Turkey cake

For thanksgiving this year I decided to make a cake. I looked at tons of pictures and I saw a Turky cake.

First in 2 stainless steel bowls bake yellow cake for the body. Then in a loaf pan I made spice cake for the legs. 

Put the cake in the fridge for 30 min to 1 hour to let the cake get firm. 

Then take the spice cake and cut it diagonally in half for the legs

Using a bread knife shape the spice cake to look like legs. Remember to save the cake you cut off. It doesn't have to be perfect because it is going to covered in frosting anyway. 

Frost the flat side of the bowls in buttercream frosting and stick them together. Cut a flat side so it sticks up skinny and tall. Stick back in the fridge for 30 min. For the legs be very carefull because they will break easily. On the cake plate put the body and the legs so it looks like a turkey. Then put 1 squer through the legs and body to hold them on and 1 squer the long way through each leg. 

Now frost the cake with brown buttercream frosting. Take all the cake you cut off and chop it to look like stuffing and attach it to the cake with frosting.  Enjoy!

Bacon wrapped turkey

So this year the turkey was my job so I decided to switch it up a little. This year I was making a bacon wrapped turkey. 

First I put the turkey in a brine. This brine consists of water, juice of 3 lemons, some salt and some maple syrup in a five gallon bucket. I soaked the turkey in there for 24 hours before I started. 

The night before Thanksgiving I took the turkey out of the brine and dried it off. I stuffed it with onions celery and carrots. For the bacon I weaved 2 bacon weaves and put them in the freezer for 20 min. 

When I took out the bacon I rubbed it with a mixture I made by whipping 1 stick butter and 1/4 cup maple syrup together. 

 

Then butter side down I layed 1 bacon weave on the back of the Turkey. Then I flipped it over and layed the bacon on on the front side. 

Without a lid bake the turkey on 350 until the bacon looks done then pull it out, put tin foil on it and bake it for the rest of the time needed to cook the turkey. When it is done let it sit for 30 min before cutting into it. 

Enjoy. 

Super easy homemade applesauce

So for Boyscouts we had a Halloween party. For the Halloween party we brought caramel apples so we just bought a whole case. That turned out to be to much so we looked for an easy recipe that uses apples. Then we came across this recipe. This recipe makes 3 1/2  cups of apple sauce. You may find we are getting better at food photography. 

First you have to peel, core and cut around 10 apples (we used 11)

Then you add 1 cup water( you can use apple juice or cider but we didn't have any),and the juice of one lemon or 3-4 tablespoons of lemon juice. 

Now for the spices. first we added about 1/4 cup brown sugar (we didn't measure so it doesn't matter if you have a little to mutch or too little), a couple dashes of five spice, 4 tbs cinnamon, and a dash of ground nutmeg. 

Put in large pot over med hi heat. Cover and cook 25 min or until apples are in some chunks and very tender. Stir occasionally. 

Place in food processor or blender and purè adding a little more each time. If you put it in all at once it may splatter and burn you because it is very hot. 

Then place in a jar (as we did) or in a bowl covered in the fridge. Enjoy!

Zuccini bread

So we got this giant zucchini from my great grandma and decided to make zuccini bread only to find out it only used half the zucchini.  So we made zucchini meatloaf too. (On a different post).

I made this a while ago but have been too lazy to blog about it. 

Sorry about the pictures I don't have this whole food photography thing down yet. 

Our ingredients 

3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs, beaten
1/3 cup water
2 cups grated zucchini
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

The directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, combine flour, salt, nutmeg, baking soda, cinnamon and sugar. In a separate bowl, combine oil, eggs, water, zucchini and lemon juice. Mix wet ingredients into dry, add nuts and fold in.

Bake in 2 standard loaf pans, sprayed with nonstick spray, for 1 hour, or until a tester comes out clean. Alternately, bake in 5 mini loaf pans for about 45 minutes.

This is a very simple and very tasty recipe for zucchini bread. By the way we ate both of the loafs in like 4 days.  

