Tag Archives: baking

Canada Day Cupcakes

8 Jul

Ok folks, so I know it’s a week late, but I promise that doesn’t make these cupcakes any less yummy… or patriotic.

This year I decided to make some Canadian inspired cupcakes for Canada Day. I couldn’t decide on just one type though, so I decided to make both Red Velvet (red and white!) cupcakes and vanilla cupcakes with maple icing. Yum!!

I’ve decided that I can now only make cupcakes and cakes from scratch – anything from a mix just tastes wrong. To dress up these vanilla cupcakes I used maple icing (recipe can be found here). I put it in the fridge overnight (I’m a late night baker and ran out of time) and it got really grainy, I’m guessing because it was mostly sugar with little butter. I actually kind of liked the grainy texture, however if you’re after a smoother icing (as seen in bottom picture) I recommend making the icing right before you put it on the cupcakes.

I’ve never made Red Velvet cupcakes before, so naturally I went to the best. These cupcakes are from Martha Stewarts website (recipe can be found here) and were pretty tasty. Although I was disappointed with their lack of actual redness, I have been told that this is par for the course when it comes to red velvet cupcakes. After seeing the first batch I took out of the oven was lacking in the ‘red’ part of their namesake, I added more (and even a bit more) food colouring and it seemed to help. Regardless, Martha didn’t steer me wrong and they were delicious.

(the picture below is the result of adding pretty much a bottle of food colouring to the batter)

Oh! And thank you to Jen for helping me ice many of these cupcakes!

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Zucchini Bread

28 Jun

Well I have certainly been a bad blogger recently! It’s been almost a month since I last did a post… tsk tsk!! As I’m sure it is with most bloggers who accidentally find themselves blog post free in almost a month, it hasn’t been for lack of things to blog about, but rather a huge lack of time.

Anyways, here is a little bit more about the mini chocolate zucchini bread loaves I made for the picnic with the BFC girls last month…

This is a recipe that my family has been enjoying for many years. We normally make it in two standard loaf pans, but I thought it would be fun to try out the new ‘mini loaf’ pan I recently bought.

I wrapped the little loaves in wax paper and then a thick strip of craft paper, before finishing it off with a kitchen string bow. I love the cute, crafty and homemade look of packaging the little loaves this way. They would make great party or shower favours! 

Chocolate Zucchini Bread

-  3 eggs
-  2 cups sugar
-  1 cup oil
-  1 tsp vanilla
-  2 cups grated zucchini
-  2 rounded tablespoons cocoa powder
-  3 cups flour
-  1 tsp cinnamon
-  1.5 tsp baking powder
-  1 tsp baking soda
-  semi sweet chocolate chips (I just keep adding them until it feels right…)
-  optional: 1 cup almonds (whole, sliced, chopped… however you like)
 

Beat eggs; add oil and sugar and beat well. Add vanilla, zucchini, and chocolate powder; beat well.

Mix dry ingredients together in a separate bowl and then slowly add to the wet mixture.

Add in chocolate chips and nuts if you so desire. Mix well.

Bake in two greased standard loaf pans, or mini loaf pans at 350 F.

The recipe book says to bake for 40-60 mins depending on the size of the loaves. However, I found that the size of mini loaf pans can really vary, the ones I bought made about 16 little loaves and only required about 20 mins in the oven.

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Oh and in keeping with the nostalgia kick I also mentioned before… here is a picture of me at age 5 or 6 making ‘Z bread’* as it is affectionately known in my family.

*Side note: it’s a lot catchier if you’re Canadian and say ‘zed’ not ‘zee’ 

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my favourite chocolate chip cookies of all time

23 May

I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic lately after going through all our old family photo albums a few weeks ago in search of a cute picture of me and my mom for Barefoot Contessa’s Mother’s Day blog post.

*you can see my mom and ‘her Eltons’ – i.e. glasses – bringing me home from the hospital, along with the other BFC girls and their moms  here*

All this nostalgia has made me hungry. You see there are about five recipes that I can recall enjoying many times over my lifetime and always seem to take me back to a happy childhood place (well, at least in my heart… and stomach). One of these recipes is the super yummy chocolate cake I made into cupcakes here… another favourite are these chocolate chip cookies.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I feel I should tell you that my most favourite chocolate chip cookie recipe is from the back of the Hershey Chipits bag. But although it is not perhaps the most fancy or exclusive recipe, it still makes the best cookies I’ve ever tasted by far. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s so good they haven’t changed it in over 25 years.

Original Chipits Cookies

 - Cream together 1 cup shortening or softened butter (I use butter), 1 cup packed brown sugar and 1/2 cup granulated sugar. Beat in 2 eggs and 1-1/2 tsp vanilla.

- Combine 2 cups all-purpose flour, 1 tsp baking soda and 1/2 tsp salt. Gradually blend in to creamed mixture.

- Stir in one package (350 g) semi-sweet chocolate chips and 1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

- Drop dough by tablespoonfuls onto un-greased cookie sheets. Bake at 375 F (190 C) for 10-12 minutes.

Makes about 4 dozen cookies.

(My secret is that I add twice the vanilla, no nuts and a few extra handfuls of chocolate chips… so good)

As I said, I’ve been making these cookies since I was little, and here is the proof. This is a picture of 3 year old me and my mom following the very recipe I’ve outlined above – you can even see the tell-tale Chipits bag in my mom’s hands.

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Pink ‘Ombre’ Cupcakes

8 Apr

looks yummy from the outside...

...but everybody knows, it's what's inside that counts!

It’s been far too long since I blogged! I have been meaning to do this post for about a week now, but have been busy with the Easter party, birthday celebrations and, oh you know, life. Anyways here are the pretty pink (almost) ombre cupcakes I made for the BFC Easter Party! To up the pink factor I used the cupcake liners I made before.  Just like the liners before them, the cupcakes didn’t turn out quite like I thought they would (I’m not sure if I’m liking this trend that seems to keep happening) but they looked pretty – and tasted yummy – all the same!

Unfortunately I didn’t have time to make the cake batter from scratch, so a box mix had to do. I just followed the instructions on the box, divided the mixture in to three bowls, added different amounts of food colouring to make the varying degrees of pinkness and then scooped them in to the cupcake liners from darkest to lightest, baked and voila!

I would however recommend doing a dark bottom, medium or light pink middle and a plain top. As you can see the two lighter pink shades just kind of blended together and so it didn’t really look ombre… hence the quotation marks in the title.

A few tips:

I would recommend leaving the most batter in the plain or lightest batter colour bowl, because it’s far easier to just make the batter darker rather than lighter. Trust me.

 Try to find a thicker cake mix – it makes things much easier when trying to layer the colours. I used Betty Crocker French Vanilla mix for these pink ones and it was thicker than the plain ‘White Cake’ mix, which I used for the disastrous purple ones (not even going there) and the pink ones actually look like they have layers.

Although there was one success story…

Julia got the best one of the bunch! If you look closely you can see all three colours – yay!

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