Free-form Carrot Cupcakes

When I wrote this post a couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I didn't love the carrot cake recipe I had used. Since then, my aunt and my mom both sent me this really delicious recipe!

Carrot Cake

From Crafty Penguin's Mom's High School Home Ec Class

Ingredients:

2 cups flour

2 cups sugar

2 tsp baking soda

2 tsp cinnamon

a dash of salt

1-1/2 cups vegetable oil

4 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

3 cups raw grated carrots (grated medium to small, not big size on box grater)

Prep. Line a 9 x 13 inch sheet cake pan with foil and grease foil. Grate carrots (easiest just to do this with the food processor.)

Step 1. Sift dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, salt) three times.

Step 2. Put dry ingredients in bowl of stand mixer. Add oil slowly while mixer runs. Beat for 8-10 minutes on medium.

Step 3. Add eggs one at a time. Stir in vanilla. Fold in carrots.

Step 4. Bake for 50 minutes at 350 degrees F. 

Step 5. Let cake cool on rack, then cut out circles with circle cookie cutter.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients:

4 oz. Cream Cheese

1/4 cup butter

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 lb powdered sugar

Instructions. Cream butter and cream cheese, add vanilla and sugar. Beat until creamy.

Frosting the cupcakes. Cut each circle-shaped cake into two layers. Pipe frosting between layers and on top using an Ateco #806 tip.

Decoration. These are decorated with gum paste carrots. The gum paste was colored with Spectrum Orange and Spectrum Green. 

The carrots can be sculpted using a knife and a toothpick. Use the knife to make the intents on the carrot, then use the toothpick to make a hole for the stalk.

Refrigerate free-form carrot cupcakes (they taste best cold!)

3D Origami Swan

My friend Angela just taught me how to make these adorable 3D origami swans! She learned how to make them when she was in Brazil last year. This little guy up above is my first solo-attempt.

To make a 3D origami swan, you'll need a lot of paper and a bottle of Elmer's Glue. I used seven 20 x 30 inch sheets of matte gift wrapping paper to make this swan. Anything from printer paper to scrapbook paper will work, although thicker paper is more difficult to fold.

Cutting the Paper. Cut your paper into 2 x 4 inch (or 5 x 10 cm) rectangles. You will need 231 rectangles for this project, plus a couple of extras in case some don't turn out quite right.

Basic Unit. Each piece of paper is folded exactly the same way. This video shows how to fold the triangle, the basic unit of this swan. You can use a bone folder to save your fingers some pain.

Building the Base. The base of the swan is a ring of 40 triangles. First practice connecting the triangles correctly, as shown in the first video, then glue them together, as shown in the second video.

Complete the ring by connecting the first and last piece in your 40-piece chain.

Building on the Base. Start the second row by building (gluing) individual triangles on top of the previous row. Each triangle added should be attached to two triangles below it (one end from two neighboring triangles below.)

Building rows 2-8. Complete row 2 and build rows 3-8. Each row will require 20 triangles. To give the swan a round shape, angle the triangles outward for the first few rows, then row-by-row begin to angle them more inward.

Note: The first photo below shows the base from below. All other photos show the base and subsequent rows from the top.

Building the Base of the Neck, Wings and Tail. The base of the neck, wings and tail are shown with orange triangles. The neck base is four triangles wide, the base of each wing is three triangles wide, and the base of the tail is six triangles wide. There should be one space between each base.

Finishing the Neck, Wings and Tail. Build on these bases by decreasing the number of triangles by one for each subsequent row. The wings and tail are complete after you add a row of only one triangle. Curve wings and tail outwards.

The neck will have eight rows of only one triangle, plus a beak. Curve the neck downwards.

Add googly eyes to give your swan some personality!

Vanilla Sugar Cookies with Blue Glace Icing

This is my first cookie set with glace icing and I'm hooked - It's much easier to work with than royal icing, and it tastes better too.

Vanilla Sugar Cookies

Adapted from the book Cookie Craft

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup butter (if you are using unsalted butter, add 1/2 tsp salt)

1 cup sugar

1 large egg

2 tsp vanilla

Prep. Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Step 1. In mixer, cream butter and sugar until fluffy. (I like to slice the sticks of butter to make the mixing easier.)

Step 2. Mix in egg and vanilla.

Step 3. Add flour cup-by-cup.

Step 4. Split dough into 2 parts. Form each into a brick. Sandwich each brick between two sheets of wax paper, then roll each brick into a sheet using 1/4 inch cookie slats. Refrigerate dough sheets for 20 minutes before cutting shapes. Save dough scraps to make a third sheet of cookies.

Step 5. Bake cookies for about 14 minutes at 350 degrees F. Cookies are done when they start to turn golden on the edges. Transfer cookies to racks to cool.

Decoration. This is the fun part! I decorated with glace icing and sugar pearls.

Glace Icing

4 cups powdered sugar

6 tbs milk

6 tbs light corn syrup

1 tsp clear vanilla extract

Step 1. Mix sugar and milk with whisk or fork until smooth. Mix in corn syrup and vanilla. Icing should be thin, forming a drizzle. This consistency is the flood icing, the background for the cookies. Split icing into several bowls - one for each color. Dye icing to the desired colors. (I left one bowl white and used Wilton Royal Blue for the other two, one with more food coloring than the other.)

Transfer half the icing from each bowl to squeeze bottles to flood the cookies. (Make sure to leave enough in the bowls for the piping icing.) To make the background of the cookies, make a pool of icing in the center of the cookie, then use the back of a spoon to spread the icing towards the edges.

Step 2. Half the icing is left in each of the bowls. This will become the piping icing. Mix powdered sugar into each bowl until icing is the consistency of toothpaste. Transfer icing to piping bags and decorate. (I used Wilton #2 tips.)

Each of the three cookie shapes here have a different design - plaid for the parallelograms, sugar pearls and stripes for the small circles, and flowers for the large circles.

For most of the piping here, I waited until the flood had nearly dried before piping the second layer.

The large circle flower design was done by piping wet-on-wet. When the flood/background is just starting to get tacky, pipe dots into the wet icing. Use a thinner piping icing if necessary. (Icing can always be thinned with milk or thickened with powdered sugar.)

This icing will get hard if you let the cookies dry overnight, but it won't become as dry as royal icing.

Basic Brownies

Sometimes you don't have to go far to find a great recipe - this one came from the inside of the baking chocolate box.

 Baker's One Bowl Brownies

From the inside of Baker's Unsweetened Baking Chocolate Squares (with very few changes)

4 oz unsweetened chocolate

3/4 cup butter

2 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

1 cup flour

1 cup pecans or walnuts

Step 1. Microwave butter and chocolate for 2 minutes, then mix until the chocolate has melted completely. Stir in sugar.

Step 2. Blend in eggs and vanilla. Mix in flour and nuts. Spread into a 9x9 baking sheet that is lined with foil and greased.

Check out how thick the batter gets after you add the eggs!

Step 3. Bake for 30-35 minutes at 350 degrees F.

Let them cool, then cut them into squares.