A busy baking weekend part 2 - Halloween cake pops

The benefits of making a chocolate cake for someone else is the possibility of leftover cake bits from shaving and smooth to make the cake flat.   What is the best thing to do with these extra pieces?  Well thanks to Bakearella - Cake Pops.   I am jealous of her creativity,  her book is awesome and I now have a new goal to try and come up with my own characters and items.   I made the Santa hats and trees last year at my Christmas party and they were a hit so I figured I would try again and make some Halloween style treats for work.  So I am attempting pumpkins and ghosts. 


What you need:

• Cake - Your own homemade, boxed, store bought. 
• Icing - Store bought or homemade
• Orange and White Chocolate
• Something for a Green stem - Now Bakarella uses Tic Tacs, I however used green sprinkles because I forgot to pick up Tic Tacs at the store.   I recommend using the Tic Tacs.  HAHA  They look much better. 
• Edible markers - and I stress GOOD ONES!

Step 1 - Crumble the cake (assuming it is already baked) and mix with icing - Hands are easiest.   A 13x9 cake would use 1 typical container of icing. 


Step 2 - Take pieces of mixture and roll into balls or whatever shape required.  In this case I did balls or pumpkins and then cylindrical shapes wider at the bottom for the ghosts.   Put these in the fridge or freezer to get cold and stiff

Step 3 - Melt the chocolate using a double boiler, place the cake pops on a candy stick and dip and roll in the chocolate.   Tap of the excess and roll around to remove dripping.    Put the pop in Styrofoam to dry.

Note:  If you are making the pumpkin ones, you need to add the green stem right away before the chocolate dries. 


Step 4 - Once they are all dried you can add your faces.   This is where a really good marker comes into play,  I was using a Wilton marker and found it just didn't cut it for drawing on chocolate.  It was hard to get it to work at all and when it did it was very streaky - as you can see from the photos. 



Despite the streaky faces, they were eaten up at work pretty quickly and everyone thought they were quite cute.   I will definitely attempt cake pops again and will repeat my Christmas pops in a few months.    I suggest you try your own cake pops and I would love to know how they work out and if you created anything new. 


Meg's rating - D-EEE-LICIOUS!    It's hard to go wrong with cake, icing and chocolate especially when I made my the cake myself, but warranted less E's because it was store bought icing.  :-P 

BONUS # 2


Another benefit of making a chocolate cake for someone is you may have extra batter that you turn into chocolate cupcakes.     So what do when you have chocolate cupcakes, and no icing but melted chocolate???     Dip the cupcakes in the chocolate of course!   I dipped a few in orange chocolate and few in white chocolate, put on a some quick fondant decorations et VOILA!!!

Pumpkin Cupcakes

My artistic shot

Mummy Cupcakes

A busy baking weekend part 1 - Apples Again!

So I signed myself up for quite a lot of baking last weekend.   On the list is a baptism cake, an apple cake for a pot luck dinner and some Halloween cake pops for work.   The first line of business was the baptism cake as that had to be completed for someone other than me.   It turned out quite nice in the end, simple and sweet.

After the cake was complete I started the apple cake. I found the recipe on cooking light and thought it sounded quite yummy.  Chunks of apples are baked in with the batter and everything just bakes together and puffs up golden brown.   I used Jonagold apples as they seem to be my new favorite apple, very close to Mutsu, big and a little sweet.

A Jonagold note care of Orange Pippin : The colouring is yellow of Golden Delicious, with large flushes of red. This is a crisp apple to bite into, with gleaming white flesh. The flavour is sweet but with a lot of balancing acidity - a very pleasant apple.


Recipe: Adapted from Cooking light.

• 1 3/4  cups  sugar, divided
• 3/4  cup  (6 ounces) block-style fat-free cream cheese, softened - I only used light cream cheese.
• 1/2  cup  butter or stick margarine, softened
• 1  teaspoon  vanilla extract
• 2  large eggs
• 1 1/2  cups  all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2  teaspoons  baking powder
• 1/4  teaspoon  salt
• 2  teaspoons  ground cinnamon
• 3  cups  chopped peeled apples 
• 1/2 cup skor bits  - added by me .  :-)

1)   Peel and Chop the apples. 

