Now Playing Tracks

This looked like a great idea in the making, but wound up as a big fat failure. Pumpkin spice fudge sounds delicious, right? And it is! Just don’t forget to spray the foil like an idiot, or you will NEVER unstick that janks. ALSO, be aware that if you leave it out of a fridge for more than five minutes, it will melt and try to take over your entire house. I would have gotten a picture of that, put it was literally trying to ooze it’s way from the stove top through the cracks into the oven. Stopped it just in time, and it ended up in the trash. F for fall failure fudge.
Zoom

This looked like a great idea in the making, but wound up as a big fat failure. Pumpkin spice fudge sounds delicious, right? And it is! Just don’t forget to spray the foil like an idiot, or you will NEVER unstick that janks. ALSO, be aware that if you leave it out of a fridge for more than five minutes, it will melt and try to take over your entire house. I would have gotten a picture of that, put it was literally trying to ooze it’s way from the stove top through the cracks into the oven. Stopped it just in time, and it ended up in the trash. F for fall failure fudge.

This is the last thing I got for ya today, and I’m qualifying it as a fail, even though some of them survived. You probably see these Pinata cookies circulating around back in May. The idea is super cute! Cookies that you bust open and there’s candy inside! How awesome is that! Where this recipe and idea goes wrong is logistics. I’m not talking about separating and dying dough, that wasn’t a bid deal, or even layering the colors. First of all, I don’t have a burro cookie cutter. I even looked at my local supply place - no dice. So the two cutters I have that would fit were penguins and dinosaurs. Great! So you have to cut the cookies immediately after they come out of the oven. Which is hard because 1). Soft cookies, 2). RIGHT OUT OF THE OVEN! METAL COOKIE CUTTERS CONDUCT HEAT! BURN YOUR FINGERPRINTS OFF! and 3). Because they’re already baked, anything that is delicate (like a dinosaur is going to crack as soon as they set. So none of the dinosaurs survived. The other huge problem is that it takes THREE regular cookies to make ONE pinata cookie. My huge tray of penguins quickly got reduced to 4 Penguin Pinatas. Two whole nights of baking, and I only have 4 Penguin Pinata cookies to show for it, and technically it was only 3 because I busted one open to get that picture up there. So yes, very very cute and fun idea, realistically, very little payoff for tons of effort.
Zoom Info
This is the last thing I got for ya today, and I’m qualifying it as a fail, even though some of them survived. You probably see these Pinata cookies circulating around back in May. The idea is super cute! Cookies that you bust open and there’s candy inside! How awesome is that! Where this recipe and idea goes wrong is logistics. I’m not talking about separating and dying dough, that wasn’t a bid deal, or even layering the colors. First of all, I don’t have a burro cookie cutter. I even looked at my local supply place - no dice. So the two cutters I have that would fit were penguins and dinosaurs. Great! So you have to cut the cookies immediately after they come out of the oven. Which is hard because 1). Soft cookies, 2). RIGHT OUT OF THE OVEN! METAL COOKIE CUTTERS CONDUCT HEAT! BURN YOUR FINGERPRINTS OFF! and 3). Because they’re already baked, anything that is delicate (like a dinosaur is going to crack as soon as they set. So none of the dinosaurs survived. The other huge problem is that it takes THREE regular cookies to make ONE pinata cookie. My huge tray of penguins quickly got reduced to 4 Penguin Pinatas. Two whole nights of baking, and I only have 4 Penguin Pinata cookies to show for it, and technically it was only 3 because I busted one open to get that picture up there. So yes, very very cute and fun idea, realistically, very little payoff for tons of effort.
Zoom Info
