Firework Cookies

A few months ago I started getting Martha Stewart Living. There's lots of cute crafts and amazing looking recipes in every issue. I got the July issue a few weeks ago and I was awestruck at the firework cookies on the cover. My Aunt invited Jeremy and I to her house to watch Fireworks this past Friday so I decided that was the perfect reason to make them! I read the recipes for the cookies and the icing and they were both totally simple. Not any too crazy ingredients except Meringue Powder for the icing. I found out that they sell it at Michaels or Joanns so that was fine. I was very nervous about making the designs on the icing though. I mean that's the whole awesomeness of the cookie!
Since we were leaving for my Aunt's right from work Friday night I had to make these cookies in advance. Also, since I don't get home from work til 7:00pm I split up making the cookies one night and the icing another. I never would have thought to do that but there were little notes after each recipe saying how far in advance you could make them and how to store them, etc.

So Wednesday night I made the cookies. It's funny that they're called "sugar cookies" because there's actually twice as much flour as sugar in them, ha! Oh also, I have no clue why I thought I could make these cookies considering I don't have a rolling pin, cookie cutters, cookies sheets to bake on or wire racks to cool the cookies. What the hell was I thinking?! This is where sisters, friends and a little inovation had to come into play. My friend Kara let me borrow her rolling pin, I used some random round lids I found in my kitchen as cookie cutters, I baked all the cookies on my pizza stone (it took 4 batches to get them all baked) and my sister gave me all her wire cooling racks. Sheesh!! These cookies were a real team effort!
Anyway, making the cookies was super easy. Oh and a tip, the recipe says to roll the dough out onto a floured surface and sprinkle with more flour so the rolling pin doesn't stick. I didn't want extra flour to dry the cookies out. Instead I laid down a sheet of freezer paper (I have a ton of this left over from the Book Club shirts I made for Vegas) shiny side up, put the dough on it and then laid another sheet on top of the dough shiny side down and rolled the dough out between them. It didn't stick and I didn't need any extra flour which could have dried the cookies out too much and also would have made a huge mess! Anyway, I cut the cookies out, baked them, cooled them and left them in the fridge over night.

Thursday after work I made the icing. I had an initial dilema because I didn't have nearly enough of the colored gel to dye the icing, I only bought one tube of each color. In the middle of everything I had to quick run out to the grocery store to get more, ugh! Anyway, once the icing was made, split up and dyed I had to get it into the bags to ice the cookies with. I don't have real piping bags or tips or anything. I used sandwhich bags and cut a teeny tiny bit of the tip off (a bigger bit off for the white though). As I was about to put the icing in the bags I realized it was going to be a total mess and real bastard because the icing is sticky...how the hell was I supposed to do this?! After two tries at just dumping a spoonful into a bag I got super frustrated. I tried to call my sister (who went to culinary school and loooves baking) to ask what the f*ck I was supposed to do now?! She didnt answer so I stood in my kitchen about to throw icing all over the place when I decided to just take a bag and friggin figure it out myself! I was pretty proud of myself when I realized what to do. You just have to hold the bottom of the bag, push it through the top and basically make a little bowl in your hand to put the icing into DUH! After that crisis was averted I got back to work.
The recipe says after piping the white on you have to IMMEDIATELY pipe on the red and blue and pull the colors out with the toothpick. I did that for the first batch.


Then I decided this was extremely inefficient. I'm assuming if I was in a kitchen that wasn't has hot and humid as mine that doing a few cookies at once could have caused a problem. It's so humid in my kitchen though that the icing wasn't drying at all so I was good to go. I did 3-4 cookies at once, it went MUCH quicker.
Here's a little play by play how to make the designs....
Pipe a ring of white icing 1/4 inch in from the outside of the cookie and then fill in the center.


Now just alternate the red and blue or do all of one color, whatever you fancy. Put a dot in the middle, a circle of that color around it and then the other color in between the dot and first line, also you can do another ring of colored icing depending on the size of your cookie. Some of the small cookies I was able to manage a dot and 3 rings of color but others I could only do a dot and 2 rings.


With a toothpick I started at the dot and just lightly dragged the icing out to the edge of the white icing, all around like a clock. Then with another toothpick, alternating between those line I dragged from the outside to the center. And that's it friends!!


And look, even if you mess up the lines you pipe on once you drag the toothpick through you can't even tell.



After the first batch I realized it wasn't too hard, just a bit time consuming. I had 55 cookies total, it only took about half an hour to make the icing, separate it and dye it. Then about 2 1/2 hours to decorate them all. My fridge was super full of these beauties once I was done.


I had a RIDICULOUS amount of icing left though. I really thinking I could have made half the icing and would have been fine.


I love the design, the cookies were delicious and everyone complimented me on them. I think I might try to make something similar around Halloween, instead of fireworks they'll be spiderwebs!

I hope everyone in the States had a great 4th of July weekend!!

Love Muffins!

Jeremy's birthday was this past Sunday and one thing I made for him were Love Muffins! He's on a bit of a health kick so I thought muffins for breakfast for a week were a lot better than a breakfast sandwich from Wawa every day!
I originally got the idea when Kimberly from chez sucre chez shared a video on how to make heart shaped cupcakes. He doesn't like sweets (which drives me nuts!) so I thought muffins might work and I mean...love muffins...it just sounded to perfect to not at least try!
Next I needed to decide on what kind of muffins. I searched around on allrecipes.com and found these Cranberry Pecan Muffins. I followed the recipe just as described except I used double the amount of dried cranberries and first soaked them in apple sauce. I have to say they are delish!! The heart shape didn't work as well as I had hoped on all of the muffins but a lot of them looked good. I made sure to put those ones on top. I found these adorable boxes at Joann's. They are so perfect and make the muffins look so professional!

