Move Over Turkey!

Thanksgiving is all about rich, decadent food and large birds with feathered fan tails, right? If that's the case, I think I really hit the nail on the head with my Peacock Pies.  It's the same cheesecake recipe from an earlier post (found here), but instead of doing it in a spring form pan, I went for the cheapy store-bought crusts. Obviously, homemade graham cracker crust is better, but if you're in a time crunch they work beautifully!  And, a half recipe made enough to fill two of these babies.

I liked experimenting with the colors. I was able to get some pretty impressive blues and greens with McCormick neon food coloring. I've used that for my last several food-dying projects with much success.  I had a great time designing them.  Proud of both, but I think the second one is my favorite because it's the essence of a peacock feather without being too literal. 

Still Poppin'

I'm turning out a batch (or 5) of cake pops almost every week. There are lots of bakes sales going on right now, plus the holidays are coming up. My goal is to get really good by Christmas so that I can give them as gifts or take them to parties.

Of course in addition to looking cute, they need good flavor. That was the project today. My grandmother, great aunt Lulie and I decided to try flavoring with extracts and oil. We ended up with gingerbread, almond, lemon, strawberry, raspberry, and peppermint. With the cake pop maker it was easy to divide out the cake batter and flavor a few cake pops at a time just to see what they would taste like. If it needed more flavor it was easy to adjust.

In order to tell them apart, we coated and topped them with things that would enhance or hint at the flavor.

Gingerbread:

Lemon:

 

Strawberry:

Raspberry:

Peppermint:

Aren't they pretty? And the "pops" don't have to be on sticks. We did them bon bon style and I think that works out pretty well.

Eye Candy

I really wanted to make some Halloween treats to take to work, but one of my professors had the brilliant idea of giving a test that day so there was no time for elaborate home-made confections. 

I cut store bought pound cake (2 for 1 at Ingle's!) into little circles and attached them to sticks.  After a quick dip in melted chocolate,  I put some gummy eyeballs in the center.  They were adorable. Unfortunately I don't have an up close photo, but the day after I brought them in my boss texted me this picture of his son:

Awesome.

Wreckies

On October 20th I went to see Jen and John Yates of Cakewrecks! My mom went with me which only seemed appropriate since she was the one who introduced me to the site in the first place. We had a terrific time shopping before hand. And of course the actual talk they gave was enlightening and funny, exactly as we expected. And the book signing was amazing. They took their time with everyone. John passed out slices of cake to those of us waiting in line while Jen was alternately gracious and witty. It was really gratifying to meet and be appreciated by people I admire so much.

In preparation for the book signing, I painted a shirt inspired by a cake from the blog.

They loved it and took a picture of it:

The Darth Vader glows in the dark. 
And of course I had to have a picture with Jen.

After this, there was great cake. So much fun!

Shoot 'Em Up

More cake pop experimentation. Grandma and I were in the kitchen all day again preparing for her church's bake sale. We taught ourselves some pretty cool tricks.

We started with a pound cake recipe, but added in cinnamon and finely chopped apple. Then we made that into cake pops which we put on sticks and dipped in caramel. 

Some also got rolled in peanuts

But then we tasted one.  The apple cake didn't come through at all. The flavor was much too subtle.  It couldn't stand up to the caramel, much less the peanuts.  So we injected them with an apple cider reduction.

Mmmm....
That worked really well and wasn't as messy as the picture makes it look. I'm looking forward to injecting more pops.  It's a great way to introduce a strong flavor. 

Not all of the pops got caramel. Some got just a bright red candy coating.

For the bake sale, everything had to be individually packaged.  We ended up with several dozen cake pops and from what I hear, they went over very well. 

Pop-ular

Cake Pops seem to be what's in right now. And it's easy to see why. They're incredibly versatile. They are portion controlled. And let's face it: they're soo cute!!

