Wednesday, December 17

In lieu of anything substantive...




Sunday, August 10

Catch-up....

I completely forgot to post my cookies from last Sunday, so I'll do that here quickly before I post tonight's (vegan!) ones later this week...


I made these cakey chocolate cookies with strawberry buttercream.  At first, I didn't like the cookies - they needed more of a kick - but as they absorbed  juice from the fresh strawberries over the course of the evening, they tasted much better.  I think the next tim
e I make them, I'll add a couple of tablespoons of fruit juice to the recipe. Probably strawberry or other berry juice - something with lots of acid...  

The cookie recipe*:

2/3 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1/3 cup buttermilk substitute**

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Lightly grease a cookie sheet.

Beat together butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Beat in egg and vanilla (again, until light and fluffy).  in a separate bowl, sift together flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt.  In 5 additions, alternately add buttermilk and dry ingredients to butter and sugar mixture.  

Drop cookie dough in 1/4 cup portions onto cookie sheets, leaving about 2" between the cookies.  Bake 12-15 minutes, or until cookie springs back when lightly touched at the center.  

Remove after a moment and let cool on cooling rack.  

*This recipe is loosely adapted from CDKitchen.com
**Not a huge fan of buttermilk, I never buy it, even for baking.  Adding 1 tsp. apple cider vinegar to milk (enough to equal 1/3 cup) works quite nicely.  
The frosting recipe*

3 tbs. strawberry puree**
1 cup cold butter
3 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar (give or take)
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

Beat together butter, puree and vanilla.  Gradually add confectioner's sugar until desired consistency is achieved.  

*This recipe graciously shared by Sprinkles Cupcakes, via Marthastewart.com
**Theirs called for 1 cup of sliced strawberries, to be pureed in the food processor or blender.  I don't have a food processor, and my blender wouldn't puree such a small amount.  After adding several more berries, I had a nice puree, but also far too much of it.  I beat the rest of it with some confectioner's sugar and spread it on some whole-wheat bread.  It was really delicious!  

When the cookies were cooled and the frosting prepared, I frosted each cookie and garnished with strawberry halves.  Looking at the photos, I would probably have added more sugar, just to make a stiffer frosting.  These look a little too gloppy.  

Wednesday, July 30

a digression from the usual baking chat

Today, I took my first-ever [successful] foray into cable knitting. It's nothing fancy, just a few turns, but I'm so completely excited about it. I really do feel like I can knit anything now!
On another note, I bought the cutest tee-shirt from my local vegan bakery, Pattycake. Their cookies and cupcakes are seriously divine - I can definitely appreciate how they've mastered both fluffy cakes and more hearty peanut butter-oatmeal cookies (to say nothing of everything else in between). It's only a few miles from my house, so I think I go there a bit more than I should (oops!). In any case, they just printed shirts and I figured it was absolutely n
ecessary that I get one.

Here are the photos I borrowed from Pattycake's Facebook page
(I bought the pink version):

So long for now. I have some knitting and German homework to do before Project Runway starts at 9.

really hope the whiny lady who loves leather goes home.

Sunday, July 20

I promise....


to be a bit better about posting from now on.

For this evening's installment of the weekly Sunday movie night Aaron and I host, I decided to make Billy's Vanilla Vanilla cupcakes (courtesy of Martha Stewart.com), topped with White Chocolate Buttercream frosting (from Jen's Genuine Life) - pictures forthcoming. I've used Billy's recipe before and I can say that it works quite well, whether you use the full recipe or half it, for a more manageable number of cupcakes.

My movie night guests are rather divided, in terms of their tastes for sweets. Cupcakes aren't always the favorites with those [boys] who aren't crazy about intense desserts. Thus, when I do make cupcakes (or really anything with frosting), I usually decide to go all out. Besides, any leftovers can always come to school with me - leaving them in the graduate student lounge usually produces an empty plate at the end of the day.

