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!

Andy the Ankylosaurus Cake

This is Andy.  He is an Ankylosaurus. And he is my favorite. <3

He was made at the request of my buddy, Ben, who's love of  ankylosauruses is shown here via awesome dinosaur pajamas.

 

Andy's final hours were here, at Ben's super dorky cool ;) game night.

This cake was my first real attempt at a shaped cake. (Weelll, I suppose you can count Edgar the Turkey, but Andy was a bit more complicated.)  

And I really like how he turned out. (Even though I think something went wrong with the buttercream recipe on this one...)

So thus ends this lovely story of Andy the Ankylosaurus. :D

The End. :)

Easter Donuts!

Welcome back to meeeee. :P

Long time no see, little blog, and I've got bunches of excuses too!...no money, no pictures, no time...etc etc. But regardless of all that, here I am, and here's some donuts I decorated on Easter at work!

Unless I've talked to you elsewhere, the fact that I decorated donuts at works needs just a tad bit of explaining.

Well, just about a month ago, I got hired at a gas station for the donut and breakfast food shift, which meant being up at fun hours like 3:30am and putting up with grumpy/hungry customers all morning.  I wasn't trained very well, so the majority of this job has been a lot of stress, trying to keep up with everything. But...

On Easter, my assistant manager left me some colored frosting and Easter-themed sprinkles, so work ended up being a lot of fun for once. 

Most of what I did was a matter of drizzling frosting and tossing sprinkles here and there, but I also got a bit creative and made a few flowers, butterflies, and suns.  And I before leaving work that morning, I even bought a 1/2 dozen of them and felt absolutely ridiculous. :P

I really have a ton of entries I need to post, and a few more possible ones in the near future.  I have my ankylosaurus cake, my Disney Belle Princess cake, a Converse shoe bridal shower cake, a Dead Space 2 cake, and food from my Oscar Party back in February, just to name a few.

So hang in there readers, and hopefully I'll be back soon. :D
<3 Rachel

"Gingerbreads" and Sugar Cookies

My mom's never been much of a cook.  I mean, dinner's always good when she does make it, but cooking just isn't something she's ever enjoyed very much.  Because of this, I've probably had more than my fair share of Mac and Cheese and PB&Js over the years.  But for as much as my mother dislikes cooking, she makes up for it in baking.  I didn't even realize (until I started writing this entry) all the countless times I've come home to a full cookie jar or Oreo brownies in the fridge.

Now that it's Christmas time, Mom's gone a bit cookie crazy.  The freezer's jam packed with Thumbprint Cookies, Oreo Balls,  and Chocolate Chips.  And after tonight, some decorated sugar cookies and gingerbread men are occupying the fridge as well.

Somewhere within the last week or so of extremely stressful Christmas preparations, I missed out on the actual baking of the two types of cookies.   I'm serious, this year has just about turned me into a Grinch.  Being absolutely broke and trying to Christmas shop had me super worn out a few days ago, and even though I had a good time at  Secret Santa party the other night, the world's just got me down.

But today's been nice. Thank goodness.

Steve and I woke up at 4pm today after arriving home late from the Secret Santa party last night.  Sometimes I really hate sleeping in forever, but today it was just relaxing.  In contrast, the last-minute-shoppers traffic was soo crazy by the mall when I dropped Steve off at his car.   I'm surprised it didn't make me berserk. (Okay, so it didn't a little.)  Maybe I was just happy I wasn't actually shopping in all that craziness, who knows, but I was in a pretty darn good mood.

And not long after getting home again, it was time to decorate cookies! :)

These cookies were more for fun than showmanship, but some of them turned out kind of neat.  I divided up our frosting into four colors, which were "the best looking colors we've ever had" as Mom stated several times. :P  Besides that, it was mostly just splashing on sprinkles (and the occasional raisin.)

The cookies got rather time consuming and the initial thrill of them wore off quickly.  So we beckoned my brother John and two of his buddies to come in for Operation Cookie Overlord, and we finished them up a few minutes later.  (On a side note, Operation Cookie Overlord was nowhere near as epic as it sounds.)

The rest of my night so far has been good as well. I  drew a Christmas present for my dad and watched a rather Christmasy episode of Conan.  And since my sleep schedule is all out of whack (just regular kind ;P)  who knows how late I'll be up.

Anywho, I hope everybody has a super awesome fantabulous Christmas!

TTFN!

<3 Rachel

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