R2D2 Cake decorating steps & tips

A reader emailed me the other day and asked for more pictures and instructions on how I decorated the R2D2 cake for my son’s birthday (posts here and here).  So I went back and dug up some more pictures and decided to post more detailed instructions and tips here for everyone to see.

I used this “vintage” Wilton R2D2 cake pan that my mother in law used for my husband’s birthday cakes when he was a kid, around 1980. 

1.  Be sure to thoroughly grease and flour your cake pan and remove the cake from the pan about 10 minutes after removing from the oven.  This particular Wilton cake pan has lots of little indentions for R2D2’s different features.  If you’re not careful, some of them may end up staying in the pan.  Not that I know from personal experience or anything.

2.  Make your cake a couple of days ahead of time.  Once fully cooled on a wire rack, wrap the cake in paper towels and then plastic wrap and place back into the cake pan (after you’ve washed it) and either refrigerate or freeze it until you’re ready to use it.

4.  Make your icing and mix your colors maybe the day before you decorate. 

**Spreading out these steps helps me to better manage my time so that I don’t spend as much time all in one day.

5.  You will need four colors of blue using a light blue, such as Wilton Sky Blue, for your base color. 

Start by mixing your regular butter cream or cream cheese icing.  I think it only requires 1 recipe worth.  I would say take about half of it and mix your #4 or lightest blue color.  Put about 1/4 aside.  Then mix more blue to make it darker for your #3 blue color.  Put some of that aside, and mix more blue and possibly 1 teeny tiny drop of black to get your #2 blue color.  Finally pull some of that out to mix in more blue and probably just a little black to get your #1 darkest blue color.

6.  I do not frost the cake before decorating.  A) It would cover up the detail of R2D2’s features which would make it way more difficult to decorate and 2) We tend to not like tons of icing.  Using just the icing for decorating the cake to icing ratio is much better for us.

7.  Pretty much, I would decorate it in order from 1 to 4 and then white using the patterns as pictured on the pan’s insert.  Stars in some areas and the back and forth snake type pattern in other areas. 

 
First, using a number 4 (or 5 or 6) tip, outline everything. 

 
Next, using either the number 17 or 18 decorating tip, begin filling in the areas as numbered above.  I use the smaller #17 tip for smaller areas and the larger #18 tip for larger areas.

 
8.  Finally, after all the blue is done, fill in the white areas and use red M&M’s or Skittles for the lights on R2D2’s “head”. 

If I have baked the cake a couple of days before and made the icing colors early, then decorating only takes me a couple of hours.

Best of luck to you!!!  Enjoy!

Darth Vader Sandwich Cookies

If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you’ll know that we are pretty big Star Wars fans around here.  So it wasn’t any stretch for me to do an R2D2 birthday cake for my son two years in a row. 

Yep.  Even though I made one last year, when we decided to go play laser tag with some friends for his birthday this year, it just seemed natural that another R2D2 cake would be in order.

But what to do with it…. that was the question.  As I’ve said before, instead of goodie bags full of junk that gets thrown away, I’d much rather send the kids home with a party favor that consists of a home baked treat of some kind.  But what could I do this year, other than iced sugar cookies, with a limited amount of time?  That was the question.

So I pulled back out my Star Wars cookie cutters and I wondered to myself, “You know, I’ve always wanted to make homemade Oreos… I wonder…”

“Google,” enter stage right.

So, I found (and “Pinned”) a blog post where someone had made green tea Yoda sandwich cookies.  I showed them to Nathan to see if he would be interested.  “No,” he said, “but I do want Darth Vader ‘Oreos’.”

Well, okay then. 

With a plan in place, I set to work.

I know that Bridget at the Bake at 350 blog had made homemade Oreos before, so that was the first place I looked.  And, in fact, it was the recipe I decided to use. 

I’d say it worked out pretty well for me.

May the force be with you.  And my new 7 year old.

Mother’s Day at The Ballpark

If you follow me on the Twitters or have read this blog for a while, you might have noticed over the last couple of years that we’re pretty big Texas Rangers fans around here.  So it should be no big surprise that we chose to spend Mother’s Day out at The Rangers’ Ballpark in Arlington (my favorite sports venue other than those located in College Station) watching our Texas Rangers take on the Angels of Anaheim.

Now, as much as we’re Rangers fans, we also have a bit of a soft spot for a particular Angels left fielder who is a Texan, Vernon Wells.  So this is how we looked on Sunday evening…

Apparently, we like #10… regardless of the team. :)

What a fun evening it was watching a resounding Rangers win with Nelson Cruz hitting a Grand Slam and even getting to see Vernon Wells hit one out as well.  I’d like to think that we were his lucky charm. 