2) Mix together 1/4 cup of white sugar with the cinnamon and sprinkle 2 tablespoons in the the apples and mix together.  Save the rest of the cinnamon sugar mixture for the top of the cake before baking.

3)  Beat together the remaining sugar, cream cheese, butter and vanilla on medium speed until well blended.  Add eggs one at a time and set aside. 

4)   Mix together the dry ingredients and add to creamed mixture on low speed.  Stir in apples and skor bits into the batter until just mixed.   Pour into a 8" spring form pan, sprinkle with the sugar mixture and bake @ 350.   The recipe said 1 hour 15 min or until it pulls away from the sides, I found it was all good by about 50 min but it may depend on your oven.


The smell in my house was so wonderful, the flavours of baked apples and cinnamon sugar. WOW!  It took a lot for me to not cut into it before the potluck but it survived.  Here's proof....Those aren't my plates. :-)

Meg's rating :  D-EEEEE-LICIOUS!!

My Rating System

In order to simplify whether a recipe is okay, good or great I am going to rate them.  In honour of my friend Kel I will use one of her famous quotes.  I will give each recipe a DELICIOUS rating.   The more E's, the better the recipe, up to 5 E's.   I will figure something out for half ratings. HAHA!   If the recipe is a flop, it will get a DNRR - Do not repeat recipe.     Keep a watch for the ratings and I hope they guide you to bake some great recipes.  

A quick meet and sign.

So one of the benefits of working at food company with a food forum, entertaining/eating area and mock store front is that companies and schools will borrow this space for conferences or presentations.   If we are lucky some of those companies/schools will bring in celebrity chefs and if we are even more lucky those celebrity chefs will take some time to meet and greet some employees of the building and even just maybe they might sign their cookbook for you.    

For this lucky moment I stood in line for almost an hour to get a signed cookbook and photo and although it was only 5 minutes  It was GREAT!   I was a bumbling idiot and couldn't think of anything decent to say other than I love your show but still great.    He was just a genuine as on the show and yes very tall.  

Good Day.  Me & my FIRST meeting with Michael Smith.    Trust me, there will be more.

Here comes Fall...Here comes APPLES!

Who does not love fall, especially fall food? Pumpkins, pears, apple, squash, there is so much wonderful baking to be done. First stop - Apples. My friend Jeff works at his girl friend's family apple farm every weekend in the fall and he is kind enough to bring us in bags of apples. So I took the opportunity to steal several and decided to make an apple crisp for the office. Apple crisp is one of those wonderful desserts where you don't really need a recipe just your favorite mix of some key ingredients.

INSTRUCTIONS:
For the apple portion - apples, white sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and flour. Peel, core and slice the apples to whatever shape you like but I tend to do a straight slice. Put the apples in a bowl, put a sieve on top to ensure the flour and sugar is sifted with no clumps and put your dry ingredients through the sieve on to the apples.

For about 15 small apples (enough to fill a 13*9 lasagna pan), I used just under a cup of sugar, teaspoons of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon or less of nutmeg and about 1/4 cup or so of flour. It really depends on how sweet or "Cinnamony" you like it.

For the crumb topping - Oatmeal, flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, butter (slightly softened) and potentially any other crunchy item you would like to add - granola, nuts, flax etc. Mix them together with your hands to get everything clumped together. For a special treat this time I added skor bits to the apple mixture and the crumble mixture and it added a fantastic caramel sweetness. The next step is to mix the apple mixture and crumble together. I like to mix some of the crumble into the apple mixture so that the crunchiness is all through out and then cover the entire apple mixture with the remaining crumble.

Bake @ 375F for about 45 min until hot and crust is golden. Serve warm w/ vanilla ice cream. You will be in heaven! :-)