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup sour cream

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh or frozen cranberries

1/2 cup chopped pecans

TOPPING:

2 tablespoons sugar

1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Here are all the ingredients and you can see my yarn stash in the background and my apron on my sewing dummy....not on me, oops! Oh and also...some gratuitous advertising for my Dad's band 2 Big 2 Fail is back there =)

I was so pleasantly surprised by the foil lid on the sour cream. It's an image of Pfeiffer Beach, Big Sur, California. Isn't that great?! I usually buy generic sour cream but decided to go classy with Daisy for these muffins. Because of this, I will totally be buying this brand all the time now!

Directions:

First I dumped all the cranberrys in a bowl with enough applesauce to coat them all.

Then, in a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add vanilla. Fold in sour cream. Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, nutmeg and salt; stir into creamed mixture just until moistened. Fold in cranberries (apple sauce and all) and pecans. Fill greased or paper-lined muffin cups two-thirds full. Combine topping ingredients; sprinkle over batter. Bake at 400 degrees F for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes before removing from pans to wire racks.

If you watched the video, then you already know but if not, to get the heart shape you fill the liner 1/3 of the way, place a marble between the muffin liner and the tin and then fill another 1/3.

Like so...

After baking here is what they looked like. Not all of them looked like hearts but it didn't bother me too much. There were enough that did and it's the thought that counts!

I'm sure these would look better if they were cupcakes and I could have used the icing to accentuate the heart shape but whatev...these were cute and tasty!

On a side note, do you blogspot-ers like the new way pictures are put into your blog? Instead of the path it's the actual picture. I thought I liked it at first but after doing this post with so many pictures, it was a real pain in the foot! Dragging the pictures is kind of difficult, especially since I like to write and then post the pictures so I'm all messed up!

Have a wondeful day!

Apple Crisp

Now that I had 15 apples in my fridge after apple picking, I had to find something to do with them!
Last year I made apple pancakes that Jeremy really liked so he requested more of those but still had 12 apples left!
At first I wanted to make an apple pie but finally decided a nice Apple Crisp was the way to go!
I looked on allrecipes.com for some recipes and found a good one but ended up altering it a bit.
This was the original recipe:

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups rolled oats
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
1 1/2 cups butter
2 quarts peeled, cored and sliced apples

Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
In a large bowl, combine the flour, oatmeal, cinnamon, nutmeg and brown sugar. Cut butter into mixture until crumbly.
Take half of the mixture and pat it into the bottom of a 9x13 inch baking dish.
Cover crumb mixture with apple slices, then sprinkle apple slices with remaining crumb mixture.
Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 45 to 50 minutes or until apples are tender.

Instead of 1 1/2 cups brown sugar, I did 1 cup brown sugar and 1 cup white sugar and decreased the butter to only 1 cup because sheesh that's alot of butter!!

I decided to make these on Thursday night and brought them in to work on Friday. I didn't start peeling the apples til about 8:00pm and good grief it took longer than I had planned! Peeling, coring and slicing apples takes a while! The rest of the mixture was pretty quick to get together.
I baked it all for about 45 minutes and mmmm mmmmmm my apartment smelled all autumny and delish!!
Here are some lovely in progress shots...

A bunch of apples!



Isn't this one just picture perfect?!



Here they are all peeled and about to be cored and sliced up!!



I didn't get a picture of them sliced or the mixture but this is how lovely it looked when it came outta the oven!



Close up!!



I brought it into work and everybody loved it. I was slightly bummed that because it wasn't warm, we don't have an oven and I certainly can't put this metal pan in the microwave, the bottom crust was sticking to the pan. Oh Well! Everyone just scraped it up and enjoyed.
I'm really starting to enjoy baking and bringing it in for my co-workers. I don't want to keep things at home because I'll eat it all and get as big as a house and Jeremy doesn't really like sweets.
We have a Halloween party coming up at work so I want to bake something new...maybe a Pumpkin Roll??

It Smells like Cupcakes

My apartment smells so delicious!!

I haven't baked in sooo long. The last thing I made was a chainsaw and bloody foot cake for my ex boyfriend over 3 years ago. You can see it here if you want to.

I have a serious sweet tooth and I think that is one of the main reasons I don't bake. If I did, I would be eating crap all the time!! It sucks that Jeremy doesn't like sweets, otherwise I'd bake him cookies and cakes and pies and what not all the time.
Tonight I made funfetti cupcakes for my manager's birthday tomorrow. I was shocked at what a small amount of sprinkles come with the icing. So I have 6 cupcakes without sprinkles. Next time, I am going to buy a whole extra thing of sprinkles!!
I'm very proud of myself for not eating one of these cute little guys!! That's not to say I didn't eat plenty of the batter or left over icing =)

Ready to be cooked!!



I love to see all the colors in the cake after they're baked!



All Iced, Sprinkled and ready to be eaten!



I hope my manager likes funfetti, she has no clue we all even know it's her birthday let alone that we are bringing in food!!