I hope you had a nice Mothers’ Day as well.

Sully Says…

“Happy New Year!”

And he also says that we are very excited that the Aggies finally won a bowl game!

*gasp*

I know!

And you know what? We were there. 

At the last minute on Thursday, I texted Mike that I had found some fairly inexpensive tickets online and did he want to go since the kids were already at his mom’s house.  Then he called some friends who then said they would love to go with us and were going to take their kids…. so it ended up being a whole family affair.  Which was an absolute blast. 

We purchased really cheap seats that had nosebleed inducing potential that were part of a Papa John’s Pizza deal and included pizza and drinks.  This was our view:

But then Mike came across some stadium employees who were swapping out upper level tickets to fill up the lower levels.  He did that and then this was our view:

Nice, huh? And it was a totally different game experience with the fans much more dialed in and complete with my son covering his ears most of the time because of the noise.

We had a great time for it being our kids’ first Aggie football game experience.  There was face painting, bounce houses and other activities before the game.  I even partook of the face painting experience. 

I had to do something to make up for the horrible Houston hair weather we were having that morning. 

One of the most moving scenes of the whole day came at the end.  Number 67 belonged to Joey V, one of our players that was killed in a car wreck a few days before Christmas.  Another player wore his number for the game and Joey V was honored several times before, during and during this scene after the game.

We still need to take these kids to Kyle Field for a game, but that will come in time.  It’s hard to spend that kind of money when they aren’t really into it.  This was actually a much less expensive option, oddly enough. 

I haven’t said much about Aggie stuff for a while here on the ol’ blog, and I felt like our first bowl win in 10 years was a fine time to do it.  It’s been an interesting year in Aggie life as our days of Big XII football are now officially over.  We are headed to the SEC with a new football coach.  Sure, we’ll take our lumps the first year or so.  And even though I’ll miss playing against some of these Texas teams, I’m believing that it will be a good move. 

Out with the old and in with the new.

Kind of like the new year.

Sully also said for you to have a “ruffulous” 2012.

Christmas Genealogy Paper Chain

I’ll bet you didn’t know that my husband and I teach 1st and 2nd graders on Sunday mornings.

Yep.  Last year we taught along with another friend, but he moved up to another class and this year, we’re on our own.  Which has been a little challenging to say the least as our average class size has doubled since last year.  We went from averaging about 8 each Sunday morning last year to averaging about 16 each Sunday morning this year.  To the elementary school teachers out there, 16 may seem like a cake walk… but we’re not talking about school.  Sunday School is a whole different animal and, admittedly, I am not a teacher by training, vocation or gifting.  So to us, 16-18 each week is HUGE. 

But I digress.

One of the things we enjoy doing with our class is a “Genealogy of Christ Paper Chain.”  We find it to be a really good teaching tool to talk about Messianic prophesy on a level that 1st and 2nd graders can comprehend and the links of the chain act as a visual to link together the old and new testaments of the Bible.

I thought my husband was very creative with the lesson portion of the morning.  He started out by talking about the Old Testament and the New Testament and the difference being that the Old was before Jesus lived on earth and the New was during and after Jesus.  Then he began reading some scriptures and asked the kids if they knew whether it came from the OT or NT and began to work in some scriptures of Messianic prophesy.  He quoted Micah 5:2 which talks about Bethlehem among others which refer to Christ to try to trip them up a little and make them think he was reading from the New Testament so that it would be a surprise that it came from the Old.  Once we were able to establish with the kids that the Bible talks about Jesus in the OT, we were able to talk about how the promise of the Messiah was made all the way back in Genesis and we began to read prophesies about the family that the Messiah would come from all the way back to Abraham.

We know that the details of our lesson probably did not all stick.  But we don’t expect them to.  If those 16 kids walked away from our class knowing that the Bible talks about Jesus in the Old Testament all the way back to Genesis, then we’ve accomplished our goal, in my opinion.

So, back to the genealogy chain… in pictures, here’s what we did:

For our class, I pre-printed all the names from the Matthew 1 genealogy of Christ on colored strips of paper.  Older kids could write them down themselves.  And the Luke 3 genealogy from Adam to Jesus could be used as well.

Because I have to have things very organized for our group of 1st & 2nd graders, I put all the names in order with Jesus on bottom and Abraham on top.  I put them in sandwich baggies as shown below so that after starting with Abraham, each child could just take the next strip of paper with the next name on it out of the bag and the rest would remain in the bag and in order.  The links of the chain may be fastened with staplers or with tape.

