Good News! Cheesecake!

My mom and I went to the store yesterday so I'm able to make her a cheesecake.  I would've made it yesterday but there was no time...  I've got a lot going on with school, student council, baking (it's my stress reliever!), and other normal teenage stuff...

But I'm still making the cheesecake.  The other reason (which I just now remembered) that I didn't bake yesterday was that Dad brought home a Key Lime Pie and Tab (best soft drink ever...) so 2 desserts would've been a bit much for a salty-rather-than-sweet lover.

Voting is still open for the cupcake challenge!  So while I'm baking, you can be voting and telling all of your friends!

Oh, and I might make some fall-themed cupcakes for the cake walk at the local elementary school's Fall Festival.  I can't go to the festival because I'm going to my BFF's homecoming game but I am making the cake walk numbers and possibly cupcakes.  I have to play it by ear though. If I don't squeeze in a few hours before Friday, I'll make cupcakes for myself!  Now to study for that Spanish test...

Hello, Fall!

Last week, Monday to be specific, the fall season began in the northern hemisphere.  And how I envy you, denizens of the southern hemisphere!  Because for you, right now, the temperature is warming up and everyone is begining to step outside after a long winter's hiberation.  For me, alas, it gets colder, ahem, "chillier," everyday and the long winter is now ahead of me, not behind me.  I just want to say that I hate being cold.  The good news in all this tragedy is that Christmas is in three months! ;-)

But fall does provide ample opportunities to bake:  my mom and dad and brother's birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, other people's birthdays, and so on.  Hopefully I'll make a cheesecake sometime this week for my mom's birthday (which is tomorrow) but she says that she'd rather I clean my room as a gift to her...

In the mail a few days ago I got a little mini-magazine from Taste of Home with Halloween recipes.  It was so cute:  my little brother came up to me and said:  you can make something for me for Halloween.  So we flipped through the pictures together, picking out a chocolate cake and pumpkin cookie pops that I should make.  Actually, I think that the pumpkins would be even better if they were cake balls!

So I've got a lot to look forward to baking wise this season.  Hopefully I'll have time to do it all, since at the same time I'm still in school, and I have to apply for all these scholarships and colleges...

Before I forget:  please go vote for your favorite basil cupcake over at No One Puts Cupcake in a Corner starting today!

Basil is Better, Chocolate is Best

I now present to you my entry into the Iron Cupcake: Earth September 2008 Competition (secret ingredient: basil)!

First, let me preface the cupcakes with some background.  Earlier in the summer, I planted a plethora of fresh herbs:  spearmint, peppermint, Italian parsley, sweet basil, oregano, and banana peppers (yes, I am aware that banana peppers aren't herbs).  However, the mints never grew. :(  Everything else did, and aside from some wimpy parsley, everything flourished.  As the season went on, I occasionally used my herbs for certain Italian dishes such as lasagna.  But I never really had a reason to eat them.  Then, alas, the weather began to get cool again and I feared that I would have no true purpose for the herbs and they would wither away and die when the frost came.  Was all my hard work for naught?  Should I have just let them die that one week when I completely forgot to water them?

No!

Thanks to Iron Cupcake:  Earth, my herbs have a reason to live again.  At least, the basil does.  So now I finally present to you Kelsie's Chocolate Basil Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing:

From Flickr: "Basil is a delicious herb but until this challenge, I never thought of putting it in dessert. When it comes to dessert, though, I'm 100% on the chocolate bandwagon. And so this cupcake was born.

The chocolate-basil cupcake is filled with dark chocolate ganache and topped with cream cheese icing and a sugared basil leave plucked fresh from my garden."

The Cupcake

Ingredients:
3/4 cup dark chocolate cocoa powder (regular is OK too but not as tasty)
1 1/2 cup boiling water
1 1/2 stick unsalted butter
1 1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 cup fresh sweet basil leaves, packed
1 tbsp pure vanilla extract
2 cup AP flour (all purpose)
1 tbsp baking powder (make sure it's not expired!)
3/4 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 375 F.  Boil the water.  While that's boiling, add sugar and basil to food processor and processor until nice and green, set aside.

