Fish Fingers and Custard: A Timey Wimey Birthday

A very fantastic lady I know turns 30 today. This weekend we celebrated with food, friends, *a few* adult beverages, and, or course, cake. Katy is possibly the biggest Dr. Who fan I've ever met, and, therefore, required a Dr. Who cake. Though this is far from a tutorial, I'm going to try and walk you through what I did in case you, too, have a Dr. who inclined person in need of a cake (I link to a bunch of free printables, too). If you are not familiar with Dr. Who, then nothing about the this cake will make sense, so just go with it and smile, ummkay? I've tried to include as many explanatory links as possible for anyone wishing to be who-enlightened.

I'd love to say I invented an amazing new flavor of cake to post here, but what I really did was use the apple cake recipe posted here and pair it with the caramel icing posted here, for an all around caramel apple flavor. Reviews were positive, so, YAY!

Drop Sugar Cookies

This recipe is a favorite from my childhood that I recently made as holiday treats for my co-workers. They are quick and easy and very unique. They are soft, light and cakey. I'm told that they taste like old-school Archway soft sugar cookies, but, having grown up in a household that did not believe in store bought cookies, I'll have to take other people's word for it. These are fun because you can add some food coloring to make them festive for a special occasion, and also because THEY ARE DELICIOUS.

This recipe originates from my great grandmother and, other than adding some food coloring, I never alter it. It makes a lot of cookies, so you could easily cut it in half, but, why would you want LESS deliciousness???? :-)

Gingerbread Ninjas (or Ninjabread Men)

Last summer, I bought ninja shaped cookies cutters. I have since been waiting and waiting and waiting for it to be gingerbread season so I could make the coveted ninja-bread-men. As in, gingerbread men shaped like ninjas. If you are not ridiculously excited right now, then I just have to say it-- we can't be friends. But, I guess I'll also state that this recipe does not exclusively work for ninja shaped cookies, and if you wanted to make non-ninja gingerbread men (or ladies), then I suppose that would be acceptable.

To ice these, I used royal icing for the first time. Since I was a first-timer, I used Wilton's recipe. I found I needed to add 3-4 more tablespoons of water than it called for in order to make it pipe-able, and also that it dries so candy-like that it fell off the cookies very easily. However, it piped on well and made for good detailed decoration. Anyone with royal/detailed icing tips, I'll gladly take them!!

Apple Cupcakes with Honey Mascarpone Icing

Happy (Jewish) New Year!! For those of you who don't celebrate, one of the key culinary features of the Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) meal is the dipping of apples in honey. We do this to bring sweetness to the year to come.  So, you know, you could take the reasonably healthy route of just dipping apples in honey-- or, you could be me and add a zillion calories to the process by making apple cupcakes with honey mascarpone icing.

Dude-- can we say Worth.The.Calories???????

I'm really quite pleased with myself on this little invention. I have been building this one in my head since last Thanksgiving, when I made this caramel-apple cake. A few months later I got the idea for a mascarpone icing when I saw this recipe on pinterset. From there, I Frankensteined together my creation. So, without further ado.....

Honey Cake

Hellooooooooo! I took a little break, but I. AM. BACK! Summer is on the way out the door, the heat has *finally* broken here in Chicago and I'm back in my kitchen. I don't know when fall officially starts, but here in Julie Vision world, it's up and running. I love fall. I the weather; the flavors; bonfires; hoodie sweatshirts; Thanksgiving; everything short of raking leaves, I love.  For me, the start of fall eating is signaled by Rosh Hashanah. For those of you who do not celebrate Rosh Hashana, it is the Jewish New Year. The Rosh Hashanah meal consists of sweet fall flavors to celebrate the season and project sweetness into the year to come. These flavors include apples, honey, and pomegranate. One traditional desert to serve at your meal is honey cake.

