A very Kirby birthday!

It is that time of the year again.  

Time to provide a nerdy birthday cake for my sweetie's kid, that is!

I knew right from the start, alas, that this time around I wouldn't have the time to replicate the feat that was last year's Super Mario Bros. cake.  

The theme was still going to be Nintendo videogames though, since the birthday boy's such a huge fan - thus, Kirby it was! 

Unlike Mario and Luigi, with whom I had a passing acquaintance if nothing else, I knew absolutely nothing about Kirby and his friends. 

All I had to work with was this pic that my sweetie kindly provided...

The Kirby games and all related characters belong to Nintendo and HAL Laboratory

I fully meant to reproduce the four of them - Kirby, King Dedede, Meta Knight and Waddle Dee - hanging up to the star, just like this.
And that was when... dun-da-da-DUN... DISASTER STROKE! 

Between me and you: that's not really true.
The ugly truth is, I've been a complete idiot and didn't check my fondant stash beforehand, so I only discovered at the very last moment that... It. Had. Gone. Bad. 

Luckily I had a bag of marshmallows in my pantry, so I quickly whipped up a batch of homemade fondant. 
The good thing was, I had a chance to flavour it to my heart's content and make it way tastier than storebought sugarpaste. But it was far too soft to model complex shapes out of it, plus - since my marshmallows were of the pink-and-white persuasion - getting a pure white base out of them was out of question, which meant I could only make characters that were pink-hued to begin with...

Even their simple, spherical bodies ended up all squished. 
Blah.

While not my better job by far, this cake tasted delicious if nothing else, as it was based on Alice Medrich's Queen of Sheba - a European-style cake, and possibly the closest you could get to a Sachertorte without receiving worryingly official-looking correspondence by some highly respected legal practice in Wien. 

Ground almonds. Egg Whites. Chocolate-based batter. So NOT a Sachertorte...

The recipe's from her Craftsy class, Decadent Chocolate Cakes. 

If you are a beginner and interested in baking with chocolate, you should definitely buy it! She gives tons of useful tips on how to work with this "difficult" yet yummy ingredient!

I was in such a hurry in the end that I didn't even snap a pic of the finished cake... but my hun took a few during the party! 
Awww... Ain't he such a sweet and considerate guy?  

(The star should have been standing, though. Sigh...)

Imma makin' Super Mario Bros. COOKIES!

Would you believe it? It's that time of the year again! Time to get into crazy baking mode, that is! 

Last year I made a Super Mario Bros. cake for the 8th birthday of my sweetie's child. This time around I'm settling for a less ambitious cake, since unfortunately I lack both the time and the storage space to replicate that feat - but, I can do COOKIES!

Many people see cookies as the easiest form of baking. I disagree with that. 

Personally I find cakes to be much less troublesome; I can't think of more than two instances where I seriously messed up a cake (and both times it was because of a notable mistake on my part), whereas I've had countless cookie misfires, even while following recipes to the letter. 

Meh. 

Not this time, though!

Of course, it helped that the recipe is from that veritable cookie lover's Bible that is Decorating Cookies: 60+ Designs for Holidays, Celebrations & Everyday, by Bridget Edwards.

Same of you might remember me raving about her (and her blog, Bake at 350) back when planning my Susan gingerbread cookies - which I made for a party we never had. Drat! - only this time I picked a chocolate dough. Kids adore chocolate cookies and that's a fact!

(Plus, this recipe has Nutella in it. Your argument is invalid.) 

Unlike my previous gingerbread experiment, these cookies baked flat and even and didn't spread at all. OMG I'm so happy about that!
That might be because I've been using cookie cutters, as opposed to cutting manually around a template - which allowed me to work quickly, manhandling the dough as little as possible. 
Also, I allowed the raw cookies a fair 10 minutes in the freezer before they went into the oven. And finally, I splurged on a few extra cookie sheets, so I didn't have to keep using the same one by refrigerating it with water between batches. I really believe it makes a world of difference!

Oh, and speaking about cutters: I got mine from WarpZone, an Etsy shop I am head-over-heels in love with. It's a nerdy baker's paradise!
They 3D-print cutters in every geeky flavour you can dream of - from anime to Game of Thrones, from Dr Who to My Little Pony... You name it, they have it!
And if they don't, they can make one from your own drawing. How awesome is that? 