Now, when you have 16 1st and 2nd graders working on such a project, there is absolutely no time whatsoever for pictures to be taken.  But with two kids working on it at home, it was a fairly peaceful affair.

 
And when they’re done…

I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for a fun way to bring my family and especially my kids back to what we are truly celebrating at Christmas time… the birth of Christ.  I hope that this is an idea that might help some of you in your endeavors to do the same thing. 

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Sugar Cookies

In preparation for a little Christmas shin-dig I’m having at my house this week, I decided to make and decorate some Christmas cookies.  Lots of Christmas sugar cookies.

It is no easy task to find the time to undertake such an endeavor with a job outside of my home, two active kids in grade school with homework and projects galore and everything else that a mom has to do.  So rather than try to do it all in one single block of time, I did it in stages.

In a spare 20 minutes I had one day, I made the cookie dough.  And since it needs to refrigerate anyways, I just put it in the refrigerator until I had time to bake the cookies the next day.  After baking the cookies the next day and allowing them to cool completely, I bagged them in zipper plastic bags and froze them until I was ready to decorate them, nearly a week later.

I made all of the icing one morning when I had a spare 15 minutes and then covered it and set it aside until later that evening when I could get around to it again.  That evening, I colored all the icing and decorated one batch and finished up the other two batches the next day. 

Taking it in little chunks like that really helped me to not feel overwhelmed by the task I had put before myself.

I saw an idea recently that intrigued me, so I decided to monkey with my tried and true sugar cookie recipe.  I removed 4 ounces of butter and replaced it with 4 ounces of cream cheese.  The outcome…. delicious!!  The cream cheese adds just a little zip to the flavor that I felt gave the sugar cookies a whole new dimension.  My updated Cream Cheese Sugar Cookie recipe is posted over on the recipe blog.  Just click on the link.

>>>Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies

In the midst of all the baking, freezing and decorating, I set some of the cookies that would eventually become ornaments on racks on our kitchen table to thaw so that I could decorate them while sitting down in a chair.  I was in the other room when I heard my husband yell, “NO SULLY!  BAD DOG!”

I came back into the kitchen and saw that something was missing.

He was really sorry.  Sorry that he got caught, at least.

Lesson learned.  Sully is now big enough to get his front paws on TOP of the table and reach food that is sitting there.  A far cry from where he started. 

I made Christmas trees, ornaments and stars all using techniques that were new to me that I learned from the brilliant Bridget over at Bake at 350.  While mine are not as good as hers, I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out for the most part.

Merry Christmas, y’all !!

A new adventure with Tomatillo Jalapeño Jam

I got the most wonderful gift from a dear friend when we hosted a fall gathering of friends at our home right before Halloween. She brought me a paper lunch sack loaded with jalapeños from her garden.

As I stood there and stared at these beautiful gems I wondered what on earth I would do with them all.  Then it struck me that I could make jalapeño jelly.  So then the search began for a recipe.  The search was pretty short.  I scanned the internet and then realized I had a cookbook in my possession that may have just what I was looking for.  And it did.  More on that in a moment.

I also had to wrap my mind around the idea of canning.  It was a thing that struck fear into my heart.  I don’t know why as I have watched my mother successfully can everything from peach preserves to pear halves my whole life.  Even still, it always seemed to be this mystical magical thing that only women who survived the depression and the dust bowl should know how to successfully accomplish.

I mean, what if I don’t do it right and everyone gets food poisoning?

But, I decided to put on my big girl panties and give it a try.

The recipe I found came from Lisa Fain’s new The Homesick Texan cookbook.  I have followed Lisa on Twitter for quite some time and have always enjoyed her blog.  So when I found out she was coming to the Le Creuset store in Dallas to sign her new cookbook, I absolutely had to take the opportunity to go and meet her in person.  (Missing a World Series game in the process, y’all.)

And I’ll tell y’all, she is just as precious in person as she seems in her book and on her blog.  And her grandma, the one she talks about in the book and whose hands are pictured in it… she was there.  I spent several minutes talking to her and she reminded me ever so much of my Nana. 

All that to say that if you have a cook in your life, her cookbook, The Homesick Texan, is a perfect gift.  Or a Le Creuset dutch oven would work nicely also. (Especially since I scored one for 40% off that night and handed it to my hubby and said, “Merry Christmas to me!”  He may or may not have rolled his eyes.)