Going back to my love of all things fall-- I love honey cake! Though this is a lesser known fall desert, I find it to be a fantastic fall-food-starter. It has great warm, fall flavor, without being pumpkin or apple. I love pumpkin and apple, but, in a season where you can get pumpkin flavored everything--from your coffee to your car air freshener--this sweet, fall-spiced cake is a good one to work into your fall baking rotation. Plus, this recipe is super easy. Double plus, I love to eat it for breakfast. (Cake is *totally* an acceptable breakfast......right? If you aren't sure if that's true, tell yourself it's acceptable to eat holiday foods for breakfast in celebration of your own culture or someone else's culture.....that just makes you worldly.) :-)

Triple Chocolate Cupcakes

Remember that time I admitted to being obsessed with this dark chocolate cake recipe? Yes. Obsession still happening. I'm the birthday fairy at work, and we had another birthday a few weeks ago. When I asked said birthday girl what she wanted and she said, 'chocolate,' so I came up with these. In short, this is a dark chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting, dipped in chocolate. They are just as delicious as they sound. :-)


On a side note-- due to the heatwave hitting Chicago right now and my lack of a/c, I will be a bit quiet through the month of July. I hope the heat breaks so I can be back to baking ASAP!

Three Layer Irish Cream Cake + Decorating Tutorial (Subtitled: How to narrowly avoid Cake Wrecks)

I made the fantastic Layla a birthday cake. Layla has long been an aficionado of the Irish Cream Cupcakes I made for Leslie's Birthday, so I was quite certain that Layla needed an Irish cream cake for her birthday. The recipe I used is the same as the one for the cupcakes, but with the amounts adjusted to make three, nine inch layers, each about 1.5ish inches thick.

I've also included a decorating tutorial for my standard birthday cake design, which you can all thank me for because now that everyone knows it's easy, they are going to expect better cakes. ;-) I will warn you that the Baileys in the icing made the icing colors appear slightly different than if you were putting them in a white, less boozy icing. This is important in this case only because the cake I envisioned was a lovely dark teal with pastel pick letters and some very elegant pink and white sprinkles, but it became the creation you see here when the colors took differently than I'd hoped and I switched to a standard confetti sprinkle. At any rate, I figure I have narrowly avoided cake-wrecks this time, even if it be only by a small margin.

Raspberry Lemonade Cupcakes

Photo by Donya.

This lemon cake recipe originated from a recipe in a magazine given to me by a friend. I have no idea what magazine it was, as the clipping given to me did not identify a title and I've googled to no avail. That being said, I've made enough adaptations over the past couple of years that I'm comfortable blogging it here as 'mine', but would very much like to give credit where credit is due! If you happen to recognize this as being something similar to something you read in a magazine, let me know!


The first thing we need to address before we get to the recipe is that this cake is finicky. So is the icing, for that matter. (See note about refrigeration in the icing instructions). The cake is sensitive to movement in the oven and, if irritated, falls in the middle. Luckily, if it comes out ugly, it still tastes good, but, the point is, if this is your first metaphorical rodeo, this is not your metaphorical horse. Or bull. Or whatever it is one rides at a rodeo. If you have not baked a cake from scratch before, start somewhere a little more straight forward, such as here or here. I don't mean you need to be an expert, I just wanted to give you fair warning that this is not the most simple of cakes. It is sensitive enough that it baked differently based on the color of cupcake paper I used (lighter worked better, FYI.) It is, however, delicious.

Ultimate Chocolate Cake + Decorating Tutorial

So, I have a fantastic friend named Susan. Susan lives in Boston and whenever we find ourselves in the same city, we base our entire agenda around visiting as many bakeries and chocolate shops as possible. We, along with another friend, once did a side-by-side formal tasting of cupcakes for six different Chicago bakeries.