I got the whole Super Mario Bros. range from them, knowing how huge a fan my hun's kiddo is... but I didn't want to mix up dozens of different icing shades all at once, so I stuck with three subjects: our two hero plumbers, Paper Mario-style... 

...plus the iconic 1-up mushroom. 

Hee hee! Aren't they friggin' adorable? Squee! 

..And here are the freshly iced cookies! 

Since kids are going to eat them, I didn't trust raw egg whites and used Wilton's Meringue Powder instead. 

I have mixed feelings about it, franky - it's super-easy to mix and takes colour well, and it doesn't clog up in the squeeze bottle's nozzle nearly as much as "real" royal icing. It seems to be sturdier, too - less brittle and crunchy, somehow more like candy melts than icing. 

On the other hand, it feels slightly chalky in my mouth, and the flavour, while not at all bad, is just different. 

Still, better safe than sorry!

Susan Sto Helit gingerbread cookies, or: Death by Royal Icing!

Learn to walk before you run.

Wise words indeed. Yet I'm afraid I am a bit like Alice - who "generally gave herself very good advice, though she very seldom followed it."

Case in point: for my very first attempt at Royal Icing EVAH, I couldn't pick a regular cookie cutter shape, to be decorated easily with, I dunno, polka dots or something.

Nossir!

It had to be a complex shape - a character cookie, no less! - requiring icing in 6 different colours and/or consistencies. Six.

There are times when I wonder if I am a closet masochist.

Then again, these cookies are supposed to be the favors for my sweetie's Discworld-themed party, so I really wanted them to be nice!

Now there are many baking blogs out there specializing in cut-out cookies, and all of them are choke-filled with useful tips for the budding decorator. I browsed a dozen or so while trying to work up the courage to try dabbling in Royal Icing myself, and from each and every one I learned something useful - but in all honesty, I couldn't have done it witout Bridget and her wonderful blog, Bake at 350. 
I've been reading her feeds through Google Reader for ages and even tried a few recipes in the past, but as far as cookie art goes, I had always admired her mad skillz from a safe distance.
Well, I told myself, No more. Time to take the plunge!

Since we're planning to watch Hogfather, my subject of choice had to be either Death or Susan. Now, much as I love the Discworld's Reaper, giving around Death cookies for our guests to take home seemed a tad dodgy... so I decided I'd go for his luvverly niece instead!
Luckily I own a full set of Paul Kidby's cutesy coasters, so I simply had to do an enlarged copy of the Susan design to use as my template!

Mixing up the dough was the easy part. I made gingerbread instead of regular sugar cookies, because I love winter spices so much! (I make no excuses here...)
I took care to chill the dough as recommended, but even so I had trouble getting more than a couple shapes from each batch I rolled. 
I obediently kneaded the scraps back into my dough reserve, every single time - then chilled, rolled out to the correct thickness, carefully traced my template with an X-Acto knife... and by that time the dough had gone soft already, so back into the freezer it went. 
It took forever, but in the end I can say I'm super happy with my cookies - such a jummy, crunchy, spicey blank canvas they are!

Onwards to the decorating part!

Bridget has a favourite Royal Icing recipe involving meringue powder, but since this ingredient is a bit hard to come by where I live, I resorted for advice to my other decorating guru: Joshua John Russell. He teaches a Modern Piping course on Craftsy, a platform I'm hopelessly addicted to - you need to pay for it unfortunately, but they often do discounts, and if you're the type of person who learns best by watching (like I am), it's well worth splurging a few bucks on it. 
In short: JJ does Royal Icing the old-fashioned way, with real egg whites (I used pasteurized ones to be on the safe side). I whipped up a batch and was ready to go!

Much as I had learned from my wonderful online teachers, I was not going to splash Royal Icing on my cookies directly, period. 
So I grabbed my trusty baking paper and set out making transfers. 

As you can see, they didn't turn out too shabby, considering my lack of experience. 

This is where Bridget's blog proved immensely precious - not so much technique-wise (although I got invaluable information on that regard as well, and I still have tons of stuff to learn from her), but in demystifying the process as a whole, so that I could build enough confidence to try it for real. 

I won't lie here: making and tinting Royal Icing is tedious, time-consuming and, above all, messy business, but you can get it right, or right enough anyway, at your first go. If you're like me in that the mere idea of wasting perfectly fine ingredients makes you cringe, you don't need to worry - IT... COULD... WORK!

