BB Cookies (again).

Its been a new year and the Brown Butter cookie recipe has changed again. So I've modified the old page and to be a bit clearer I'll repost again here:

Original Brown Butter Cookies
1 cup (2 sticks) Butter
1.5 cups Brown Sugar
2.5 cups Cake Flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
1Tbsp Vanilla Extract
Sea Salt

Chocolate Brown Butter Cookies
1 cup (2 sticks) Butter
1.5 cups Brown Sugar
2 cups Cake Flour
3/4 cup Cocoa Powder (Hershey's Special Dark)
1/4 tsp Salt
1 tsp Baking Soda
1Tbsp Vanilla Extract
Sea Salt

Brown butter on the stovetop. Combined butter and other ingredients in mixing bowl and let chill. (Dough should have a claylike consistency) Roll into walnut sized balls and top each with sea salt. Bake at 325 F for 13-15 minutes. Makes 2 dozen.

Cookie Monster!

The original Brown Butter Cookie.

Original Brown Butter Cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) Butter

1.5 cups Brown Sugar

2.5 cups Cake Flour

1 tsp Baking Soda

1Tbsp Vanilla Extract

Sea Salt

Chocolate Brown Butter Cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) Butter

1.5 cups Brown Sugar

2 cups Cake Flour

3/4 cup Cocoa Powder (Hershey's Special Dark)

1/4 tsp Salt

1 tsp Baking Soda

1Tbsp Vanilla Extract

Sea Salt

Brown butter on the stovetop. Combined butter and other ingredients in mixing bowl and let chill. (Dough should have a claylike consistency) Roll into walnut sized balls and top each with sea salt. Bake at 325 F for 13-15 minutes. Makes 2 dozen.

(Revised again. 12/13/2011)

Number Eight

Today I completed another task on my 20 before 20 list, as I made Char Siu Bao today. Char Siu is basically Chinese Barqbeque pork, like you can find in most Chinsese resteraunts and Bao is a bun with something cooked (or steamed) in the middle. The recipe still needs a little tweeking but I'm pretty happy with the outcome. However, it's definitely something I'm going to make again in the future.  So,  for the 20 before 20 that makes 2 of 20 or 10% completion.

Sweets Overload

I mentioned that I was baking again yesterday, well today went a little crazy in the kitchen.

Yesterday

• Double batch of chocolate chip cookies

Today

• Cheesecake
• Snicker-doodle cookies
• Another double batch of chocolate chip cookies

It's Alive

You may have noticed by now, but when I'm not working on homework (which encompasses when I blog) I've tended lately to obsess about DnD. And today is no different, I've been everything I can to give me ideas for my character, Korin Meyer (as a note, yes that is the same first name as my freelancer character, Korin "Kori" Leena).

Well, one of the DnD books on equipment has a chapter talking about mounts. My favorite mount-- the gelatinous cube. Best part you ride it from the inside of the cube. So, imagine that: essentially riding around in a giant, hungry cube of Jell-O (does that make anyone else really want Jell-O, espeically if if looks like this(which is technically Jell-O ice cream, which sounds even better to me!)).

However, you do need a magic item that creates a force-field around the character in order to avoid being flat-out devoured by the cube. But, to move the cube you actually trick it into thinking there's food in a particular direction by banging on that force-field. Personally I still think thats a neat trick.

Part Three: The Conclusion

Yesterday I continued the  "Multipart Posting Spectacular. So today I bring you the conclusion to the series. 


I suppose I got a little ahead of myself yesterday (Don't worry, the cake is not lie... I just have some backtracking to do first). Before I was able to frost and decorate the cakes I still had to remove them from the pans and stack  them together. The first cake came out cleaning while the second (shown here on top) had a portion of the bottom stuck in the pan. In order to make a  single cake out of the two  I had to do two things. First I had to carve a flat surface to join the two  and join them together with a layer of frosting. And second I carved around the edges to make a smoother more continuos surface to frost. It was fairly simple I grabbed a serrated knife (in this case its actually a steak knife but it worked wonderfully) and set about cutting and sawing. I worked on a plate so that I could easily lift and flip the cake onto the serving plate. This also gave me an opportunity to taste the cake from the scraps. 

So now that we're all caught up-- the finished cake. 

And thus concludes the  "Multipart Posting Spectacular.  I hope you all enjoyed it.

Part Two: Baking and Frosting

In yesterday's post I began a special series I dubbed the "Multipart Posting Spectacular." So here is today's continuation. 


For David's cake I decided to bake a "yellow cake" mix-- partially because he likes vanilla flavored cakes and partially because it was the only type of cake mix I had. At some point I'd like to try making my own cake's from scratch, but for now the boxed mixes are convenient and rather tasty. So I gathered my supplies started to work while the oven preheated.

I whipped up the cake and poured the batter into the pans.

Then they hit the oven. I set a timer and approximately 30 minutes later I pulled the cakes out.

 

While I did not make a cake from scratch in favor a boxed mix, I did make my own frosting. And I must say that I learned quite a bit in the process.

I used a recipe that called for:

     1 cup shortening

     2 teaspoons vanilla
     4 cups powdered sugar
     4 tablespoons milk

From that I upped everything but the shortening, for taste and texture. 

As I began to color the frosting I realized two things: 

1.) I didn't have enough food color to make red frosting (so it turned out pink and actually a little darker than the first picture).

2.) food coloring is water-based and doesn't mix well with the oil based shortening (as a solution this recipe would need some sort of emulsifier (eggs for example) so that the two would combine better).

After mixing the frosting a lovely shade of pink I spread it over the entire cake and mixed the remainder into a darker color that was trying to black but ended up a grayish-purple and put that into a piping bag. I piped the words and a border on to the cake and "attached the characters."

Thank you for reading Part Two. Tomorrow in the conclusion, I'll reveal the finished cake. Stay tuned. 

Part One: Cake Design

Sorry for the delay in in posts and the somewhat secrecy (I couldn't have my surprise cake design ruined). Without further ado, I present you a multipart posting spectacular-- featuring drama, intrigue, and frosting.  

This past weekend a good friend of mine, David, celebrated his 20th birthday. And for some reason I decided to bake a cake him (it might have so something to do with my fondness for decorating cupcakes).

Thus began my dissent into frosting.

To start I decided to stack two round 8 inch cakes to create the shape of the cake. This gave me a canvas but I still had to come up with a design. And, of course, when I offered to decorate a cake I had no idea what I wanted it to look like. Eventually I decided to feature and image of David's character from WoW, Maynar, and my character's pet cat, Cindy. Here are some of the sketches I came up with.

At first I wanted to use this cake as an experiment with fondant,  but I just didn't have time to learn a new medium. So I instead decided to make the figures on paper and attach them to the cake.

I also planned to pipe a simple message that read something to the effect of "Happy Birthday, David!" However, all this was subject to change...

Check back tomorrow for Part Two.