In her book is a recipe for Tomatillo Jalapeño Jam.  I really liked the idea of using tomatillos and the addition of some additional spices like clove and allspice to this jam really got my attention.

 
Since I was trying to make enough for some Christmas gifts, I multiplied the recipe a couple of times and learned a very valuable lesson in the process.  You CAN multiply a jam recipe too many times.  I think I had too much liquid and therefore it initially did not set up properly.  But I cooked it just a tad bit more the next day and added just a little bit of unflavored gelatin and that did the trick. 

And you know what?  The canning part of the whole thing was not a huge deal.  In fact, it was kind of fun to boil the jars, remove them from the water and wait to hear the pop of the lid sealing.  I don’t know how it happens, but it does, and it’s as cool as all get out to tap the top of that jar and hear it go, “PING.” 

So now I have some awfully good tasting gifts to give for Christmas.  I think two jars will go to the kids’ teachers and the others to my cousins. 

So, if you’re still reading this and are interested, here is the recipe (used with Lisa’s permission):

Tomatillo Jalapeño Jam
copyright 2011 The Homesick Texan Cookbook, page 36

Yield: 1 pint

1/2 pound tomatillos, husks removed, chopped
2 jalapeño chiles, seeds and stems removed, finely diced
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 cup lime juice
2 teaspoons lime zest

Special Equipment:
1 pint-size jar or 2 half-pint-size jars
(I recommend the latter)

1.  Sterilize the jars and lids in either a pot of boiling water or dishwasher.

2.  In a pot, add the tomatillos, jalapeño, vinegar, sugar, ground cloves, ground allspice, ground cinnamon, lime juice, lime zest and 1/2 cup of water.  Bring to a boil and then turn the heat down to a low simmer, stirring often, for 45 minutes or until it’s thick and syrupy.

3.  Pour the jam into the jars, then cover with the lids and fasten with the ring.  Let it cool and then refrigerate.  The jam will become more solid after a few hours in the refrigerator and will last for a month, refrigerated.

 

{Side note: For those of you who are like myself and love to use a thermometer for things like this, I did some research in my On Food and Cooking book and found that the temperature should reach 217°-221° F “which indicates that the sugar concentration has reached 65%”.  The author, Harold McGee, also suggests that “a fresher flavor results when this cooking is done at a gentle simmer in a wide pot with a large surface area for evaporation.” Page 297.}

Enjoy!

Homemade Butter. Just like the Pilgrims?

Well, maybe not *just* like the pilgrims did it, but homemade butter nonetheless.

Our school has a tradition in each grade.  My son is in 1st grade this year and the big tradition for them is the Thanksgiving celebration and feast.  During the party portion of the day, also known as the whole first half of the day, the kids are split into small groups and they rotate from station to station.  These stations include teepee stories, snacks, bracelet making, necklace making (of the macaroni variety), bows and arrows (as we pray against any impalements) and finally butter making.

Which is where I come in.  Because, you know, I’m an expert on making butter.

Or not.

Regardless, it was certainly fun.  And exhausting.

But more about that later.

You may be wondering how on earth one might make homemade butter.  Well guess what… we’re just going to subtitle this post here today as “Butter Making 101” and I’ll try to give you a lesson.

Start with clean baby food jars.  I know that the lids aren’t on these, but you need the lids.

Fill them about half way up with heavy cream.

You may add a little salt if desired.  Then tightly screw on the lid.

When you are doing 46 of these for your son’s entire first grade at school, it will look something like this:

And finally, begin to shake.

Your child will start out very excited to be on this journey of making his or her own butter.  They will smile and giggle as they shake. 

Your child might even break out into song.  Like:

“Shake – Shake - Shake!

Shake – Shake - Shake!

Shake your butter!

Shake your butter!” 

Or:

“You know you make me want to shake! 

Kick my heels up and shake!

Throw my hands up and shake!

Throw my head back and shake!”

Things will be all nice and rosy until about two minutes later and the children all of the sudden wilt into little moaning whining puddles that used to resemble happy children as they complain and ask, “Is it done YET?”

That’s where your big strapping arms come in. 

Yeah, I know.

So as you shake, at first you clearly hear the liquid sloshing around.  Keep shaking.  Then you hear less and less and the jar is completely white and you can’t see a thing in there. Keep shaking. Then all of the sudden, you will clearly be able to see in the jar and it will look like a single mushy mass. Keep shaking just a little more. Then that single mushy mass will separate and become a butter ball and buttermilk.

Now before I began this project today, someone told me to keep the cream cold and that it would work better if the cream was cold.  These kids and the adults helping to chaperone them (okay, more the adults than the kids if I’m honest) shook these little jars for 10-13 minutes.

