There's a monster in my closet! (And my tummy!)

AH! MONSTER!

Who? Me?

A COOKIE monster that is!

Let me begin with a bit of backstory as to how this cute, yet ultimately doomed little sucker came into being.

My favourite lecturer is leaving.

*cue wails of despair*

And he loves the Muppets, and Sesame Street. I am not kidding, every lecture has to have some form of puppet character mentioned in it or it just isn't complete.

And he's leaving us. Forever.

So what better send-off could there be than one of his favourite characters in cupcake form?

Seriously, can you think of one?

I thought not.

This entry is essentially going to be a 'how-to' decorating entry. You can use whatever cupcakes you like for this, I just used a plain vanilla cupcake, so as not to detract from the simple cuteness of the decoration.

And because my brain goes into meltdown if I have to make special cupcakes AND decorate them.

Not shown here: the flaming flecks of my frontal lobe coating the walls

So, to start off with, make the buttercream.

My recipe uses two tablespoons of butter/margarine to 1/2 a cup of pure icing sugar, I ended up making about 4 times this amount for 24 cupcakes.

Once your icing is all beaten to perfection, dye it blue.

Note: this will stain teeth, tongues and small children

Take a generous amount of your icing, and spread it evenly over the cupcake.

Or as evenly as you can manage

Next, take 1/2 a cup of dessicated coconut, place it in a zip-lock bag, add a few drops of blue food colouring, then knead it until the colouring is evenly distributed.

Mmmm... appetising...

Then, add the coconut to a bowl.

This step requires great skill, and hand-eye co-ordination

And dunk the cupcake in to coat the icing layer.

Goodbye, cruel world! *dunk*

Once you've iced and dunked your cupcake, take some large white chocolate melts, and attach smaller dark chocolate buttons to them with a little melted chocolate. Voilà! Eyes!

 Toothpicks are your best friend when decorating, you can use them for detailing, fixing mistakes, and poking in the eyes of sibling who try to pinch a snack

Press the eyes into the top half of the cupcake, feel free to make your cookie monster look as crazy, or as normal as you like.

I'm not sure what was in those cookies, but I like it....

Then comes the cookies, I just used the sugar cookie recipe found here:

http://procrasti-baker.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/cookie-capers-biscuit-bonanza-and.html

And added about 3/4 of a cup of chocolate chips to the mix before adding the flour.

Roll out the dough, cut it into circles, then cut off one edge, this will help it sit properly on the cupcake.

Off-cuts can be disposed of at your discretion... om nom nom

Now, fully assembled, these cupcakes are quite high and wouldn't fit into my container, so if you need to travel with them I'd recommend transporting the cookies separately and assembling them later.

C is for cookie, or it would be, if I had a mouth that could form the letter C

Once you have reached your destination for the gustation, simply jam the cookies flat-side down into the cupcakes and enjoy the cuteness!

Or stark-raving insanity, whichever you prefer

These were a great hit with my lecturer and classmates, and I never cease to be amazed at how popular baked goods can make a person!

Now that I think about it, he kinda looks like he's choking on that cookie, that's why his eyes are so big

Anyways, enjoy!

Procrasti-baker out.

Cookie capers, biscuit bonanza, and decorative deliciousness (Part 3)

Umm... Hi...

Yes, I am well aware of quite how long it's been since my last post.

I did tell you that this was not going to be a regular thing, didn't I?

I know I did.

Anyways, in typical me fashion, I shall make it up to you by completing my next few blogs in rapid succession.

 Maybe. 

If I can be bothered.

To be perfectly honest, it's kinda cold here, there's every likelihood my fingers will freeze off.

I hope you appreciate what I go through for you.

I was going to type 'Anyways' as a segue into my next line of thought, but then I realised I'd already done that...

Anywho, this blog is going to be the final in my cookie capers series, and it's on...

VEGAN CHOCOLATE-COATED SUGAR COOKIES

(le gasp!)

Om nom nom shiny deliciousness

There are two reasons I got into vegan cooking:

1. Because I have quite a few vegan friends.

2. Because tacking 'vegan' onto the front of something instantly makes my family think it's going to be all vile and healthy, and thus they won't eat it.

No matter how cute and delicious they look

Selfish? Maybe. 

Effective? Very.

Now, my recipe for vegan sugar cookes is essentially the same as for normal sugar cookies, so I'm just going to copy and paste and make the changes I need to.