When the water is boiling hot, stir together the water and cocoa powder until smooth, set aside. 

Cream together the butter and sugar/basil until light and fluffy.
Add egg and vanilla and beat until smooth.

Add flour, salt, and baking powder and beat until incorporated.

 

Finally, add cooled cocoa mixture and stir until smooth.  

Fill muffin cups (with or without liners) 1/2 full and bake 17-20 minutes (I baked for 20).  

After the cupcakes have finished baking, set aside to cool and continue...

The Ganache

Ingredients:
8 oz whipping cream
1 tbsp butter
1 oz sugar
12 oz chocolate (high quality; I prefer dark)

Heat the cream, sugar, and butter to boiling over the stove.  Pour over chocolate in a stainless steel bowl.  Let stand for 5 minutes.  Stir out from the center until smooth and ganache-like.  Let the ganache cool in the fridge until it is of piping consistency, then pipe ganache into cupcakes.

The Icing

Ingredients:
1 stick room-temperature unsalted butter
1/2 cup Crisco
8 oz softened, room-temperature cream cheese (not the low fat kind)
1 tbsp vanilla
2 lb powdered sugar
1/2 tsp salt.

Cream together the butter, Crisco, and cream cheese.  Gradually add the vanilla, powdered sugar, and salt.  This is a thick recipe so you might have to cut back on the sugar (I did).  This is a very sweet cream cheese icing.  About half the people in my family thought it was too sweet while the other half loved it.  (Funny thing, my mom was one of the ones who loved it, even though she hates sweet icings and desserts.)

I piped the icing on the cupcakes with a 1M (2110) tip and I piped a lot, but then, I like a lot of icing.  So pipe at your discretion.  However, watch out for the ganache, which might be poking back out of the cupcake!

The Sugared Basil Leaves

You need as many basil leaves as you have cupcakes, a food-quality paintbrush, granulated sugar, and corn syrup.  Clean the basil leaves and paint them with the corn syrup (you could dip them in the syrup but then you have a lot of excess) and then dip the leaves into a bowl of sugar.  Gently set the leaf on top of your cupcake, and you're done!

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More About Iron Cupcake: Earth

If you've ever seen Iron Chef on the Food Network, then you know what this competition is about:  a bunch of cupcake fanatics compete to win the Challenge by baking, you guessed it, a cupcake with the secret ingredient.  This month's ingredient was Basil (of course)!

Anyone can enter the competitions, just go to the Iron Cupcake blog to sign up.  Oh, and anyone can vote, too!  Voting will begin on Sunday, September 28th at No One Puts Cupcake in a Corner.  So please be sure to cast your vote for your favorite Basil Cupcake.  Hopefully, my cupcake will be your favorite, but the competition is tough!

Before I forget, too, there are some awesome prizes provided by the following awesome people and companies:
Etsy artist Metal Sugar
Head Chefs by Fiesta Products
Karen Tack and Alan Richardson, authors of Hello Cupcake
Cupcake Courier
Jessie Steele Aprons
Taste of Home

So that wraps up my very long post about my Iron Cupcake: Earth cupcakes.  If you have adventurous taste buds, I encourage you to try these unique and earthy but tasty cupcakes, and don't forget to share the cupcake love by voting on your favorite!

Daily Double

Part A:  Hillary's Birthday

Ta-Da!  Hillary's fantastic 18th birthday cake to go with her fantastic birthday and party.  Sorry I didn't get a better picture but as it was already safely packaged in the box, I didn't want to risk making it un-safe. ;)  The theme was Jeopardy, because that is such an amazingly fun show and my BFF is uncommonly good at shouting out the right answers when watching it. (Fun Fact:  After we ate the cake, we actually watched the show.  Good timing, huh?)  The cake was also deliciously German Chocolate.  You know that super awesome coconut/peacan stuff that they put all over German Chocolate cake?  Yeah, I put it all over this cake, too, even if you can't see it.  It's between the 2 layers of cake and around the sides.  The buttercream icing on the top is flavored not with vanilla extract, but with coconut.  It smelled heavenly. =)

The party was a lot of fun, too.  There was a pool full of jello, two birthday girls, two cakes, a sombraro and lots and lots of fun.  I guess I already said that it was fun, but that's the only way to describe it!

