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.

Red Hots Apple Cider

I have this need to smell cinnamon all the time around these months, lol. Also, I still have some more Red Hots in a secret stash (my aunt sends candy in bulk) that Marguerite doesn't know about. If I don't do something about them, they just might still be around when cockroaches take over the world. Anyway, had apple juice as well, so why not some apple cider?

I thought it was a nice ruby red, but it lacked embellishment, hence... topped with whipped cream:

That still wasn't enough, so I added twigs of cinnamon pretzels and sprinkles of chocolate shavings. You can see it here.

Strawberry Wine from Baguio

Lookit! My cousin Cheska gave this to me when she got back from Baguio. It's strawberry wine. It may look harmless, like wine cooler or something like shandy, but it did daze me, lol. Probably because I treated it like a bottle of soda. It did leave the impression of being part strawberry syrup, part wine and mostly pink food color. :)

Do Grasshopper Pies Have Real Grasshoppers?

Yesterday, Marguerite and I made a grasshopper pie. We were inspired by Teri Shuester in Glee gorging on grasshopper pie, pretending to be pregnant (yes, we - mother and daughter are both Gleeks - Marguerite's just all about the performances, of course). I didn't have marshmallow creme or peppermint extract, so I ended up just melting peppermint candy along with the milk and marshmallows.

Ingredients:

30 Oreos (pounded and crushed by a three-yr-old)

2 T melted butter

3/4 C milk

30 large marshmallows

4 pieces of peppermint candy

whipped cream

green food color (optional)

We mixed butter and Oreos, pressed the mess into the pie plate to make a crust. Heated milk, tossed in candy and marshmallows to make marshmallow cream (added green dye to make it look all minty). Poured that into the pie shell, and then covered that with whipped cream. We then crumbled another Oreo to garnish the thing. Voilà!

 that's supposed to look green

 you can see some of the green I meant peeking out

Okay, the thing is, we haven't tasted it yet. I'll just have to update you on that part. For now, we think it looks good. :)