Seriously, I cannot refer to this COOKIE without typing it in all caps. This is not just a chocolate chip cookie. Oh no, dear readers. This is something I’m going to have to use two glasses of milk with.

Do you see that penny and nickel? Yeah, I discovered that my ice cream scoop I use for cupcakes is WAY WAY too big for cookies.

Well way too big in the I might end up mindlessly eating two of these and dying.

Recipe from my post.

p.s. and since I’m very proud, in a OMG SOMEONE READS MY SITE! kind of way. Dawn over at liked my Star Trek cupcakes. She’s found some other super awesome stuff, you should check her site out.

This sort of came together randomly. I wanted to make a cake for my bf’s birthday and he likes Star Wars. It was the only thing I could do in a short amount of time. I free-handed the idea from an image I pulled off google of a poster of the Death Star so I really could have planned it better. His birthday is coming up again, as birthday’s tend to do, so now I’m scrambling to think up something again.

I’m guessing it will be something DC related. Time will only tell where my ideas will take me. edit: like this one. cupcakes with magikarp on them. Since I’ve told him repeatedly “IF THIS WERE POKEMON YOU’D BE THE GUY WITH 6 MAGIKARPS” So I may be making him 6 cupcakes ^_^

(HELLO IT IS 3AM AND I REALLY WANT TO BE MAKING FUDGE WALNUT BROWNIES BUT IT IS FROWNED UPON IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT WHEN I DON’T SLEEP)

I’ve also been very very busy trying to find work and working on some side stuff. But I’ve been craving some brownies and I have some awesome pictures of the Dr. Seuss cake I made. I also have another cake to do in 3 months for my friend’s little girl’s first birthday that I have to start working out what I’m going to make. It’s going to be a Star Wars theme, not sure if I’m going to do another Death Star or not.

So coming soon:
the Easter cake pops I made
Dr Seuss Cake
Tie Dye Peace cake
Pontchki’s
Chocolate/Walnut cake with Chocolate Frosting
Rose cupcakes flavored with Mike & Ike’s

I’ll get this updating thing down I swear lol

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve made cake-pops but these might be the cutest ones I’ve made. They also included sugar cookies! I used a flower cutter I had and cut some of the petals off to give them cute tails. I should know what the feather’s on a turkey’s end are called but I can’t think of it at the moment. The beaks were candy coated sunflower seeds and I did the eyes with white and regular chocolate. I put the white on first and then took the back of a sucker stick that I had dipped the very end of it and stuck it in the whites. Some of them looked a little crazy but they were a huge success.

The original recipe/idea is from Bakerella

pictures get bigger when you click them!

I knew this as bar sugar before I started baking heavily, I’m the family bartender on the 4th of July lol I actually discovered this on accident when I was trying to break up some sugar I found in the back of the cabinet and it was a brick. It was all the sugar I had and I was in the middle of baking some cupcakes so I broke it up the best I could then threw it in the food processor.

It did take a while to break up but it turned into the superfine sugar. As a warning it was LOUD so don’t do this when other people are trying to sleep. I used a cuisinart processor (in case that matters) that we got a while ago and figured it would work because I was making horseradish sauce and it took that on like a champ.

I was looking up the prices on amazon and regular sugar ends up being about $2.40 a pound and Castor Sugar was around $4.73 a pound. So being able to re-purpose sugar that’s gotten hard with minimal effort will save so much money and from what I’ve used it in it works way better than regular granulated sugar in baking.

This all started by me making a cake for my nephew’s birthday. It was a plain chocolate-chocolate cake and I decorated it in a Star Wars theme. My niece gave a “But he’s had TWO birthday’s already!” and I pulled her aside and asked her what kind of cake she wanted me to make her for her birthday. After having her narrow it down so I wasn’t trying to do a Disney Princess extravaganza for the first time she picked Ariel and Anastasia. Then a few weeks before her birthday her mom asked if I wanted to do the cupcakes for her birthday party too. Since I can’t say no to my family wanting me to bake things I had 24 cupcakes to make on top of the cake. This is when I just went with Ariel, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to get both of them on cupcakes. lol

I sketched out some stuff on my computer and printed them out for reference and went to work. I had the kitchen table COVERED in fondant, powdered sugar, random tools I was trying, and the stages of these designs for at least 4 days. Oh and vodka, cause I can’t be taking on something like this without alcohol I remember hearing somewhere that vodka evaporated faster than water so I just kinda went with it to stick all the pieces together. I put these together the morning of her party so in everything I had to get a trial and error from it definitely took more time that I could have imagined.

each image can be viewed larger by clicking on it.

My niece’s reaction to the piece was more than worth all the work.