185g of Nuttelex™, or some other butter substitute

1 cup caster sugar

1 teaspoon of Orgran® no-egg* + 1 tablespoon of water

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 1/2 cups plain flour

• Cream Nuttelex and sugar until light and fluffy
• Mix no-egg and water together until there are no lumps of no-egg left (I always seem to make a mess of this step, can't figure out why!)
• Add no-egg and vanilla essence to Nuttelex/sugar, mix until well combined
• Add flour, around half a cup at a time, switch to dough beaters or by hand when mixture becomes too thick for normal beaters
• Wrap dough in cling wrap and chill for about 2-3 hours (or stick it in the freezer for 20-30 mins, if you're impatient like me)
• Roll out the dough and cut into desired shapes (This dough is very soft, but not overly sticky, so if you're going to roll it between two sheets of baking paper, be careful not to roll it too thin)
• Bake at 150 degrees for about 10-12 minutes, or until bottoms are just lightly brown (cooking time depends on the size of your cookies)
• Leave to cool completely

*No-egg can be found in most health food shops, and apparently is available in a huge array of countries. If you can't find it, any egg substitute would be fine.

This recipe makes quite a lot of dough, which is great, because you can eat more of it before anyone notices

 Also, I often split my dough into two lots to refrigerate. It means it firms quicker and you don't have to have it all thawing out while you work with it.

 Funnily enough, no-one really notices if you've over cooked your cookies once they're smothered in chocolate

 Also, for this variation, keep an eye on your cookies while they're in the oven, because these tend to brown very quickly.

As for the chocolate,  I used Green & Black's® Organic Dark 85% Cocoa Chocolate. It's very bitter, but I think that works well with the sweetness of the biscuits.

NOTE: The label says 'May contain traces of milk solids' so it's at risk of containing contaminants, but the vegans I talked to had no issues with this. If it bothers you, or you're unsure, seek out a totally vegan brand of dark chocolate, or ask your friendly neighbourhood vegans for advice.

Melt the chocolate using whatever method works for you, I used a rather non-conventional double-boiler system:

It worked for me, so shut your cake-hole

Once it's all nice and melted, grab a spoon and just paint/spread a little chocolate over the backs of the biscuits, then leave them to set.

I'd recommend sticking them in the fridge for a bit, because mine didn't set too well sitting out on my kitchen bench.

Because who said veganism had to be healthy?

Now the more observant among you may have noticed that some of my cookies were half-dipped in the chocolate rather than prettily painted, this is how I started out, before I decided that it was a little too messy and fiddly and switched to painting.

Best part about baking is you can eat your mistakes.

Seriously, no-one has to know they even occured.

Unless you take photos, of course

All in all, I'd say this was a pretty decent baking effort. They kinda ended up tasting like teddy-bear biscuits.

So go forth and unleash your culinary prowess upon the masses of vegans starved for baked goods!

Procrasti-baker out.

Cookie capers, biscuit bonanza, and decorative deliciousness (Part 2)

And another post!

This one should be short and sweet.

And very cute.

Wanna know why?

Because it's TURTLES!

Seriously, who doesn't love turtles?!

These are called 'icebox cookies', I don't know why, maybe it's because there's a freakish amount of chilling involved when making them.

Because I'm lazy, and I wasn't originally going to make this into a post, I don't have photos of my baking process. 

 'Black magic' is usually accepted as my baking technique.

What I do have, is a link to the original website, so here it is: 

http://www.diamondsfordessert.com/2011/02/turtle-icebox-cookies.html

Their cookies are far tidier, cuter, and better lit than mine, so head there and check out their step-by-step cooking guide.

I seldom have time to fancy-schmnacy my photos, I know I'm procrastinating, but there's a limit.

All I can really offer here is a little guide on what I did differently, so here goes.

1. Instead of using matcha powder, which I have no idea how to procure, I simply added about a teaspoon of cocoa powder and some green food colouring, to roughly the same effect. I'd also add just a dash of milk to the greeny batch too, as mine got rather dry.

2. I found it useful to roll both dough logs out to the same length, and then flatten the green one. Just makes it easier.

Gimpy ones go to family members, usually the ones you like least.

3. I'd wash the inside of the green dough with a little milk, just to help it stick to the plain dough.

4. The recipe calls for something called 'black nonpareils', I couldn't be bothered finding them, so I just used extra chocolate to dot the eyes.

This little dude almost looks surprised, 'You're sticking me WHERE?!'

