Seeing Red

I think there have been too many strawberry desserts lately:

I made the strawberry hypocrite pie, tweaking this recipe. For the strawberry jam cake, I mostly followed this recipe. As for the cupcakes, they're actually store-bought and I just added buttercream frosting.

Cake Dilemma

Today is my daughter's birthday, but between all the handmade gifts and other details, I was so exhausted and was not able to bake her a cake. My husband got one from a bakeshop and I just personalized it with an M and a fondant strawberry (will edit this later to add a picture). She asked for a birthday cake, but Mark got a mango one. I think I'll bake her a cake tomorrow or on Friday, a proper strawberry one. :)

Mark's Birthay Cake

My husband recently celebrated his birthday and I decided to bake a cake instead of buying one. Since it's my first time making a birthday cake from scratch, I opted not to be too adventurous and just chose a simple white cake recipe. I wanted to do a fondant, but chose the uncooked recipe and that flopped. I should have paid attention when it said "for candy" (somebody was able to use it for cake though, accdg to the reviews). I should have just gone with the traditional cooked with gelatin version. Anyway, I was still able to produce an edible and "charming" cake. Here it is:

Vanilla Cake with Orange Vanilla Frosting

This is the first cake I made after a long baking hiatus. I followed this simple vanilla cake recipe. For the frosting, I mostly followed this recipe, but added a bit of orange extract instead of doing the replacements indicated. It was a success although it didn't look very pretty. It was also a dense type of cake, in case you want to go for fluffiness.

Update on My Kitchen

Long time no post... I have actually been busy in the kitchen. Now that we've moved back in with my parents, I hardly do any cooking at all. That's why I've mostly been focusing on baking. I know I'd cooked  a few things in the old apartment that I didn't blog about here. However, I did blog about them over at Spinning Lovely Days, so go see:

Blueberry pancakes and Spanish tortilla

Cabbage quiche

Ratatouille

Now for the baking I've been doing:

Bread

Apple pie

Mini banana muffins

Banana cream pie

Colcannon for St. Paddy's

Hmm, just when I was thinking about retiring this blog, I publish another post. On St. Paddy's Day, Marguerite and I made Colcannon. Since I don't think I've even ever personally come across a curly kale, I used cabbage. Found my recipe here. Marguerite actually liked it. Have to keep that in mind. That's a good way to get cabbage in her.