lemon ginger ice box cake for alex’s lemonade stand & melissa’s produce challenge

lemon ginger ice box cake for alex’s lemonade stand & melissa’s produce challenge

This week I’m partnering with Melissa’s Produce and my awesome blogger friends to support this wonderful cause, Alex’s Lemonade Stand, a foundation for Childhood Cancer. I used some beautiful produce provided by Melissa’s Produce to create a simple, easy and delicious summertime dessert: Lemon Ginger Ice Box Cake! This requires no ovens so your house gets to stay cool while you prep! Continue reading lemon ginger ice box cake for alex’s lemonade stand & melissa’s produce challenge

stabby broken glass cupcakes for halloween

For Halloween this year, my work held a baking contest! I can’t tell you how excited I was about this. I started browsing around on Pinterest for ideas the day I found out the contest was happening to help me find a decorating idea. I stumbled upon some images of broken glass cupcakes… and I knew I wanted to do something similar to that.

I’d seen Dexter themed cupcakes with the glass slides and a dot of red in the middle, but I wanted to do something slightly easier than trying to make perfect sugar rectangles. The broken glass sounded challenging but without the requirement of symmetrical lines. Broken glass easily became the winner.

First I made red velvet cupcakes using Brown Eyed Baker’s recipe (but doubled).

Don’t you just love the color of red velvet cupcake batter? It’s so bright! And perfect for bloody, stabby cupcakes.

Once the cupcakes were done and cooling, it was time to start making the “glass”.

You basically just need to dump sugar, corn syrup, water and cream of tartar into a pan and mix it until it’s incorporated. It’ll look like a big, weird mess and you’ll start to think to yourself, “I have no idea how this is going to become candy.” Put your disbelief aside and crank that sucker until you get a hot, boiling mess.

Having a thermometer is pretty important when you’re making candy. I didn’t have a candy thermometer, so I had to steal the one out of our BBQ grill outside. Improvising: it works.

Make sure you’ve got a baking sheet ready (I put a silpat on the bottom of my baking sheet for extra protection) during the last stages of your candy making process. You want to start watching it like a hawk when it starts getting closer. Let your bubbling, hot, sugary mess get up to 300 degrees and then pull it off the stove.

Quickly pour the mass of sugar onto your prepared baking sheet.

Get every drop out!

And let your hot, sugary candy sit until it cools down. You’ll be able to feel it when it’s ready for the next step – it’ll be a little sticky but hard to the touch. I think I waited 15-20 minutes for it to cool down before moving onto the next step.

I first used a mini mallet (like the ones you use to crack crab legs) on the candy, but that made it far too splintered.

A butter knife ended up being my stabbing implement of choice – it created much better cracks and was easier to control as I broke up the glass. I tried to create a variety of sizes and pieces, often rebreaking larger pieces to create smaller glass-like pieces.

I stuck various sized pieces and shapes into the cupcakes creating shards.

Then I created an “edible blood” made with corn syrup, corn starch, water and food coloring to create a bloodied effect on top of my pristine, white cream cheese frosting.

The effect turned out quite well, making the cupcakes look like they were bleeding out from the stabby shards of broken glass.

My co-workers seemed to enjoy the cupcakes enough to award me first place that day – woohoo!

This is my first place prize – a mixer with a $50 gift card to Vons inside!

Want to make your own candy glass? Instructions below! Continue reading “stabby broken glass cupcakes for halloween”

repost: zombie graveyard cake for halloween

Halloween is right around the corner! And if you need a rockin’ cool cake to make for your Halloween party (or any other zombie related event), you should try your hand at making a zombie graveyard cake. It’s not too bad to make this sucker and the best part is that is doesn’t have to look neat – zombies like gorging on flesh, they’re not exactly concerned with how they look, you know.

This is a repost from my old craft blog that I decided to port over here for the holiday. Enjoy!

[zombie graveyard – view one]

The cake is a yellow cake with vanilla pastry cream (dyed red) and fresh strawberries in the middle with chocolate frosting.

[zombies coming up out of the dirt]

Continue reading “repost: zombie graveyard cake for halloween”