Giada's Strawberry Meringue Clouds

My mom was watching the food network and saw an episode of Giada De Laurentiis where she made strawberry meringue clouds. What caught my mom's attention was that she put freeze-dried strawberries into the meringue. You normally can't add anything wet like fresh fruit to a meringue, because they have to be bone dry for them to set correctly. My mom printed off the recipe and told me to give them a try and I did. The recipe can be found here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/strawberry-meringue-clouds-recipe.html

The strawberries had to be cut up into smaller pieces.

You just make a basic meringue and get it to the shiny stiff peak stage.

Then I added the strawberries,

a bit of lemon zest, and then folded those into the meringue.

They have to bake forever, so keep that in mind before you start.

Here's how they came out.

The strawberries gave it a unique flavor and twist to a traditional meringue. I'd like to try these again, but mix it up with different dried fruits now that I know that it can be done.

Duncan Hines Decadent Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcakes

While I was in the grocery store, I ran across Duncan Hines Decadent cupcake mixes and decided to try one out. I went with the strawberry cheesecake flavor:

Inside the box is a cake mix, a frosting mix, and a piping bag.

It only makes twelve cupcakes, so it's easy to divide the batter and make each one even. Also, when you mix up the cake mix, you can see tiny bits of dehydrated strawberries, which I thought was an unique touch.

Look at how evenly those baked. I usually have tiny ones and monster ones, but they are all mostly the same size.

I didn't realize how blurry this next one was, but the frosting is easy to make up and has a cream cheese flavor. The plastic is strong enough to insert frosting into the cupcakes like it says to do in the instructions.

Then, once you have put frosting inside the cupcakes, you can make a fancy design on top if you want. I went with the classic swirl look.

Here's what it looks like when you take a bite. The frosting inside the cupcake keeps it moister than Ducan Hines already moist cake. You can't taste strawberry chunks from the dehydrated strawberry pieces since they are rehydrated and so small that they don't add texture, just flavor. 

I didn't get a cheesecake vibe from it, more of a strawberry cupcake with cream cheese frosting taste. I think this would be an great and easy idea for a jazzed up dessert for a small get together. Or, you can do what I did and eat all of them by yourself over the course of two days. Those were a good two days.

Christmas Tree Ornament Cupcakes

My mom told me that there was going to be a bake sale at the hospital that she volunteers at, so I took it as an opportunity to try out a holiday themed cupcake design. I went to my go to cupcake decorating design "Hello Cupcake" and went to the holiday section. They had a design for Christmas tree ornaments that are easy to make a large quantity of unique cupcakes. I ended up making four dozen cupcakes.

The cupcakes, although made the same, came out differently because I have problems keeping my oven at a constant temperature.

I made one dozen all red to look like the top of an ornament.

For one dozen I made a red stripe. I piped frosting on just where I wanted the red to go and dipped them in sprinkles.

Then I pipped on icing onto the rest of the cupcake and dipped it in the green sprinkles.

This gave a nice side view to the ornament.

Next I made the top of the ornament that is used to hang it onto the tree. I started by putting a spice drop onto a pretzel stick. This requires patience, practice, and the ability to cope with sticky fingers.

A Twizzler was added to the top to complete the hanger.

In addition to the green with red stripe, I made red with green strip cupcakes.

To jazz them up a bit more, I added cinnamon candies.

I loaded them up into trays to give a mixture of top views, side views, red, and green.

Then they headed off to the bake sale where I hope they added some holiday joy.

Nestle Mint Chocolate Delights

I was at the store with my Mom and we ran across the limited edition Dark Chocolate and Mint Morsels by Nestle Toll House. It was just a matter of saying "Hey Mom, check these out" and getting a response of "Put them in the cart." I decided to make the Mint Chocolate Delight recipe on the back of the package. It's like their normal chocolate chip recipe, except there is cocoa powder in the batter and the chocolate chips are a combination of dark chocolate chips and mint flavored chips.

