CookieD-oh

Like totally. For real, man. My lame photography skills don't do these justice. In some circles, I am renowned for my cinnamon rolls. I keep telling people how easy they are and that they can make their own, but nobody believes me. You believe me, don't you? If not, I'll prove it to you. First things first, go to the Pioneer Woman's site and steal her sweet dough recipe. Go ahead. I'll wait. Got it?  Ok make some dough. I made some...it was one and a half batches. I'm really glad I didn't go crazy and double it. That's my biggest stock pot right there. So, once you've made the dough let it sit in the fridge overnight. If your biggest stock pot is alarmingly full, you may need to get up a time or two in the night and punch the dough down. Maybe. But here's where we leave the Pioneer Woman behind and strike out on our own. And since I was making cinnamon rolls I forgot to take pictures (you can thank me later) and you'll have to...

A friend of mine from work brought me a picture of a cake a while back and asked if I could make it for him. He got it off of Facebook, so if it's yours, let me know. He's a big fan of M&M's.  But then again, who isn't? So I finally got around to making it. (I kept telling him I hadn't forgotten!) This cake used lots and lots and lots of M&M's. And as I drove it to work the next morning, every bump I hit I heard M&M's hitting the cake board. I made repairs at work and no one was the wiser. Red and Yellow were a bit bumpy. They're giant cake pops and I used off-brand candy melts to coat them. I repented immediately. I will only use Wilton candy melts from now on. I piped the faces onto waxed paper using royal icing and candy melts and glued them onto the pops the next morning. I made lots of extras just in case. And lots of extra "M"s, thankfully. I had quite a few snap as I was glueing them on. Chocolate ca...

I made some cookies to take to work a couple weeks ago.  I wanted to try something different...but not too different.  So I found this recipe on Pinterest and decided to try it out. It's originally by the Picky Palate ...click on the link for the recipe. I stuck pretty close to the original recipe.  I think the biggest difference was that I baked mine for about twice as long as she did.  About 20 minutes.  They needed it. They were some big honkin' cookies. Basically, two chocolate chip cookies with an Oreo in the middle.  They were pretty good.  I think they would be better with Reese Cups. Or even fudge covered Oreos. I made a double batch and got about four dozen cookies.  Huge cookies. Anyhoo, that's all for now. Enjoy!

It seems like there were lots of birthdays this summer. And I made lots of cake.  But didn't take many pictures. For example: I worked really hard on my great-aunt's 80th Birthday cake, and only took two horrible pictures. Here's the better of the two: She's not a pastel buttercream rose kind of gal.  And here you also have a little insight into what my kitchen looks like after a cake. It ain't pretty. Then I took two more bad pictures at the party, so I'll share those, too: Aunt Iva is an Ohio State Buckeye fan, so I made a scarlet and gray cake for her. :-)  As an aside, I love my Agbay .  Best. Tool. Ever. The other two cakes were chocolate.  The one in the foreground had mint chocolate ganache filling.  The one in the back (that you can't see...the pink one) had vanilla buttercream filling. Very tasty all around, if I do say so myself. Anyhoo, that's all for now. Enjoy.

One of the ladies from church asked me to make a cake for her mother's 100th birthday celebration.  I was honored, to say the least.  All she wanted was pink and purple and NO FONDANT. The rest was up to me.  No pressure! Anyhoo, that's what I came up with. It was massive.  14" and very, very heavy.  I make weird roses. I have only made one other 14" cake, and I had forgotten how big that really is. It ended up being too tall for the box so I had to prop the lid open.  It never occurred to me that the cake box wouldn't be deep enough. I felt a little betrayed by the box. Plus 40 cupcakes for the nursing home staff. Because who doesn't like cupcakes? I thought it came out nice, and she loved the cake, so yay! That's all for now. Enjoy!

Happy Autumn! Apparently I decided to take the summer off from blogging. It happens, I guess.  Things get busy and before you know it, the summer's over and the leaves are turning.  Stupid leaves. One downside to having a baking blog is that sometimes you get so busy baking that you don't have time to blog. Happens to me a lot.  That and I don't take pictures because I'm a lousy photographer.  But if you've been around here before you already knew that. So I finally decided to stop messing around with the bottles of vanilla extract at the grocery store. Found this one on Amazon.  Now hopefully I won't run out every week or two. My beautiful assistant started the first grade this year.  How did that happen? To prove that I've been baking, despite the lack of blog posts,  I took a picture. From left to right-ish: Honey Wheat Bread , Granola , Chocolate Cake , Peach Cobbler . Click on the links for recipes.  The peach cobbler has...

So I made another black raspberry pie . Still not crazy about the seeds, but the young'uns love the pie. Thought I'd get fancy this time and try a lattice top.  I totally screwed it up, but you can't tell unless you look closely. This time I added a little cinnamon to the fruit mixture.  I also took my potato masher to it.  But just a little.  I left lots of whole berries in the mix. Aaand pie: Do you like the paper plate? I know we've had discussions in the past about how classy this blog is. I just like to reinforce the issue every now and then. Well, that's all for now. Enjoy!