So, Hillary, I hope you had an amazing 18th birthday and I'm very, very glad that you loved the cake so much!  It was an honor to make it for you!

Hillary took this picture after we sang "happy birthday".  There are holes in all the 6s because there were only 6 candles; 6 x 6= 36, the combined ages of Hillary and Sarah.

Time for cake and singing "Happy Birthday!"  Sarah's hand is green because of the Jell-O pool.  And she didn't realize that she was lighting "magic" candles that don't blow out. ;-)

Part B:  The 100th Post

Do you remember in elementary school when you celebrated the 100th day of school?  There were all kinds of fun activities:  counting out 100 pieces of fruit loops to string on a necklace, making 100 hats, counting to 100, counting to 100 by 2s or 5s or 10s...

In elementary school, 100 was a big deal.  Well, I may be as far removed from elementary school as a public school student can get, but the number 100 is still a very important number.

For example:

This is my 100th blog post!

Yay!  Fanfare!  Applause!

As far as the 100th post went, this wasn't the most exciting post:  I didn't have 100 fireworks, or 100 cupcakes, or even 100 pictures or something.  As a blog post about cake, however, I think my best friend's 18th birthday is terribly exciting.  And I hope that you do as well.  But, if you've stuck around for 100 posts (or even if you've only been reading my blog for a little while) then I think we probably do share the same ideas about exciting cake moments.  So to end this for today, I just wanted to say thank you for sharing your support, encouragement, stories, and pictures with me and I hope that you stick around for the next milestone!  Now I shall go and get ready for post #101 (cupcakes)!

Ni-Hao, Cake!

 

My baby brother is 5 years old!  Can you believe it?  The little guy is growing up!  In fact, we visited the Georgia Aquarium recently and I can remember when we went to the Tennessee Aquarium years ago when Adam was only 2.  He sat in a stroller and wasn't nearly as excited about seeing big fish or "Dory" fish like this time. He was still cute back then though!

If you are unfortunate enough not to have a little person in your home who does not watch Nick Jr., then you are probably wondering who the heck is on Adam's cake.  Meet Rintoo!  He is a fun-loving, albeit mischievous five-year-old tiger on Ni-Hao, Kai-Lan, the most adorable show on TV ever.  (To give you some quick background in your are unfamiliar with Kai-Lan and co.:  it's a show about a little bilingual Chinese girl who teaches kids how to speak Chinese-- like Dora the Exporer-- and also about the culture while teaching important lessons like sharing.)

Anyway, Adam asked me to "please make a Rintoo cake (!!!!!!)" so even though I had no idea how I was going to decorate this lemon cake 24 hours before it was completed, I knew Rintoo would be there.  (In fact, I didn't even know if he wanted a "circle" cake or a "rectangle" cake until I was about to pour the batter in because he kept changing his mind!)  But I found a cute image of the happy tiger and decided that he needed a speech bubble to wish Adam a happy birthday, and I used that to make a frozen buttercream transfer.  (I remembered to reverse the image!!)

The flowers and mushrooms make the cake look a little girly in my opinion, but I tried to make the cake themed around the show as much as possible.  The icing was thinned down to make the transfer, so the flowers are a little droopy.  Something else that I would've done differently:  the words are written with a #5 tip but I think a #3 would work out better.

Overall, I'm pleased with this cake, especially considering that I didn't start baking until 9pm the night before the party and that I decorated between coaching Adam's soccer team, working at the concession stand, and watching James' soccer game.  Saturday was very busy!  Adam was pleased with the cake too, I believe, even if he didn't actually eat any at the party (?).  James, however, had two slices (and remember, he's the one who claims not to like cake) and Mom liked it too.  Although, the cake was lemon flavor, so that might have something to do with it.  I thought it tasted alright (I used a Duncan Heines box mix with an extender).  But it looked cute!

