Pumpkin Challenge: Cheesecake Armageddon

Well folks, I am just going to lay it out there: my pumpkin challenge was a complete and utter disaster.  I should have known it wasn’t meant to be when canned pumpkin was not available at the grocery store because of a pumpkin shortage.  But as luck would have it, my mom was coming into town and she happened to have a couple cans of pumpkin she was able to bring with her.  Crisis one averted.  Unbeknownst to me, there were to be many (many) more crises on the road ahead.

Initially, I had planned on making pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting.  Delicious, safe, cream cheesy pumpkin bars….  Then, as I was flipping through my copy of Williams-Sonoma’s “Holiday Entertaining” (which, by the way is an AMAZING book), I saw it.  A recipe for Ginger Pumpkin Cheesecake.  I had to try it.  It looked too delicious to let it remain in the pages of a book, two-dimensional.  Looking back, leaving it as a pretty picture in a book may have been a better course of action.

The first step in making this cheesecake was making the crust, which consisted of crushed gingersnaps, crushed walnuts, a little sugar, and melted butter.  Easy peasy.  Except when you can’t find the base of your food processor (which you later remember is at your sister’s house).  I thought “No big deal, I’ll just crush the gingersnaps and walnuts by hand.  How hard could that be? How long could it possibly take?”   I grabbed a serving spoon planning to crush with the back of it, and headed into the living room to watch some Glee as I crushed.  The spoon could not have been less effective.  Instead I had to use a giant, heavy, mug which worked much better.  Even with the incredible crushing power of the mug, it took me an entire episode of Glee, PLUS half an episode of New Girl just to crush the gingersnaps.  I moved on to the walnuts, during which I finished New Girl and started Up All Night (which, as a side note, I’m not loving so far).  Finally, after an hour and 45 minutes, everything was crushed.  However, the baby was awake and I no longer had time to finish the cheesecake that day.  I covered the gingersnaps and walnuts, and headed off to change a diaper.

Flash forward to the next morning.  I was ready, I was excited, today was the day!  I would get that flipping cheesecake done if it killed me!  Things started out well.  The crust was mixed, patted into the pan, and baked.  I started on the filling, which was going swimmingly until I got to the pumpkin (that F-ing pumpkin).   The recipe called for either 26.5 oz or 830g of pumpkin puree.  Well, the can I had said that it was 29oz/822g.  So in ounces it was too much, but in grams too little.  After careful consideration, I just dumped the whole can in thinking I would “split the difference” even though that makes absolutely no sense.  Right after I’d mixed the pumpkin in, I looked at the directions again and realized it also said “3 ½ cups” of pumpkin.  So, probably I should have just used that measurement.  Too late.  Everything was ready to go.  I poured the cheesecake into the crust, put the pan into its water bath to bake, and sat back with my fingers crossed. 

I knew something was wrong the first time I peeked at the cake.  Its water bath was a very pumpkiny shade of orange.  Clearly, the cake was oozing out the bottom of the springform pan.  So, here’s my question:  the recipe says to wrap the pan in foil, which I did.  I assumed it had to do something with how the cake baked, but was it actually to keep the water from getting in?  Because IT DIDN’T SAY THAT.  Clearly, if I had known that was the purpose, I would have made more of an effort to make it water-tight.  Otherwise, I just have a shitty springform pan I guess.  I let the cake keep baking, although it was not cooking like I thought it should.  I left it in for an extra 25 minutes because it kept looking too soupy (too much pumpkin, or water seeping in the bottom? I’ll never know for sure).  Finally I took it out, confirmed that the bottom was soaked, and stuck it in the fridge praying that a miracle would occur.

This morning, I removed it from the fridge and it actually looked okay.  I thought that maybe it turned out after all. 

I poked the top with my finger: pretty solid.  I tried to unlatch the side of the pan and take it off.  That pulled the cake apart.  So I went around the side with a knife and tried again.  Not so pretty, my friends, BUT it still looked like a cheesecake, homely or not.  

Then, the true test.  I cut into it.  FAIL.  It was a smooshy mess. 

Noooooooo!  All that time… all that delicious cream cheese, WASTED!  I sort of want to cry when I remember how long crushing those gingersnaps took.  But, I vow to try this recipe again within the month.  And next time it will be better.  Because I’m making my mom help me.

PS My camera also ran out of batteries and I couldn't find the charger.  So I had to use a cell phone to take these pics.  Sigh.  October Madcap Challenge = Fail on Every Level.

