Banana Bread: Project 1 for using random kitchen ingredients pre move!
Recipe: Typical banana bread ingredients. That’s it.
I’m moving into a new place in less than two weeks (YAY–I got a super cute one bedroom cottage alllllll to myself. No more sharing walls. Got a yard and a deck. Close to Greenlake. It’s all very magical. See below for picture.) and decided today that I should try to bake through some of the more random ingredients I currently have in my kitchen so that I don’t have to move them. One of the more random things is a LOT of frozen bananas…. A banana is almost always somehow involved in my breakfast but sometimes I can’t get through them fast enough and when that happens, I throw them in the freezer. So, as of this morning, I had 10 frozen bananas and really don’t want to move them. Since banana bread is such a glorious glorious thing, the decision to make it my first pre move baking project was easy.
Chocolate Chip Cake with Custard and Strawberry Buttercream
Recipe: Three stacked 6″ chocolate chip cakes layered with homemade pastry cream and fresh strawberries and frosted with a strawberry buttercream.
This past week I was in Hawaii and it really was paradise. I’ve never seen any place that was more beautiful. Truly. So when I got back to Seattle on Saturday night to discover that our weather forecast was 10 straight days of rain–summer is apparently over here–I was a little bummed. Not only was I no longer on a tropical island, it was probably going to be a while before I even saw the sun again. So now, to cope with the lack of blissful sunshine, I bake.
Berger Cookies, Take 1
Recipe: A shortbread-type cookie covered in chocolate.
If you’ve never had a Berger cookie from Baltimore you’re seriously missing out. I’m not even much of a cookie person but these cookies… ❤ nothing I could say could do them justice. I love them so much that before leaving DC, I went to four different locations in town where these cookies were supposedly sold, only to find that they weren’t in stock. Unbeknownst to me, my friends similarly went on searches for me and also couldn’t find them, so I ended up ordering two boxes online to be shipped to Indiana for the holidays. The cookie gods were not looking kindly upon me though and I got a notice that they weren’t even going to be shipped until January 1 and I was leaving for Seattle the next day…but my parents love me so they forwarded on one of the boxes and yes, I ate them in a time period that I will not be revealing online. Point? I love them. A lot.
Chocolate fudge swirl chocolate peanut butter ice cream-what up.
[Actual picture to come soon – for now, enjoy my visual interpretation of chocolate/peanut butter love.]
Recipe: A chocolate peanut butter ice cream with a chocolate fudge swirl (sort of).
My ice cream container has been sitting in my freezer since last summer, just waiting to be used again. And, now that it’s cooled off from temperatures that were frankly too beastly hot to consider doing basically anything, even in the A/C, I decided it was time to make some ice cream magic happen! A friend recently proclaimed their love of all things chocolate peanut butter so I decided if I was going to make ice cream, I might as well do something fancy (pb is fancy, deliciousness in my book!) and satisfy their craving.
Molly-is-coming-soon Strawberry Cupcakes!
Recipe: A homemade strawberry cupcake and strawberry buttercream, both with fresh strawberries.
My friends Rachel and Sam are expecting a new addition to their family soon-a little girl named Molly. These are for her! : )
Strawberries were on sale at the grocery store over the weekend and they inspired me to retry the strawberry cupcake recipe I made a few years ago (and failed at). Well, to be fair, the cupcakes were great (and are this time around too!) but the buttercream recipe in my cookbook was incomplete compared to the instructions I later found for the same recipe online. This time, I decided not to take the risk and just used my standard vanilla buttercream, minus some vanilla, and plus a whole heap o’ fresh strawberries! YAY SUMMER.
A Modified Boston Cream Pie (And Tips For A Successful Stress-Baking Experience)
Recipe: A yellow layered cake with a pastry cream filling and raspberries, topped with a semisweet chocolate frosting (aka a modified Boston Cream Pie).
The last few weeks haven’t been particular wonderful for me so I decided tonight the perfect thing to do was to indulge in a little stress baking. And then to eat a lot of my baked good. However, as the evening moved along, my plans somewhat morphed. I have discovered the perfect steps to a successful stress-baking experience and I’m going to share them with you now.
Rubix Cube Cake
Recipe: A three-tiered chocolate cake with a raspberry buttercream filling/frosting, decorated as a rubix cube.
A friend turned 30 recently and she requested a rubix cube cake for her 80’s-themed party. I haven’t had much experience making cakes and, as I have posted previously, I’m not always big into fashioning cakes/cupcakes to look like something else. But this was a challenge I wasn’t about to pass up.
Strawberry Champagne Cupcakes – Nope.
Recipe: A strawberry champagne cupcake with a champagne frosting.
I have an upcoming cupcake job for a surprise 50th birthday party and I decided I wanted to try something fancy-ish. The pink champagne cupcake recipe I have is pretty good and always gets food reviews, but it seemed a little not classy enough for a 50th birthday party. So I offered a strawberry champagne cupcake with a champagne frosting, not having tried the recipe first. Yeah – fail. For whatever reason, the cupcake flavor became indiscernible when it was both chopped up frozen strawberries and champagne. And the frosting – no. It called for boiled down champagne, butter, and powdered sugar. And it tasted like butter and sugar. So I added some vanilla extract. The consistency was fine, but it tasted not like champagne. Blah. Whatever. I was able to get the order switched to plain champagne cupcakes with a champagne frosting (the pink champagne recipe using straight champagne).
Cauldron Cakes (or why I don’t usually try to make my cupcakes look like something else)
Recipe: A chocolate cupcake with green marshmallow fluff, a pretzel broom, and black licorice handle…
Soooo. I like to bake. A lot. I want to own a bakery someday and bake all day long. And in this bakery, I have big plans for selling cakes that look like cakes, cupcakes that look like cupcakes, and, well, you get the picture. But I have a very good friend named Aimee and Aimee is having a Harry Potter party tomorrow night in honor of the last HP movie. I love Harry Potter. I love Aimee. Therefore, for the second year in a row, I have attempted to make cauldron cupcakes for said party.
It isn’t Christmas at the Conklins’ without Gingerbread with pears
Recipe: My Grandma Conklin’s gingerbread with my Mom’s touch of adding a caramelized pear topping.
I should probably start this blog off by saying that no, I am not confused about what time of year it is. I’m aware it’s nowhere near Christmas – a person need only step outside in the 100-degree-index heat (gross!) to know that couldn’t possibly be the case. It is, however, cultural awareness month at work (or is June in general cultural awareness month?…) and tomorrow the health care team is having a cultural diversity lunch. Everyone is supposed to bring in some sort of food that is part of their culture or that they always had growing up. It took me a while to come to this conclusion, but I eventually realized that the perfect thing to bring in was the dessert my family traditionally makes every holiday season: gingerbread with pears.
Exercises in Glucose Replenishment: My weekly experiments in baking 