In any case, the frosting I made is a "true" buttercream and is, by anyone's standard, quite serious. The white chocolate seemed like just the right amount of richness for my sweets-loving friends, so I decided to go for it. The end result is fabulous and creamy, but I did have to tweak the recipe to make the frosting stiff enough to spread thickly. This didn't surprise me, as I feel as though I always have to add a bit more confectioner's sugar (in this case, just under half a cup). It's surprising that anyone can ever quantify the necessary ingredients enough to produce a recipe, really. I usually wing it with my frosting and glazing recipes, but the addition of melted chocolate gave me pause.

You can see from the pictures that the frosting is a bit grainy. This is because the chocolate hadn't cooled completely when I added it to the butter. Parts solidified and sort of splintered while I beat the ingredients together. I figure I'll just tell my guests that the cupcakes are topped with a "vanilla buttercream with white chocolate flake." They'll buy it, I'm sure... Otherwise, though, the flavor is delicious and I have to give Jen (of Jen's Genuine Life) a lot of credit.

update: I took the movie night leftovers to my sister's birthday party a day or so later, and they disappeared about an hour after we got there. Success!

Monday, June 23

So much to say...

I've been thinking a lot about these really simple salmon quesadillas we made for the first time a few weeks ago. they definitely can't be classified as sweets, but they are still fabulous and in my mind pretty consistently as of late.

Wednesday, June 18

My fabulous new necklace


I might post more in a little while, but I couldn't resist putting a picture of my new present all over the internet. i came home today and Aaron had gotten me this fabulous, fluorescent pink Alex+Chloe octopus necklace. I have been secretly lusting after their jewelry for some time now and am pretty stoked he found it for me! I don't mean to be too sappy, but....

Monday, June 16

A week later...

and my summer has begun. Finals are finally over, my grades are in, I've taken my requisite week-long "mental health break" consisting mostly of sleeping 10 hours per night and sitting on my couch, watching mindless reality television. I have to say, it was fabulous...and mildly full of baking.

I've been listening to She & Him obsessively and have at least one of their songs stuck in my head at a given moment. Aaron doesn't love it, I can assure you.
He's sweet though, and pretends I'm not constantly singing. It really doesn't help the matter that everyone I work with is just as enamored by the band. The CD gets played at least once a day, and doubtlessly more.

In lieu of anything else significant to say this evening, I think I'll just show you pictures of cupcakes:


These, I made a month or two ago. I used the base recipe for peanut butter cupcakes I found in a
cookbook my friend got me for Christmas. I doubled the amount of peanut butter, though, so the result was a really decadent pound [cup] cake. Half of the batch were topped with chocolate buttercream frosting and the other half with an improvised grape jelly frosting (peanut butter and jelly, get it?). Buttercream is sort of always improvised though, at least for me.

It's funny how after a while, "enough" seems to be an acceptable measurement of ingredients. I seem to be slowly getting the knack for "enough" with my cooking, but I'm still not quite there. The art of spicing food still basically eludes me. I'm unquestionably more the baker than the cook.

Cupcakes for dinner?

Sounds good.




Monday, June 9

First Day Jitters

Welcome to The Frosting on the Cake. Being, as it is, my very first day blogging, I'm a little nervous. Bear with me...

I woke up this morning, thinking about the vast amount of attention that cupcakes have received in the last several years. And why not? They're fabulous and portable and have become tiny canvases upon which to present endless combinations of flavor, color, and texture.

(Be sure to check out my links section for just a few of my favorite cupcake sites)


In any case, having only recently finished the first year of my graduate education, I assure you, I have made my fair share of cupcakes. In addition to (or most usually, instead of) working on reading assignments, research, and writing, I have found a remarkably great deal of time to devote to baking. This has included not only cupcakes, but other cakes, cookies, and pastries as well.

Though I don't currently have much procrastinating to do (being, as it is, the quarter break), I still spend an inordinate amount of time looking for new recipes, looking at pictures of glorious sweets, and looking forward to the next dessert to try. In the process, I tend to get waylaid by all the other interesting things the internet has to show me. Thus, while this blog may be the Frosting on the Cake, I have a feeling it'll be a reflection of all the other directions my mind wanders too.