Quick Fix Monogram Cupcakes

So I normally don't post a recipe or method of decorating baked goods until I am one hundred percent happy with it. Then I thought that maybe you could learn from some of my mistakes...

It was my student teacher's birthday so I thought that I would quickly whip up some cupcakes for the class. I was totally swamped with work though so I decided to whip up something quick. 

I baked some chocolate cupcakes and debated about my frosting choice. I broke down and bought butter cream and decided to use some candy melts for the base. I chose candy melts because I knew it would be too complicated and messy to try and transport mountain high iced cupcakes to school.

Ingredients:

Butter cream
Candy Melts (or you could probably use another type of chocolate or icing glaze)
Cupcakes of your choice

Method:

Make sure that all of your cupcakes are completely cooled before icing.

Heat up some of the candy melts in 30 second intervals. Don't microwave for too long as the chocolate can seize up. Spoon the candy melts onto the top of the cupcakes. Use the back of your spoon to even out the topping. Do this quickly or else you will end up with lumps and bumps like I did! If you can't spoon the candy melts on fast enough, don't worry because you can reheat the candy melts (that's the upside of using these special melts; regular chocolate can be a little bit more difficult to work with). 

The candy melts dry fairly quickly so you can add the butter cream pretty soon after you apply the candy melts to the cupcakes. 

You know what I notice about buying butter cream from the store? It's always way too floppy and doesn't ever produce the nice thickness that a homemade butter cream produces. Here's a small and easy tip: add icing sugar. Make sure to actually test the thickness though before you start piping, because mine was still too floppy which is why you can see little peaks and flops everywhere on the finished product. 

*Tip: do not use anything else except for a piping bag or parchment triangle to ice cupcakes or cookies because plastic baggies will explode on you

Use a small tip to pipe the butter cream. Make sure to use a good amount of pressure and stop squeezing the piping bag when you would like to end a line. Single lined letters are nice, but I decided to op for the double line as it looks a little bit more stylized and fancy. Don't worry if you mess up, because the candy melts provide a hard and shiny texture, you can easily wipe away butter cream mistakes. 

My students loved presenting these cupcakes and singing Happy Birthday at the top of their lungs. They also requested that I "make them special cupcakes everyday". Oh how I wish I could!

Beautiful Baking Sweeties

Peppermint Mocha Macarons

Hello fellow bakers,

Last night I had the most stress-free macaron making day ever! Crazy how when you're not under a time crunch, baking seems so much more relaxing.

For these macarons, I used a basic macaron recipe. This easy macaron recipe is similar to the one that I use except my macaron recipe makes about 160 shells which makes 80 completed macarons. As mentioned in previous posts, I cannot give out the recipe I have as it is not mine to distribute. However, I can share with you the little tips and tricks that I use to make sure I get the perfect little 'feet' and smooth shell every time.

You may use any macaron recipe you like, but make sure that your recipe contains the following:

For the mint chocolate ganache filling (note: I did not use mint chocolate because I thought the mint would come out more in the shells. If I were to do them again, I would make sure to use mint chocolate if you really want that minty flavour. Make sure to use dark as well as it will help cut through the sweetness of the shell):

Approximately two bars or equivalent of dark mint chocolate (I find that Lindt is the best quality you can find at your average super market and it isn't overly expensive. Making macarons is a tough and laborious task though so I would say if you are only going to make these once a year, be sure to use the best quality chocolate you can find!)

Softened room temperature butter

Whipping cream 

For the shells:

Ingredients:

Almond flour (which is simply just ground almonds; you can make this yourself, but it's very time consuming and it can alter the way your macarons will turn out)

Icing sugar

Granulated sugar

Water

Aged egg whites (you should age them for seven days, but if you can't, it's not a big deal; I have found that if you age them for only three or four days, they turn out just fine, but if you don't have a good stand mixer, then your egg whites won't whip up nicely)

Instant coffee (I used instant Starbucks Peppermint Mocha)

Optional gel food colouring

These are only some of the ingredients and tools; I took the picture before I was actually done laying things out---silly me!

Tools: 

For the filling:

Digital scale (do not try to convert the recipe into cups; this will alter the recipe completely although the measurements are close, they need to be EXACT)

Heat proof bowl

Sauce pan

Whisk

Glass pan

Saran wrap

For the shells:

Digital scale

Large bowl

Food processor 

Large baking sieve

Kitchen Aid Mixer (or any other stand mixer)

Spatula

Small bowl(s)

Large whisk

Heavy duty baking pans (not the ones that you use to make cookies on; these ones are literally heavy)

Oven

Stove

Digital candy thermometer 

I would re-write the method, but the method previously mentioned recipe and method would work well with a few little tweaks here and there. Here are some tips:

For the ganache:

With any ganache recipe, make sure to melt the chocolate in a heat proof bowl over a simmering pot of water. While the chocolate is melting, heat the whipping cream in a pot on medium heat until it boils. As soon as soon as you see large boiling bubbles, take the pot off the heat and stir it in three parts into the melted chocolate. Once the chocolate and whipping cream are fully incorporated, take the chopped up pieces of room temperature butter and whisk them in. At this point you want to whip super vigorously. Keep whipping until the butter is fully incorporated and the ganache feels slightly thickened. Pour the ganache into a shallow glass pan and place saran wrap directly onto the ganache to ensure that a skin does not form on the ganache. 

