Ian and Mommy made some cupcakes from Deceptively Delicious. We learned that there is still a shortage of canned pumpkin and also that chocolate chip cupcakes with sweet potato and squash inside are delicious. The sprinkles were Ian’s idea.
Green French Toast. Yes, that is what we had for breakfast on Ian’s birthday. Your color display is not off. Why you ask? Well, let me begin at the beginning.
First of all, it seems we have now entered an era where cake is no longer exciting in and of itself. Or so I came to understand on Tuesday, when Ian informed me that “Mommy, I want a train cake for my birthday.” And rue the day that I decided to do a Google Image Search for ideas with him in the room.
Now, if you’ve ever eaten cake around here, you’ll have noticed that although I strive for a taste aesthetic that is nothing short of (with apologies) orgasmic, the appearance of said cakes is distinctly… homey. I try to do a nice presentation. I apply whatever treatment I’ve come up with tidily and, I hope, competently. And there it stops. I don’t own a pastry bag. I never aspired to own one. Because while I admire a fancy looking confection, they usually bore me when it comes to the eating. And I’m all about the eating. So please understand how appalled I was when my son looked over my shoulder and shouted, “I WANT THAT TRAIN CAKE FOR MY BIRTHDAY! I WANT THAT THOMAS CAKE!” Because he was looking at this cake:
Which is not merely rife with piped buttercream frosting. It also uses a kit I didn’t have time to order for said birthday. And, the clincher, the instructions for assembly include AIRBRUSHING the grass onto this cake. Sorry kid. Mommy has never airbrushed in her life, and while she’s delighted you are turning three (and by delighted I mean devastated that my baby is gone but proud of my big boy) she is not going to celebrate it by cramming to learn how to airbrush cakes.
The next day dawned and he was still talking about this cake. Time to gird my metaphorical loins and figure out a way to pull this off without the kit, without an airbrush, and without making and piping not one but FIVE colors of icing. A little more googling came up with a Thomas Carnival scene that I felt comfortable laminating and using as a backdrop, and a rootle through the train box pulled up one of Ian’s Thomas engines to grace the top of the cake. Now all I needed to do was figure out how to do a respectable job of icing the cake, when my last and only experience with piping frosting was a cooking class I took during the summer of, I believe, my sixth grade year. I created a distinctly diseased looking rose for the top. And the cake fell. So pardon me for not feeling that I should depend on THAT background for my one and only child’s birthday cake.
Thank goodness for my friend Casey, who is my polar opposite when it comes to baking. Not only is she willing to decorate cakes, she revels in it. And she pointed out that the tracks are just chocolate frosting. Which led me to the nearest grocery store where I found out that you can buy chocolate icing in a pouch with a nozzle, all ready to pipe. You just need a tip. You can also get white icing IN A CAN with a selection of tips. Who knew? So now I just needed grass.
Now, back to my philosophy of baking. People fall into two camps when it comes to icing. You have your “I eat sugar straight from the bowl” types who can’t get enough, and you have your scrapers who ask for a middle piece and push all the icing off before they eat their cake. I’m in the latter camp. So I’m completely against the standard buttercream icing that is normally used to decorate cakes. It’s a waste of food for me, because I’m putting it all down the garbage disposal. So I went through my cookbooks for some other kind of frosting I could dye green and came up with Fluffy White Frosting, which is a confection made from beaten egg whites and surprisingly little sugar. I thought it sounded perfect.
Come the night before Ian’s birthday and, what with wrapping the presents and a few other things that took me a little farther into the evening than I had originally planned, it was midnight by the time the cake was cool and I was ready to try my hand at an egg white frosting. Nothing daunted, I pulled out my mixing bowl, my hand mixer, the green food coloring, and the vanilla. I started cracking the eggs and separating them exactly as I learned in Home Ec all those years ago. And promptly broke a yolk into the bowl. This is when it dawned on me that midnight might not be the time. So I put the eggs, green food coloring and all, into a tupperware container in the fridge, made green buttercream frosting and iced that cake within an inch of its life. Then I stuck it in the freezer and went directly to bed. In the morning, I added a little milk to the failed attempt at frosting and there you have Green French Toast. Ian loved it. Actually, Ian loved the syrup, and would have been perfectly happy with cardboard if he was allowed to use it to eat syrup.
As for his cake, it turned out like this:
The cake itself was chocolate chip and quite good. The icing was exactly as disappointing as I expected. Ian apparently saw no difference between what he requested and what I actually did. Hooray for childhood.
http://www.bigtent.com/group/forum/message/30549052?ff=1
Lots of work and lots of love go into everything that comes out of the Pint Size Panetteria. There’s the shopping, the chopping, the measuring, the mixing… and Chef Ian is on top of it all, from charming the cashiers to Kitchen Patrol.
So, Mr. McNamara, what’s next on your agenda?
Ian: “I’m going to make some for myself.”
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| Microsoft Word and some Scotch Tape made the perfect loaf band. |
Since we know that Daddy and Raba both love a good rye bread and that Raba loves pecans and Daddy loves raisins, a good Raisin-Rye Bread with pecans and a jar each of Peach Jam and Apple Cinnamon Cream Cheese were the order of the day.
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| A cloth napkin and a recycled newspaper bow dress up the basket. |
Ian was SO excited and proud to give Daddy and Raba gifts he’d made himself!
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| Happy Father’s Day |
I came up with this recipe after hours and hours of experimentation in the crummy little kitchen of my first apartment. I know, that sounds nuts, but this was “back in the day” before you could tap your ingredients into Google and have a recipe in seconds, and I wanted to make a carrot bread. I started with a zucchini bread and modified it heavily. I made at least three batches before I came up with something you’d really want to eat. It became a staple of my holiday baking for several years.
My past self could use a few notes from my present self about how to put a recipe together, however… I made a list of ingredients and noted the bake time and just assumed I’d remember the rest. After I had Ian I scaled back my holiday baking, so I made this for the first time in a long time today and apparently I figured it out. So, past self, take note: THIS is how you write out a recipe.
Yield: 1 loaf
3 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
2 1/4 cup shredded carrots (finer is better)
1 apple, peeled, cored, and minced
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon orange extract (optional)
3 cups flour (half whole wheat is okay)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 Tablespoon cinnamon
1/2 cup raisins
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 9″ loaf pan with non-stick spray.
Combine eggs, oil, and sugar in a small bowl. Mix well on low speed. Add vanilla, carrot, and apple, and orange extract if using, and combine.
In a medium bowl, combine the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and cinnamon. Stir well.
Add the first bowl to the second bowl and mix well on low speed, occasionally scraping the bottom of the bowl with a rubber spatula.
Fold in raisins. Pour into prepared pan and bake for 50 minutes or until a toothpick in the center comes out clean.
NOTE: You can also substitute grated zucchini for part of the carrots. Zucchini is a little wetter than carrot, so my instinct would be not to substitute more than 1/3 zucchini.
PS: Little Dude LOVED it.
Ian was tickled pink when I said I was going to make “honey bread.” This turned out not to be because he wanted to help me measure and mix the honey-whole wheat dough but because he wanted some honey on a spoon. Of course I said yes.
Ian spent this entire (apparently quite boring) phase of the baking in his sandbox.
Punching down the dough, Ian style.
Playing “peek-a-boo” with the resting loaves before they went into pans…
He covered these up all by himself. “These bread gonna make MORE teeny bubbles.”
Maybe not so pretty, but oh so good. These didn’t finally come out of the oven until Ian went to bed, so we’re going to have to resist the temptation to eat them all before he wakes up in the morning.