I won't be posting for a while because Hillary's birthday cake is up next and she has requested that I keep her cake a complete secret until reveal time, including blog posts.  So I won't have any updates about that until the beginning of next week.  In the meantime, perhaps you could check out my Facebook, Flickr or Twitter.  See you next week! ;-)

Play My Music

 

If you can't tell, the cake is supposed to be a guitar.  Actually, it's supposed to be an acoustic guitar but the pick guard looked weird so I took it off, and according to the directions, it's just a guitar without the pick guard.

This cake was destined for greatness from the beginning.  Don't believe me?  Just look at the picture!  I took it out of the pan, and it didn't fall apart!  That's always a good sign.  (Thanks, Ruthie, for showing me how to flatten the bottom of the cake!) I used the cake mix extended recipe with a Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix.  However, I didn't use all the batter, so I make a little 8" cake with the leftovers and stuck it in the freezer.  More cake balls, perhaps?

I made a batch of regular white buttercream and half a batch of chocolate buttercream.  I crumb coated the entire cake:  white at the top; chocolate at the bottom.  Then I carefully did a second coat along the sides of the cake and smoothed them out nicely.  The entire top of the cake is made out of marshmallow fondant.  To get the different shades of brown, I used MMF with chocolate MMF and a bit of yellow food coloring.  I also used CMMF and black colored CMMF.

Actually, I lied.  The entire top is not exclusively made of fondant.  The guitar strings (#5 tip) and "Congratulations" (#2 tip) were buttercream. 

Why does the cake say "Congratulations" anyway?  Well, because I am congratulation my little brother's 4th grade teacher because he is getting married next week!  I was asked to make a cake because the class was throwing a little surprise party today during lunch.  I was told by a very good source that everyone loved the cake and said it was delicious and awesome, etc.  So I'm glad that everyone liked it, because, critical cake decorator that I am, I couldn't help but notice the little imperfections with my piping.

So that's my guitar cake.  I'm not done yet, though.  Today is my other brother's 5th birthday and I'm making him a cake this weekend.  He can't decide if he wants a Yoda cake, Lego Starwars cake, Rintoo cake, or an orange electric guitar cake.  He needs to decide pretty soon though.

Oh, and by the way, Cakes by Kelsie now has a Facebook Page!  So please join, if only because I have seven nine friends. ;-)

The Tastiest Kind of Success

Without bragging too much, I just wanted to say that my 2nd attempt at making cake balls turned out superbly excellent.  The entire process went smoothly (which is quite a feat for me) and, to top it all off, they are delicious!

So as I show to you the surprisingly easy process of making cake balls, I may just have to enjoy one myself!  Enjoy eating one that is. ;-)

The beginning.  It's so flat, it's it?  Too bad about what happens next...

 

Crumbled Cake and Cream Cheese Icing.  I mushed it up with a fork.  If the call balls don't form together properly, it's because there isn't enough icing.  However, I didn't use the entire can, just most of it.

 

Cake Balls!  They are half the size of an ice cream scoop.  The ones that were ice cream scoop sized were too big for dipping. :(  

Melting the chocolate chips in a "double boiler" (hello, multi-tasker!)  They are milk chocolate this time, although I still have a soft spot for dark chocolate!

This is my work station. I actually did a pretty clean job this time!  Surprising to hear that I didn't make a huge mess, isn't it?  I mean, I still made a mess; it just wasn't huge. :)

Dipping the cake ball into the chocolate.  Of course, I took the chocolate off of the heat and let it cool for a bit before dipping the cake ball (which was frozen overnight) in it.  Because I obviously know that hot, melted chocolate would burn my fingertips when I dip the ball.  Duh.

Three completed cake balls.  Too bad they didn't all look this nice (some of them had some funny shapes to them...).  All of them taste this nice.