Strawberry short cake

My dad broke his leg 2 weeks ago so since then I have been spending  a lot of time at home with him so I decided to make him some strawberry shortcake because we had an abundance of strawberries  in the fridge.  

This is a picture of his X-ray 

This is after his surgery 

This is a metal rod with 4 screws

Any ways back to the recipe, this recipe makes 8 servings

Ingredients:

1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1/4 cup sugar

1 Tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup cold butter cut into 1/2 inch pieces

1 large egg

1/2 cup heavy cream plus extra for brushing

2 tablespoons raw sugar

Filling

4 cups strawberries hulled and sliced

3 tablespoons sugar

Whipped cream

Recipie

Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a food possessor and pulse 2 or 3 times. 

Add the butter and pulse 4 more times. Mix the cream and egg together in a small bowl and pour into food processor.  Pulse 3 times, if the dough is not very soft add cream 1 splash at a time and pulse until it becomes a soft dough.

Spoon out the dough onto a baking sheet with parchment paper into mounds 3 inches wide and 1 inch high spacing them 1 inch apart. Brush with cream and sprinkle with raw sugar.

Bake 12 - 15 min. 

While the shortcakes are in the oven prepare the filling. In a bowl using a fork crush 1 cup of the berries.

Add crushed berries to the rest of the sliced straw berries.  Add the sugar.

Mix andrefrigerate for 30 min

Put the short cakes on a wire rack and cool for 15 min

To serve, cut the shortcakes in half horizontally. Spoon the strawberries and whipped cream onto the bottom half and place top half as you probably already know on top.

Serve and enjoy!

Home made root beer

For my cousins birthday I decided to make home made root beer. 

Since I wanted to start easy I decided to use a root beer extract. 

First I dissolved  a heaping 1/8 tsp champagne yeast in a cup of 98 degree farenheit water and let stand for 5 min

We found root beer extract at our local hobby store.

Shake the root beer extract well. Add a table spoon of extract and 2 cups of sugar to 4 cups water. 

Add yeast mix to the extract mix

Add 11 cups of warm water

Fill 2 sterilized 2 liter bottles 2 inches from the top with the root beer and seal tightly

In order to sterilize our bottles, we poured boiling water into them and dumped it out.

Lay the bottles on their sides to test for leaks. 

Age 3-4 days at room temperature.  Check the bottles for fimness and once they are hard, move them to the refrigerator for 2 weeks.  We made root beer floats with ours and it turned out great! 

Enjoy

Angry birds cake

It's my cousins birthday so I decided to make him a cake for his party. We had to travel to get to the party, so we made the cake and the fondant the day before, and brought everything with us to decorate the cake when we got up north.  We ended up using a boxed chocolate cake mix to save time.  We actually used one and a half boxes of chocolate cake mix and a 9x13 cake pan.  Because we made the cake the night before, we let it cool right in the pan that we brought up north.  This was apparently a bad idea because it refused to release from the pan.  After a lot of pounding and scraping, the cake came out. You can't see it but this cake is in three pieces and is held together by butter cream frosting.  No one knew except for us.  We melted the chocolate frosting a little to make it easier to spread.

The fondant recipe we used was pretty simple.  We actually made one recipe from scratch and bought another batch of it from the craft store because we thought we needed more for our cake pops we were attempting.  The one batch we made would have been enough for the cake.  We decided we liked the homemade stuff better.

We used one 16oz bag of mini marshmallows, 4 Tbsp water, 2 lbs of powdered sugar and a lot of shortening to keep things greased.  We also used our stand mixer which made it really easy, but you could knead this by hand if necessary.  