Monthly Madcap Challenge: Pumpkin Edition

Our first Monthly Madcap Challenge was pumpkin! I spent all week making super colorful Halloween cookies, so I dialed it down a notch and went with pumpkin bread. A few months ago, a friend gave me a bag of Amish Friendship Bread starter. It's awesome. It's basically a chain letter, but with very moist breakfast bread. You get a bag of yeast starter, let it ferment for 10 days, make the bread, keep a bag of starter for yourself, give starter bags to your friends, and so it goes. It's possible to make bread every 10 days, but if you can't make it that often, you can even freeze the starter at anytime and just bake when it's convenient for you. The standard recipe is great, cinnamony, sugary goodness. But for me, the real fun is taking the original recipe and adapting it to whatever flavors I feel like tossing into bread. I figured it would be a great way to make use of our monthly challenge ingredient: pumpkin.

Pumpkin Bread (Amish-style)

2 c flour
1 c brown sugar
3/4 t salt
1½ t baking powder
½ t baking soda
1 c Amish bread starter
1 c sugar-free applesauce
¼ c skim milk
3 egg whites
1 egg
1 t vanilla extract
15 oz. canned pumpkin puree
1 c chopped walnuts
1 4-oz package of Jell-o flan-flavored pudding mix - comes with a packet of pudding mix, and a packet of caramel sauce
1 t cinnamon
3/4 t nutmeg
½ t ground cloves
½ t pumpkin spice
¼ t ground ginger
extra cinnamon / sugar for sprinkling

Only use non-metal bowls and mixers for the bread. You can bake the bread in a metal pan, but no other metal should touch the batter during the mixing process.

Preheat oven to 325. Mix all ingredients in a bowl, except the caramel sauce packet.

Grease two large loaf pans. I use two casserole dishes, which results in more surface area per piece, and therefore more cinnamon / sugar to bread ratio. Dust pans with ½ c sugar and some cinnamon. Drizzle the caramel sauce in the pans.

Put batter in pans, sprinkle with more sugar and cinnamon.

Bake 1 hour. Cool 15 minutes. Remove loaves from pan and serve warm or cold.

Until next time - 

Madcap Baker J

A week of making Halloween cookies

Based on the title, you'd think that spending a week making Halloween cookies would result in more cookies than an elementary school bake sale. Not quite. I've just been so busy that this one batch has extended itself into a 5-day long process.

Sunday night, I drew out my cookie designs, which is the lesson I learned while in Denver. I made Martha Stewart's Ideal Sugar Cookies batter and popped it in the refrigerator. Fortunately, I already had brandy in the house (not Moesha's Brandy, but I think she would have liked the cookies as well).

Monday night, I baked the cookies to 1/8" thin, as directed by Martha, using an actual ruler to measure. Normally I would have made thicker, chewier cookies, but I wanted more cookies for practice. I ended up with about 75 2.5" circles. I am fine with how thin they are - I can achieve a better icing:cookie ratio - but I had to adjust my baking time. For the last couple trays, I baked them for 7 minutes at 350, which was perfect.

Tuesday night, I made Bridget's royal icing in orange, black and purple (also left some white). I piped and flooded the orange cookies and the purple cookies, to leave those to dry for the night. I wanted them to be super firm for the next step. I made it a bit too thin this time, because a few cookies had the icing drip right off the edges onto the table. Ah well. It isn't like the icing was wasted. Did I use my finger to scoop up the icing and eat it off the table? Perhaps. To make the spiderweb cookies, I piped and flooded the black cookies. After a few minutes, I added an orange dot in the center, with 3 orange / purple / orange concentric circles around the dot. Then I dragged a toothpick from the center to the outside for 7 to 9 spokes that look like a spiderweb. What was great was seeing that this design is VERY forgiving. Some of my circles were ovals, some of the colors started to blur, and some were just messy. No worries, and once I started toothpicking, all of the cookies looked really neat. Except for the one that dripped onto the table, which was eaten immediately. It was the weak one of the herd.

Wednesday night, I only had time for a quick project. I basically stamped a little bat onto each cookie, by taking a rubber stamp and using a paintbrush to paint it with black gel food coloring that was only slightly diluted with water. Immediately after stamping each cookie, I sprinkled it heavily with black sanding sugar. I pressed the sanding sugar down gently, then gave the cookie a shake. One of the things I learned quickly was to lean down and get close to the cookie and the stamp, so I could actually see what part of the cookie the stamp was stamping. Some cookies were a little uneven, so at first I'd pull the stamp up and there would be just half a bat. Using a tip I learned from a Bridget video, I did the sprinkling over a piece of parchment paper so I could pour the extra sprinkles back into the bottle (i.e. my mouth) later.

