Mmmm....cookies

We dogsat for a friend this weekend, and I promised my daughter that we would bake puppy treats for our weekend guest.  Peanut butter cookies, in fact.  It got me thinking...if I'm going to make peanut butter cookies for a dog then damn sure I'm going to make some for me too!  I love cookies.  Far too much.  At least now I have 4 bodies in the house so I can rationalize their quick disappearance :)  I think we created the perfect peanut butter chocolate chip recipe and thought I'd share.  It is going to be one of my staples from now on.  It was so good that it didn't last the whole weekend and we had to make a second batch on Sunday :)

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup mini chocolate chips


Directions:
Preheat oven to 375ºF (175ºC).  Line a cookie sheet with a silicone mat or parchment paper.


1. Cream butter until light.  Add both sugars, and cream 3-4 mins until fluffy.
2. Add egg & vanilla and beat until it is smooth.
3. Add the peanut butter and mix until it is blended.
4. Add the flour, baking powder and salt and stir until combined.
5. Add the chocolate chips and stir.
6. Drop spoonfuls of dough on the cookie sheet.  Run a fork under water and lightly press each cookie (you will need to wet the fork every 3 or 4 cookies).
7. Bake in the oven for 13 minutes, until the edges and tops are golden.
8. Let rest 5 mins and then remove from cookie sheet to cool.


Yield: 24 cookies.  It should probably make 50% more than that, but a lot of the dough is eaten before it makes it's way to the oven in my house ;)


These cookies are awesome!  Soft and chewy and delicious!  Hope you enjoy.


Notes:
*If you like a little more crunch in your cookie simply adjust the sugar to 1/2 cup white and 1/2 brown - the more white the more crunchy; the more brown the more soft.
*You can sub the mini chips for any kind you like - dark chocolate, white chocolate, mini m&m's, etc.
*These freeze really well.  Just make up the dough, drop them on a parchment-lined sheet and press each cookie.  Then pop the whole sheet in the freezer for 10 or 15 mins. Once they are slightly frozen, pop them into a ziplock bag and place in the freezer.  When you're ready to bake them just add about 4 mins to the baking time and they can go from freezer to oven.
*If you have a little bit of dough left over at the end - you know, not quite enough to warrant baking a whole other batch, but too much to scarf down without guilt - I like to pop it in a small ziplock and put it in the freezer.  Some time when you're in the mood for a treat you can take it out and scoop small chunks into ice cream for homemade cookie dough ice cream. Mmmmm.....

Finding Nemo Cupcake-Cake, Part 3

And now for the fun part...putting it all together!  A cupcake-cake is actually very simple to put together.  You will need a base of some sort - I used a piece of cardboard that I had covered with cardstock paper from a craft store.  Once your cupcakes are cooled (or thawed, if they were frozen), place them on your board to get an idea of what shape you'll arrange them in.

Once you are happy with the shape, pick each cupcake up and pipe a small amount of icing on the bottom - this will act as glue to hold them all in place.  Be careful how much you use - I used too much and the icing is visible:

Once the cupcakes are in place, you will then fill in the spaces between each cupcake with icing.  I used the Wilton tip 1A for this, but you could use an empty coupler or just snip a hole in a ziplock:

Next you want to pipe an outline of icing around the entire shape.  This will help to give your cake clean edges:

Then use your piping bag to fill in the outline with icing.  Use an offset icing knife (or regular knife) to smooth out the icing and fill in all of the areas.  Once you're done it will look like a cake from the top:

Once the cupcake-cake is iced, you can decorate as you wish.  In addition to the decorations that I made I used laffy taffy (watermelon flavour) for the seaweed, the Finding Nemo action characters that I bought from the Disney store, some blue raspberry tube candy that I found in the bulk section of my local grocery store, chocolate candy rocks from a candy store, and pearlized white non-pareils that I had lying around from some wedding cupcakes that I had done.  Here was the final product:

The birthday girl and her guests were very happy with the results!  It was a big hit and I will definitely be doing cupcake-cakes again, especially for kids parties!

