Club Penguin Cake

L's Birthday was this weekend. I spent 2 days messing with her cake, the prep for it, baking it, and then crafting the figures for it. She was pleased with the cake, and wants to keep the figures forever. LOL 

Here's penguin #1, the first one that I made. Little beady eyes. Hehe. Those little body less things are called Puffles, they are the pets in Club Penguin. The little green one is basically a support for the heavy igloo door, lol. It kept sinking, so I stuffed a puffle in the doorway. 

Here's penguin #2, looks a little better since I got the shaping down on the first one. Crazy orange puffle in the background, the oranges ones, I'm told are the CRAZY and very silly ones, so that's why he's got weird eyes.
 
 Here's the whole cake, little snowballs all over. (The penguins in the game get to throw snowballs at each other) A simple little cake with penguins and puffles. And the igloo.



Here's the cake with the new "Friends" L got. Those are the actual plush penguins. She got a secret agent and ninja penguin. She had the Fairy penguin already. If you look, there's a little fondant cow that I added in at L's request, cause the stuffed cow is her best buddy. He's been well loved as you can see. It was fun making this cake, a little frustrating in the beginning with the first penguin as I was working to get the shape right, but fun. Birthday girl liked it, so I guess that's all that matters in the end. 

P.S. Here's a lime pie I threw together earlier last week. I cheated though, used pre made crust and a canned filling. LOL. Limes are overpriced up here, so I opted for making a quick (cheap) pie.
It's good. I made cake balls earlier last week too, but I forgot to take pictures and well, now they're all eaten. They sure were good. Little spheres of cake and icing covered with chocolate. YUM.

Cucumber Kimchi!

Some yummy Garlic Bread from the other day that I forgot to post up!

It was delicious with a heaping bowl of spaghetti and a side of salad. 


Today I made some more Cucumber Kimchi. It's delicious and crisp and cool for the warm summer weather. (Although I'm not sure if it's summer yet, the weather has been really weird lately) 
We went to the Korean market yesterday and got ourselves a bunch of Korean goodies to cook. One being my cucumbers! This time we got a lot more, 22 of them to be exact. I made a big batch. Yum. Here's all of the cucumbers after being salted and getting wilty.

My Mixture of goodies that go inside said wilty cucumbers. Carrots, Garlic Chives, Green Onions, Little Shrimpies, etc. 



Here I am putting the goodies into the cucumbers. These are my kimchi gloves. They are awesome. They go all the way up to your armpits. LOL. 
Its better than having pepper flake stained hands for a week. 

Tada! The Finished products! Now I just let them sit for about a week or two in the fridge before digging in. That way they can ferment and get all yummy. This is the one kimchi I have down. The other kinds... are still a work in progress. I tried making cabbage kimchi one time before.. it didn't turn out very good - Oh well, it's all trial and error. That's why it takes lots of practice before you get good!

Rainbow Cakes

Today in Piggy's Kitchen: Rainbow Cakes

I found this idea on another blog page, http://www.omnomicon.com/rainbowcake.

I thought that was interesting, and decided to take it one step further as a trial cake run and make the cake itself from scratch. No Box cake today! I figured if it comes out tasting good and looking pretty, I can use that for L's cake instead of plain old one color cake. 

There's the batter, all different colors. That was a bit of work trying to get the purple to come out right, lol. It came out darker than I wanted, but it would work. It was fun to drip all  the different color combinations into the pans I was going to bake in.

The box shaped cakes I think I'll cover in fondant to get some more practice with that. Not decided yet. Here they are after baking in the oven. 

Cool looking, aren't they? I ran out of batter so I couldn't make 12 squares, just 11. Well, 10 now, we had to do some quality control and test one. I wanted to see what the inside looked like. 

Here's a cross-section of the test cake.

Neat little swirls! And it tastes great too. Nice and fluffy and moist. Next I need to get them decorated up better and have a little cake show. LOL

Off to decorate! 

Gift Cakes

Today in Piggy's Kitchen: Gift Box Cakes! 

I made some strawberry cakes with my new pans, some were fluted, like a miniature bundt cake pan. The other pan was of little squares. I decided to mess with my marshmallow fondant to give it another try rather than using that awful tasting Wilton Fondant. (Overpriced too!) 

My MMF (marshmallow fondant) came out better this time, instead of that sticky mess I ended up with last year, I found a different recipe to try for MMF, and it worked much better and was fun to work with, no frustration or annoyance this time!

I decided I'd make little mini edible gift boxes with the square cakes that I had. I was going for all of them looking like they were little gift wrapped cakes, but with the peanut gallery bickering over the same 5 legos (when we have MILLIONS in the house...-.-) left me with no patience for crafting the fondant into little ribbons. So I have one gift cake, the others just have some little simple decor on it. ^.^ 

Aren't they pretty? 