Let me back up-- this goes all the way back to college. Somewhere in the early 2000's, Susan and I met on a summer program that was hosted on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, where there was no chocolate. It was like a bad social experiment that ended in one of the program staff stealing us chocolate chips from the kitchen pantry to quiet our withdrawal. Bonding over stolen baking morsels has led to the years of bakery/chocolate themed touristing noted above, as well as the idea that we should someday open a bookstore/cafe/bakery called "The Cookie Bard," where all the treats are ironically named for a writer or literary character. So, like, the menu would have things like Nick Caraway twists; Miss Maudie's Lane Cake; The Curtis Brothers' Special would be chocolate cake and scrambled eggs; The Hemingway will appear on our coffee menu, but is nothing but a solitary mug of cheap gin; etc. You get the idea. {...........and you think it's AWESOME, right??}

All this back-story is leading to this-- Susan's birthday cake. Even though Boston is about 1000 miles outside my delivery range and she would never get to eat it, Susan an I thought it would be fun for me to design a cake for this occasion. Clearly, this cake needed to be covered in chocolate. Like, it needed to be a chocolate fortress, with a WALL of chocolate keeping the chocolate from leaking out. The best part? This decor looks cool and it's super fast and easy.

Hazelnut Mocha Cupcakes

Photo by Donya.

I'll start by stating that I've developed a minor obsession with this dark chocolate cake recipe. You'll notice it popping up a lot. That's because it's good. Like, REALLY good. I have plans to bust it out for some triple chocolate high-hat cupcakes soon, so stay tuned for that one. Also, I liked it for this recipe because you can make the coffee extra strong by using Starbucks VIA packets, which gives the cake a slightly mocha-ish flavor all on its own, even without the icing. (Usually, even though there is coffee in the batter, it doesn't taste like coffee, it just tastes like chocolate).

(For a printable version of this recipe, click here)
The Cake...


Dark Chocolate Cake (Yield 2 dozen standard sized cupcakes)
Adapted from Sweetapolita's Rich & Dark Chocolate Cake

2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
3/4 cups dark cocoa powder, such as Hershey's Special Dark
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup strong black coffee (I used 1 cup water + 2 Starbucks VIA packets)
1 cup whole milk, room temperature
1/2 cup melted butter, cooled
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
12 Ferrero Rocher chocolates, unwrapped (optional)

The Cookie-Cake-Brownie Cake

Photo by Donya

For Erin's 30th birthday, there needed to be an amazing cake. Not just an amazing looking cake, but an amazing tasting cake. (Have you met the woman? Don't let the skinny exterior fool you-- girl can proudly pack in the desserts like a champ!) I struggled for some time to come up with the best cake idea, and finally, it came to me. Why limit the cake to cake?? I immediately busted out my spring form pan and set to work on the Cookie-Cake-Brownie. This was one layer of chocolate chip cookie, one layer of vanilla-butter cake, and one layer of brownie. I made all three of theses ahead of time and froze them so that I could stack/decorate them the day before the party.

Photo by Donya

Photo by my phone. Not as awesome as photos by Donya. :-)

Iced Sugar Cookies

First and foremost, this post starts with a massive shout out to Donya, who not only assisted in making these cookies, but took all the amazing photos that you see in this post. AND, she let me use her stand mixer. STAND MIXER!!! I wanted to steal it, but it wouldn't fit inside my jacket.

I'll back up a moment-- these cookies happened because Donya and I worked with Erin's husband to throw her a surprise 30th birthday party. We had to be awwwwwfully sneaky to do this, because, as far as Erin knew, Donya and I had only met in passing and didn't really know each other. This was true, except that we spent the past month emailing 320482304234723948732 times a day planning the party. (and giggling.)

As this party took place over an hour from where I live, but only about fifteen minutes from where Donya lives, we decided that the day before the party was going to be 'last minute errands-decoration making-baking slumber party of fun.' And it was just that! We finished all the last minute decorations (pics to come!), iced the cupcakes (posts to come!), baked up a batch of these bad boys, and still had time to go out for a fabulous dinner and do a load of laundry. I've now determined we are the best party planners ever, and shall henceforth be referred to as "Crooked Vision." :-) (The universe that exists in my brain is SO AWESOME, you have no idea.)

Crooked Vision!!!!!