This is the last thing I got for ya today, and I’m qualifying it as a fail, even though some of them survived. You probably see these Pinata cookies circulating around back in May. The idea is super cute! Cookies that you bust open and there’s candy inside! How awesome is that! Where this recipe and idea goes wrong is logistics. I’m not talking about separating and dying dough, that wasn’t a bid deal, or even layering the colors. First of all, I don’t have a burro cookie cutter. I even looked at my local supply place - no dice. So the two cutters I have that would fit were penguins and dinosaurs. Great! So you have to cut the cookies immediately after they come out of the oven. Which is hard because 1). Soft cookies, 2). RIGHT OUT OF THE OVEN! METAL COOKIE CUTTERS CONDUCT HEAT! BURN YOUR FINGERPRINTS OFF! and 3). Because they’re already baked, anything that is delicate (like a dinosaur is going to crack as soon as they set. So none of the dinosaurs survived. The other huge problem is that it takes THREE regular cookies to make ONE pinata cookie. My huge tray of penguins quickly got reduced to 4 Penguin Pinatas. Two whole nights of baking, and I only have 4 Penguin Pinata cookies to show for it, and technically it was only 3 because I busted one open to get that picture up there. So yes, very very cute and fun idea, realistically, very little payoff for tons of effort.
Zoom Info
This is the last thing I got for ya today, and I’m qualifying it as a fail, even though some of them survived. You probably see these Pinata cookies circulating around back in May. The idea is super cute! Cookies that you bust open and there’s candy inside! How awesome is that! Where this recipe and idea goes wrong is logistics. I’m not talking about separating and dying dough, that wasn’t a bid deal, or even layering the colors. First of all, I don’t have a burro cookie cutter. I even looked at my local supply place - no dice. So the two cutters I have that would fit were penguins and dinosaurs. Great! So you have to cut the cookies immediately after they come out of the oven. Which is hard because 1). Soft cookies, 2). RIGHT OUT OF THE OVEN! METAL COOKIE CUTTERS CONDUCT HEAT! BURN YOUR FINGERPRINTS OFF! and 3). Because they’re already baked, anything that is delicate (like a dinosaur is going to crack as soon as they set. So none of the dinosaurs survived. The other huge problem is that it takes THREE regular cookies to make ONE pinata cookie. My huge tray of penguins quickly got reduced to 4 Penguin Pinatas. Two whole nights of baking, and I only have 4 Penguin Pinata cookies to show for it, and technically it was only 3 because I busted one open to get that picture up there. So yes, very very cute and fun idea, realistically, very little payoff for tons of effort.
Zoom Info
This is the last thing I got for ya today, and I’m qualifying it as a fail, even though some of them survived. You probably see these Pinata cookies circulating around back in May. The idea is super cute! Cookies that you bust open and there’s candy inside! How awesome is that! Where this recipe and idea goes wrong is logistics. I’m not talking about separating and dying dough, that wasn’t a bid deal, or even layering the colors. First of all, I don’t have a burro cookie cutter. I even looked at my local supply place - no dice. So the two cutters I have that would fit were penguins and dinosaurs. Great! So you have to cut the cookies immediately after they come out of the oven. Which is hard because 1). Soft cookies, 2). RIGHT OUT OF THE OVEN! METAL COOKIE CUTTERS CONDUCT HEAT! BURN YOUR FINGERPRINTS OFF! and 3). Because they’re already baked, anything that is delicate (like a dinosaur is going to crack as soon as they set. So none of the dinosaurs survived. The other huge problem is that it takes THREE regular cookies to make ONE pinata cookie. My huge tray of penguins quickly got reduced to 4 Penguin Pinatas. Two whole nights of baking, and I only have 4 Penguin Pinata cookies to show for it, and technically it was only 3 because I busted one open to get that picture up there. So yes, very very cute and fun idea, realistically, very little payoff for tons of effort.
Zoom Info

