The Joys of Baking

In the past few weeks i’ve been on this baking rampage. I made everything from scratch: the cakes, icings, fondants, pie crusts.. everything. I even cut out the cake cardboards that I placed under my cakes. Today my mom bought around 5 lbs of butter and a huge package of eggs and said these were designated for my cooking. I took it as a sign that I should keep baking and I figured I should probably start blogging about it. So here’s a brief overview of some of what I’ve been doing in the past 2 weeks.

I started with from baking a total of six cakes to create a 3 tier - 2layer fondant covered birthday cake. The cake were a classic chocolate and vanilla butter cake with a mocha butter cream. This was my first time making my own fondant and covering a cake with it. But I think it came out okay. I got frustrated during the decorating phase, white fondant is not forgiving with colored icing. And I also went overkill with the instant espresso with the first batch of mocha buttercream.. The bottom layer was the best, but no could eat more than one piece since the fondant was so sweet.. Oh well, it went to work with my mom and she said it disappeared in seconds.

Next up were cake pops. Cake pops took the place of cupcakes being the new fad. All they are is crumbled cake mixed with frosting, formed into balls and dipped in chocolate. It was a good way to use the cake that I had shaved off the layer cake. I used the chocolate cake with a cream cheese frosting and white chocolate to dip it in. I bought the Ghirardelli baking chips.. not the bidness. Next time definitely getting chocolate that was made to melt. This shit would not melt down into a consistency that will allow me to dip the cake into easily. The whole time I was making these pops I kept singing Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls song.. haha

Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls Song

This weekend I shifted to pies. My nephew has been hinting to me that he wanted an apple pie, so I finally got around to making it. I also wanted to use up the buttermilk I bought for the cakes, so I found a recipe for Buttermilk Pie. I’ve never had this kind of pie before, so I wasn’t quite sure to expect. All the recipes I looked through said it was a very sweet custard common in the South. I figured out a way to reduce the sweetnes.. it was a hit at our family Party! It was a knockout, unlike the Pacquiao Marquez fight.. harharhar.. i had to make some kind of boxing reference.

What next?! Im thinking about venturing into fried pies.. like a peach mango pie or brazo de mercedes.  We shall see.. Baking is fun because it makes other people happy and since I’m so tired of seeing sugar by the time the product is done, I don’t wanna eat it. LOL I rather have other people tell me how good it came out than me eat it and find things that aren’t good about it. LOL