The recipe itself has been in my family for over 150 years and came from my great-great-great-great-great grandma on my mom's side. The original recipe calls for lard, but over the years it has been adapted to shortening-- I do not recommend using butter! The cookies have a light, cakey, texture and freeze really well. (No, YOU repeatedly got caught stealing frozen cookies out of your grandma's freezer.) This is the recipe we use for Christmas cookies, or really any kind of celebration. My grandma still mails me a box of these on special occasions, because my grandma is awesome.

Sheep Cupcake Decorating Tutorial

I was invited to Easter at a friend's house this year and was very excited at the prospect of baking cute, kid friendly Easter things.  This is the first time I've done any Easter baking, and everyone told me that meant I had to make a lamb cake. I googled lamb cake. I entertained the idea for about a twenty-four seconds before one of the ladies at work mentioned that, unless you really know what you are doing, the head of the lamb cake often falls off. I'm a lot of things, but I am NOT the guest who shows up with the decapitated lamb on Easter. (Maybe on Christmas.........;-))

Risk of headless lamb aside, I continued to google and see if I could find an adaptation of the lamb cake that held less risk of accidental, offensive, mutilation. I came up with these little lamb cupcakes that are SO CUTE!! (My inspiration came from here and here.)

What you need to make these little sheepy cupcakes:

- One dozen cupcakes (I used the dark chocolate cake recipe here. I wanted the cupcakes to have nice, high, domes on top, so to bake them, I started them at 450* for seven minutes, then took them down to 350*F for another seven. This process makes them 'poof' more while baking.)

'Poofy' cupcake

- Approximately two cups thick white icing. (I think one store bought can would do it, but I used the recipe below since it is easy and tastes better than canned icing.)

- One medium sized bag mini-marshmallows.

- One dozen Milano cookies. (Chocolate ones also make cute little sheep, but they are more difficult to find.)

- Two dozen mini-chocolate chips or two dozen candy eyes. (I used Wilton candy eyes.)

Passover Bagels

So, anyone who has ever been to a Passover Seder knows that Passover baking is not always the finest. During Passover, those who celebrate remove all grains and grain based items from their homes, with the exception of matzo and flour made from matzo. We also refrain for eating anything with leavening, such as yeast, baking powder, or baking soda. (This article does a good job of explaining the basics, if you are interested.) Naturally, this makes baking complicated. Things tend to not taste quite like what they are trying to be and often end up like edible rocks.

My family celebrated almost every year of my childhood with another family, and that other family always made Passover Bagels. The matriarch of the other family, Susan, remains to this day as one of my favorite adult figures from my childhood. Susan didn't cook-- in the whole of my youth, I recall her making a total of three things, all of which made repeated appearances at various functions: orange jello mold, caramel brownies, and passover bagels. All three were delicious. Though Susan passed away a number of years ago, I think of her every Passover, and this year, I tried my hand at her Passover bagels.

Before we get to the recipe, keep a few things in mind: 1) generally, these don't look exactly like bagels-- in fact they look a little bit of a mess; 2) they won't taste like regular bagels; 3) despite items 1 and 2, they are delicious. Susan used to make hers the size of regular bagels, I made mine a bit smaller so that they can be eaten like a dinner roll with the Passover meal.

Dark Chocolate Raspberry Cake + Decorating Tutorial

Doesn't this cake look awesome??!!!

It's so easy to make, it's almost embarrassing.

I'm serious.

I have the step-by-step for each part of this cake-- the baking, the decorating and the making of those cute flower toppers--here in this post. ANYONE can make this cake, I promise!


The cake.......

(For a printable version of this recipe, click here)
Dark Chocolate Cake (Yield 3, 9" layers)
Adapted from Sweetapolita's Rich & Dark Chocolate Cake

2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
3/4 cups dark cocoa powder, such as Hershey's Special Dark
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup strong black coffee
1 cup whole milk, room temperature
1/2 cup melted butter, cooled
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Butter Pecan Cake

We decided to start celebrating birthdays at work. This is very exciting, because it means I was nominated birthday fairy and I get to make treats for birthdays. The tricky part is that my office has a few people who either don't like or can't eat chocolate, so I'm rapidly expanding my non-chocolate portfolio. (If your response right now was, 'wait, cake comes in NOT chocolate?? WHAAAT??" then we are totally friends.) One of the new cakes I've adopted is a butter pecan cake / cupcakes, and it is AWESOME. Almost worth forgetting I know about chocolate.

