Abraham Lincoln's Birthday Cookie

Happy 204th Birthday, Lincoln!  Here! Have a cookie! :D

Okay, so maybe I made these for his birthday 3 years ago. Oooh well. ;)

Enjoy!

How to Make a Rainbow Cake

Step 1:

Mix cake batter and separate evenly into plastic cups.  Add desired food coloring to each cup and stir well.  (I wanted a lot of small sections of color, so I divided the batter into 24 cups, using 6 different colors. So 4 cups of each color.)

Step 2:

Pour contents of each cup into pan. For best results, pay close attention to the distribution and arrangement of color. Do not stir or swirl!  To level batter, drop pan forcefully and repetitively on countertop. (Steve came into the kitchen while I was doing this because he thought I was mad and throwing things around. :P)

Easy Peasy Pumpkin Squeezy

Whew, I've been neglecting this blog for awhile.  Finals week was awful, so I plan on kicking back and blogging much more often now that winter break is here.  On the downside though, I'm so poor right now that I don't know if I'll be able to buy any of the ingredients for all the super awesome Christmas cakes I had planned...*sigh*

When I last posted, I had mentioned I made several cakes for Thanksgiving.  Well, Cake Number 3 was a lovely pumpkin bundt cake.  I was planning on carving the shape of it myself, but once I come across the idea of using two bundt cakes instead, it was too easy to pass up.  (I was just all caked out at this point.)

Then came my search for the perfect recipe.  I decided on this one from allrecipes.com

Ingredients
* 1 (18.25 ounce) package yellow cake mix
* 1 (3.4 ounce) package instant butterscotch pudding mix
* 4 eggs
* 1/4 cup water
* 1/4 cup vegetable oil
* 1 cup canned pumpkin
* 2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
* Whipped cream


Directions


1. In a large mixing bowl, combine the first seven ingredients. Beat on low speed for 30 seconds; beat on medium for 4 minutes. Pour into a greased and floured 10-in. fluted tube pan. Bake at 350 degrees F for 50-55 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool in pan for 15 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. Serve with whipped cream if desired.

I only had one bundt pan, so it took double the time to bake the two pumpkin halves.  In the meantime, I started working on the frosting.  I thought a cream cheese buttercream frosting would be amazing, so I took a recipe from MarthaStewart.com.  I dyed the majority of it orange, but dyed some green and brown for the stem and leaves, too.  (You just cover an ice cream sugar cone in brown frosting for the stem, sooo simple. :D )

This frosting did taste great, but I had a few issues with it when it came to covering the cake.
When I had both cakes baked and cooled, I put the two halves together with frosting.  This left a very apparent line across the middle of my cake.  When I began to frost the entire "pumpkin" I unfortunately discovered the frosting was too thin to completely hide the cake (and the line across the middle) beneath it.  I struggled with it for a good 30 minutes before just coating the whole thing and giving up.  I was super late for a friend's birthday party at this point, so I left, planning to get home early before my family Thanksgiving to give the cake another coat and to add the vines and leaves.

Except....that never happened.  In fact, I was super late to Thanksgiving too.  (Being late is kind of a thing with me. Heh.)  And! To top it off, some of the cake was eaten before I ever got to take a picture of it. :(

All and all though, I'm okay with how everything turned out.  It was still an orange pumpkin shaped cake with a nice brown stem.  Some vine detailing would have been nice, but that one layer of orange frosting got a bit thicker over night, so I'll take that instead.  Not to mention, I happened to think it tasted preeeettty darn awesome.

So, if you have the time to fiddle with the frosting for this one, I'd recommend it.  It's super simple, just a bit time consuming.

Toodles for now!

<3 Rachel