The Birthday Bakery

Today is my son's 4th birthday party and we have lots of his friends and classmates coming over to help us celebrate so I baked up my usual storm for his birthday. This years theme is centered around a moon cake, my son's request, complete with a space shuttle and astronauts an American flag and even star shaped candles. 

  The moon cake. Pin It The cake itself is red velvet with a buttercream frosting. The cake was made using the Wilton baking pan for making a soccer ball (or baseball, basketball, etc) cake pan. 

I also made dozens of these moon cupcakes as we have too many people coming to the party to only serve the moon cake. I thought the flags were a nice, simple touch.

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Pin It I also made my first ever sugar-free cupcakes and frosting. A nice golden cake with a chocolate fudge frosting. I did taste the frosting and it is so yummy I could have eaten it till I was sick and my neighbor was my first taste tester of the cupcakes and couldn't believe these were sugar free. They absolutely were as I cleaned the mixer, stand and all, in between making the other cakes and these just to be sure there was no sugar added to these. 

I will say there are so many good Vegan recipes out there that I really don't miss the milk products much and these cupcakes (well the frosting at least) has convinced me that I could give up sugar if I needed too as well. Part of the trick to not missing out on all the stuff you think you will miss is really just learning to cook and bake, that way you have more control over what you eat and know that you aren't getting added things. 

The red velvet and buttercream recipes are from The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes. The sugar-free cupcakes and frosting are from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, there are also gluten-free recipes in there.

Moon Birthday Cake - Trial Run

As a pair of geeks I think my husband and I are pretty lucky to have a child going on 4 years old who is so completely obsessed with all things space and NASA so of course I wasn't surprised that he really wants an astronaut birthday party and wanted a moon cake complete with a space shuttle and astronauts on the surface of his moon cake. For the trial run I did not decorate it with the space shuttle and astronauts as I knew I would never be able to retrieve the toys from him once he saw them.

The trick to making the craters in the frosting was to let the cake sit for a while so the frosting would harden a bit and then I took a flat bottomed measuring spoon and dug it into the frosting until when I pulled it out of the frosting I got a nice crater, I used a tablespoon for all of the craters and wasn't too particular about how the craters came out as I know they don't need to look perfect to really look perfect as things that happen in nature never appear as perfect as we assume they would appear.

I used the Wilton cake pan for making soccer balls, baseballs, basketballs, etc and made a double batch of vegan red velvet cupcake mix and a single batch of the vegan buttercream frosting recipe from The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes. We did dig into the cake after dinner tonight and I will say that this pan leaves a bit of a tough area around the rim of the cake, but nothing I see a bunch of 4 year olds complaining about as my own almost 4 year old said he liked the cake and later asked for more of the cake.

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Lemon Pancakes with Raspberry Sauce (vegan)

This morning I made one of my favorite breakfasts, lemon pancakes with raspberry sauce. This vegan version of a dish I had at a restaurant once is so nice and light and refreshing and yet satisfying. I first found this particular recipe when our lemon tree had so much fruit on it that I had to go theme for a week or two and make everything I could to use up all of those nice lemons. I made lemonade, learned to make lemon Italian soda and found a bunch of other fun recipes like the lemon drop cookies that I posted earlier.

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Lemon Drop Cookies (vegan) and Mexican Mocha Brownies (gluten-free)

Pin It The other week we hosted a little Mexican food party at our house so I made these lovely vegan Lemon Drop Cookies (found in The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes), my husband's favorite cookies these days. They are like a little tea cookie coated in powdered sugar, the powdered sugar makes a nice contrast with the tartness of the lemon cookie. The cookies are quite tart without being coated in the powdered sugar, at least my lemon drop cookies are quite tart without the powdered sugar but that may just be because I have quite tart lemons on my lemon tree.


Pin It I also made these gluten-free Mexican Mocha Brownies for the party as a friend of ours is gluten-free so the cookies my husband wanted me to make would not be appropriate for her to eat, as someone with a food allergy myself I try to accommodate others with food allergies and dietary concerns as I want to enjoy the food and want everyone else to be able to enjoy the food as well. These brownies were quite nice although the coffee in the brownies meant they were not really for kids or those who are pregnant. This was only my second gluten-free dairy-free recipe and I thoroughly  enjoyed these brownies, but look forward to trying them again when I can make the raspberry sauce to go along with them (maybe I will try the main recipe as opposed to the Mexican Mocha variation) and maybe I will open that bottle of chocolate raspberry mead to go with the brownies, it was something my husband picked up on a business trip.

Star Wars cookies

On a recent trip to Williams Sonoma my son just had to have the Star Wars cookie cutters, so of course my husband and I obliged and bought them for him. Well, I finally got around to making him those Star Wars cookies and even frosting and decorating them, well all except the Boba Fett cookies as my 3 year old doesn't yet recognize him. He does recognize the Stormtroopers, Darth Vader and Yoda so I took my time and practiced a little patience doing my best to make these cookies for my little man.

Here are the cookies before and after being baked, for those of you who want to know how well you can distinguish the details from these cookie cutters. I will say I did really put a little effort into getting the details to come out on the cookies. I really put some amount of force into pushing the little knob at the top of the cookie cutter and even rolled it from side to side and up and down while putting pressure on the knob to ensure all the details would be visible. 

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School Bake Sale

Thursday my son's school is having a bake sale and I have to drop my goodies off at the office tomorrow so I decided to make some red velvet cupcakes and wrap each cupcake individually. I put each cupcake in a 9 ounce party cup and then put each cup in a cellophane bag and then tied each bag with some ribbon. Hopefully these little gems do well at the bake sale.

Of course I had more than the 20 cupcakes that I packed up individually so we have some treats for ourselves and our neighbors as well. I even tried making some mini cupcakes. I only had silicon cupcake sleeves for the minis though and the one I helped my son with kind of got stuck to the liner. I'm sure I will figure out how to make these liners work better for me in the future.

Here are the mini cupcakes that I topped with a little dollop of buttercream frosting. It got late though so I didn't indulge in one of these cute little cupcakes yet. I can hardly wait to try one of these minis. By the way this is the first time I have tried making mini cupcakes other than in the toaster oven which my son and I use as an easy bake oven when we feel like baking a little treat. 

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Star Wars Craft Day

This week I didn't do any baking, but I did decide to try my hand at a craft project. My son has been dying to get a lightsaber but he doesn't pay a lot of attention to where he is swinging it so I was thrilled when I came across this little project for toddler friendly lightsabers made from pool noodles. I headed out to my local discount stores and dollar stores looking for pool noodles and found a store with green and blue pool noodles. Then I went to the hardware store for black and silver (shiny silver) duck tape for the hilts. I already had scissors and a blade to cut through the pool noodles with so with only the purchase of pool noodles and 2 rolls of duck tape I was ready to go.

I also found a cool set of Star Wars ReColoritz BLACK with 5 wipe-off crayons, eraser sponge, built in pop-out frame and 10 reusable Star Wars: The Clone Wars Scenes at one of the stores I visited today so I am very hopeful that my little geeklet loves his surprise when he gets home from school today. 

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