For the shells:

Before placing the icing sugar and almond flour through the sieve, make sure to process the almonds in a food processor. Shake the food processor every now and then and scrape the sides of the processor with a spatula. Pulse and shake the food processor so that the almonds are fully ground and appear almost powdery. Although the almond flour appears to be fairly ground up when you first buy it in the bag, you want to make sure that all of the little chunks are gone. If you ever see a macaron shell with bumps and lumps, it is because this step has been skipped. It makes for an unpleasant and improper macaron shell texture. 

After grounding up the almonds once more, incorporate the icing sugar and the instant coffee powder. Shake this up once more in the food processor. Your arms may hurt after picking up your food processor, but most food processors can't process everything evenly all the time (consider this your work out before you eat the macarons). 

After processing all of the dry ingredients, then put it through a sieve. 

In the previously mentioned method, they use the French meringue method which means there is no boiling of water and sugar. Although I do use this method for making meringues, I generally use the method of boiling sugar and water together first when making macarons because this is much more reliable than the French method. 

Boil the sugar and water on the stove. While the sugar and water is boiling, make sure to place half of the egg whites into your stand mixer. When the boiling water and sugar gets to 239 degrees F (use a digital candy thermometer; don't try to fiddle around with an analog one), turn on the stand mixer to a medium high speed. Once the boiling water and sugar gets to 244 degrees F, take it off the stove, turn up the mixer on high and slowly pour the sugar water into the egg whites. A small and constant stream should be coming from the pot. Once everything is incorporated, make sure to whip the egg whites for one minute on high and another minute on medium. 

Incorporating the dry ingredients into the egg whites is the most difficult part. Over whipping, under whipping, it's all a nightmare! If you under mix at first, it is probably better than over mixing as you can't undo that. I still mess up the texture every now and then, especially when I am out of practice, but I always make sure to under mix a little bit. During the first incorporation of ingredients, it is okay if the mixture is still a bit thick. Let the mixture rest for thirty minutes loosely covered in plastic wrap. Mix it one more time. The batter should fall off the whisk slightly and mound up on the batter as it falls. After about thirty seconds, it should be incorporated back into the batter after falling. I test out the batter by piping out one or two onto the parchment. After a few minutes, if the batter still has a little bit of a peak, then the batter is too thick. If it is so soupy that it spreads out instantly, then it is too soupy and your macarons won't work out. 

After piping out all of the batter, you may choose to sprinkle on some decorations or cocoa powder. Make sure you do this step before the skin has formed over your macarons as shown below:

Here are the macaron shells that have formed a skin after forty-five minutes. They have a matte finish as oppose to the shiny finish the above macarons had:

Place them in the oven at 350 degrees F for five minutes, turn the pan and bake them again at 330 degrees F for another five minutes. I guarantee if you do this right, you will get feet!

Fill up your completely cooled macaron shells with the mint chocolate gancache. The macarons cannot be eaten right away. You need to freeze them for two days, take the amount that you would like out of the freezer, let them thaw for forty-five minutes and enjoy!

These were a little bit more red in person, but for some reason they look very pink! Oh well, I am sure people won't mind eating pink-ish Christmas macarons.

Beautiful baking sweeties!

Organizing Baking Supplies

Hello fellow bakers!

I am back for some baking blogging. It feels so nice to actually be able to sit down, relax, blog and bake for once. I no longer sell sweet treats to the public as I am far too busy being a grade one and piano teacher, but I still do enjoy baking from time to time. I am sure there are plenty of busy people out there as well that find they never have the time to do much baking so I am sure you can relate to my baking woes! I missed out on Halloween cookies this year so I vowed to myself that I would most definitely not miss out on Christmas baking. I am going to kick off my holiday baking early today by whipping up some peppermint mocha macarons (yes, I am extremely excited to make these and yes, a blog post will soon follow!). 

Before I was even ready to think about making macarons I needed to make sure that I cleaned out all of my baking supplies. It was the last few hot summer days when I stopped baking for business and I discovered something horrible. Some of my baking supplies were infested with ants! I could not believe it as some of the wonderful sugar flowers I had spent eight hours working on for a personal cake were being eaten alive (alright I understand that my sugar flowers weren't actually alive, but when you spend that many hours working on something they're like your babies). There were hundreds and hundreds of ants swarming some baking tools as well (which made no sense to me because they were all cleaned and didn't have any ounce of sugar on them). Needless to say, my fiance sanitized all of my baking tools that were attacked, threw away my sugar flowers and got rid of the ants over the next few weeks as I cried on the couch. I am such a baby when it comes to my baking. Surprisingly, none of the ants got into my ingredients, but I was still too worried to use them. I had one last sugar cookie order that a friend had asked me to fill months ago, but I refused to use any of my tools and any of the ingredients that I had. Although the ingredients and tools cost me far more than what the cookies were going to cost, I sucked it up and bought all new ingredient and tools. Needless to say it took me about two months until I was ready to tackle my ant phobias. I had peeked into the ingredients box every now and then to make sure that there were no ants, but I screamed when I opened it. No, there weren't any ants, but the ingredients box was a total mess! So were my cookie cutters, edible dyes and pretty much anything else I used to bake beautiful creations.

