Pics of my "coffee cake"

Sitting at the table having a little snack this afternoon  and Mackenzie was wondering about the cake I made.  After I told her all about it she says "So it's really a coffee cake."  I guess so.

    Here's a picture of it, with some cuts and some pieces just torn off.  It's better the day after too!

   And a picture of a batch of rice crispie cookies Zoe helped me with the other day. They didn't last too long either.

 

This one I just thought was too cute.  I left some shopping bags in the living room and the kids figured they made good chairs for watching tv!

 

My twist on things.

I've imposed a diet on the family this week, and it's only because I'm so unhappy with my own weight.  Of course, I'm craving something sweet to have with a cup of tea, so I started to do a batch of my grandmothers cookies minus the chocolate chips.  Then I thought 'hey I have some wheat germ in the cupboard' and I toasted some of that and added it in.  It needed a little something extra so I threw in a spoonful of instant coffee. Zoe keeps telling me (Thanks to the host of Best Recipes Ever) that fat is flavor, but right now we're cutting down on fat so I needed to find something else for a flavor boost.

At this point, I hadn't actually looked at the original recipe and I added too much milk so I had to add extra flour and it ended up being a cake instead of a batch of cookies.But that's ok because it's not too bad.

No picture since the camera is stowed away along with most other things in the house (realtor showing this evening) but maybe tomorrow I'll have a chance to snap a picture before it's all gone.

In the mean time, here's the recipe for you all to try out.

3 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp - 1 tbsp instant coffee (depending on how much you want it to taste like coffee)
1/3-1/2 cup toasted wheat germ
Mix all this together and set aside.

Cream together 1/2 cup butter or margarine
1 cup sugar
add 1 egg and 1 can evaporated milk.   I think you could probably use about 3/4 cup of regular milk as well but evaporated milk was all I had on hand tonight.

Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix just until incorporated.  When I did it it was like a banana bread consistency.  Bake at 375F for 30 minutes.  Check it with a tooth pick or cake tester to make sure it's done.

I lined the bottom of a round pan with parchment paper and it popped right out no problem.  You can let it cool completely but I cut it after a few minutes. 

I hope some of you try it and let me know how you like it.  My kids seemed pretty happy with it.

BzzAgent

In my never ending search for free things online, I came across BzzAgent.com a few years ago.  It's basically word of mouth marketing.  Companies use BzzAgent to send out some of their product to us agents and all they want in return is for us to talk openly about what we've received, share some of what we get in our BzzKits, and to let them know what people are thinking about it all.

Over the years I've gotten lots of things to try out, some food related, some not.  I've found out about some other interesting web sites from other agents and also gotten little rewards.

Now we can register our blogs with BzzAgent and get exclusive content to use as well as the opportunity to participate in more campaigns. So I've just registered My Baking Babies and we'll have to wait and see what goodies we get to try and talk about.

If you are interested in becoming a BzzAgent or just want to know some more about it, go to BzzAgent

The Fabulous Princess Cake

I'm pretty proud of myself today.  I made Zoe a princess cake like she's been coveting at the supermarket for months and months.  I had the same kind of cake when I was 4 (Thanks Aunt M) so I think it's pretty funny that's what she picked at age 4.

So here it is, along with the birthday girl blowing out the candles.  I'm having a hard time uploading pics tonight so if I can get some kinks worked out later I will post more then.

finished santa hats

So the hats didn't work out like I wanted them to, since the chocolate got too hot and clumped, but I think the ones that I ended up with after it was all said and done turned out to be pretty cute.

The first thing I had to do was make the ganache, which is just cream and chocolate.  When that was cooled I piped it into a mini ice cream cone.  You can see them to on the left side of the picture in a bowl.  Then we made the cookies that would be the bottom part of the hat.

The recipe we used wasn't that good (first time trying it) so next time we'll use a recipe we know and love.

After baking the cookies we let them cool and then trimmed them to be sure they were round.  Then we put the cones on and they looked like this.  If you overfill the cones a little the ganache will act like glue to keep them in place.

Next step was to get them ready to cover in chocolate so we spread them out on a cooling rack with some parchment paper under the rack to catch the drips.

This is the candy coating we had but when I microwaved it I wasn't very careful and it got too hot.  On to plan B.  I got out the icing, coloring, and piping bag. I piped red stars all over and to finish off put a big blob of white on the top for a pom pom and then some white stars around the bottom to be the fur.

I'll try it again with the candy melts because I think doing it all in icing is just a bit too much, and I might even trim the cones to be a bit shorter (if I have time and patience).  The kids love them though and even before they were all put together some of my babies were nabbing ganache cones to nibble on while watching tv!

Santa Hat Cookies

I have an idea (that I'm changing a little from a halloween recipe I saw this year) for Santa Hat cookies.  The original recipe I saw online and it was small sugar cones filled with ganache laid on top of a flat round cookie and covered in dark chocolate to make a witch's hat.  I'm using mini icecream cones, sugar cookies, and red candy wafers to coat them.  I hope they're going to be as cute when they are done as the picture I have in my head. 

The cones are filled and now I'm going to make the round cookies.  I'll have to get some white icing to make "fur" trim and a pom pom while they are baking.

Birthdays birthdays birthdays.

We have 4 birthdays in our family in November.  1st, 10th, 12th, and 24th.  In between there we have cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends.  We're not even half way through and I'm exhausted already.

But I do love celebrating milestones with our family and I love having the babies help me bake cakes, or in the case of the last two birthdays, cupcakes!

Our little man Hunter's day was the 1st.  He decided on chocolate.

Next was Mackenzie and she wanted a very grown up french vanilla.  Sprinkles courtesy of Zoe.

Tomorrow is mine and Zoe has informed me that they would like to use Mackenzie's giant cupcake pan to make my cake.  I'm really looking forward to that and to spending the day with three of my babies.

Hopefully I'll be back in the swing of blogging soon since the house is on the market and there's no other renovations to be done (knock on wood).  Zoe has requested a princess cake so stay tuned for that.  I had one when I turned 4 too so it's a bit of a big deal that she wants the same cake that I had at that age.