Our baby’s not a baby anymore. WAAAAH! If I were younger and much, much less lazy, I’d totally have baby fever right now. Alas, I am old and very lazy, so I’ll just have to befriend some pregnant ladies.
Back to the subject at hand. Kellan celebrated his second birthday in style. Grandma and Grandpa came to brunch with delicious coconut cupcakes.
vees are reary yummy
And after naps the neighbors joined us for some cake (and adult beverages). It was a super fun day.
happy birthday, kellan video
So, now we have two big boys and no babies. Guess it’ll have to do.
buzzy and batman
The cake was inspired by a post on somewhere in the middle. I used Pilsbury’s box mix with an extra box of pudding and an extra egg, spread pudding between the cake layers and used a Betty Crocker tub of frosting. I figured the whole thing is going to be dripping in M&Ms and Kit-Kat bars, who’s going to notice the cake?
cake and candy!?! oh yeah!
Words of warning: the M&Ms got cloudy after spending a little time under the cake dome. The cake was totally cool and it wasn’t terribly hot in the house. Perhaps refrigerating the whole thing may have helped? Anyway if you make one of these either add the M&Ms right before bringing the cake out or leave it uncovered.
It’s a rather minimalist Christmas this year, but we did manage a few decorations…
pleased with what $15 in walmart ornaments can do
and some yummy treats…
mmmm...gingerbread
We made mini cupcakes using the Cook’s Country gingerbread recipe – only baked them for 10 minutes or so and frosted them with a powdered sugar and milk glaze and crushed candy canes. Next time we’ll up the ginger and cinnamon.
and little giftees for Liam’s teachers.
dish towels - my favorite way to wrap
Eight dozen cookies for the 10 teachers at Liam’s school. He spends time with most of them at one point or another during his day, so we made a little treat for everyone. Again, the recipes were from Cook’s Country. Everybody got 2 chocolate chip/coconut and 2 Heath Bar chip cookies (too big! Next time we’ll adjust the baking time and make more reasonably sized cookies) and 4 molasses spice cookies (like the gingerbread, needs more spice). I really love using dish towels to wrap gifts. Who doesn’t need more dish towels? A little sprig of pine from the trimmed boughs of the tree tied on with kitchen twine was an easy and cute way to close each parcel.
That’s about it this year. A far cry from Christmases B.C. (before children)
So, I made Liam a crown for his big day. Finished it about 15 minutes before the party was supposed to start. It looks cute in the photos and he wore it for a little while, so overall I was pleased. Basically, it’s a simple pieced front and solid back with low loft cotton batting between and a 1″ bit of elastic in the back encased in the lower binding. The fabric is 100% cotton fat quarters from WalMart, $1 each and just too cute. I may need to make a quilt or something with the leftovers.
Anyway, back to the crown. First, I pieced the front by sewing the pieces together through the batting like this. Next I attached the “1”, sewing a narrow zig-zag with a short stitch length through the fabric and batting, then attached the backing fabric, leaving the bottom open. I trimmed the seam allowance very close and turned the crown right side out, then quilted around each section of the front of the crown. I totally screwed up the elastic casing. Not really sure what I was thinking, but I first attached the elastic to the crown, then sewed the binding to the back of the crown, folded it to front and zig-zagged it with the same narrow zig-zag and a longer stitch length, and finally tried (failed, but tried) to seam the binding around the elastic. Ugly, but it stayed together for the party.
You can only imagine how long and hard I thought about my baby’s first birthday cake. I lamented having already done the very hungry caterpillar, considered something Sesame Street (in honor of their 40th birthday), and finally settled on a rainbow. It was months of agonizing and eye twitching – Seriously, I have a recurring eye twitch now. That’s hot! – mental gymnastics. Here’s the result.
crappy photo, but we were in the moment
The six layer cake is made with a double recipe of Cook’s Illustrated’s Basic White Cake. The batter was very, very scarily thin, but the cakes turned out pretty good. I used the same old baking powder that I thought was crappy last May. So, surprise! The cake seemed dense to me. The frosting is a basic buttercream, and lots of it. Like 10 lbs of powdered sugar’s worth.
Back to the method, each batch of batter was divided into thirds and dyed a different color with gel food coloring. A bit was poured into a cupcake pan and the rest was then baked in a disposable 8″ diameter pan. So, there were six individually colored cupcakes and cake layers. The cupcakes were trimmed flat and cut in half to make smash cakes for Liam and Grandpa, who turned 70 in November.
You can see some of the smash cake layers in the photos below. And, yes, Liam did wind up with both cakes. And Grandpa’s slice of cake too, if you’re keeping track.
And finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. The jello rainbow.
and it only took 8 hours to make!
In the bowl, it wasn’t bad, but turned out, this nasty thing looked like a flaccid, multicolored breast implant. I’ll spare you the gory details and leave you with this tip. Do it this way or this way.
This is a seriously good recipe. Far and away the best I’ve made. Thank you once again, Cook’s Illustrated. We gobbled up this yummy bread along with some incredibly sweet and salty Irish Butter, a delicious aged Irish Cheddar, and an Irish Stout cheese. Oh, and some Beamish. A lovely St. Patrick’s day all around.
Irish Soda Bread
3 c – all purpose flour
1 c – cake flour
1-1/2 tsp – baking soda
1-1/2 tsp – salt
1-1/2 tsp – cream of tartar
2 TBSP – sugar
2 TBSP+ – butter (softened)
1-1/2 c – buttermilk
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
Mix a.p. flour, cake flour, baking soda, salt, cream of tartar, and sugar in a bowl. Work butter into the dry ingredients until you have coarse crumbs. Stir in buttermilk. When the dough just begins to come together turn it out onto a floured surface and knead briefly – just until its is cohesive and bumpy.
(Resist the temptation to overwork the dough, as it will cause the bread to come out tough and chewy)
Form the dough into a 6-inch disk and cut a cross in the top using a serrated (bread) knife. Place it on a parchment lined baking sheet and bake for 35-45 minutes, until the internal temperature reaches 180 degrees (the recipe says 35-45 minutes, but it’s more like 30 in my oven).
When done, transfer the loaf to a cooling rack and brush liberally with 1-2 TBSP melted butter and let it cool. You really should let it cool so the fluffy little air bubbles can form. Hard to resist digging in immediately, as it smells soooo good…
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