My transfers are far from perfect - there are bubbles in the royal icing, and I didn't have a damp brush at hand to flatten out those unsightly peaks I got while piping the outlines - but I'm happy with them. 

They were surprisingly sturdy, too, so that I managed to get them off the baking paper and onto the actual cookies without breaking a single one. Hooray! 

I "painted" a little corn syrup on the cookies, then simply placed my Susans on them. Turns out that, despite all the chilling and such, the cookies did spread a little while baking - drat!

The thickness, too, was not as even as I was hoping; this actually gave me some trouble, because the Royal Icing shatters just by blinking at it wherever it isn't resting squarely on the cookie (in the pic below you can see the cracks in the scythe's blade and in her cloak)... but hey, it wasn't a particularly forgiving shape to begin with, with all the sharp edges and protruding bits. I suppose I should have expected cracks to happen. Which is not to say they don't irk me like you wouldn't imagine. 

The final touches included painting on the edible metallic dust, and attaching a tiny silver dragee in the middle of the splotches that were supposed to be her necklace... 

...and finally, here's how my party favors look like, all packaged and ready to go! 

They are biding their time in my freezer now - my sweetie's birthday was on January 19th, dammit! - waiting for a day when the stars will be right and neither the two of us nor our guests will be otherwise busy. 

Of course you can count on me to tell you how his unbirthday party turns out in the end! 

...Gee, what's up with all the Alice in Wonderland references anyway? 

Peppermint Kiss Sugar Cookies, or: Is Xmas over yet?

There is one little thing you need to know about me: I do not care about "seasonal".

I am known to fancy persimmons in April, rhubarb in December, pumpkin in June or what have you. At any given time my freezer drawers will be bursting with ingredients I squirreled away months before, so when one of my ill-timed cravings hits, I am ready.
This arrangement works especially well for me since I'm broke most of the time (wanna try being a foodie on a CSR's budget, hmm?) and it's cheaper for me to grab the leftover seasonal goodies after the holiday's over and the prices plummet.

I won't deny, of course, that my main reason for despising seasonality in food may be that I got the "Mary Mary, quite contrary" bug pretty bad.
Take peppermint, for instance. It's one of my favourite things in the world (and hands down my favourite when paired with chocolate), and I would gladly eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day of my life - except in the week-or-so that goes from mid-December to Xmas. You know, when everybody and his dog is baking candy cane-flavoured anything, as if there's a global-level flash mob going on or something.

This is why I baked my test batch of these cookies in mid-October, with candies I had bought back in January, and kept sitting in my fridge during the summer months.

They were delicious (why, of course - we're talking peppermint sugar cookies here, gents!) but not perfect. In retrospect I think I overbaked them, because they ended up far crispier than your average crinkle cookie.

And I'm baking them again now, with Kisses I ordered online and had shipped all the way from the other side of the big pond. Talk about a time-consuming mise en place!

Once you can get you dirty paws on some of these elusive Peppermint Kisses (and, possibly, the baking chips Hershey makes in the same flavour around Xmas, so you don't have to unwrap another bunch of them just to chop them up), the recipe's actually very easy. 

You can get it HERE, by the way! 

It's weird how I still am unable to automatically associate the colour red with anything peppermint-flavoured. 

I mean, the rational part of me knows it's because of candy canes, only... every time I see the iconic red-and-white stripes, the first thing that occurs to me is strawberries and cream, because these are the flavours I grew up associating the colours with. To me, mint candies must be green or white, or both.  
Oh well...

Sugar crinkles are yummy and cute enough as-is, but pressing an unwrapped Kiss into each warm, soft cookie is what makes the magic happen. The candy will melt slightly and go all creamy inside and shiny on the outside... 

...See? It's magic, I tell you!

As with all good sugar cookies, these have a slightly crunchy surface and a soft, crumbly heart. They're wonderful with coffee, or hot cocoa, or with your balsamic infusion of choice - and even more so on their own, so you can concentrate on the different textures and colours of the cookie and candy.

On a side note: sugar cookies freeze exceptionally well as a rule, and these are no exception. Only once they're thawed, the Kisses will have lost the creamy quality and gone back to their pristine condition of hard chocolates. Sad, really...

Now, about my manicure. Isn't it adorable?

If you want to treat youself to candy cane nails too, here's a video tutorial for you...

The idea of painting my nails to match the cookies I'm serving would never cross my mind normally, but this tutorial was so easy and fun, I just couldn't resist!