I decided that if I was ever going to bake again, I needed to re-organize all of my things. I decided to tackle my ingredients box first. I took a look into my ingredients and realized that although things were messy, I had sealed off all of my ingredients properly. After taking out all of the ingredients and laying them on my kitchen counter, I cleaned out the giant tub that holds my ingredients. I took it outside, hosed it down, sanitized and dried it. I carefully sifted through all of the ingredients to ensure that no damage had been done and placed them into containers. I usually left flours and sugars in the bags that I bought them in because the containers I had bought before were too narrow to even fit a half measuring cup into, but I found this method was too messy. I picked up a tip from a friend to place sugars and flours into large Tupperware containers. So much easier to dig in and reduces the mess almost completely. I continued to label all the rest of the containers I had and I felt so good as I looked into my organized ingredients box.

After the ingredients, I knew I needed to clean out my cookie and cake decoration box. I carefully cleaned off all of the edible dyes and once again sanitized my baking tools. To save room, I also took out all of my decorative sugars out of their half empty containers and put them into plastic Ziploc bags. I also got a cute mini scoop to scoop the sugars out of the bags. Don't worry about not having the little shakers that usually come with the sanding sugars and crystal sprinkles. I find that with sugar cookies, its best to scoop out the sanding sugars rather than trying to sprinkle it on. For cupcakes, it also creates a much nicer effect if you use pinched fingers to distribute the sugars rather than the shaker. My tips also kept shifting every time I opened the drawer and it would make it near impossible to find which tip I was looking for so I put the tips pointing upwards in a measuring cup. I then added some labels to each drawer to make sure that I never have to utter the words "where is that ______?" again. Nothing is more frustrating than not being able to find something when you need it or worse, finding it dirty!

After that, it was time to tackle the cookie cutters. My cookie cutters are probably what frustrated me the most when I was in a hurry. I used to place my cookie cutters into categorized Ziploc bags, but I could never find any of the ones I needed when I needed them. I lost my figure skate cookie cutter for months and it resurfaced when I was re-organizing them again. Turns out that I had categorized the figure skate as a Christmas cookie cutter which does make sense, but I assumed it would be under the 'miscellaneous' category. To avoid this again, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a whole bunch of containers. I carefully re-categorized all of my cookie cutters and placed them into labeled drawers. It took a little bit of time to write down every single cookie cutter that I had, but I am glad I did. Total cookie cutter count: 129. Here is the list:

Characters:

Full Body Hello Kitty
Hello Kitty Head
Large Hello Kitty Head
Mickey Mouse Head
Mickey Mouse Profile

Clothing:

Bikini (2 Pieces)
Chef Hat
Cowboy Hat
Cowboy Boot
Dress
Flip-flop
High Heel Shoe
Jersey

Halloween:

Bat
Cat
Large Pumpkin
Orange Pumpkin
Spider
Witch Hat

Beach:

Seashell
Starfish
Sun
Umbrella

Birthday:

Cake with Candle
Cupcake with Candle

Food:

Apple
Carrot
Cotton Candy/Ice Cream
Strawberry
Martini

Transportation:

Airplane
Car
Motorcycle

Music:

Black Eighth Note
Eighth Note
Guitar

Miscellaneous:

Fairy
Golf Bag
Graduation Hat
Mini Tiara
Teapot

Animals:

Butterfly
Butterfly and Flower Mini Cutter Set (11 Pieces)
Chick
Dog Bone
Fish
Rabbit
Yellow Chick
Unicorn

Flowers and Foliage:

Flower Fondant Cutters (6 Pieces)
Maple Leaf
Sunflower
Tulip

Numbers:

0
1
2
3
4
5
6 and 9
7
8

Shapes:

Circle Set (9 Pieces)
Clover
Egg
Oval
Rectangle
Star (2)

Christmas:

Bell
Blue Snowflake
Candy Cane
Christmas Tree (3)
Gingerbread Man (2)
Gingerbread Woman
Holly Leaf
Large Figure Skate
Mini Figure Skate
Mitten
Ornament
Polar Bear
Snowflake (2)
Snowman (3)
Stocking

Baby Shower:

Baby Bottle
Bear
Bib
Carriage
Fancy Carriage
Foot
Onesie

Wedding/Valentine’s Day:

Dove
Hand
Heart
Joined Hearts
Large Pink Heart
Lips
Mustache
Scalloped Edge Heart
Wedding Cake

I finished off my day of organization by collecting up all of the pans and molds I had and placing them into a large tub. I discovered that I had a mini bunny cake pan and cookie press that I had forgotten about. Spritz cookies at Christmas? Yes please! It was a great day of organization and now I feel much better about starting a baking project. 

Beautiful baking sweeties!