Good Friday Good Dessert

Easter weekend off work so we invited Jonathan's family over for lunch after church on Good Friday morning.  We prepared steak on the BBQ with the compound butters (check out this post), potato salad and our project dessert - the frozen lemon mousse.  Something we hadn't tried before but wanted to make!

It had a few different parts to it - candying the lemon rind, such a cool and yummy way to prepare this and very good for decoration!  Lemon curd to make, strain and chill.  And then of course the cream part of the dessert to mix with the curd, all before putting them in the freezer in their molds. While they were freezing there was also a lemon sauce to make!  And for something extra we melted some chocolate and made some swirls and other decoration that we also froze ready for when we plated the dessert.

Lemon Curd in preparation

Candying the lemon rind, yummy! 

A long time ago I found a great shaped silicone mold tray but had never used it... But now here was my chance!  We did 4 in the molds, and then a few extra desserts in ring molds.

Here's how it ended up:

5 around our little table, nice and snug for a family meal!

Frozen Lemon Mousse
with dark chocolate swirl and raspberries.

Thank you Martha Stewart for this recipe.  We loved trying it out - both making and eating!! :-)

Easter Bakes and Makes

This Easter meant lots of family get togethers which for me means the opportunity to make and to bake as much as I can!  Just like my 'About Me' says, freedom is boredom so busy time is the best time - and I made the most of my Easter days off work!

First stop was Easter cards.  Just a little simple design using our scalloped circle punch from our wedding (it has been well used since!) and some printables I found of course, on Pinterest!

Next stop more scalloped punches... A quick and easy bit of bunting using paint strips (thank you Walmart hehe), the punch and some cute yellow ribbon.

Then come the Easter treats!  A big bunny cutter and my tiny little farm animal cookie cutters led to these sugar cookie goodie bags iced and decorated for an Easter treat for everybody.

After seeing this on Pinterest from Sweet Vanilla Bean I HAD to try it!  Chocolate dipped peeps, so cool! Super fun easy make anybody could do (even Jonathan joined me for this!)... just melt some chocolate and coloured wafers dip and go!  Just be prepared for a sweet SWEET day of eating!

Although I have some more Easter baking and making to post about I think that's all the Easter treats that will make it onto this post!

Here are the finished products:

Chicks in a Nest

Happy Easter everybody!  I love making Easter Cakes.  I love pure white fondant icing and mini eggs and always love to include those.  This year I had my basic design planned out, a white cake, with mini eggs around and perhaps a few fondant Easter animal cut outs.  However, as you will see in a later Easter post we had an abundance of egg whites left over from our Good Friday dessert so for fun I thought I would make some meringue nests - why not have a couple of pavlovas hanging around in the kitchen! :-D  Once they had cooked overnight I realised when decorating my cake one of the meringues could be a nest.

So with our extra meringue nests and our decorated Peep chicks the cake came together with all of these elements.

Oh and I almost forgot to say, the cake inside was a lemon sponge cake with butter cream filling of course!

* Happy Easter *

One a penny, two a penny ♫

♫ Hot cross buns.  Hot cross buns.  One a penny, two a penny.  Hot Cross Buns ♫

Who else can still remember how to play this on the recorder?!

It's Easter time which means it's time for Hot Cross Buns.  After our bread baking adventures in the past year we decided this year we wanted to try making them ourselves.

Not only to try it out and be adventurous, but also so that we could be particular about how they look and taste.  We didn't want the icing version of the cross on top - we both love the hard crunchy cross and wanted to recreate that.  Also I really dislike a strong cinnamon flavour and didn't want to spend a few weeks and calories buying and trying all different kinds of Hot Cross Buns from different supermarkets!!

So we did it!  We made our own.  Here's how it went:

A little, erm, more overdone than we would have liked but only a little!  Tasted good and that's what matters.  

My first pie!

There always has to be a first try.  And this time it was my first try at a pie!  We were heading over to our friend's place for the evening and I of course offered to bring a dessert - an excuse to try something new out :-)  However there was one catch - our friends were half way through their Lent of being vegan!!!  Hmm, no eggs, milk, cheese, anything you would usually find in baking!  Eek...what to do.  I was searching recipes but wasn't sure about preparing something specifically using vegan ingredients - so many different powders, milks crazy stuff I had never heard of.  And then the thought came to me, I could use a vegan shortening in a pie.  That would be the only substitution necessary but no butter or egg wash on top of the crust but I thought I'd give it a try and see how it went.

I think using the vegan shortening did effect the crust a bit but the taste was good and the filling wasn't effected by anything and I think we all enjoyed it!  

The next pie I make I will try with butter in the crust to see if there's a difference.  

I used this recipe here as well as her vegan pie crust link you'll find on there.  I loved the combination of pear and blueberries and the filling was nice and gooey.  So my crust isn't as pro looking as the one on her website but oh well - first try!

So some of the pastry was a little crumbly pre-cooking.