Thursday night, I did the ghosts on the orange cookies. The black outline of the ghosts was not pretty or consistent, and it was way too thick. But adding the white after it had time to harden slightly made a huge difference. They looked like cute little ghosts then, and I just toothpicked their hands and tails so the lines would make cute little V's. I sprinkled each one of these with white sanding sugar, too.

Things I could improve on: icing consistency and sloppy piping. But, all in all, I'm pretty proud of how these turned out. Although it isn't even October yet and I have a pile of Halloween cookies staring at me.

See you next week for the Pumpkin Challenge!
Madcap J.

Jumbo Animal Cookies

So here's one final foray into sugar cookies before I embark on our October assignment: Project Pumpkin.

I loved these cookies for lots of reasons, but the biggest one was it only required one color of icing. After my Bon Voyage adventure, it was nice to commit to a single color. That made for a super easy piping experience, which was a nice change of pace after my maps, planes, and bears (oh my!).

To make these taste more authentic, I added half and half lemon and vanilla extract (mainly because I actually had lemon extract. I don't think it'd be worth buying just for this). The taste was really good, though my overzealous application of rainbow sprinkles overpowered the cookies a little.

The only other issue I encountered was not chilling my first batch of cut cookies long enough. My baked lions and elephants were a bit on the amoeba side. However, by my second tray my animal crackers actually looked like animals. And with the help of some piping, even the blobs resembled their ancestors.

Next time I'd make half white ones and half pink. These were a big hit at the office.

Here's a walkthrough:

Mid-tracing.

Flooded.

Sprinkled.

Happy Fall! B

P.S. I should also note that this idea was stolen again from Bridget @ Bakeat350. Thanks, Bridget! I promise to stop stealing your ideas. They're just too darn good.

Lemon Bars

Hi! Just a quick post about these lemon bars I made last week.  The recipe I used was from Bakerella and you can find it here.  In short, the three best thing about these bars are....

1. They are SO EASY and quick to make.
2.  I had all the ingredients already (as I'm sure you would), so no trip to the store.
3.  Delicious!  They were a hit at the dinner I went to last week - the host gave out ziploc baggies so everyone could take some home.

A picture (I have to get some new plates - those colors don't really go well with much):

I didn't notice the baby fingers until after the pictures was taken :)

And that's it! Short and sweet!

Madcap E



Monogram Cookies

I have two friends in Minneapolis who have birthdays right around now, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to practice my cookie-making skills.  I LOVE the monogram cookies Bridget makes at Bake at 350, and thought I'd give it a go.  Let's just say my results had ups and downs.  Since I am known for my optimism (haha), let's start with the successes!

I used both a different cookie recipe and a different royal icing recipe for this batch.  Both were from Annie's Eats.  You can find the cookie recipe here, and the icing recipe here.  You guys, they were DELICIOUS.  I made no changes to the cookie recipe, but for the icing I added a scant 1/2 cup of water instead of 5 Tablespoons, and I also added 1 tsp. vanilla extract and 1/2 tsp of lemon extract.  I think using less meringue powder really helps with the taste, and I have to say the lemon flavor with the sugar cookies was amazing.  Madcap J, Annie says to mix the icing on a low speed which worked out way better than what we did.  It looked more like icing and less like over-beaten whipped cream.  Also, I think my icing skills are improving, but they are certainly far from professional as you'll see in a minute.

Okay, now for the failures.  Well, I guess it was a singular failure, but it was a big one!  The icing dried in a funny way making the cookies tasty but unusable as gifts.  Even S., who is normally very unpicky said that they looked "strange."  Now, my first thought was that it was the icing recipe.  However, so many of the comments on Annie's page said that they got great results, I feel like that can't be the problem.  Also, I think the same thing happened with the batch that Madcap J and I baked together, just to a lesser extent.  So I suppose all I can do is try, try again.

Here are a couple pictures of the cookies:

I need a better camera, but the easiest spot to see the weird icing is the lower left part of the pink "A" cookie. It's discolored and just sort of squidgy looking. Here's one more picture:





You can see it a bit on the yellow "M" cookie as well.  Sigh. S. and I have been nibbling on these for days, which is why I'm taking them to a little gathering I'm going to tonight :) I'm also taking some lemon bars from Bakerella's site which I'll post on later.

