Some Kind of Food Blog

  After it being suggested I make a blog or something to promote my baking/cooking/whatever I have finally caved and decided to try it out. I’m not sure this is the right avenue for starting something like this, but it is probably a good starting point at the very least. 

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"Gravity defying" sprinkles cake. With a quetzalcoatlus.

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Chocolate pecan stuffed chrysanthemum pull apart bread

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Gravity defying cereal cake! The bowl is made of candy melts. The cake is a cinnamon spice cake with cinnamon buttercream frosting topped with cinnamon toast cereal. The milk is made of fondant and the spoon is a spoon.

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Blood lollipop in bubblegum flavor. Another Dracula Day inspired treat

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Vampire cupcakes. Recipe from The Scran Line. In honor of Dracula Day (May 26th)

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A vampire themed dinner (roasted garlic soup and a spinach salad with beet vinaigrette, grilled chicken, and fig goat cheese with toasted garlic bread) in honor of Dracula Day (May 26th)

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A Shaymin green salad for dinner. The recipe is from The Pokémon Cookbook by Maki Kudo.

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Neapolitan cake (vanilla and chocolate cake with chocolate fudge filling, strawberry frosting, and dark chocolate ganache) topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry

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Baking Project in The Works

     I am a big fan of Pokemon. I always have been and I likely always will be. That fandom coupled with my love of baking has inspired a baking project that will no doubt take me a little while to put together. I want to make cupcakes that represent each Eeveelution (the name for the many evolutions of the Pokemon Eevee). I am aware that this has certainly been done before, but I don’t want to copy those. My goal is to find cake and frosting flavors that represent each Eeveelution (in their type and/or appearances) and decorate them to look like each one.  I want to be as original as possible while doing this.

    So far I’ve made a basic outline for the flavors that I want to work with for each Eeveelution and some basic ideas for design. I am looking forward to continuing the project and I will include updates as the process goes on.

[baker-bri]

Happy Asparagus Day (May 24th)! In honor of Asparagus Day I made for dinner Asparagus stuffed chicken breasts, creamy Asparagus soup, and an asparagus soufflé.

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I recently wrote about my difficulties finding cotton candy flavoring oil and it inspired me to bake something using said oil. Here I took a basic sugar cookie recipe and replaced the vanilla extract with the cotton candy flavoring. I also added to the dough pink and blue rock candy bits and pastel colored jimmies.

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Baking Struggles

    Without a doubt the most frustrating part of baking (to me) is obtaining obscure (or hard to find) ingredients or baking/cookware. I cannot tell you how many times I have had all of the ingredients needed to make a particular recipe and find that I need to pick up a silicon bowl or some particular kind of baking pan. In theory, you’d think some things would be incredibly simple to find in a store (grocery, department, or even specialty). But there are so many things that you just simply can’t find (at least where I’m located). For example, I needed a silicon bowl tonight for a baking project I wanted to work on. Simple, right? Wrong. Nowhere I looked had anything close to what I needed and the only place I can find to buy one is online. Which is fine, but then you have to wait several days for it to arrive. Which is an absolute drag if you’re fired up and excited to bake something now. 

     Along a similar vein is obscure (or hard to find) ingredients. Some things are so hard to find and there is no godly reason why they would or should be. I spent several days searching several stores looking for cotton candy flavoring oil. The stores that carried flavor oils seemed to have just about every flavor under the sun except for cotton candy. Of course, I ended up buying it online, but the fact remains that it should have been much easier to find. Something I still have yet to find anywhere in store is edible flowers. I know you can order them online and all, but you pay a much higher price for them with shipping involved. 

    It can be discouraging sometimes to be unable to complete a project right when you want to, but I suppose the wait makes it that much more exciting to finally do.

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Healthy (or Healthier...) Cooking

        Generally speaking I do not cook things that would be considered entirely unhealthy. Desserts not withstanding, I always try to make meals as healthy as possible. 

       I use a lot of substitutions with my cooking (skim milk with corn starch instead of cream, egg whites instead of eggs, 99% fat-free ground turkey instead of beef, margarine or light butter instead of full fat, etc) and try to shave off unnecessary calories and/or fat from the recipes I make. I have, over time, found ways to make traditional recipes into much healthier ones in comparison with my substitutions. I also opt to bake things instead of frying them in like 99/100 situations. The extra fat and grease of frying isn’t ideal to me and I feel like a baked mozzarella stick is just as good, if not better, than a fried one.

       I will say that when it comes to baking, though, I am not a fan of healthier substitutions usually. Some things work, like light butter in baked goods, but others do not, like light butter in buttercream or frosting recipes. Texture and stability play a big role in baking properly and some things do stand up pretty well with less sugar and fat, but overall it is much better (to me anyway) to bake with the “normal” ingredients that are to go into it. That isn’t to say I don’t want to make healthier desserts or don’t try at times to work with the substitutions. It’s just that often lessening the sugar content of a cookie recipe results in it being more cake like and less crisp than it ought to be. And nobody wants that, eh?

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A campfire cake. I baked it so long ago I forget what exactly the flavors were. Haha

Edit: I remember now that it was a pound cake with chocolate frosting.

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Pumpkin spice cake with marshmallow frosting, made to look like a Trick-or-Treat candy bucket for Halloween 2016

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Graveyard pull apart cupcakes for Halloween 2016

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Cappuccino cupcake with Swiss meringue frosting