Vanilla Cupcakes

I experimented with different types of vanilla cupcakes. I added chocolate chips to half the batter and then orange juice to one to see how it would taste. I frosted with cream cheese frosting. The best cream cheese frosting I've ever met. My house was really hot so it sort of melted a little bit but I finally found a cream cheese frosting that I liked that I could actually pipe with. Now if only I can find a vanilla frosting that I like that will let me pipe.

Listening to: This is my suitcase

Saffron Pistachio Ice Cream

First off let me say that I haven't abandoned my blog. I was sick for about 2 weeks then I went out of town for a weekend. I came home and was exhausted. Here I am, back at it again.
So I went to California for a wedding and they had the prettiest cake. I just want to show a picture of it cause I loved it. It was very simple, and when I went to look at it there were some other people and they were asking questions about the cake that I could actually answer. Guess all the baking and reading I do pays off.


When I bought my red kitchen aid stand mixer I got a free ice cream maker attachment. It isn't as great as the ice cream maker I have but it was fun to do. It was hard to set up but after figuring it out with no help from the directions it gave. With the old ice cream maker we had we use to make Iranian ice cream all the time. This seemed like a great time to do that again. This ice cream is made with the basic ingredients for ice cream: sugar and whole milk. I found a great Paula Deen recipe that also used vanilla pudding mix and evaporated milk. With that I added saffron, rose water, and pistachios. A little goes a long long way and with saffron and pistachios being as expensive as they are that rule is a very good thing.


Saffron Pistachio Ice Cream:
2 cups of whole milk (don't think 1% or 2% will work because it won't)
1 cup of sugar (I used about 3/4 c because that is all we had left and it was still great)
1 pkg of french vanilla instant pudding
12 oz can of evaporated milk
saffron and rose water to taste
1/4 cup of pistachios, grounded (grounded that they are little pieces but not so much that they are a powder)

Daring Bakers: L'Opera Cake

This is my first Daring Bakers Challenge. And oh my, was it a challenge. This was my first cake that had so many elements that became very time consuming. These past few days have been busy since my friend is in town for 2 months so I had to find time to finish this cake. Tonight I finally did.

First let me describe what a opera cake is. It is a layered cake with layers of buttercream, nutty flavored thin cake, ganache, and glaze. Usually the flavors are coffee and chocolate but since it is spring time the daring bakers decided that light colors would be more appropriate.

This is how the cake is set up (jaconade, syrup, buttercream, jaconade, syrup, buttercream, jaconade, ganache/mousse, glaze).

I made a jaconade using hazelnuts instead of almonds and vanilla extract. A jaconade is a cake that does not rise. it is very very thin. I decided to not make the syrup because the jaconade was already sweet enough and i didnt want to make it overly sweet with the syrup. It was also already very very moist. Even after 2 days it was incredibly moist.
I didn't use the Daring Baker's buttercream frosting recipe because of the issues with eggs and how I didn't think the syrup would actually be hot enough to get rid of the bacteria in the eggs. So I actually used the buttercream recipe in Dorie's book. Finally Dorie didn't let me down. Hah. The buttercream was really good. The only thing was it was more buttery then sweet so I added about 2 TBSP of icing sugar and a lot of fresh lemon juice and frozen blueberries in juice. It turned out great. Not too sweet, but still a great thick consistancy. This was a great buttercream to experiment with.

For the ganache I use Gharadhelli (hopefully I spelled that right) white chocolate I got from Trader Joes. Trader Joes is my new place to get baking chocolate. You get a big block of nearly 9 oz for pretty cheap. At grocery stores it can get really expensive which adds up. So, I learned that my mixer doesnt whip up egg whites or heavy cream that well because I halved the recipes so its about half a cup at a time since I dont like to make a lot. I whipped out my hand held mixer that I have had since I was little. The instructions to make a ganache is you have to melt chocolate over the stove with a few tablespoons of heavy cream. It turned out oily and i had to use a spoon to get rid of the oil that built up. After I put the ganache in the fridge and it turned out GREAT! So far everything turned out as great as I wanted.
For the glaze which I didn't end up using a lot of in the end was blueberry glaze. Not the white chocolate glaze like in the recipe. I used corn starch to thicken it up. A lot of people use agar agar or gelatin to make a glaze. I have yet to try those, I will in the future I am sure. It ended up so well and very blueberry tasting.
Finally everything came together after 3 days. Attempt the recipe for yourself!

