December 2009

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Week Fifty: Eggnog Cupcakes with Cinnamon Rum Frosting

December 23, 2009 in Cupcakes, Internet Recipes, Weekly Baked Good | 1 comment

(This week’s cupcake recipe came from How To Eat a Cupcake and the frosting recipe came from The Busty Baker. Thanks, ladies!)

For the past six years, I’ve known Christmas is near just by opening my refrigerator. While I’m not looking, my husband will sneak a carton of eggnog into our grocery cart every week. And he’s the only one in our house who drinks it.

Yes, readers, I am a nog hater.

The running joke (which is actually 100% true) is that the very idea of eggnog is enough to engage my gag reflex. Have you ever looked at the ingredients in eggnog? There are uncooked eggs is that stuff! It probably doesn’t help that I don’t like milk either. There are just way too many things going on in eggnog that I do not like.

But baking with it? Count me in! It seems like the perfect baking ingredient. So I knew I’d have to find an eggnog cupcake recipe somewhere…and I found it at How to Eat a Cupcake!

The culprits:
Rum and Eggnog

The recipe was pretty straightforward, and included a nice douse of rum (because if you’re going to drink eggnog, it should probably be alcoholic…) and cinnamon. The batter tasted yummy:
Eggnog Cupcake batter

And I even found somewhat holiday-ish cupcake papers!
Cute cupcake papers

The batter went into the cupcake tins:
Eggnog Cupcakes

And when they came out, I frosted them with Cinnamon Rum Frosting (the same frosting I used for my Pumpkin Spice Cupcakes at Halloween). I dusted the tops with a little cinnamon:
Eggnog Cupcakes with Cinnamon Rum Frosting

Very pretty. I had one of these cupcakes right after I baked them, and thought it was okay. Not spectacular. It seemed a little dry. But I put them in the refrigerator and hoped for the best. I don’t know what happened in that refrigerator, but the next day these cupcakes were ah-mazing. They looked amazing, they smelled amazing and they tasted amazing. A few of my co-workers said this cupcake edged out the Tarte Tatin with Carmelized Apple Cupcake as their favorite. One of the account executives took a cupcake and sniffed it experimentally, then looked at me in amazement and said, “It smells like a Yankee Candle!”

It’s that frosting, I tell ya’. That frosting could save a burnt-black cookie.

Two more weeks, two more weeks, eek! This week I’m baking a Grasshopper Pie for my sister-in-law’s Christmas Eve party. And I still haven’t made a decision on the final project. I’ve got two ideas in mind, but both could prove to be beyond my budget. I’ll have to put some more thought into it. I feel like it needs to be something spectacular, seeing as how it’s The End!!!

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Week Forty-Nine: Gingerbread Cookies

December 16, 2009 in "Martha Stewart Baking Handbook", Cookies, Weekly Baked Good | 1 comment

(This week’s recipe came from “Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook”.)

Oh, Martha, is there anything you can’t do?

I knew I had to make gingerbread cookies at some point this holiday season, and when I quizzed a couple of my co-workers on what kind of treat they’d like me to bake, they immediately said gingerbread cookies. Who am I to deny my fans?

Martha’s recipe is a little bit different from most gingerbread cookie recipes, in that it incorporates fresh ginger into the cookies. The recipe is incredibly simple to put together, although I found it took some convincing to get the dough out of my mixing bowl and onto a sheet of parchment without crumbling into bits. I had to manhandle it a little bit to get it rolled into a ball.

Martha recommends chilling the dough in the fridge for at least an hour before rolling it out, which I agree with. But then she gets a little crazy. She suggest you roll out the dough onto a cookie sheet, then freeze it for 15 minutes before cutting out the shapes, and then putting the shapes on another cookie sheet and freezing THOSE for 15 minutes before baking. I don’t know about all that. My dough never really got too soft, and after I froze the first sheet of rolled out dough for fifteen minutes, I couldn’t get a cookie cutter through it for about ten, which seemed to me like it canceled out the freezing…but whatevs. I’m sure Martha had a reason for all the freezing. I just found it unnecessary.

Once my cookies were baked and cooled, I went to work trying to make Royal Icing once again. If you’ll remember, back on Father’s Day, I tried to make Royal Icing for the hammer and saw cookies I made for my dad, with disastrous results. This time, it went a little better. My icing was still a little too runny, and no amount of powdered sugar could get it to the consistency I wanted. As you’ll see in the photos of the finished cookies, my icing didn’t spread too much, but it still wasn’t perfect. I’ll keep trying in 2010.

Unfortunately, once again, I took zero photos of the production process of these cookies. But here are a few of my favorite finished cookies:
Diaper Gingerbread Man
Gingerbread Man wearing a diaper (or briefs, you decide)

Christmas Tree Gingerbread cookie
Gingerbread Christmas Tree

Star Gingerbread cookies
Gingerbread Star

Cyclops with Claws Gingerbread Man
Gingerbread Cyclops with Claws

Whew! I’m caught up again! Only three more weeks in this project..it’s crazy to think that I’ve actually stuck it out and can see the finish line just around the corner.

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Week Forty-Eight: Thanksgiving!

