Pretzel Faces and Paddle Boats

Last week, there were two days on which the girls were home from school. We spent one of those days at The Works - the local engineering museum for kids -making these paddle boats.

Day #2 was declared (by the kids) craft-and-baking day. We made cookies and these pretzel faces. The idea came from a craft magazine. The kids had loads of fun decorating them.

When they had set, we packed them into bags and delivered them to the neighbors. We also saved some to eat.

And now I must return to my sewing cave to work on Halloween costumes. I'd rather be out running through the leaves like a four-year-old, but Motherhood beckons. 

Happy Halloween!

Pumpkin-shaped (store-bought) mini pancake Kate found,
with scrambled egg (not store-bought) eyes and nose.

Nutella Banana Cupcakes and Hamburger Cupcakes

 

I'm back on Nutella.

Jenna and Kate saw these hamburger cupcakes online and wanted to make them, so on Thursday afternoon we baked a batch each of of french vanilla and dark chocolate mini cupcakes and assembled these burgers.

Into the leftover dark chocolate cake batter, I added some nutella and mashed banana, then frosted the cooled cupcakes with nutella-cocoa cream frosting. 

The recipe is very inexact because I was using leftovers and tasting as I went. Also I was working with Betty Crocker's boxed mix, which was a nice moist basic cake and enough for only seven regular-sized cupcakes. Here are the approximate proprotions:

Batter - mix and bake

• Enough dark chocolate cake batter for about 7 cupcakes (obviously if you are making a full batch of 12 or 24, you should increase the rest of the ingredients proportionally)
• About 2/3 of a very, very ripe banana, roughly mashed (should have small chunks)
• About 1/5-1/4 cup nutella

Frosting
About 1 cup heavy whipping cream
About 1/4 cup powdered (icing) sugar
About 2 Tbsp cocoa
About 2 Tbsp nutella, or more to taste

Whip till stiff, and pipe using star nozzle.

In future, I might add a bit of softened butter (like 1 Tbsp) to stabilize the frosting. But maybe not, because the flavor as is is out of this world.

Incidentally, Kate became a nutella convert  that day. Yay!

Nests

Wellllllllllllll....... we're very behind on the holiday/seasonal baking and crafting thing The girls would probably like it if we made, say, sugar cookies in the shape of easter eggs (flat, I mean, not 3D) and frosted them. But the truth is they don't eat them as much as they just enjoy the decorating. And we still have sugar cookies in the freezer leftover from Jenna's birthday last November. So..... no baking. But I was craving chocolate, as I do on an almost daily basis anyway, and so we made these nests. Then it weirdly became an unplanned educational activity, which doesn't usually happen during our kitchen adventures. 

They're secretly these chocolate haystacks, but nest-shaped. And we bought jelly beans for eggs.

The girls had discussions on whether the nests should be filled with the same kind of eggs or different. 

And how many eggs. 

Katie and Emily strictly believed there should only be three eggs in each nest. 

Jenna was in the My Cup Overfloweth camp.

I had more practical convictions and filled in any little spaces so as not to waste jelly beans.

For their dad (not generally a fan of candy), we substituted roasted peanuts.

Emily was concerned about the realistic factor of the egg colors, and was sent to do internet research on egg colors, and their accompanying bird parents.

We ascertained that blue, white, brown (and shades thereof), turquoise and green were popular egg colors, and that the extinct elephant bird laid extremely large eggs. 

And then we ate the nests. Yum.

Cupcakes Are Messy But Fun

I wanted to avoid sewing today, so we made cupcakes. Jenna was very excited, because she adores cupcakes but Emily and Kate also joined in with gusto. And we got to use the new Kitchenaid mixer to make the cake part and the frosting.

I continue to be amazed at the girls' skill in piping. I did the white part of this cupcake, and Emily did the pink rosettes.

The most exciting part of today's baking adventure, though, was the fondant. The girls have been wanting to try (eating as well as making) fondant icing ever since they heard about it on a TV show. Kate even told me, when we asked her some months back what sort of cake she wanted for her next birthday, "A fondant cake" (I'd expected her to say "Princess" or "Fairy" or "Pink").

We made marshmallow fondant because we'd heard that it was tastier than regular fondant.

After sampling it, though, I'm convinced that if regular fondant is less tasty than this, I never want to try it. Still, the girls enjoyed eating it and playing with it. Kate wanted to collect small fondant shapes - she wasn't interested in actually using them for decoration. Here is a picture she wanted me to take of her fondant shape stash.

Here is where the fondant shapes were supposed to go - and, happily, most of them succeeded.

All in, we had a lot of fun designing cupcake toppings.

And after making them, we had a tea party and ate some.

There was an awful mess to clean up after.

We don't mind - it is evidence of children having swept, like small whirlwinds, through the kitchen one winter's day, laughing, loving, and learning, leaving good stuff in their wake.

All Hail Salt

Have I ever mentioned here that I use box mixes for cake? Love them, those Betty Crocker mixes. I also use canister frosting. They do taste better than the cementy stuff served on real cakes from bakeries. Growing up in Singapore, we never ate dense frosting. It was fresh cream or nothing. And even now, I scrape the frosting off cakes (unless it's chocolate frosting or has cream cheese in it) and eat the cake part. 