Be sure to grease the dough hook and bowl of the stand mixer really well.  Add 2/3 of the powdered sugar to the bowl.  In a microwave safe bowl, melt the marshmallows with the water on high for about one minue or until the marshmallows are melted.  Add the marshmallows to the powdered sugar and mix on low speed for 2-3 minutes.  If sticky, add more powdered sugar and continue to mix.  Fondant should be pliable and firm, not dry and crumbly or super sticky.  If kneading by hand, be sure to grease the counter tops and your hands very well and knead until firm.  Turn fondant onto clean work surface and knead by hand until excess powdered sugar is absorbed.  This is when we added our colors.  Be sure to use gel food coloring because regular food coloring will change the consistency of the fondant. We used red, blue, yellow, black, orange, brown, and grey.  Feel free to play with the colors to get ones you like. Wrap the fondant in cling wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes before using.  We found that after using it for awhile, it would start to get get sticky, so we put it in the fridge for a while to let it firm back up.   

 

We rolled out the green fondant to just cover the cake.  We ended up buying a fondant roller from the craft store which worked really well.  Make sure to grease it.  We were going to buy a fondant wheel cutter thing (like a mini pizza cutter) but decided to just buy an exacto knife instead because it was cheaper.  It worked, but the fondant sort of got stuck around the blade.  The wheel cutter could be useful if your going to try working with fondant again.  We cut a scalloped edge using the exacto knife. Be careful to not roll the fondant too thin or it will be hard to get onto the cake.  We actually rolled and cut the fondant on a flexible cutting board mat which made it really easy. We just picked up the mat and flipped the fondant onto the cake.  It could get tricky if you tried to pick it up I think.  

This is what it looked like after covering it. 

We made the rice crispy treats according to the recipe on the box before we started frosting the cake.  This way they had time to cool beore we needed to mold them into shapes.  we made a slingshot and four balls for the birds and then four different sized balls for the pigs.  We also made a box shape for tnt and then a few shapes for boulders.  The rice crispies are really easy to shape and work with.  Be careful not to make the slingshot too big because it gets heavy on the cake and ours started to tip over.

This is the platform that the pigs sat on.  We covered it in brown fondant and placed it in one corner of the cake.  

We wrapped all the rice crispy pieces in the different colored fondant and then added details with fondant as well.  The fondant pretty much sticks to itself, so it wasn't too hard, just tedious.

Here is the finished cake  

We used frosting pens to write the birthday message.

We tried making angry bird cake pops but that was an epic fail.  We tried to wrap the fondant around the cake pops, but then had to somehow roll it to make it look smooth.  This caused the cake to disintegrate and start to fall apart.  It was super frustrating.  Especially because there are apparently a million people online that have made angry bird cake pops look awesome with fondant.  These people must be superhuman, because we almost threw them out the window.  The cake pops caused some tension among all of us.  Once we finally got the few cake pops that we decided to decorate look normal, we put them on the sticks.  The fondant made them so heavy though, that the sticks went right through the top of their heads and the cake slid to the bottom.  That made it super annoying.  We took the cake off the sticks, and then set the cake pops on the sides of the cake. They looked pretty good in the end, but we would not recommend attempting the cake pops.  Save your sanity and stick to the cake.  We finally ended up taking the rest of the cake pops and dipping them in buttercream frosting and adding sprinkles.  The kids loved them. Way easier. 

To go with the angry birds theme, we also made a full size sling shot out of 2x4s. We attached it to some big pieces of wood at my uncles house, and then attached a water balloon launcher.  We brought a bunch of cardboard boxes and my stepmom painted a bunch of pigs onto the boxes.  The kids were lined up to shoot dodge balls at the cardboard box wall.  It was a pretty big hit.  There were 30 kids at this birthday party so it was kind of crazy for awhile.  

We got the idea of this cake from another blog if you would like to see this blog go to this site

http://www.discountpartysupplies.com/blog/2011/11/21/angry-birds-cake-tutorial-you-can-do-it/

Very easy apple pie recipe

This is a very easy apple pie recipe that I made. It takes about an hour and a half. 

Ingredients: 

3-4 medium apples cored peeled and sliced

1cup sugar

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 cup unsalted butter cubed

2 9in crusts

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375

Place bottom crust in to pan. 

 Mix apples sugar and nutmeg

Add ingredients to the bottom crust and top with butter. Place top crust over and poke a few holes to vent. Place in oven for 1 hour

Serve.