Gracies Super Why Birthday Cake

I proud to announce that as of April 8th, 2010 i am a mother of a 4 year old!!! WOW i can't believe that my little Grace is already 4 years old. Time flies so quickly!!!

Anyway, enough reminiscing. This is not a sappy blog, this is a baking and cooking blog so stop already.

So my daughter decided this year that she wanted a SUPER WHY party.

I had no clue what to do since not much deco exists yet. So i started researching and letting my imagination go wild. I had to lean the character and figure out what kind of cake to make. Grace requested to make a WONDER RED cake and i was like "no way"  there was no way i was that advanced to do that. So i moved on to another option. I was gonna use the Book Club approach of SUPER WHY and create two books stacked on top of each other. 

Even though i could not give myself a 5 stars for it i think i was very pleased with my attempt and I was very happy with my daughters response. 

So here it is: 

The blue book was carrot cake filled with butter cream icing and covered in vanilla fondant from Satin ice. The Brown book was chocolate cake filled with fudge chocolate icing and covered with chocolate and vanilla fondant from Satin ice.

Here are some pictures of the actual party deco and of my lovely Grace dressed up as WONDE RED:

Love you my dear Grace!!! 

HAPPY 4th BIRTHDAY!!!

CROCK POT CREATION: pork and mushroom yumminess

So the other day i made this pork and mushroom yumminess and i need your advise.

I made it and thought it was oh so good, but my husband just thought it was  "OK". Us ladies in the house (which consists of a 25, almost 4 and 1 1/2 year old) thought it was a yummy dish that made our palettes melt. 

This is how i need your help: Cook the meal at home and tell me what you think. It's that easy and so is the recipe:
Prep time: 25 minutes, Cooking time: 8 hours on low or 4 hours on high, plus 15 minutes on high on the end. Makes 4 servings.


Ingredients: 
1 1/2 lb boneless pork shoulder, cut into 1 inch cubes
1 tablespoon cooking oil
8 oz fresh mushrooms, sliced
1 onion, chopped
1 (14oz) can chopped tomatoes
1 cup water
1 teaspoon dried marjoram 
1 teaspoon dried thyme
2 teaspoon  instant beef bouillon granulates
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/3 cup cold water
3 tablespoons flour
2 cups of hot rice or your choice pasta

1. In a large pan brown meat half at a time in hot oil. Drain off fat. 
2. In slow cooker place mushrooms, onion, and meet. 
3. In a bowl combine tomatoes, 1 cup water, marjoram, thyme, bouillon granulates, salt and pepper.
4. Pour into crock pot. 
5. Cover, cook on low heat setting for 8-10 hours or on high heat setting 4-5 hours. 
6. After cooking desired time: Mix 1/2 cup cold water and flour in glass and pour into crock pot. Stir together. 
8. Turn crock pot to high heat setting and cook another 15 minutes.
9. Serve over hot rice or pasta.

Let me know what you think :) be as brutally honest as possible.

long time no bake

Ok so i have not posted in a while.
Here is a little update of my life: As of October 29th i am a USA residence. Getting used to life here in the USA did not exactly provide me with lots of time to bake. One of the problems is that a lot of my baking tools and my baking pantry needs to be restocked. So when i get fully settled and make friends that trust me with my creations then i can start blogging about cakes again. Until then, I might just write a few entry's about cooking in America. That on its own has shown to be a challenge. All kinds of new ingredients and temperatures to cook with. So bare with me until i got my kitchen together.


If you would like to help me get my kitchen set up so that you can see more of my blogs click here. Thanks!!!

And thanks for your patients,


Charity

Little Miss Hello Kitty

The summer kept me busy. There were many birthdays and events so i got to learn and try a lot of new techniques. So ended up worth showing and others i am afraid the "CAKE WRECK" lady might write about me. So i decided to only post the good ones.
Little Miss Sophie, also known as my niece, turned 4 the end of August and so i had the privilege to make her birthday cake. Totally obsessed with anything that has Hello Kitty on it, there was no other option than to make her birthday a Hello Kitty theme.
using my daughter to pick the design i showed her 5 cakes i had chosen and she picked the winner.

Never having done this kind of icing technique, i was nervous and excited at the same time. On the end i was excited the my sis-in-law was able to find the exact figures to place on top.
This time, to save time, i cheated and used funfetti cake mix. For the icing i used partly store bought icing and partly home made Decorators butter cream icing.
I have to say, that using a professional pipping bag really made a huge difference. it helped me have a lot more control as well as cut the time it took to decorate in half.


I was so happy about the result. Here it is :

Dad at the beach

So my parents went away on vacation to Croatia leaving the church a great opportunity to plan for my dad's (pastor of our church) birthday surprise.

my dad absolutely loves popcorn and so for my dads 53rd birthday the church got money together and bought him 53 kg of popcorn seed. hahahahaha!!!!!!!!! It was awesome seeing his face expression when we totally interrupted him while starting the service to present him the incredibly huge present :)

So since he was totally brown from his vacation in Croatia and since he loves the beach i created this cake for the church to share after the service.

have a good laugh. it is meant to be a funny cake :)

black and white cake

So i saw this picture about 9 months ago and decided that i wanted to give it a try.I thought long and hard to when i would want to until finally i decided to use either my dad our my husband as a guinea pig.

Being that my dad and husband have their birthdays back to back i thought it best to have them celebrate together. And so they did :)
As the date got close i started to become sad because i realized that most of the family would be out of town. How could i make such a huge cake and risk over half of it getting spoiled? So i opted for a smaller creation of the cake.

And here is my creation: White/dark chocolate Supreme

The top layer was a milk chocolate cake filled with milk chocolate frosting and the second layer was darker than dark chocolate sponge with dark chocolate fudge frosting.

The tricky part was the chocolate decoration. living in Europe has proven to be a challenge when it comes to creating any kind of chocolate statues, candies or in this case chocolate sheets with swivels all over. The chocolate is just not right for it. The chocolate tastes better in Europe however the consistency is just not right. it melts too fast. So in between each sheet i created i had to refrigerate them before making more or adding the swivels. It took me a whole day just to get the chocolate sheets prepared. The rest was easy. Once i had the sheets the baking layering and icing the cake was done in no time. once the cake is iced you simply stick on the chocolate sheets. It was a great cake to create!!! A real man-ly cake and it was very much enjoyed by my family and friends.

cakes soon to expect

Here is just what to look forward to:

> a black and white cake

> a cake of my dad laying on a beach

>My nieces birthday cake

> and of course other cakes and cupcake from before i started my blog

So stay posted and add yourself as a follower of my blog :)

Charity