However, I have been on the hunt for a good homemade buttercream frosting that doesn't taste like plastic. All I've tried so far (yes, even Betty Crocker's recipe) have failed. Today, however, I found one that was actually lovely. The ingredients and proportions are pretty standard: some kind of shortening, powdered sugar, liquid. However, there was an extra ingredient I'd never noticed before: salt. And not just a pinch of it. I tried it, adapting the recipe as I always do, and it was marvellous. Truly good. Amazing what a good helping of salt can do to reduce the plasticky powdered-sugar-cornstarchy-vanilla-essence taste. Even Jenna said, "Now that's gooooooood frosting!"

We tinted some in rainbow colors

and turned the rest into chocolate. The frosting was light and mousselike and very, very good.

Recipe (adapted from I Am Baker's)

• 2 sticks salted butter, softened
• 4 cups powdered sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• heavy whipping cream (add to get the frosting to desired consistency)
• 3 Tbsp cocoa (or to taste)
• vanilla essence if desired (use less than you normally do and omit completely for the chocolate version)

Baking for Teachers

Fake summer weather (cold, not fun) again today so we stayed in and found solace in our food coloring jars and cookie cutters.

Tomorrow is Jenna's last day of school, so we made these stout pencil cookies for her teachers. They are rainbowy, which made Jenna very happy. 

We used our standard sugar cookie and frosting recipes and outlined everything with chocolate. 

We also finished those flowers.

Productive, yes. But really, we just want to be out at parks. Notice Kate (yes, that's Kate) is wearing a long-sleeved, ankle-length fleece costume. And she was still cold. Summer this year is very weird. 

Slightly related, I am slowly getting used to our new camera. It can produce amazingly sharp photos, but only by luck, if I'm the one using it. My goal this summer, therefore, is to be extremely lucky. And speaking of luck, those robins under our deck got an extra day of rest because the workers got delayed till tomorrow. Yay (for the robins, I mean. We want the work to start)!  

Lurid

That's not paint.
That's cake batter.

We made lurid cupcakes today.

The magazine called them rainbow cupcakes,
but we thought rainbow was a bit modest.



Kate picked out the frosting in the supermarket -
pink with sprinkles. The little tub of frosting was
very precious to her. She fought her sisters off when
they wanted to even look at it. She would have gone
to bed hugging it if we had not wrest it from her little hands.

When we were done eating the cupcakes,
the crumbs on the kitchen table looked
as if playdoh had just happened.

Hello Kitty Dry Run

Emily has asked for a Hello Kitty (sigh) birthday party this year.
Could be worse, really.

Anyway, it rained all day today, so a good time for a dry
run. Royal icing (which I usually use) dries hard and is
nice for doing ahead and packing away till the actual day.
But bland. Very bland. Karen's (mother-in-law)'s recipe
for frosting is absolutely scrumptious but not stiff enough
for piping details. So I am testing out the frosting and cookie
recipes from one of my favorite baking blogs,
The Decorated Cookie. Verdict - amazing.

Had so much fun today playing with piping bags. How I wish
I had the time to bake more! Some of the Hello Kitties are a
bit wonky because I dashed them off free-hand with Kate
clinging to my leg. Will try for more consistent faces
for the actual day.

Most enjoyable, though, was teaching Emily to use a piping bag.

She did really well!
Jenna did some piping, too, and I was very impressed with
her attention span and control. Whoo hoo, children! No
pictures of Jenna at work, sadly, because by then my hands
were full of encrusted icing that I daren't touch the camera.
Also was alternating between cutting up raw chicken for
dinner and piping whiskers (Kate still hadn't left my leg),
so didn't to confuse things further.

Muffin Tin Snack Buffet

A variation on the Muffin Tin Lunches -
today's post-nap snack was a bicultural buffet.

L to R:
Top row: Snack Stix (which the kids call Bone Crackers), Annie's Bunnies, Ball Cookies (melt-in-your-mouth cornstarch and egg spheres)
Bottom Row: Goldfish crackers, Captain Crunch Berries, Shrimp crackers.

The kids had this with hot chocolate,
their standard winter wake-up beverage.

Catching up with the kids

I regret (slightly) that I haven't been in the kitchen as much 

as I'd have liked this Christmas season. Potentially, there are 

so many fabulous things to do with the kids there - baking, 

especially. But we've been busy doing other things and 

some days it feels like we're just trying to make it to 

bedtime in one piece (or, as our neighbor says, 

"without losing any of the children"). 

We're one week from Christmas today, and most of the 

major errands (like Christmas shopping, grocery stock-up 

and meal planning) are done, so the kids and I did some 

catching-up. This means actually and deliberately planning 

fun things with them, rather than letting them aimlessly drift 

from one pointless activity to another as they get caught 

in a descending spiral of boredom and 

I run after them trying to clean up.

For lunch, we did a muffin tin lunch. Or, more specifically, 

a Christmas-shaped silicone muffin-pan meal

After lunch we sat and read a couple of 

Christmas books before naptime. 

For tea, we made graham cracker (not going to attempt 

gingerbread this year) and cream cheese frosting houses

which, when combined with the 

miscellaneous candy in our house

and little fingers

made for a rather interesting afternoon 

and a tasty dessert after supper!