My Month in Baking: June 2011

June was a busy month for me. I tried to memorialize my month in baking, but then I just realized these are only pictures of about half the treats that left my kitchen. None the less:

Cookies

My friend’s soon-to-be Mother-In-Law is part of an annual charity bake sale.  She asked me if I would make some treats for the bake sale.  Each table is assigned a color.  The color assigned to her table was purple (and yellow for her partner’s table).  I made purple traditional French macarons filled with Lemon Curd Butter Cream (not pictured), yellow and purple layered rice krispies treats (not pictured), and decorated earl grey short bread/sugar cookies.

The bake sale had an overarching tea party theme, hence these cookies.  The frosting is a regular royal icing flavored with orange extract.  That was the special touch to these cookies.

Giant Cupcake Cakes

The kids my mom used to babysit were having a birthday party and I brought the cake.  The pink one is my homemade confetti cake recipe in a giant cupcake size (10 cup capacity) with Swiss Meringue Buttercream.  The blue one is an experimental snickers bar cake, in a slightly smaller large cupcake size (6 cup capacity), with a Swiss Meringue Buttercream as well.

Both of these pans were gifts, and I never used them before.  The fact the pans are so deep made it impossible to completely bake the larger cupcake thoroughly without the outside of the cake turning nearly rock hard.  If I had more time, I would have applied simple syrup to remoisten the cake.  The snicker cake looks a mess, a delicious mess, due to the inherent liquid quality of caramel.  As this cake was sliced, it became the leaning tower of cupcake.

Birthday Cake

There was another office birthday at the end of June, so another cake was in order.  I used the same confetti cake recipe I created in a previous post, except I exchanged the buttermilk for sour cream to ensure the cake was moist (and tried not to over bake it this time).

This cake came out perfect this time.  I put a little strawberry filling between the layers and frosted it with a Swiss Meringue Buttercream.  I added a little shortening to the SMBC, for better decorating consistency, and added the piped dot flowers.

I loved the way this cake came out.  It looked wonderful with all the different positions and sizes of flowers, not to mention the stems and leaves.

So far, July has not been a busy baking month, but I do have an apple tart in the oven as I type :-)