Finding Nemo Cupcake-Cake, Part 2

Part 2 of this project was baking the cupcakes and making the icing.  I used a recipe from Billy's Bakery in New York for "Billy's Vanilla Vanilla Cupcakes" that I found on the Food.com website.  The icing that I used was my go-to recipe: Magnolia Bakery's vanilla buttercream.

Both can be made ahead of time and stored in an airtight container until using.  You can even make the cupcakes and freeze them until you need them, if you want to make them more than a few days ahead of time.

Tune in for part 3...assembling and decorating the cupcake cake!

The Inaugural Post - Finding Nemo Cupcake-Cake, Part 1

My daughter decided on a Nemo cake for her 3rd birthday party. After looking at various designs on the internet and deciding that I was under no circumstances going to create Nemo, Marlin and Dorie characters out of fondant, I went to the Dinsey store and bought a set of Nemo action figures.  We decided on a cupcake-cake, which is perfect for kids parties since there's no cake to cut...each kid can just pull a cupcake out and they're good to go.  Here is the finished product:

And now for the instructions...I did this in 3 stages.  First was making the decorations for the top.  Second was baking the cupcakes and making the icing.  Third was the fun part...assembling the cupcake cake!


1) Making the Decorations
We made several decorations for the cake 4 or 5 days ahead of time, when we had some free time on the weekend.  I say "we" because my almost-3-year-old daughter was heavily involved, such a good (and occasionally messy) little helper!


First up was the coral.  I used twigs that I found outside of our house, but you could also use grape stems.  This was the only non-edible part of the cake (aside from the action figures).  To make the coral, we just dipped the twigs in melted white chocolate and then sprinkled different coloured sugars to coat them.

We chose bright colors for the coral, but anything will work.  You can melt white chocolate chips, baking squares or candy melts.  Just microwave it 30 seconds at a time, stirring in between, until it melts:

                                       

Dip the twig into the melted chocolate until it is completely covered:

Sprinkle the sugar over the chocolate-coated branches to coat and you're done!  I just layed them on a sheet of waxed paper to dry and then they can be handled:

Next up was what I believe is called sea sponge (also referred to as "long, pink, tubey things" in my kitchen).  I made up a batch of candy clay which I got from the "Cupcakes, Cookies and More, Oh My!" cookbook.  This stuff is awesome - easy to make, easy to colour and easy to work with...and far less messy than making marshmallow fondant, which is what I used to use for decorations before I discovered the candy clay recipe.  For the sea sponge, we colored it a pink shade.  To make it, we rolled it out using icing sugar to keep it from sticking to the counter, cut it into thin strips, rolled each strip into a tube and shaped the top so that it opens a little.  Here is the process in pictures:

Roll the clay out into a thin, long strip:

Using an offset icing knife (or regular knife), cut a strip double the length that you want your sea sponges to be, and  about a finger-width wide.  Mine were about 7" high by 0.5" wide:

Using your knife, start to roll up one edge of the strip...

...until it looks like this:

The clay is easy to work with.  Keep rolling and playing around with it until you get the seam fairly smooth and the top open:

Once I had made the tubes I grouped them together in bunches of 3 and brushed them with luster dust to give them a nice shine.  Here is the finished product:

Next up was the sea anemones.  This was also made using the candy clay, which we had colored an orange shade.

Start rolling!  Roll each piece between your palm and a flat surface such as a counter top.  Shape a bulb at one end.  You'll need about 15 of these for each anemone:

The easiest way to attach them all is to hold one piece upside down and start adding the other pieces:

When you have enough pieces put together, roll a small disc of the clay to create a base for the anemone.  You'll need this so that the base can stand up on your cake:

Attach the anemone to its base and you're done!  You can arrange the pieces so that they're going in all directions (which gives the look of an anemone underwater), or however you like:

And after a few hours of fun in the kitchen you're all done!  Next up is part 2 - making the cupcakes and icing.