The dough part wasn’t as bad as what I thought. In fact, it was super super easy. Just flour, water, and butter then eggs beat into it. It came together really easily. I was impressed.

I ran out of piping bags from our previous Cupcake Cookies so I had to spoon out the dough onto the cookie sheets.

After cooking them, I know now that I didn’t make them thick enough. Oh well, next time right?

They cooked up nicely though and for that I was pleased. I was pretty nervous while waiting for them. I tweeted about it…a couple times!

Which reminds me…are you following us on Twitter yet?

Gorgeous for a first try!

Drum roll please, here is the finished piece:

Yep, I sure didn’t sift the powdered sugar again and you can tell. When will I learn?!

Want the recipe? Check it out here!

I was the student when it came to these sugar cookies. Shaina had already made cookies with royal icing two times before. I wanted to try it with her and learn. I’ve always wanted to do it, but never got around to it!

These were a lot of fun to make. The worst part was cutting out the cupcakes because we had used a stencil Shaina hand drew. That was very time consuming.

Once the cutting, freezing, and baking was done, the decorating became a lot more fun. We had our own styles but quite similar.

Shaina made her cupcake “liners” adorable and fancy what with the ridges and the ‘folds’ of lines. I was jealous but decided to just do what I figured I wanted.

I just stuck to polka dots and marble on top. Some I put sprinkles like Shaina’s, most I didn’t.

We each did 6. We only made 12 cookies. We started at 10pm and ended around 1am. I was tired.

I still am…

I’m not as young as I used to be ya know.

I love how thick these cookies are. They just look so…beefy.

Want the recipe? It’s from Bake At 350.

Ingredients:

3 c unbleached, all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 c sugar (I use sugar that I’ve stored vanilla beans in)
2 sticks butter
1 egg
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/2 tsp pure almond extract

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350.

Combine the flour and baking powder, set aside. Cream the sugar and butter. Add the egg and extracts and mix. Gradually add the flour mixture and beat just until combined, scraping down the bowl, especially the bottom.

Roll onto a floured surface and cut into shapes. Place on parchment lined baking sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes. Let sit a few minutes on the sheet, then transfer to a cooling rack.

It’s that time of the year again! The kiddies are all going back to school! To celebrate this time of the year, I decided to make some cute little pencil cookies for my brothers!  I found this neat little recipe over at Bake At 350 . What can I say? I absolutely love what she does!

When I was baking these, I forgot to take step by step pictures. These were pretty simple to make. I just have to work on making my hand steady! I didn’t have a pencil cutter, so once again, I just made a stencil.

So celebrate back to school and bake up a dozen or so of these cookies!

To celebrate Jeremy’s birthday, I decided to make some nice cookies for him. I found a great idea on Bake at 350! I didn’t have a cake cookie cutter, so I just made a tiered cake stencil and went from there. It took a little longer than it would have with the cutter, but it worked the same.

I have never used royal icing on cookies before so I was a little nervous while doing it.  But all in all, it came out fine.

This is the outline with the royal icing. Please forgive that I don’t have a very steady hand!  I was just so nervous!

Now we are going to fill in the cookies with the thinned royal icing.

I used the squeeze bottles that you can find in craft stores and it made things so much easier! It was so much fun watching the icing spread out on it’s own.

Now lets do the dots. This was probably my favorite part of these cookies.

After I finished doing the icing, I let the cookies sit for about an hour. Then I came back with my blue and added the trim and wrote the number 2 on the top of each of the cookies. This is what the finished product looked like:

They aren’t perfect, but it was my first time doing royal icing! I think they turned out pretty cute! Expect to see a lot more cookies with royal icing!

The lone muffin! To veer off a little, I should have called this site the “I only have one kind of plate” site.

Yes, it bugs me! I swear we have other plates.

They just aren’t as pretty!

Anyway, we had some blueberries in the fridge and I wanted to use them up before they went bad. I didn’t want to do another cake so I figured I’d do some muffins.

Then my darling husband decided he would use up some of the blueberries. Viola! Now they are half blueberry and half raisin muffins.

The raisins were rebels and wanted to go to the bottom. I have a way with things going to the bottom I guess!

What do you think of my little bowl turned upside down and made into a muffin stand? I’m so imaginative!

So..the recipe you can find at Allrecipes.com.

The only thing I did differently is used brown sugar in the topping and then 1/2 cup blueberries and 1/2 cup raisins.

I will say, they were delicious and I will definitely make them again!

My brother brought over some huge zucchini’s from his friends and I instantly thought, zucchini bread! I’ve read about it all over the blogs and wanted to make it.

So, I did.

And it was delicious!

It was so rich, moist, and fantastic. Everyone loved it. I shall be making this again! I got the recipe from Allrecipes of course. I also took the advice of someone in the comments and substituted 1 cup of brown sugar and used 4 cups of grated zucchini.

It was zucchini-tastic!

We all love Snickerdoodles, and if you don’t, what the heck is wrong with you?

Okay, so I’m sure there are some of you out there that don’t like Snickerdoodles, you can always turn away from this post.

I love them. I made them for the first time Christmas last year during our baking day. I didn’t know they were so darn simple! I saw this recipe for a Snickerdoodle cake and instantly wanted to make it. Of course wanting to make it and getting off my butt to do it are two different things.

Alas, I made it. Yet, I have not tried it! That will be in my edit later when I do.