This is the last thing I got for ya today, and I’m qualifying it as a fail, even though some of them survived.

You probably see these Pinata cookies circulating around back in May. The idea is super cute! Cookies that you bust open and there’s candy inside! How awesome is that! Where this recipe and idea goes wrong is logistics. I’m not talking about separating and dying dough, that wasn’t a bid deal, or even layering the colors. First of all, I don’t have a burro cookie cutter. I even looked at my local supply place - no dice. So the two cutters I have that would fit were penguins and dinosaurs. Great! So you have to cut the cookies immediately after they come out of the oven. Which is hard because 1). Soft cookies, 2). RIGHT OUT OF THE OVEN! METAL COOKIE CUTTERS CONDUCT HEAT! BURN YOUR FINGERPRINTS OFF! and 3). Because they’re already baked, anything that is delicate (like a dinosaur is going to crack as soon as they set. So none of the dinosaurs survived.

The other huge problem is that it takes THREE regular cookies to make ONE pinata cookie. My huge tray of penguins quickly got reduced to 4 Penguin Pinatas. Two whole nights of baking, and I only have 4 Penguin Pinata cookies to show for it, and technically it was only 3 because I busted one open to get that picture up there. So yes, very very cute and fun idea, realistically, very little payoff for tons of effort.

Well, it had to happen. I was overdue for a failure. It came in the form of these stacked brownie&blondie combinations. It’s a blondie baked on top of a brownie, if you couldn’t surmise.I saw someone post this in my dashboard and thought “Hey, that’s not a bad idea! I like both of those things! How can this go wrong?” But it went TERRIBLY TERRIBLY wrong. First of all, the recipe said to bake for 20-25 minutes, which seems a bit low, but I thought it would be fine. They needed a FULL FORTY MINUTES on top of that. And then when they came out…they just weren’t good. You didn’t really taste either brownie or blondie, you just tasted…baked sugar bar, no real flavors. It’s unfortunate, because I thought it was such a good idea at the time. But you know what they say about hindsight, right? F for Browndies.
Zoom Info
Well, it had to happen. I was overdue for a failure. It came in the form of these stacked brownie&blondie combinations. It’s a blondie baked on top of a brownie, if you couldn’t surmise.I saw someone post this in my dashboard and thought “Hey, that’s not a bad idea! I like both of those things! How can this go wrong?” But it went TERRIBLY TERRIBLY wrong. First of all, the recipe said to bake for 20-25 minutes, which seems a bit low, but I thought it would be fine. They needed a FULL FORTY MINUTES on top of that. And then when they came out…they just weren’t good. You didn’t really taste either brownie or blondie, you just tasted…baked sugar bar, no real flavors. It’s unfortunate, because I thought it was such a good idea at the time. But you know what they say about hindsight, right? F for Browndies.
Zoom Info

Well, it had to happen. I was overdue for a failure. It came in the form of these stacked brownie&blondie combinations. It’s a blondie baked on top of a brownie, if you couldn’t surmise.I saw someone post this in my dashboard and thought “Hey, that’s not a bad idea! I like both of those things! How can this go wrong?” But it went TERRIBLY TERRIBLY wrong. First of all, the recipe said to bake for 20-25 minutes, which seems a bit low, but I thought it would be fine. They needed a FULL FORTY MINUTES on top of that. And then when they came out…they just weren’t good. You didn’t really taste either brownie or blondie, you just tasted…baked sugar bar, no real flavors. It’s unfortunate, because I thought it was such a good idea at the time. But you know what they say about hindsight, right? F for Browndies.

Cake fail. :(  But let’s back up a bit first. Went to the National Capitol Area Cake Showcase yesterday for a bit with Wifey. That was cool. It was very very neat to see all the different levels of cake design that were going on. We stepped into the Live Challenge, but only for a minute, as there was no seating left, and Vengelet REQUIRES a seat. But we got to see Norman Davis emcee, which, again, was cool. So inspired by that, I set about making a cake. I found a recipe that seemed simple enough in my Chocolate cook book, and decided to give it a whirl. Less than half a dozen ingredients seems easy, right? Well, something went wrong somewhere along the way, and this turned out to be a big ol’ turd. I doubled the recipe to go a bit bigger. Wifey thinks I may not have beaten the eggs enough or stirred the batter too long once it was all assembled. The cakes came out of the oven, super dense, practically bread-like. And the addition of raspberry puree and chocolate whipped cream did nothing to help, the cake was just to tough. Inedible. Wifey thinks it may be the worst thing I’ve made. Sigh. But that’s how we learn right? F for chocolate cake. Let’s see what I can during the coming week.
Zoom Info
Cake fail. :(  But let’s back up a bit first. Went to the National Capitol Area Cake Showcase yesterday for a bit with Wifey. That was cool. It was very very neat to see all the different levels of cake design that were going on. We stepped into the Live Challenge, but only for a minute, as there was no seating left, and Vengelet REQUIRES a seat. But we got to see Norman Davis emcee, which, again, was cool. So inspired by that, I set about making a cake. I found a recipe that seemed simple enough in my Chocolate cook book, and decided to give it a whirl. Less than half a dozen ingredients seems easy, right? Well, something went wrong somewhere along the way, and this turned out to be a big ol’ turd. I doubled the recipe to go a bit bigger. Wifey thinks I may not have beaten the eggs enough or stirred the batter too long once it was all assembled. The cakes came out of the oven, super dense, practically bread-like. And the addition of raspberry puree and chocolate whipped cream did nothing to help, the cake was just to tough. Inedible. Wifey thinks it may be the worst thing I’ve made. Sigh. But that’s how we learn right? F for chocolate cake. Let’s see what I can during the coming week.
Zoom Info

Cake fail. :(  But let’s back up a bit first. Went to the National Capitol Area Cake Showcase yesterday for a bit with Wifey. That was cool. It was very very neat to see all the different levels of cake design that were going on. We stepped into the Live Challenge, but only for a minute, as there was no seating left, and Vengelet REQUIRES a seat. But we got to see Norman Davis emcee, which, again, was cool.

So inspired by that, I set about making a cake. I found a recipe that seemed simple enough in my Chocolate cook book, and decided to give it a whirl. Less than half a dozen ingredients seems easy, right? Well, something went wrong somewhere along the way, and this turned out to be a big ol’ turd. I doubled the recipe to go a bit bigger. Wifey thinks I may not have beaten the eggs enough or stirred the batter too long once it was all assembled. The cakes came out of the oven, super dense, practically bread-like. And the addition of raspberry puree and chocolate whipped cream did nothing to help, the cake was just to tough. Inedible. Wifey thinks it may be the worst thing I’ve made. Sigh. But that’s how we learn right? F for chocolate cake. Let’s see what I can during the coming week.