December 16, 2009 in Internet Recipes, pie, Weekly Baked Good | Comments closed

(The Pear-Honey-Cranberry Sauce recipe came from allrecipes.com and the Pumpkin Chiffon Pie recipe came from How to Eat a Cupcake.)

Thanksgiving! The second best holiday of the year (Christmas is number one, of course, and Halloween is probably third). My Thanksgiving this year was different from all my past ones; instead of watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV, I got to see it in person!
Tom Turkey

Also, my mom came out to visit from Ohio! This was also a pretty big deal, as my mom has never been to New York City before. We took her around to all the tourist traps and posed for pictures with the Naked Cowboy. Much fun was had.

My darling husband insisted that I make some kind of crazy cranberry sauce this year, so I scoured the Internet for recipes. I found one that combined cranberries with pears, sugar and honey and seemed easy enough to figure out. It actually turned out quite lovely. I’m not a cranberry sauce fan, but even I put a little on my turkey this year:
Pear Honey Cranberry Sauce (I made this!)

My main project though was a Pumpkin Pie. My husband’s family is all about traditions at holiday events, so when I told Rob I wanted to mix things up a little bit and make a Pumpkin Chiffon Pie, he was beyond nervous. He was so afraid that the pie would be some radical experiment. But it wasn’t! I followed the recipe from How To Eat a Cupcake, and it turned out great! The only problem I had was that my pre-baked pie crust slid down the pie pan on one side a little…not enough to ruin the pie, but enough to ruin the aesthetic.
What makes this pie a little different is that it incorporates gelatin and whipped egg whites in with the traditional pumpkin filling. It makes for an incredibly light pie. I like pumpkin pie well enough, but after one piece I’m usually done until the next Thanksgiving. I could have eaten two or three slices of this one.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of the pie-making process, as I was really busy putting it and the cranberry sauce together the night before Thanksgiving (we had to be up at 5 a.m. Thanksgiving morning to get to the parade route in time). But here’s the finished product, which went over very well:
Pumpkin Chiffon Pie (I made this!)

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Week Forty-Seven: Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

December 16, 2009 in Cookies, Internet Recipes, Weekly Baked Good | 1 comment

(This week’s recipe came from allrecipes.com)

A few weeks back, Rob and I went to visit our friends Alison and Brian in Scarsdale. They have two kids who are four and two, and it was my responsibility to bring dessert. I tried to think of something that kids and adults would like that wasn’t just a chocolate cupcake or sugar cookie. I found a recipe for Pumpkin Whoopie Pies and thought, “Eureka!” Pumpkin is a flavor that adults and kids both seem to enjoy, and who doesn’t like a nice, thick layer of sweet creamy filling?

The recipe started with a really thick batter. It definitely did not have the consistency of a chocolate chip cookie dough, but it was thicker than a cake batter:
Pumpkin Whoopie Pie dough

The batter went down on cookie sheets and, as I learned from the Iced Pumpkin Cookies, I put it down in exactly the way I wanted the cookies to turn out, as pumpkin cookies don’t spread much:
Pumpkin Whoopie pies

They baked up into beautiful golden cookies that were slightly springy and moist:
Pumpkin Whoopie pies

The filling for the middle was made of Crisco and sugar and a few other things and was delicious. I spread a thick layer on half the cookies, and then sandwiched another cookie on top:
Cream filling for Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

The cookies were a big hit. Brian and Alison both loved them, and their kids worked on those cookies for the better part of ten minutes (they were pretty big cookies), licking up every crumb. I’m so happy that they enjoyed them, because I was living in fear that they’d take one bite and then spit it out.

Kid-tested, mother (somewhat) approved (the kids did run around like crazy people after all the sugar!).

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Week Forty-Six: Free Form Apple Tart

December 16, 2009 in "The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book", Tart, Weekly Baked Good | Comments closed

(This recipe came from “The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book”.)

Wowwww, I have been M.I.A. for some time. Sorry about that. I plan to rectify it in the next couple of days. I’ve only got a few more weeks of baking, and I need to get the blog caught up before the baking ends!

On the first full weekend of November, Rob’s sister and her boyfriend came over for dinner. We had falafel and a Free Form Apple Tart for dessert. The falafel was good, but the tart was better.

The recipe began with making a crust in the food processor:
Making dough

The dough was then chilled and then rolled out in a (rough approximation) of a circle:
Dough for Free Form Apple Tart

The next step was to layer apple slices in a circle on the dough in what I would describe as a snow-fort pattern. My first attempt was a little too tall and a little too narrow:
Free Form Apple Tart first attempt

The next try was much better. Once the apples were down, the dough was folded over itself and then gathered around the edges:
Free Form Apple Tart second (and successful attempt)

The whole shebang was placed on a rimmed baking sheet and baked for about an hour:
Free Form Apple Tart

Free Form Apple Tart

Apparently the big thing with these Form Form Tarts is that they tend to leak. That’s why it’s so important to leave about two inches of the dough uncovered with apples to fold over; it acts as a barrier. I’m proud to say that my tart did not leak. And it was delicious. And even better sliced up with homemade whipped cream on top. I plan to make this again sometime soon. It was a lot of work peeling and slicing the apples, but overall fairly easy.

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