Yep, I'm a slacker. Not when it comes to baking, just when it comes to blogging about baking. I've done quite a bit of baking since Christmas and I've uploaded the pics to Facebook, but I haven't sat down and written about them. Why, because it's easier to just quickly throw the pictures up on Facebook and call it a day. So here's all the stuff I've baked (hopefully I don't leave anything out).
This is a Banana Cake. It tastes like banana bread with a touch of cinnamon and is topped off with Cream Cheese icing. A new favorite in my house. I buy bananas a lot and normally they are eaten, but we run into times where I end up with several that are going bad and no one is touching them. Normally I make banana bread or muffins or I freeze them for smoothies. If I want to be healthy, I should stick with the muffins (it's a Weight Watchers recipe), but it we want super yummy; this is the way to go.
This next beauty is a yummy white sheet cake. Another new favorite at my house. The cake was thin and the icing was delicious.
Valentine's goodies! I made plain and chocolate sugar cookies and M&M cookies this year. The sugar cookies look a lot like last years.
Natalie is becoming quite the decorator. I flooded the cookies (did the background color) and she asked to get up at 6 a.m. so she could decorate them.
Natalie and I also made cake balls for the Father/Daughter dance at her school. I bought a cake ball roller at Christmas and we've been dying to try it out. It did a great job and should really speed things up for us next Christmas. I'm hoping to start making cake balls more throughout the year, but I've got to find places to take them so my family doesn't go into a diabetic coma eating them.
Natalie's Birthday cake. She wanted a plain white cake (box mix) with purple icing (homemade buttercream), topped off with polka dots. She doesn't like fondant, so I'd been keeping my eye out for something else to use. I found these candy dots at Michael's. I thought it looked like a circus cake, but Natalie didn't agree. The sugar dots were cute; but not very tasty. By the next day they were darkening up and dissolving into the cake.
I got real outgoing on Gerry's birthday; although none of it was baked for his birthday. He requested a dump cake, but wasn't feeling well, so asked me to wait to make it. So instead I made another banana cake, some sugar cookies, and tried a new recipe...iced brownies. They kind of taste like a yummy chocolate cake recipe I have, but do have more of a brownie like consistency. They were good; but I think I like the cake better.
Here are the sugar cookies I made. Andrea was going camping with her Girl Scout troop and I thought campfire cookies would be perfect to send. They didn't turn out quite like I'd envisioned. They cutter I found was kind of small, so there wasn't much room to make the fire look right. And since they were small, I decided to make shamrock cookies to go with them. Sorry there aren't many to look at. I remembered to take a picture after I'd already bagged most of them up.
I also made the Dump Cake for Gerry this past weekend and an Alabama Cake for him to take to a friend's house. Sorry I didn't take pictures of those. I make the Alabama Cake all the time, so it didn't cross my mind to take a picture. If you haven't had the Alabama Cake, then you probably have no idea what it is. We were in Alabama a few years ago for my father-in-law's funeral. A family friend brought this yummy chocolate cake with white icing over for the family. It was a big hit. As we are getting on the interstate to head back to TX Andrea ask "Mom, you didn't forget to get the recipe, did you?" The urgency in her voice had me worried at first that we had forgotten something and would have to turn around. Well I didn't have the recipe, but assured her I would get it. The guy that made it finally gave my mother-in-law the recipe, but said he thought it was right because he'd just thrown it together. Some of the amounts didn't look right to several baking friends. So I took that as a challenge. Based on his recipe, I searched the internet and found the perfect cake and icing recipe. It is really a Chocolate Buttermilk cake, but my family always calls it Alabama Cake since that is where we first had it and so that I know which chocolate cake they want.
Well that sums up my last 3 months of baking. Are you hungry now? I've got to find more people to eat my sweets or bake less because I can't keep eating so much of it. Don't get my wrong; I'd love to eat all of it; but my jeans just don't fit like they used to.