So, my deep dark secret is that I am not crazy about making cupcakes. Cupcakes are getting a ton of press right now, and that’s all well and good, but I just do not get psyched about making them. Part of me is hard-wired to eschew trendy things, and the fact that everyone is “OMG TINY CAKES” puts me immediately on the defensive against cupcakes. HOWEVER, to try to overcome this epicurean deficiency, I got this book, recommended by a friend. It’s got a whole bunch fancy/crazy cupcake recipes, and if any cupcake book could get me out of my set ways, it would be this one. I decided to try the Mountain Dew Cupcakes, as the Dew was one of my favorite sodas when younger, and I thought it would be a good first foray. Long story short, these failed. HUGELY. A tricky recipe, combined with my own meager skills ended in tragedy. The cakes(full of Dew and sugar) never set up quite properly and came out soggy. The buttercream, which I tried to salvage(because I had invested 12 egg whites and 2 pounds of butter into) also ended badly when I cooked the egg whites with the sugar. F. F for Fenton. BUT, it gives me a reason to bake something else tomorrow night. I might break out the Panzers….THEN you’ll see!
Zoom Info
So, my deep dark secret is that I am not crazy about making cupcakes. Cupcakes are getting a ton of press right now, and that’s all well and good, but I just do not get psyched about making them. Part of me is hard-wired to eschew trendy things, and the fact that everyone is “OMG TINY CAKES” puts me immediately on the defensive against cupcakes. HOWEVER, to try to overcome this epicurean deficiency, I got this book, recommended by a friend. It’s got a whole bunch fancy/crazy cupcake recipes, and if any cupcake book could get me out of my set ways, it would be this one. I decided to try the Mountain Dew Cupcakes, as the Dew was one of my favorite sodas when younger, and I thought it would be a good first foray. Long story short, these failed. HUGELY. A tricky recipe, combined with my own meager skills ended in tragedy. The cakes(full of Dew and sugar) never set up quite properly and came out soggy. The buttercream, which I tried to salvage(because I had invested 12 egg whites and 2 pounds of butter into) also ended badly when I cooked the egg whites with the sugar. F. F for Fenton. BUT, it gives me a reason to bake something else tomorrow night. I might break out the Panzers….THEN you’ll see!
Zoom Info
So, my deep dark secret is that I am not crazy about making cupcakes. Cupcakes are getting a ton of press right now, and that’s all well and good, but I just do not get psyched about making them. Part of me is hard-wired to eschew trendy things, and the fact that everyone is “OMG TINY CAKES” puts me immediately on the defensive against cupcakes. HOWEVER, to try to overcome this epicurean deficiency, I got this book, recommended by a friend. It’s got a whole bunch fancy/crazy cupcake recipes, and if any cupcake book could get me out of my set ways, it would be this one. I decided to try the Mountain Dew Cupcakes, as the Dew was one of my favorite sodas when younger, and I thought it would be a good first foray. Long story short, these failed. HUGELY. A tricky recipe, combined with my own meager skills ended in tragedy. The cakes(full of Dew and sugar) never set up quite properly and came out soggy. The buttercream, which I tried to salvage(because I had invested 12 egg whites and 2 pounds of butter into) also ended badly when I cooked the egg whites with the sugar. F. F for Fenton. BUT, it gives me a reason to bake something else tomorrow night. I might break out the Panzers….THEN you’ll see!
Zoom Info

So, my deep dark secret is that I am not crazy about making cupcakes. Cupcakes are getting a ton of press right now, and that’s all well and good, but I just do not get psyched about making them. Part of me is hard-wired to eschew trendy things, and the fact that everyone is “OMG TINY CAKES” puts me immediately on the defensive against cupcakes. HOWEVER, to try to overcome this epicurean deficiency, I got this book, recommended by a friend. It’s got a whole bunch fancy/crazy cupcake recipes, and if any cupcake book could get me out of my set ways, it would be this one. I decided to try the Mountain Dew Cupcakes, as the Dew was one of my favorite sodas when younger, and I thought it would be a good first foray. Long story short, these failed. HUGELY. A tricky recipe, combined with my own meager skills ended in tragedy. The cakes(full of Dew and sugar) never set up quite properly and came out soggy. The buttercream, which I tried to salvage(because I had invested 12 egg whites and 2 pounds of butter into) also ended badly when I cooked the egg whites with the sugar. F. F for Fenton. BUT, it gives me a reason to bake something else tomorrow night. I might break out the Panzers….THEN you’ll see!

To Tumblr, Love Pixel Union