I started baking them off and remembered why I have a love/hate relationship with chocolate cookies. The love part is simply that I love chocolate cookies. The hate part is that they are more difficult to tell when they are done cooking since you can't look for the golden brown color that you get with normal chocolate chip cookies. This is compounded for me by the fact that my oven is very temperamental and does not always have the correct temperature, so cooking time is always a game of guess and check for me.

With all of that being said, the only problem I had was with the smaller bite sized cookies. The package indicated that bite sized cookies could be made and I gave them a shot. However, they came out a little bit burnt on the bottom, because my oven doesn't like me. The normal sized ones, on the other hand, came out perfectly and taste like a thin mint cookie disguised as a chocolate chip cookie. I will definitely be looking for these chips again.

Pillsbury Funfetti Cake Pop Kit

My mom got me another Pillsbury Pop Kit, but this time it was cake.  It is similar to make as the brownie one that I did before.

So it starts off like you're making any other cake. 

And then things get fun. You have to tear apart this cake until it is just a bunch of crumbs. It's hard to put into words how satisfying it is to destroy a cake into tiny pieces, but it is AMAZING!

Here it is crumbled into submission.

Then you add some frosting to act as glue to hold this all together.

Then you make twelve equal balls of cake.  I always have trouble making them equal sized, but it really doesn't matter. All they really need is to stick together well, so press those puppies together well. This is also the part where you want to make sure your hands are all clean before starting so you can use the phrase that my family enjoys using in these situations: "Untouched by human hands"

This is the same as the brownie mix I made. You add chocolate to the sticks and put them in the fridge to cool down which helps them stay together when you add the melted chocolate on top.

I'm not sure why, but I had more problems with the white chocolate being sticky and clumping instead of being smooth.  I worked though it and got them covered and sprinkled.  As you can see, I did have one fall apart on me when I was putting chocolate on it, but it easily became the first taste test.

Here's how mine came out.  Compared to the brownie pop kit, I thought these weren't quite as good.  Part of this is that the cake is harder to hold together than the brownies were. The other reason is that if you give me an option of chocolate vs any other flavor of cake, I always choose chocolate.  That being said, I would be interested in trying a cake kit in chocolate cake.

Jam pocket cookies

I saw these cookies online and thought they looked delicious.  The original is made to be in a Halloween style like a vampire bite which is a really neat idea.  For full instructions, I recommend looking at the original here:

http://bakingbites.com/2008/10/vampire-cookies/

Here's how mine came out:

 Adding the jam

 Putting on the top

 Fresh out of the oven

Yum! They taste like a pie in the form of a cookie.  Does that even make sense?  You'll like these if you're into jam thumbprint cookies or jammie dodgers or that sort of thing.  You could even change the filling for something else like Nutella for a different flavor.

Twinings Chocolate Cake

Due to some buzz by a couple friends of mine, I decided to try out Twining's recipe for Assam Chocolate Cake which you can find the recipe for here:
http://twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/tea-recipes/make-a-delicious-assam-chocolate-cake

I was overzealous in getting started that I started before really preparing for making this recipe.  First off, the recipe is written using weight measurements and other methods that I'm sure are standard in the UK.  I had to spend a good deal of time converting the measurements into USA baking measure friendly ones.  I also failed to realize I was missing two ingredients.  One of which was probably the greatest over-site, because it is in the name of the cake.  I do not have any Assam tea.  I do, however, have English breakfast since that is my favorite flavor of tea, so I substituted that in.  Next I went to the fridge, pulled out my milk, and noticed that the pull date was past and well, it wasn't suitable to use.  Since it wasn't a whole lot of milk being used, I just replaced it with water and continued on.  The rest went rather smoothly until I came to my baking pan.  It says to use a springform pan, but the only one I had was too large.  In fact, the closest in size I could find was still too big, but I used it anyway.  I set the temperature and cooked it as long as it said.  I really should have cooked it a bit less since the pan was larger.  The cake puffed up while baking and settled once I took it out.

Here it is out of the oven settled down.

Here's a slice of the cake itself.  It tasted good, although, because of the larger pan, it did not come out as pictured.  I don't mind, because it hit the spot and made me consider other things that I could possibly put a tea flavor into.  Despite the over-sites, I would consider this cake to be a success.