For work or for places where there are lots of people, I always do cupcakes just to make serving the cake easier. However, this recipe makes so much batter that I made two dozen cupcakes and still had enough batter/icing to make the birthday girl her own 6" cake to take home.

My only disappointment in this whole experience was my use of the floral themed Wilton cupcake papers. These did not bake as pretty as I had hoped and many of them looked kind of ridiculous. Since the icing on this cake is not able to be piped, I was hoping that using the flour papers would help decorate them, or that the nutty icing would look like centers in the flours. Unfortunately, it did not turn out this way.

(For a printable version of this recipe, click here)
Butter Pecan Cake - Yield 3, 9" layers OR 3 dozen standard cupcakes
Adapted from the recipe found here and originally published in Christmas with Southern Living, 2005.

Cake:
6 ounces white chocolate, chopped
1/2 cup evaporated milk
1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cup sugar
4 large eggs, separated
2 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon baking soda
3 cups all purpose flour
Toasted pecan halves- for garnish, if desired


Icing:
2 tablespoons butter
1 1/2 cup chopped pecans
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup butter, softened
16 ounces powdered sugar
3 tablespoons milk/cream;
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Step #1 - Preheat oven to 350* F.


Step #2 - Melt chocolate with evaporated milk in double boiler over medium/low heat. Set aside to cool. If you don't have a double boiler, you can always put a glass bowl over a sauce pan to create one, which is what I do. Make sure that the bowl is big enough to sit on top of the pan securely, but without touch the bottom of the pan and allowing for the water to boil underneath.Also, make sure steam is not escaping from the pan below and contaminating the chocolate. This will ruin it.If more that slight amounts of steam are escaping from the pan, then it is too hot; turn the heat down.

Step #3- In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter and sugar together until they are fluffy.

Step #4- Add, the vanilla and, one at a time, the egg yolks, mixing after each one.

Step #5 - Dissolve the baking soda in the milk. 

Step #6 - Add,the flour, white chocolate, and the milk/soda mixture to the butter mixture, alternating between them
as you stir. Once it's all incorporated, the batter should be smooth and slightly thick.

Step #7 - In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites with a mixer until they form still peaks. This always takes me a different amount of time depending on the day. 'Stiff peaks' means that, when you pull the beaters out of the mixture, the mixture stiffly holds the peak. Having egg whites at room temperature when you start is vital-- cold egg whites are much more difficult to fluff/get to the peaking point.

Step #8 - Fold the egg whites into the batter until well incorporated.Folding is the motion of using a spatula or large spoon to 'lift' the batter over on top of itself as if you were folding it. DO NOT MIX WITH A MIXER!! The purpose of adding fully egg whites to a cake batter is to help the cake become moist and fluffy. If you beat the batter too much, it will beat the fluffy-ness out.

Step #9 - Bake at 350* F. For 9" layers, bake for 20-22 minutes. Make sure the pans are well greased and lined with wax paper.For cupcakes, bake for 10-13 minutes.

The Icing
You can easily make this icing the day before you bake the cake if you need to. Also, this type of cake/frosting freezes well.

Step #1 - Melt two tablespoons of butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the chopped pecans and simmer over medium heat until pecans are toasted. (about 10 min). Careful! It's easy to burn the pecans! Remove the pecans from the pan immediately. The pan holds enough heat to burn the pecans even after you've removed the pan from the heat. ALLOW PECANS TO COOL!!!

Step #2 - Beat, with a mixer, the butter, cream cheese, vanilla, milk and powdered sugar, until creamy.

Step #3 - Add cooled pecans and beat until well incorporated. Apply to cake and garnish with toasted pecans if desired.

S'mores Cupcakes

So, first, these are delicious.