Over the weekend I was in Chicago and got to visit Bleeding Heart Bakery, I had heard of it because I’m a huge food network nerd and they’re on Challenge a lot. We got there a few hours before closing so they were out of most cupcakes and Dale wanted a cookie so I picked up 2 Chocolate Chip cookies (which were Vegan) and some cake balls. I had my reservations about the cookie. I do not enjoy dark chocolate and the only experience with vegan cookies was when I had to try them to see if they were to be sold where I was working. They were awful and I don’t want to reminisce further. I didn’t tell Dale when I gave him the cookie until after he’d eaten it and he just kept saying he needed milk. I tried eating the other cookie, after I got some milk, and while it was delicious I couldn’t finish it. It’s very very dry and I really don’t like dark chocolate. I’m guessing the dryness could be that the cookies had been setting out in the open all day but good grief I went through two glasses of milk and ate a size of two quarter if you set them side by side. I didn’t try to eat the cake balls right away but when I did try to eat them I couldn’t even bite into them and they were like twice the size of the ones I make.

This left me really wanting some good chocolate chip cookies (these are not at all Vegan) and this is my new go-to recipe. It is delicious and for as ridiculous as my oven is (doesn’t hold temp at the right spot 350 = 450 on the knob etc) these turned out to be awesome.

Ingredients

• 2 sticks unsalted butter
• 2 1/4 cups bread flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 1/4 cups brown sugar
• 1 egg & 1 egg yolk
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 bag of your favorite chocolate chips. I used Ghirardelli Milk Chocolate Chips which ends up a little over 2 cups

Melt your butter completely. I usually do it in a microwave safe measuring cup but it could also be done on the stove with a heavy bottomed pan. While you’re waiting for this sift together flour, salt, and baking soda in another bowl.

Pour the melted butter into a mixing bowl and add the sugars. Cream these together on medium. Slow the mixer to low and add the egg, yolk, 2 tablespoons milk and vanilla extract and mix until well combined. Then slowly add dry ingredients until they’re incorporated after that you stir in the chocolate chips.

Let the batter chill and heat the oven to 375°. I’m pretty sure this helped my constant issue of my other recipes baking into flat cookies. Then line your pan with parchment paper so you don’t have to deal with the greasy cleanup, I usually only use 1 pan because my oven sucks and I don’t have the attention span some days to do more than one at a time. The baking time will vary but it’s usually around 13-14 minutes. I try to keep an eye on it after 5 though and if your oven has a hot spot, make sure to rotate at about this time too. Let cool until you can touch them and then I move them over to a hard surface to cool completely then move to a airtight container.

Since I almost cut the tip of my finger off last week, my cooking has been pretty low-key. I’ve been working on editing some photos of projects I have done and I have pictures of my processes for some recipes I want to post too. I’m posting some fudges and two variations of caramel. I managed to do these with a cut finger but I hit it more times than I cared to. I have such a want for blueberry scones but it’ll have to wait.

I also have some tutorials I want to try out then once I get them tested I’ll post how they came out for me. One is some pressed sugar decorations and the other is an edible gelatin bow. There’s another tutorial for home-made vanilla extract but I need vanilla beans and 6 months to do that one lol (it’s in the works) I am planning a cake or cupcakes for the upcoming Bears shenanigans and some other cakes in the works I’m doing for family birthday parties. So hopefully I’ll have some test cakes to show on here soon as well.

But seriously, be careful with knives. A ring finger on the left hand is WAY more useful than you would think.

I wanted to surprise my best friend with something AWESOME and tasty. I got what kind of cake/frosting she likes and went with it. I have a great chocolate butter cream recipe that ends up tasting like hot cocoa that I wanted to use and had the recipes set aside then started trying to figure out what I was going to put on top of them. While I watched Star Trek a lot with my dad, she is a huge fan and my personal Bones so I got to work on these cupcakes. Doing the sketches took forever, I couldn’t get some of them looking how I wanted. These are all made using fondant and I really need to figure out a better way to make them look shiny or something.

I’m especially proud of the Enterprise I did, not even going to lie. I made two of the ship itself and one is in a zip lock bag with my baking supplies. Guys, her birthday was in October. Which brings me to the large amount of clay I bought so I could remake these and keep them forever. Except for that tribble, the little heart I cut out was cute but that is not at all how I wanted the tribble to look. For those who don’t know, the tribble is the brown glob with brown smears on it, it should have been WAY cuter. I think my favorite is Galia (she’s green). I also get all twitchy about red fondant, I’m not even kidding it makes me nuts.

Do you want to see these guys individually and up close? Each image can be clicked on to enlarge.

Totally random note: my first post! I finished writing/assembling it at 1:45am and waited till 2 to post it to start things off right.  Enjoy everyone, tell your friends.