.


Next you will need to melt some of the chocolate to glue the lolly pop sticks in. Each of the balls will have a flat spot from resting on the tray. I used one stick as a guide and pressed it into each ball to make a hole halfway into the ball. Then I went back and glued the sticks in each ball.

Obviously my cake balls aren't perfectly round. Look at all the crazy directions they are pointing!

Then it's back into the fridge again to set the chocolate glue and let them rest before coating them in chocolate and beginning the decorating process.


I started off by melting the chocolate in a double bowl over a saucepan of water. This is where I encountered my first real problem. The chocolate was very thick and not at all suitable for dipping in. When I tried my first two cake pops, they were literally sucked into the chocolate off the sticks. It was a disaster! I know that working with chocolate can be tricky. I think my problem in this case was that the steam from the saucepan caused the chocolate to seize. I was able to save it by adding some oil to it (my sister's suggestion) and covered another few balls before it seized again.

The two in the top right were the first two. They are darker and look messier. 

The next batch that I decorated was much more successful. I melted the chocolate in the microwave and added some copha to it. This meant it was much runnier and they coated beautifully. I decorated each one with sprinkles or piped melted chocolate on them. You need to move quickly as the chocolate sets really fast! I had some polystyrene which I covered in plastic wrap that I used to stand the cake pops in to set. (the plastic wrap protects the pops from the polystyrene and means that you can reuse it for next time.

This is my second batch. They look great!

My Cake Pop. Ready to eat.

Probably the most important thing I found about all of this is the time needed. They really aren't difficult, but they are time consuming. You need to keep the pops in the fridge while you are working, so doing them in batches works best. You will find that half a dozen at a time would work nicely. My cake pops are fairly simple compared to some I have seen. Perhaps the best blog I found on the cake pops, and definitely the most popular, most mentioned blog is Bakerella. If you want to see some truly amazing cake pops you should head over and check them out.


Anyway, making the cake pops has been a challenge. It has frustrated me and pleased me in equal parts. I have a great bunch of friends who gave me very helpful suggestions when I was stuck with the chocolate. So to them I say a big Thanks! Their help gave me the patience to try again, and I'm glad I did as the second attempt went so much better. As they say, if at first you don't succeed and all that. As my blog post title suggests, the jury is out on whether I will make these again or not. I know that I can. I'm not sure that I want to. I guess time will tell. Perhaps the kids will get involved next time and lessen the work load. Although having said that, kids tend to increase the work load rather than lessen it!

Red is the new White.

A couple of weeks ago I won another competition. This time it was through one of our favourite wineries, Tahbilk in Nagambie. The prize was two tickets (valued at $150 each) to their Wine Club Dinner at the Comme Bar, in the city. SH was pretty excited about the prize as the dinner was actually their "Celebration of Shiraz" dinner. A four course meal, with shiraz tastings at each course. He was salivating! I, on the other hand, was more excited about the food. My dad felt that he should go in my place, and his logic was faultless... I don't drink red wine - only white wine, so it would be wasted on me. Unfortunately I had to disappoint him. There was no way I was missing out on this! I decided that if ever I was going to learn how to drink red wine, this dinner would be my chance. I can't talk about all these wonderful foods in this blog (although admittedly a lot of my favourite foods are sweet dishes) without being well rounded in my tastes. I can't spend my whole life completely ignoring red wine!


Our night began with pre-dinner drinks, glasses of Sparkling Shiraz, which were presented to us as we reached the top of the grand staircase. Half an hour of small talk later and we were shown to our tables in the Grand Room. We were seated with 7 other people, right up the front of the room. Our table was all decked out, with three glasses of Shiraz in front of each place. When I say glasses, they were tasters, so there was about 100ml in each. We were very lucky to be seated at the table with one of the Winemakers and his wife. He was a great talker, and happy to answer all our questions. It was also a plus sitting with him as he told us the order we should taste the wines in, as opposed to the order we were supposed to drink them. He smelled each wine, looked at each glass and then said "this one first" etc. When we did as he suggested, you could really appreciate what he was getting at.