Second-- save these for a special occasion or a day when you have nothing on your schedule, because HOLY MESS, BATMAN! Delicious enough to warrant a mess, but, mess it is! Just for the batter, you need five separate mixing bowls, plus a microwave safe container/sauce pan to melt butter, that's not even starting on your pans/measuring cups/etc.

Why would I make such a mess, you ask? We can start with: SEE DELICIOUS ABOVE. Then we can note that these were made in honor of the fantastic Corrin's birthday / visit to the Chicago area. Corrin is my fashion guru and even carried one of my Julie Vision Designs bags in a NYC fashion week event last year. (Yes, I did practically pee myself with excitement, and still do JUST a little bit when I think about it.) It also turned out there was another birthday to celebrate once Corrin got her Chicago based gang together, so CLEARLY this warranted deliciousness.

I've been inventing this baby in my head for a while-- I feel like there are so many cupcakes out there that claim to be S'mores flavored, but don't do the trick. I find they are usually a chocolate or vanilla cupcake filled with either chocolate or marshmallow filling, topped with either chocolate or marshmallow icing, and the sprinkled with graham cracker crumbs. I consider this (though it may be tasty in it's own right) a s'mores fail. There MUST be substantial graham involved in s'mores themed deserts. So I came up with this: A graham cupcake, iced in a mountain of marshmallow, and coated in a layer of chocolate.

These do require being frozen for several hours (over night is best) in order to chocolate coat them, so please keep that in mind as you plan your epic s'mores cupcake making event.

Birthday on a Budget

 
My past few recipe posts (and, let's be honest, the next few posts) have all been about things I baked for my friend's 30th birthday party. I thought it might be fun to show you some of the awesome, non-edible things from this party, seeing as we pulled off some extreme awesome within a very reasonable budget.

I mentioned before that this was a slumber party. Like, grown women in their late 20s / early 30s in silly pajamas kind of slumber party.  The idea came about kind of by accident. Several months before the big day, the birthday girl was a little mopey, and stated that all she wanted to do for her birthday was go to bed at 9pm.  Right. If you've met said birthday girl, you'd know what a LIE this was. So, I informed her that, if she was going to bed at 9pm, we must then have a slumber party.  From there, the beast was born.

Cocktail Cupcakes Part 4 - Irish Cream Cupcakes

Welcome to the fourth and final installment of the cocktail cupcake recipes!! If you are new to this blog, These are part of a series of booze flavored cupcakes I did for my BFF's 30th birthday. You can check out how this got started here. You can also check out the other cocktail cupcake flavors: mojito cupcakes, chocolate cinnamon stout cupcakes with salted caramel icing, and amaretto sour cupcakes.

(For a printable version of this recipe, click here)
Irish Cream Cupcakes (Yield - 24 standard cupcakes or 4 dozen minis)
Adapted from the Baileys Irish Cream cake recipe on the Baileys website.

Cupcakes:
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 teaspoons baking powder (divided)
1 1/2 cup Baileys Original Irish Cream
2 cups flour
1/8 teaspoon salt

Icing:
1/2 cup butter
2 cups powdered sugar
3 tablespoons Baileys Original Irish Cream
1 teaspoon vanilla

Cocktail Cupcakes Part 3 - Amaretto Sour Cupcakes

 

This is part three of four in my series of cocktail cupcakes! For a look back at how this all came to be, take a look here.  Other cocktail cupcake flavors include mojito, chocolate stout with salted caramel icing, and Irish cream. 

(For a printable version of this recipe, click here)
Amaretto Sour Cupcakes - The Recipe (Yield 24 standard cupcakes or 4 dozen minis)
Adapted from the Magnolia Vanilla Cupcake recipe posted on the Food Network.

Cupcakes:
1 1/2 cups self-rising flour
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
2 cups white sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup amaretto 

Icing:
1/2 cup butter or shortening (I used shortening)
1/2 teaspoon lemon zest
3 cups powered sugar
3 tablespoons sweet-and-sour mix 
1 teaspoon amaretto 
(optional - maraschino cherries as garnish)