5. You might notice the heads and limbs on mine are rather a lot bigger than the originals, I didn't quite realise this at the time, and so I ran out of plain dough. If you prefer your turtles with bigger extremeties, make some extra plain dough for them.

6. I didn't have a teeny cookie cutter or a straw, but I found that the inside of an icing bag coupler of about the right size worked pretty well for the heads. For the limbs, I'm pretty sure you could just mould pieces with your fingers to about the right shape.

Chubby little turtles obviously can't reach the sea before being eaten.

These cookies weren't actually all that hard, and were a big hit. 

Because obviously tasty + cute = success

Like little turtle-y soldiers, lining up to meet their fate.

So, turtle cookies = awesomeness, and a few well spent hours.

Procrasti-baker out. 

Cookie capers, biscuit bonanza, and decorative deliciousness (Part 1)

Woo! Second post. Within some kind of semi-reasonable timeframe! 

Sorta. 

Maybe. 

Not. 

Anyways, this shall be a series of posts, and it's going to be quite a long one, as I have recently baked/decorated three different types of biscuit over the past few weeks.

First off, we shall start with this semi-disaster of cookie decorating:

No heckling, please.

Now, these may not look that bad, and they still tasted okay, but the more astute among you may have noticed a couple of small issues,

1. My ability to pipe in circles (or in general) is kinda sucky.

2. The colouring isn't particularly vibrant.

3. They are shiny, and so not dry (okay, you may not have noticed that one, but it was an issue)

If I were a magpie, the shiny would be perfectly acceptable

I'm going to address these issues in turn, in the hopes that maybe it will help someone to avoid repeating my mistakes, or offer me some words of wisdom that will help me not repeat them.

1. I think my inability to pipe is more due to a lack of experience/technique than an actual problem with my icing, I have been watching countless youtube videos of how to correct this, and so hopefully my next attempt will be a tad more aesthetically pleasing.

Again, they still tasted okay. And really, that's the important thing, right? Right? No? Okay

2. I was aiming for black icing, and vivid red icing. I kinda wound up with grey and tomato soup coloured icing. There are a few reasons for this, first of which being my red was made with liquid food colouring, which really isn't great for vibrant colours. The other was that my 'black' was done with black colouring paste, and I didn't realise exactly how much I'd need for it to work.

Next time, it appears that adding cocoa powder to my icing may help get it black, but that needs to be tested.

 Not shown here: the bucket of colouring used to get this far.

 

3. My icing took around 3 days to set. This is not normal, even for flood icing. And it wasn't that humid. One explanation I can come up with was that too much of my watering down for flood icing was done with food colouring liquid. Number two may be that it was simply too watered down. Number three is that the universe kinda hates me.

Number four is due to some other incompetence that I'm sure someone will call me up on.

Bottom line is: this wasn't a perfect attempt, but it was an attempt.

Sugar cookie recipe

(This came with my set of portal cookie cutters)

185g of butter, softened

1 cup caster sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 1/2 cups plain flour

• Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy
• Add egg and vanilla essence, mix until well combined
• Add flour, around half a cup at a time, switch to dough beaters or by hand when mixture becomes too thick for normal beaters
• Wrap dough in cling wrap and chill for about 2-3 hours (or stick it in the freezer for 20-30 mins, if you're impatient like me)
• Roll out the dough and cut into desired shapes (This dough is very soft, but not overly sticky, so if you're going to roll it between two sheets of baking paper, be careful not to roll it too thin)
• Bake at 160 degrees for about 10-15 minutes, or until bottoms are just lightly brown (cooking time depends on the size of your cookies)
• Leave to cool completely before icing

After baking your cookies, outline in royal icing (whatever recipe works for you), then water down your icing so that when you pick it up with a spoon and drop it back into the mixture, it smooths out within around 10 seconds. Flood cookies with icing, and use a toothpick to push icing into any gaps.

There are plenty of youtube/blogging tutorials on how to do this, so I won't detail it too greatly.

For the heart shaped swirls, simply pipe dots of a different coloured icing onto your flooded cookies before they dry, then swirl through the centre of the dots with a toothpick. It's easy, and looks pretty effective.

I hope this was helpful, or at the very least, somewhat amusing. 

More cookie capers to follow!

Procrasti-baker out.

Rainbow Birthday Cake

Well, now's the moment of truth, the first official Procrasti-baker post. Complete with recipes, pictures, and a whole lot of boring drabble that I'm sure most people skip over.