My grandmother and I have been working on our cake pop technique in the last week. The first batch we made from a recipe that instructed us to bake a cake then crumble it. Then it told us to use icing to stick the crumbs together into little balls. Once that was finished, we dipped lollipop sticks into melted chocolate, stuck them into the pops, and froze them for a while. After they got nice and hard, we covered them in various melted candies. You can't go wrong with dipping them in chocolate and sprinkling tiny colored dots on top. They can't help but look festive. We even added a wrapper and gold twist tie to make them look pro-fessional.

The next batch of cake pops we did a little differently. We used pound cake and a cookie cutter to form the pops, dipped them in chocolate, and sprinkled them too. That worked very well and it was much less effort than the previous method, but maybe not as pretty. 

We also found this way of drying works best. Floral styrofoam- fairly cheap and you can use it over and over.

But, we had a major breakthrough this last time. I bought a pan that makes balls of cake. It's cute and fun and it really works! It's by a company called BabyCakes. Using that grandma and I created a fantastic array of beautiful cake pops this afternoon.

Usually we work at grandma's house with her well-equipped kitchen and craft closet. But today we were working in my house. Neither my kitchen nor my craft closet is as well stocked as hers. She's lived in the same house for 30+ years and I've lived here since June. I forgot to tell her to bring the foam so, we made do with what I had. Which was a styrofoam wig head that has already had kind of a hard life. In previous projects she has had a more dignified role as a model in my photography:

But today she served a very different purpose:

What a trooper.

But really, let's get a close-up on these beauties

Fantastic fun. And very delicious. The brown nutty-looking stuff is toffee. Some are sprinkled with cayenne pepper and some have salt. The drizzling was my favorite part. It doesn't take any work at all to make a cake pop look great. And it's a very egalitarian desert. Anyone can have one.  If you're on a diet or if you're diabetic, no big deal- it's just a bite! It's not going to throw everything out of whack. There are hundreds of reasons to eat these little babies. If you haven't tried them yet, jump on the bandwagon!

Dead On!

My grandma has always made the family birthday cakes. She gets creative and always produces an elaborate sugary sculpture to suit whatever we're into at the time. Superheros, flowers, dirt and worms, Disney characters- whatever it is she has always made the perfect cake for our personality and stage of life. 

I am delighted now to have the skill and experience necessary to help her with family cakes. For the last several we have teamed up. I've said this before but I'm saying it again- I think we make a fantastic duo.  

 

My cousin Lee had a birthday on Saturday and this year she wanted a "scary vampire cake" to go along with her Halloween-themed birthday party.  Grandma felt a tad uninspired this time around because vampires aren't really her kind of thing, so she asked me what I thought. I had to mull it over for a few days, but finally I came up with what I thought was a fairly simple but impressive design:

Eeek! So scary! Haha.

The face is modeled after Buffy the Vampire Slayer vampires. They are my favorite vamps because I like that when they die they just turn into dust. The TrueBlood vamps are sexier, but they are super gross when they get staked. I don't know much about sissy Twilight vampires, but I was pretty sure (even though I LOVE glitter) that I didn't want this cake to sparkle. I knew that Edward Cullen wasn't going to cut it for an 8 year old tomboy.

I remember being quite scared of Spike (of BtVS for those of you who haven't watched) when I was younger and I was hoping it would be just the thing for Lee. Not that I wanted to scare her, but I wanted her to feel grown up. Since she specifically requested a scary cake, I wanted to deliver just that.

Our vampire guy was made of fondant and the chocolate/vanilla cake was covered with modeling chocolate which turned out to be super easy to make and really amazing to work with. It's my new favorite thing.
The hands could have used a little more attention, but we were a little pressed for time. This has been the weekend from hell. Not that anything bad has happened, just lots of good things happening all at once. While we were working on this cake, we were also working on my dad's cake. For him this year I decided to try the suddenly popular cake pop. They were super experimental, but turned out pretty great. I'll have pics in the next post so stay tuned!