dinosaur cookies

My cousin's son Ethan absolutely loves dinosaurs, so when he turned 3 a couple of months ago, she asked me to make dinosaur cookies for his birthday party! The party's theme colors would be blue, green, and orange, so I decided to make three different types of dino cookies in each color.

After ordering a few dino cookie cookie cutters on Amazon (this one, this one, and this set), I was all ready! I made my favorite sugar cookie dough (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), rolled it out to about 1/8 inch thick, and used my new cutters to cut out the shapes.

Here's Brontosaurus ...

and Stegasaurus ...

and of course I had to make T-Rex as well!

After baking them at 350F until golden (about 10-12 minutes), I let them cool on a rack while I made my royal icing (recipe also in my book!)

I colored my royal icing with gel-based food coloring, and then used a disposable piping bag with a small round tip to outline the dinosaurs with stiff icing. Next, I used runny icing to fill them in.

While the icing was still wet a piped little drops of a lighter shade of icing onto each dinosaur's back. This way I would have flat spots (as opposed to raised spots, in which case you would pipe the little drops after the first layer of icing had dried).

Then I let the cookies dry for several hours (or overnight).

Aren't they super duper cute?

And I just love the color combination!

 

Happy Birthday, Ethan! Hope you enjoyed your cookies!

monogram wedding cookies

My cousin Yvonne got married to her longtime fiance Marvin a few weeks ago (YAY!), and I offered to help out my making wedding cookie favors!  Her wedding color was robin's egg blue, so I made blue and white "Y" and "M" monogram cookies, representing their initials.

As always, I used my favorite homemade sugar cookie and royal icing recipes, but you could of course use store bought..  Since I was making 200 cookies, I ended up making 8 batches of the sugar cookie recipe!  After letting the dough chill in the fridge, I rolled it out and used these Alphabet cookie cutters to cut our my letters.

When all of the cookies were baked (it was late at night by now), I stored them in airtight containers to keep them fresh overnight.  Then the next day I started on my icing.  I made two batches of royal icing, and colored half of it robin's egg blue (I used a combination of Americolor sky blue and teeny bit of lemon yellow), trying as best as I could to match it to the colors on the invitation.  I decided to make the "Y" cookies blue, and the "M" cookies white - by first piping a stiff icing outline around each letter, and then filling it with runny icing.

After the icing had dried (I let it dry overnight), I piped a dotted border around each cookie to finish it off.

Two hundred cookies later, I was done!

Finally, I wrapped the cookies in cellophane bags (one "Y" cookie and one "M" cookie in each bag), and tied them with custom favor tags and raffia.

The wedding turned out beautiful!  The ceremony was lovely, the food was deelish (lobster, filet mignon, cuban rice, and fried plantains!), and the Matthew and Melodie had so much fun dancing all night long.

Congratulations Yvonne and Marvin!  We love you!

thanksgiving birthday cake - pumpkin spice layer cake with browned butter cream cheese frosting piped roses

My cousin Yvonne's birthday was on Thanksgiving Day this year, and since the two of us are known to devour an entire pumpkin pie together, I decided to bake her a pumpkin spice layer cake.  I used a recipe from Martha Stewart's "Cupcakes" book, except instead of making cupcakes I made two 8-inch round cakes.

While the cakes were cooling, I started on the filling and the frosting.  I knew that I wanted to make brown butter cream cheese frosting (when I made that combination for my Halloween cupcakes, the flavors combined were delicious!), but I wanted the filling to be a bit lighter, since my family doesn't like desserts that are too sweet.  So I whipped up some fresh whipped cream, and then added about a cup or so of the brown butter cream cheese frosting to it, to make a lighter filling with the same flavors.

Once my cake was filled and stacked, I let it set in the fridge so that I could add color to my remaining frosting.  I was going for a peachy-pinky color, so I mixed pink with orange and a bit of yellow.  Once that was ready, I applied my crumb coat of frosting (this is to seal the cake and to prevent any cake crumbs from ruining the finished frosting).

Since the first roses cake I made was so popular (inspired from the rose cake tutorial by I Am Baker), I decided to decorate this cake the same way.  Using a 1M Wilton tip, I piped large roses all over the cake, and filled in the remaining spaces with swoops and swirls.  I loved the way the specks (from the browned butter) in the frosting showed through the peachy color of the frosting.  Although, while my frosting started out to be the perfect peachy color, after a few hours the color set and turned into more of a bright orange sherbet color!  It wasn't what I was originally going for, but it actually worked out to match the whole Thanksgiving theme of the cake.

The final touch was a homemade birthday banner for the cake, similar to the one I made for my son's Superman birthday cake.  I took differently patterned craft paper and cut small triangles out of them, then threaded them together with string and a sewing needle, and then wrote "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" on them.  Then I attached the two ends of the banner to bamboo skewers ... I attached double-sided tape on the skewers, wound the string around the sticky part of the skewer, and finally tied the string securely in a few knots.

It was the perfect combination of Thanksgiving flavors, birthday cake look-and-feel, and girliness with the roses and patterned banner.  Hope you enjoyed it, Yvonne!  Happy Birthday!!!

triple chocolate mousse cake for angie and yvonne

My cousin Angie flew in from Chicago last weekend, specifically to run in Bay to Breakers with a group of friends.  My other cousin Yvonne planned to run in it as well.  So on Angie's first evening in town, we all had dinner at my house.  For dessert, I made a triple chocolate mousse cake - a 6-inch version of the individual triple chocolate mousse cakes I made a few months ago.

The bottom layer was a moist chocolate cake (I again used my favorite homemade chocolate cake recipe instead of the flourless chocolate cake recipe from ATK), the middle layer was a bittersweet chocolate mousse, and the top layer was a white chocolate mousse.  Then I piped on a good luck message in melted chocolate.

After I unmolded my mousse cake, the top edge was really wonky and uneven.  So I thought I would pipe on a nice shell border (to hide the wonkyness).  But, it only made the cake more ugly (sigh).  I had the urge to pipe a shell border on the bottom of the cake to even it out, but I resisted, as I have messed up cakes in the past by continuing to add things such as this.

In the end, the cake tasted great, and that's all that matters, right? :)

Hope you enjoyed it Angie and Yvonne!

canelles and cake for auntie shelfee's birthday

A few of my aunties were in town over the weekend, and since Auntie Shelfee's birthday is coming up and we were going to be taking her to an early birthday dinner, I decided to make her favorite dessert - canelles.  They're made with milk, butter, flour, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and the secret ingredient - rum - and then baked in silicone molds at a very high temperature to give it a crusty, almost burnt exterior, while maintaining a moist chewy cake-like interior.

I also had two 6-inch chocolate cake rounds in the freezer (previously baked and then double-wrapped with saran wrap and stored inside a large ziploc bag), that I had intended to make into ice cream cake for Matthew's birthday (but never got around to doing), which I defrosted and then made a quick coffee buttercream frosting to ice it with, so that we could bring a cake to dinner for dessert.

First we hung out at the house and played with the kids, while snacking on canelles, coffee, and my mom's homemade banana bread.

Then we were off to dinner at our favorite local Italian restaurant.  We dined on fried calamari, polenta with cheese and mushrooms, caprese salad, butternut squash ravioli with sage and brown butter, linguini with seafood, and gnocchi with sausage, spinach and red wine sauce.

Then it was time for dessert!

Happy (Early) Birthday, Auntie Shelfee! See you at Thanksgiving!