 

And finally, a picture of the dipped balls sitting in the freezer to harden.  After they hardened, I put them in my big green Tupperware and stuck it in the fridge.  Oh, and I accidentally dropped 4 on the floor, but rest assured, the "5 Second Rule" was put into play!

Cake Balls, Take 2

I really wanted to try to make cake balls after that gooey fiasco.  I don't really have an excuse for making them, other than that I want to.  I suppose that is a good enough reason, right?  So I bought some red velvet cake and some cream cheese icing (I know!  Store bought!  But I wanted the process to be as little messy as possible so that I could concentrate on doing everything correctly).

Last night, I baked the cake.  Just a regular ol' box mix in my regular ol' (actually, it's kinda new) 9" x 13" rectangular pan.  I didn't bother with flower nails in the middle or even Crisco/flouring the pan; I just used that spray-on fake butter stuff.  I wasn't concerned with how the cake turned out because, well, I was just going to crumble it all up anyway.

Lo, and behold:  the cake was flat!  I don't understand.  I mean, I didn't try at all with this cake; but everything about it was perfect:  It came out of the oven perfectly; it's a perfect shade of red; it's not too lumpy in the middle (although there is a slight hump).  I just don't get it.  Why?!  Of all the times that I have make cakes, praying for them to be flat, why did this one cake turn out flat?

It's so perfect that I almost want to just leave it as a cake...

...Or maybe I'll smush it up and make red velvet cake balls like I originally planned.  I mean, either way, cake balls or no, it's going to get eaten.  So I might as well have fun with it.

So I'll try to finish these babies up this weekend (which would be quite a feat, considered the amound of homework that I have!) and next week I have 2 other cakes:  my brother's birthday cake (he wants a lemon cake?! But he still hasn't decided on the theme), and a surprise cake that I'm making for someone at school (chocolate).  And, of course, the week after that, my BFFF turns 18 and I get to make her delicious cake!

Que Maravilloso!

(Which is, roughly translated, how marvelous!)

How cool is this? Stella, at The Fabric of my Life, has awarded me the "Arte y Pico" award! Stella, from the bottom of my heart, thank you! I've never recieved a blog award before (unless Blog of Note counts)! ;)

Anyway, along with the great honor that has been bestowed upon me, I have the pleasure of presenting the award to five other bloggers who contribute to the blogging community based on their creativity and content.

Huh. That's not going to hard at all... (*sarcasm*)

Anyway, give me a few minutes while I find only FIVE (what a small number! I subscribe to fifty-five blogs on Google Reader!)

......

......

Okay, I've got it! Drumroll please...

1. Every Day Every Hour Every Minute is a blog written by Cara about her life with diabetes.  As she puts it:  "This blog is just a place to vent my frustrations and to find other people who can relate."  It's really an good blog to read and I can definitely relate to what she says in some of her pots, but that's probably because I'm diabetic too.  Anyway, it's a blog worthy of this award.
2. Homemade by Jill is a yummy blog.  She has all kind of food recipes and pictures, but Jill's craftiness extends beyond that:  she sews, she makes quilts, and I think her diaper cake is adorable!  (If you thought "diaper" and "cake" don't go together, then you'd be wrong.)
   
3. HomemadeS by Arfi is yet another great blog.  She has some great recipes and she's quite the photographer.  (Chocolate cotton cake anyone?  It looks so good!  In fact, everything she takes pictures of looks good, whether or not it's food.)
   
4. The Bakerella blog makes my mouth water.  I mean, look at those cupcakes!  And her cake balls put my own to shame.
5. Lisa is an amazing cake decorator, which is one of the reasons that I like Cakes and Cupboards so much.  Another reason is that she can make a darn good petit four and another is that her blog is just really fun to read.
   

Well, that's my blog awarding for today.  I hope you enjoy checking out the blogs that I have choosen for this award and I want to again thank Stella for giving me Arte y Pico! =D

(And more recently I was awarded "I love your blog" by Tracy.  (Thank you!!)  That award deserves its own post so in the meantime I'll pick seven more blogs that I love.  So I'll get to work on that and hopefully it won't take me too long.)