TWD: Sticky Buns

This weeks challenge, I will call it, was a failure, to but it lightly. So far I have not been impressed by Dorie, hopefully that will change soon. For this challenge you are suppose to make a Brioche bread dough, which I did. I didnt want to make more then I needed so I halved the recipe like it said to. Maybe that is where I went wrong, but I am not sure. When I made it the night before it seemed alright. More butter then I would ever put into a bread but I thought hey I love butter this will taste great. Then today I make the gooey part and that turned out alright too. I thought wow this will come out amazing. Wow was I wrong. Maybe it was the paper I used or I did something wrong with the glaze or the bread. The dough did not roll out to 15 rolls like said. I got 9. I also don't think I added enough cinnamon for the filling, that was my fault. This turned out a disaster, when I baked it it looked great then when it came time to plate it, the stuff would not come off of the parchment paper I used. It was stuck on there, and wasted my pecans which I paid so much for. I didn't even want to take a picture of the end result I got, the words I used to describe it as I was sobbing in dissapointment was "hot mess"
I guess you can't win them all.

Sticky Buns Recipe

TWD: Berry Cheese Cake

Recently I joined 2 group baking blogs. TWD (Tuesdays with Dorie) is a group of bloggers who use the book "Baking: From my home to yours" by Dorie Greenspan and bake something weekly then post it on Tuesdays. This weeks challenge was Mandelines but unfortunately I do not have the right pan for it and I have yet to buy it, maybe sometime in the future but not now. So, we were allowed to do past challenges. Since this is my first challenge I got to choose from many. Everyone in my family has been craving cheese cake and this one seemed like a great one to do.



This cheese cake definitely needed to be eaten cold to taste good. It wasn't a great tasting one and I will probably try finding another recipe that taste better. Along with cream cheese this also had cottage cheese which my family and I are not a fan of. The texture of the cottage cheese really came through but luckily the taste of it didn't. It wasnt as creamy as I would have liked. The crust was great and I will use that recipe again for sure. I also liked the idea of having a layer of jam in it, I used Raspberry Jam.


Hidden Berry Cream Cheese Torte

Oooey Goooey Brownies

These brownies came out so much better then i thought they would. Taste great with ice cream. I made them with bittersweet chocolate baking chips which was my first time using chocolate baking chips. I have heard horrid stories about them, about how they dont melt right and stuff but these were at this cake decorating store I found a while ago and I thought if Ina Garten (i think thats how you spell her name, whatever the barefoot contessa) uses them I should do. I wish the store was closer so i can buy more. They melted great and the brownies turned out so moist and not too rich like the chocolate cookies I made. I cut down the chocolate the recipe asked for. I also added walnuts cause they always go great in brownies.



I dont know if I already mentioned this, but if anyone is in the market for a new baking book I totally recommend William Sonoma Baking book and Martha Stewart Baking Handbook. I recently bought them and they are fantastic. They have helped me out so much.

The Best Gift to Give.

Graduation time is around and I thought instead of spending tons of money on gifts for friends that are graduating that I dont even think they need I could bake them something. Because one its from the heart and because its practice for me.
I decided to make 3 or 4 things for each person. I had 3 people to bake for which meant a lot of organizing to get this right. Its one thing to have your family eat something that you made but its on a whole other level if you have someone not related to you eat something you made. It's just more pressure.
This took 2 days of baking, because there is only a certain amount of day I get to use the kitchen all by myself without people coming in and out complaining about the mess I am making.
Also this was a great time for me to use my new Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer I just got in a great Red color.
So I decided to make stuff that would be small and wont go bad when mail. I made Raspberry Crumb Bars, Blondies, Banana Nut Bread, Sweet Cinnamon Bread, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Pumpkin (chocolate chip) Muffins. This was the most I've baked since Senior year I had to make close to 200 cookies for a school event. That was a little more hectic then this though.

Cinnamon Bread:
(Sweet Bread that is cake like and the bread is made of basically vanilla cake and then in the middle and top has cinnamon butter, sort of like cinnamon roll.)

Brown Sugar Blondies:

Raspberry Crumb Bars:
(The Crust and Topping had the best smell, I mixed in some cinnamon and nutmeg for taste and smell, those have become my 2 favorite ingredients they aways kick up anything you are baking to a new level)

Banana Nut Bread (with walnuts):

My awesome moist and crunchy Chocolate Chip Cookies:
(I must have made nearly 50 cookies for mom's coworkers, family, and then freinds)
I made Pumpkin Muffins but Ive already posted on here and I have got to say that those muffins are probably the first recipe I actually invented and has secret ingredients. Hah.