I seem to be missing a photo or two of the cooked pie so this is all I'm able to post right now but I'm pleased with how my first pie went and look forward to more pie-making soon :-)

Mother's Day Tea

Well what better way to start off my 'Tea' category than to blog about tea!  This year I thought for Mother's Day creating some handmade tea bags would be perfect.

My Mum used to only drink regular tea.  Just the normal.  But I then kept discovering some green tea at home when I visited and in general it seems that loose leaf tea is all the rage...so I put that together and created tea bags filled with our choices of loose leaf teas!  I ordered the tea bags from ebay which would seal with heat - an iron!  We filled them with the teaspoon or so recommended for a cup of tea, added string and a little label to distinguish each one and voila, handmade tea bags!

To match the gift, I made a tea themed card to go with these.  Some purple card, a white lacy doily and a cookie cutter created this card.  Loved using doilies to make cards, and could do any simple shape with them for a really cute feminine card or scrapbook piece.

Happy Mother's Day Mum! ♥

They're in the Freezer!

And it's true...they are in the freezer!  We are now the proud owners of freezer cookies to be shared at a moment's notice :-)  Come on over!  Lemon Icebox Cookies - kind of shortbready - so yummy!  Cherry cookies with pieces of glace cherries in and such a cool colour!  And finally some of the good old classic chocolate chip cookie dough - maybe we'll keep this one just as dough!!  

Unfortunately I don't have the links of the recipes we used, just the recipes saved as a document - let me know if you want to try them!  They are yummy.

In a freezer mood that day we also made some compound butters!  Using a combination of our stand mixer and food processor we managed to create my personal favourite - basil butter as well as roasted garlic butter, chive butter, roasted red pepper butter and one sweet one - maple butter perfect for waffles or pancakes.

Just a little chunk sliced off, placed on top of a freshly grilled steak and you're ready to go!

Valentine's Day meringues ♥

After making a deal with Jonathan to only do savoury treats for Valentine's Day I went ahead and broke this deal.  Oops!  But after seeing these meringues in Rachel Ray's Every Day magazine I knew these were for him!

Apart from changing the sour cherries to maraschinos I made these to the recipe all for Jonathan!  So, in the end, he got the sweet and I got some delicious cheese, yum.

A little flatter than I had hoped.  Perhaps not stiff enough meringue mixture... But the taste was the same!

♥ Happy Valentine's Day ♥

Game Night Birthday Cake

My first big baking project of 2012 was for Jonathan's birthday party!  Hosting our first birthday party in our home together we invited cousins and friends and knew that inevitably games would be played.  So I decided to make a game night cake including some of his favourite games!  I wanted to create a stacked board game effect which meant tiers.  Tiers were not something I had tried before so it was all a little risky but I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out!  ... Whatever will I do next year now?!

Bottom layer:  Cranium design for the red velvet cake with butter cream filliing.
Middle layer:  Apples to Apples design for the vanilla sponge with Oreo butter cream filling.
Top layer:  Word game fondant decorations; Boggle and Bananagrams!

Happy Birthday banner to go with the celebrations :-) 

Christmas Cakes

My first MAJOR project of the year began in November and I was super excited (and nervous) about it for lots of reasons.  We were lucky enough to get an amazing Kitchen Aid stand mixer as a wedding present for one and I decided that Christmas Cakes would be my first adventure with it! ... Two, we are well and truly settled in to our first home together - so my own kitchen, to make my own mess in and have all to myself!  And three, Mum has graced me with her Christmas Cake recipe to try out for myself this year.  Very excited to start!

So, with almost the whole day off work (just 2 piano lessons on a Monday evening in November) I got to work!

I don't start things simply.  That sometimes backfires on me - I get mad when it goes wrong but I also am determined to do the best I can with everything so... 4 cakes.  That was where I would start with my first experiment of Christmas Cakes.  (That would be a whole lot of wasted ingredients if I failed, eek!)

Here's some of that fun Monday in November baking baking baking day in photos:

Our kitchen (looking oddly tidy!) ready to go

Making a start using the fruit that
had been soaking for a few days.

Yey glass bowl!

Ingredients all out before I started.

First batch of mixture in! 1 large, 1 small. 

2 batches later 4 cakes were born!

For the weeks afterwards my cakes were stored in a combination of tins and cake boxes getting the occasional feeding of sherry!

Christmas was happening in Canada this year... for the first-time ever away from home for Christmas :'-( but it did mean I had lots of pre-Christmas time to get everything ready without worrying about packing to leave.

So December pre-Christmas was here and it was marzipan and icing time.

Then of course I needed some ideas for the decoration.  My favourite part!  The worst thing  is trying to think of them... I need to KNOW what I'll be doing but the more I force it the longer it takes to think.  So just taking a second to pause meant that the ideas flowed and I was ready to begin.  I had found COOL 3-D cookie cutters at St. Lawrence Market in downtown Toronto and thought they might be just the thing.  As well as some bonus fondant icing for some chubby little snowmen!

Snowmen and 3-D cookies decorated
with writing icing and silver balls!

I love snowmen!

Decorations ready so it was time to put it all together!

Christmas can begin!  Happy Christmas everyone!