One last thing on the monogram cookies: if you attempt them, know that the candy melts harden fast!  I started by doing about 6 monograms with the melted candy, and then tried to sprinkle them all with nonpareils.  That did not go well, as nonpareils went bouncing across my table not sticking to anything.  I ended up doing them one at at time (in a little bowl to prevent more nonpareils from escaping) which worked out much better.

Ah, adventures in novice baking :)

Madcap E.

Bon Voyage Cookies

My cookie dough was in the fridge, my decorating supplies were on the counter, and the Doppler radar was getting more and more ominous. I had planned to make a batch of Bon Voyage cookies to see off Kerri before she moved to San Francisco, but it was becoming clear that the weather was not on our side.

After throwing an impromptu goodbye bash at a bar before the storm, I was left with a batch of cookie dough and new cookie cutters that beckoned. So, I took one for the team and spent the rain-soaked weekend making cookies for me and D. All in all, I thought these turned out well for a first attempt. The design is inspired (okay, totally copied) by Bridget's cookies here. Her's obviously blow mine out of the water.

In addition to the maps, I also made airplanes and teddy bears, which called for making six (six!) different colors of icing. That was too many colors for my liking and by the end, I was so sick of washing out squeeze bottles that I started drizzling my flood colors into the borders. As you can see, that produced okay results. California managed to spread a bit beyond its boundaries.

I didn’t get any pictures of the planes. Those would have been cute, but I failed to really pipe the red trim. I think next time I would just do maps or planes, or at least spread the decorating over two days.

I used Martha's cookies and Bridget's icing. I used clear almond extract in the icing and I always use Corvosier in the cookies (because I'm a rapper).

Here's the best pic:

Happy baking! Madcap Baker B!

Black-Bottom Banana Bread

Hi Ladies!
   We eat huge quantities of bananas in our house, but somehow we found ourselves with four really gross brown ones today.  So I decided to make banana bread, and remembered this recipe that my mom used to make.  It's called Black-Bottom Banana Bread and it comes from a cookbook called "West of the Rockies" (published by the Junior Service League of Grand Junction).  It is beyond words how good this stuff is, so please make it immediately and feel free to email me with notes of praise and gratitude.

Black-Bottom Banana Bread

4        small, very ripe bananas
1        stick unsalted butter, softened
2/3     cup sugar
3        large eggs
1/4     cup milk
1        cup cake flour
1 1/2  teaspoons baking powder
1        teaspoon baking soda
1/4     teaspoon salt (generous)
1 1/4  cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

•  Preheat oven to 350.  Generously grease a 9x5-inch loaf pan; dust lightly with flour.  Set aside.
• Coarsely chop bananas in food processor or mash until lumpy with a fork (about 1 1/3 cups).  Set aside in large mixing bowl.
• Beat butter and sugar in food processor or electric mixer.  Add eggs and mix until fluffy and smooth.  Add milk and combine
• Transfer batter to mixing bowl with bananas.
• Sift dry ingredients. Add to bowl along with chocolate chips.  Use wooden spoon or spatula to combine gently.
• Transfer to loaf pan.  Bake until loaf is dark brown and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean, 55 to 60 minutes.  Let rest on wire rack 10 minutes.
• Gently remove loaf from pan; cool completely on wire rack.  Can be served then or wrapped in foil overnight.
• Chocolate sinks to the bottom during baking. Freezes well.

Here are some pictures (it's clear I need to work on my food photography skills, but you get the picture):

Happy baking! That's all for tonight :)
Signing off -
Madcap E

Our "first" batch of decorated sugar cookies!

So, here they are.  Our first sugar cookies decorated with royal icing.  We have to say that the first batch did not turn out that well.  Due to a so-so cookie recipe, too-thick royal icing, and a limited color scheme (white and yellow), we were less than pleased with our initial results.  Only two of those cookies survived.  We tried again with Martha Stewart's "Ideal Sugar Cookies," with much better results.  We also picked up some new food coloring and tested out a few new colors.  Our results for the second batch were a bit.... neon, but much better than the first.  We decided to use our leftover white piping icing from the first batch, hence the white outlines.  Also, a few cookies got squished before we photographed them (should have waited a little longer before covering them with plastic wrap).  Overall though, we were decently happy with this batch, and can even envision making actual nice-looking cookies in the future.

We're both planning on making another batch next weekend (in our respective cities).  One of the main lessons learned this weekend was that if you go into a cookie decorating session without a design, you'll get some wins and some real losers.  We realized how key it is to have a design in mind before starting the process.

That's it for our first post! Signing off -

Madcap E. and Madcap J.