We also got to take home the Shiraz Grape Jelly!

The remainder of the people at our table were great fun, and we had some very lively conversations going around them all. I found that the man sitting next to me had never drunk wine at all, he was a beer drinker, but it turns out his favourite rum is also mine - Mt. Gay. Anyway, enough about the people. I was talking about food and wine!

The menu for the evening was like something straight out of MasterChef. I was in heaven!

Entree:

Carpaccio of venison with celeriac, Lyonnaise salad, soft cooked quail egg.

Wines: 1991 Shiraz, 2002 Shiraz, 2008 Shiraz

Main:

O'Connors Striploin, tongue and cheek with horseradish croquette, jus viande

Wines: 1999 Reserve Shiraz, 2003 ESP Shiraz, 2006 ESP Shiraz

The "steak" is the tongue and the darker meat is the cheek. They were actually both delicious!

Cheese Plate:

Will Studds aged cheddar, parsley cream, quince and watercress

Wines: 1995 Magnum 1860 Vines Shiraz, 2005 Magnum 1860 Vines Shiraz

I didn't like the parsley cream, it tasted like lawn clippings!

Coffee and Petit fours

Wine: Muscat

Our evening finished with an invitation from the Winemaker to ask for him personally when we next travel to Tahbilk. SH is very excited about it, he loves that sort of thing. I thoroughly enjoyed the evening, and by the end of the evening, I had come to enjoy the taste of the Shiraz too. My favourite was the 1999 Reserve Shiraz, but don't ask me why. My taste for it is still too new to really break it down for you. I will say, that I am certain I will try other red wines now. I'm no longer afraid of trying them. I might not like them all, but I am sure to like some of them!

Finally I would like to leave you with a photo of me, enjoying a glass of red. Nothing momentous for most people, but something that my family felt sure they would never see me do.

Secret Family Recipes

I am very excited about my prize for the May Foodie Competition from albumworks and am really looking forward to spending the $100 voucher on making my own photobook. I have decided to use this opportunity to make my own personal cookbook (might be my only chance!), making the recipes that have been passed down from my Grandma, Oma, and various relatives and family friends. Once I have made them, I will photograph them, same as I have been for this blog, and then put it all together into an album. I have been tossing around names for the album, and think I am going to settle on "Secret Family Recipes". Which is silly, I know, considering that I share the recipes on here anyway! It just sounds cool to me. If someone asks me how did I make my Grandma's Nut Loaf, I can say it's a "Secret Family Recipe". (yes, yes, I am that lame!)

Anyway - my family are looking forward to me doing this as they get to eat all of our favourite recipes too! It's turning out to be heaps of fun already, and I have even tried a recipe that I have never been game to do before.

It was my sister's birthday at the end of June and we had dinner at my mum and dad's house with the whole family. I usually bring a dessert along, so decided to make a cake. Looking through my list of recipes that I want to put into the album I saw that I had put a "Blowaway Sponge" on the list. I've never made a sponge before as I have heard that they can be quite tricky. So I figured that now was the time to give it a try. I have been getting more adventurous with my cooking, so I figured I was up for the task. It turned out well, with only a minor sag in the middle. I have since made another for my neighbour as a birthday cake, and will probably make a third before it makes it to the cookbook.

Blowaway Sponge with whipped cream, Peaches and Passionfruit.

It's the first week of the school holidays now, and the kids are looking forward to baking with me. They love helping, mostly because they can lick the bowl, or taste the biscuit dough. Yesterday afternoon I made a batch of Oma's Chocolate & Vanilla Biscuits, a definite family favourite.

Chocolate & Vanilla Biscuits

These are very easy to make, and they look great. They are absolutely delicious too. I am going to play with the recipe a bit, add some different flavours, maybe mix up the colours a bit. Whatever I decide to do, I have a ready supply of taste-testers lining up to help.