A different someone during the day said that they thought it would work better if the cream were more at room temperature.  So that got me to wondering.  And I did a very scientific experiment. 

I left a jar out on our countertop for a little while (that’s a very specific and scientific measurement of time, right there).  Then set the timer as my daughter shook it up.  It took her 3 minutes flat.

I think I’d be going with closer to room temperature if I ever did this again.  Because after two and a half hours of shaking cream into butter for a bunch of soft 1st graders who couldn’t shake their jars more than 1 1/2 minutes, my arms were killing me.  I mean, who needs a Shake Weight when there’s baby food jar butter to be made?

I left the school, went home, immediately took some Advil, put huge ice packs on my arms and began looking into cryotherapy. 

(As of this writing, it is in the evening of the same day and I have warned my husband that I do not intend to lift a single thing tomorrow.)

Let me give you just a little piece of advice.  If your son’s first grade teacher asks you to be in charge of the butter making station for the Thanksgiving celebration, just politely say no.  Your arms will thank you for it later.

In all seriousness, it was a blast and I really enjoyed getting to impart a little bit of food science to them as I tried to describe the butter making process on a 1st grade level.

If you have some cream and a small jar around, I suggest trying this with your child some time.  They might just appreciate that butter that they use on their toast or corn on the cob just a little more if they know how it’s made.

 

Technorati Tags: homemade butter,baby food jar butter,thanksgiving,children in the kitchen,children cooking

R2D2 Birthday Cake

We recently celebrated my son’s 6th birthday and if you didn’t know, he’s a little bit of a Star Wars fan.

 
Just a little.

So it only stands to reason that he would have a Star Wars birthday cake.

Well, it just so happens, that Mike was a bit of a Star Wars fan when he was a little guy as well and his mom thought he should have a Star Wars birthday cake, too.  And when she moved out of the house Mike grew up in several years ago, we came into possession of the “Empire Strikes Back” R2D2 character cake pan that she used some thirty years ago for Mike’s birthday cakes.

So now it was my turn to make an R2D2 cake for my son using that same pan.

 

 

This six year old was pretty happy!

I made a strawberry cake (from cookscountry.com) and used cream cheese icing (which is always a challenge to work with because of the relative ease with which it melts). 

Poor R2 (Artoo?).

BBA Challenge #24 - Panettone

As you can see from the dates of all my pictures, I baked this bread much earlier in the year. I felt like it might be time to actually post this.

Maybe.

Panettone is one of those breads that I was not really looking forward to. It has all kinds of dried fruits and didn’t really look like it was up my alley from the pictures. Basically it looks like fruit cake except in a yeast bread form.

So maybe it’s timely that I’m posting this around Christmas-time.

The only thing is that fruit cake has never been the slightest bit appealing to me. Maybe it’s the pecans. Maybe it’s the candied fruit. May it’s the low proportion of cake to the other two ingredients. I don’t know. But me and fruit cake = meh.

So getting to this bread was not terribly exciting for me. However, as part of the challenge, I was interested to make it and see how it went.

I always look for new ways to use my wild yeast starter, and when I found out that this was one, I was pretty excited.

Wait, have I ever shown you a picture of my wild yeast (sourdough) starter? Well, like any proud mama, here she is…

Isn’t she just the cutest thing?!?! All those bubbles just make her beautiful, don’t you think?

Ahhh. But moving on.

I don’t know why, but I found it interesting that when I combined the vanilla, rum and orange extract that the mixture became cloudy. I felt a little like a mad scientist as it happened.

Muaaaahahahahaha!

But I digress.

Next came the process of seeing what fruits I was going to use. I’ve already mentioned my aversion to the idea of candied fruits so clearly, it would be some blend of dried fruits; the exact blend would be dictated by what I had on hand. Ultimately, my fruit combination consisted of raisins, dried cranberries, dried cherries, dried dates, and dried apricots.

And then came the process of actually making the dough and bread….

The bread turned out beautifully.

To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t hate it when I tried it. And my husband actually said he liked it.

I made some of the dough into little muffin type rolls with the intent of doing the “Holiday Bread Brule” as described in the Grace Note on page 206. Without going into great detail, we’ll just leave it at… not so much. But the bread pudding it made was pretty good and would be a nice addition to any Christmas or holiday dessert menu.

I don’t know that this would be one that I would do a lot, but would definitely consider it for making bread pudding.

To see my other Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge blog posts and to read about the challenge, go here.