So, without further ado, let us begin this rollercoaster of deliciousness.

Today is my Mother's birthday, so I decided that I would make her a very special cake.

A rainbow cake.

Can't get much more special than that.

This is really just a plain buttercake recipe I've adapted from one of my Mum's old cookbooks, it's simple, but as you'll see later, probably not the best choice for a layer cake.

Anyways, first off, I gathered my ingredients:

1 cup of butter (at room temperature)

1 cup of caster sugar

4 eggs

4 cups flour

1 cup milk

1 tbsp vanilla essence

assorted food colourings

(I didn't photograph those, because in reality I wasn't organised and more pulled things out of cupboards when I needed them rather than having them all at the beginning. They're really only listed here because it's more convenient to have them in a list. So here's the ingredients, in a list.)

Then I gathered my equipment. I'd heard from a friend of mine that disposable metal baking pans are excellent for making layer cakes, so I thought I'd give it a go. At the very least, they're cheap, and easy to procure.

 I greased them really thoroughly, and added baking paper because I wasn't sure how much they'd stick.

Also, they had a pattern in the bottom, and I wanted my cakes flat.

To make the cake, I simply creamed together the butter and caster sugar*, added the eggs, one by one, then the vanilla essence. After that, I alternated adding flour and milk till everything was in the mixer, and kept beating till it was well combined.

*I cream the butter and sugar together till the mixture is pale and has a creamy consistency (shock), some people dissolve all the sugar, I'm too lazy/impatient.

Then it was a relatively simple task of dividing the mixture into seven bowls.

I don't think anyone really appreciated the amount of cleaning up I had to do afterwards.

And adding the food colouring to make the colours of the rainbow (I won't list them, go back to primary school). I used liquid food colouring, because that was all I had. Sometime in the near future I may invest in paste or gel colours, because these weren't vibrant enough for my tastes, but they turned out okay.

Yeah, my violet kinda looks like someone beat a smurf to death with a baseball bat.

I only had four pans, so I baked them in lots of four. Which is convenient, because more than that probably wouldn't have fit in the oven anyway.

 I don't think of them as 'thick', I call them 'space-occupyingly challenged'.

I had them in the oven for about 15-20 minutes, till they started getting a little brown, and a toothpick came out clean, you know the drill.

Next time I make this cake, I will find a runnier cake recipe, because this one is very thick, and doesn't spread well, so they didn't turn out quite as round and perfect as I would've liked. I will keep you posted, and possibly re-do this cake with a better recipe.

 My younger brother came home, "What's with the play-dough?"

 Little bugger.

After I'd cooled them, and chilled them in the freezer for a bit (about 10 minutes, till they were cold to touch), I cut some of the tops to make them flatter, then assembled them with layers of buttercream between colours and around the outside.

What do you do with uneven edges? Plug them with more icing, that's what!

My buttercream recipe is essentially 125g of butter with around 2 cups of pure icing sugar (give or take, depending on how thick you want your icing), thrown in a mixer and beaten till it doesn't get any paler. I made about 2.5 batches and still didn't have enough to cover it. Basically, it takes a lot of icing.

So, after about 3 hours of hard work, the cake looked pretty darn awesome, tasted okay (again, I need to find a better recipe), and Mum had a great birthday.

There are also plenty of leftovers, so I'm gonna look pretty darn awesome at Uni tomorrow.

Seriously, I have all of this to get rid of.

Until next time,

Procrasti-baker out.

Well, this is cosy

So, first post.
Before I launch into a step-by-step guide of my favourite treats, I figured I should make a few things clear:

1. I am not a master blogger.
This is not going to be a regularly updated blog. I might enjoy wasting my time, but that doesn't mean I don't have things to do.

2. I am not a master chef.
I do what I do for fun, and so sometimes things don't quite work out, but it's a learning curve, so if it helps someone, or makes someone shake their head and chuckle at my foolishness, then it's all worth it.

3. I am not a master inventor.
Most of my recipes I will adapt or use straight from other sources, and I will reference these where I can, but sometimes I miss things, but there's no infringement intended.

4. I am also not a master photographer.
I will have pictures, they will be taken by my cheaptastic camera, with my kitchen's lighting, and my shaky-cam handiwork. Deal with it. Nobody's perfect.

If I think of anything else I am not a master of, I shall post it along the way.

Procrasti-baker out.