The recipe is so simple and it comes from The Cake Mix Doctor. This book is so awesome. However, it’s kind of vanilla.

Here’s the start of the recipe page:

Looking at this picture of the page, I don’t think I have ever had a 9 inch round cake serve 16. That says something about the size of our pieces here I guess!

The batter was so quick together since its base is a cake mix after all! It looked great, I didn’t try any, I was a good girl!

The batter was super thick and it said to spread it into your pans with a spatula. I didn’t believe it until I got to that part. It seemed so creamy as well, I love looking at it.

The frosting is just a cinnamon buttercream but I was surprised to say that it actually worked out. Not like the 4th of July disaster cake frosting thankfully. I have redeemed myself!

Yea, I still have to work on my decorating skills.

I think it looks pretty decent though.

I also need to be a bit more generous with the frosting in the middle. Hey, it’s a learning process here. I’m never done learning.

So, later I have to try it to give my verdict.

The recipe right out of the book:

Ingredients:
Solid vegetable shortening for greasing the pans (Do not skip this step. Trust me on this.)
Flour for dusting the pans (See above)
1 package (18.25 ounces) plain white cake mix
1 cup whole milk
8 T (1 stick) butter, melted
3 large eggs
1 t pure vanilla extract
2 t ground cinnamon
Cinnamon Buttercream FrostingPreheat over to 350, generously grease two 9″ round cake pans with shortening then dust with flour. Shake out the excess and put the pans aside.

Place the cake mix, milk, melted butter, eggs, vanilla, and cinnamon in a large mixing bowl. Blend with an electric mixer on low speed for 1 minute. Stop the machine and scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Increase the mixer speed to medium and beat 2 minutes more, scraping the sides down again if needed. Divide the batter between the prepared pans, smoothing it out with the rubber spatula. Place the pans in the oven side by side.

Bake the cakes until they are golden brown and spring back when lightly pressed with your finger, 27 to 29 minutes. Remove the pans from the oven and place them on wire racks to cool for 10 minutes. Run a dinner knife around the edge of each layer and invert each onto a rack, then invert them again onto another rack so that the cakes are right side up. Allow them to cool completely, 30 minutes more.

Meanwhile, prepare the Cinnamon Buttercream Frosting.

Place one cake layer, right side up, on a serving platter. Spread the top with frosting. place the second layer, right side up on top of the first layer and frost the top and sides of the cake with clean, smooth strokes.

Place this cake, uncovered, in the refrigerator until the frosting sets, 20 minutes. Cover the cake with waxed paper and store in the refrigerator for up to 1 week. Or freeze it, wrapped in aluminum foil, for up to 6 months. thaw the cake overnight in the refrigerator before serving.

Cinnamon Buttercream Frosting
8 T room temperature butter
3 3/4 C confectioners’ sugar, sifted
3 to 4 T milk
1 t pure vanilla extract
1 t ground cinnamon

Place the butter in a large mixing bowl. Blend with an electric mixer on low speed until fluffy, 30 seconds. Stop the machine and add the powdered sugar, 3 T milk, vanilla, and cinnamon. Blend with the mixer on low until the sugar is incorporated, 1 minute. Increase the speed to medium and beat until light and fluffy, 1 minute more. Blend in up to 1 T milk if the frosting seems too stiff.

First, I must say, I have to make something to redeem myself here. My frosting is just the worst thing ever. I have a plan though and here’s hoping it’ll work!

Anyway, onto the cake! This was just like the 4th of July Cupckaes except it’s in cake form!

I made SMBC for it, but, at 90 degrees a butter base frosting was not the way to go! It’s okay though. I’m out of the baking groove and have to get back into it.

The technique was done the same as the cupcakes, gel food color and white cake mix! The inside was pretty, if I do say so myself!

This was the before shot of the cookies. Of course. I had to divide the dough into 3 sections and dye the 2 red and blue. I forgot to freeze the dough, so the cookies ended up cracking when they were baked. They also had a lot of sweat from the humidity.

And here is the shot after they were baked. As you can tell, they cracked a bit. That’s okay. They were still delicious! I also ended up mixing all the dough together and making multicolored cookies! Those were neat looking.

I got this recipe and idea from Bake at 350 It’s just a simple sugar cookie recipe which everyone could do as long as you have an hour to spare! These cookies were fun and I will for sure try them out again. And this time I will freeze them for the 10 minutes!  I sure hope everyone had a wonderful 4th!

The fourth of July has come and gone and don’t think I didn’t make something for it! The items didn’t quite goes as planned, but they were good to eat and that’s all that matters in the long run, right?

I did a red, white, and blue cupcake. I didn’t frost them. Why? I wasn’t bright enough to think that in 90 degree (100 heat index) weather, that Swiss Meringue Buttercream just wouldn’t hold up and I should have made a frosting with shortening and not butter. Oh well!

I did some layered and I did some swirled. It was a lot of fun making them. It was just a white cake mix from a box and colored.

I think they turned out looking pretty good. You can tell which were swirled, they look tye dyed!

Here’s a close up of my favorite top:

I still need to learn how to take good pictures I guess!

I will say, that I am positive that this is not the first nor the last you have seen of this cupcake. Especially when Independence day was nearing. They were on nearly every food blog I swear! However, others had theirs frosted. I just wasn’t very bright that day!