^.^ Piggy

Busy Weekend

Finally had a bit of sun this weekend, so kids and I spent most of the weekend outside. I planted all my little green onion stubs, made a little irrigation channel in the garden for them. 

The ones over on the left are the first ones that I posted a while back, they've grown quite a bit so far. I still have some more in the house that I have to find a spot for. I stuffed some avocado seeds in the dirt too, lol. I know it's a tree, but just for the heck of it, I want to see if it even sprouts. LOL.

Here's my lovely bunch of weed flowers that the peanut gallery gathered for me. They went far out into the field where the weeds have grown to about 2ft tall and swam around looking for the pretty weeds to bring back. lol. I'm glad I took my Benedryl on schedule to enjoy the weedflowers that I was presented with. There's nothing sweeter than your little boy running back hollering at the top of his lungs in a little baby voice,"mama! mama! I got "fowers" for youuuuu!" Totally cute. 

Next up is my ghetto rigged garden teepee. It's made out of these bunches of curtain rods we had to buy for the old house that we were in last year. That old house that we lived in for like 8months up here had like 500 windows. Or close enough to it. So this normal little suburbia house we're in now, has the regular amount of windows, so I have these rods just sitting around in a storage closet. I figured the snow pea plant could use a little support, and why not use the rods that I have no use for currently? ^.^  Oh yeah, that black tray has little tomato plants I tried to grow from seeds. They're growing SLOWLY.

Here's the right half of the garden area, the one where I dug little irrigation channels. There's my rows of green onions, a tomato plant, some various peppers and a row of cilantro. Yum. Pico De Gallo in the garden! Well, almost. I don't have a lime tree, nor do I have regular onions growing. 

Made another 2 loaves of French Bread on Saturday. One always comes out great looking and the other always seems to just want to do something weird. It never fails. I'm sure the loaves are just laughing at me," Ha! One of us will turn out great, the other will boggle your mind!"

^.^ Chef Piggy

Went and got some new cake pans today while grocery shopping (along with a pile of stuff for L's Bday Cake) I'll have to take pics and post those tomorrow or something. This week will be trial baking week; mess with the new pans, play around with fondant.

Birthday Cake : Decision Made!

So it's been decided. This year's birthday cake request is Club Penguin. L loves to play on it, it's an online game where your character is a penguin, and you can run around and play games to earn penguin money and buy things like clothes and pets. It seems to be really popular among the kids these days, there's club penguin books, games, cards, stuffed animals, figurines.. etc. 

So the project this year will be to create a Club Penguin themed cake. I got some new springform baking pans over the weekend, and the cutest little mixing bowls. Cow print on the outside and piggy colored pink on the inside. TOTALLY CUTE. 

I think as I bake more, my drawing skills will improve. At least that's my hope. My drawing skills are really bad, I can only draw stick figures. (Sometimes those come out bad too, uneven stick arms and legs, lol) I've been working on some rough draft sketches for how to make this cake. My penguin drawings look like eggs with feet.I'm better with fondant than a pencil and paper, ha. 

Mother's Day was awesome, I got a great home cooked meal, Beef and Chicken Fajitas. YUM. With Pico de Gallo, and fresh guacamole, flour tacos. YUM. I stuffed myself silly with the great Mexican food. I'm still eating the tons of leftovers today, no cooking! 

^.^ Piggy

French Bread

Today in Piggy's Kitchen: Fresh French Bread

Mmmmmmmmmm.... Smells great in the house!
This time I think I got the seam pinching down, they really look great!

^.^ Piggy

Doughnut Day!

As Homer on the The Simpsons would say," mmmmmmm...doughnuts...*drool*"

This morning in Piggy's Kitchen: Dairy-Free Doughnuts! 

I found this recipe a few weekends ago after daydreaming about the days when the hubby and I could go to Krispy Kreme and gorge ourselves on doughnuts. It's been years since we've set foot into a Krispy Kreme and I wondered if I could find a recipe and try them at home. Lo and behold, I came across This Guy. He had a recipe for Krispy Kreme-like doughnuts, and I thought, hey I'll give it a go. Here's the recipe : Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. I tweaked it for making it dairy free, and they came out soo good. Now we can have doughnuts at our house again, without worries of milk allergies going crazy. Here's my tweaked version of the 99 Cent Chef's original recipe, with substitutions made to avoid milk and butter.

Doughnut Ingredients

(Approximately 1 dozen doughnuts)

1 package yeast
1/4 cup lukewarm water (100 degrees)
2 cups flour
3/4 cup of warm milk (Soy Milk)
2 tablespoons of sugar
1 egg
1Tblsp. Crisco Shortening
A pan/pot to fry them up in with at least half an inch of oil.

Sugar Glaze Ingredients and Directions

1 Tbsp. Crisco Shortening

1 cup powdered sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
2 tbsp. water (clear glaze) or milk (white glaze)
Melt Crisco and add to powdered sugar, vanilla and water. Mix well for a couple of minutes. Pour into shallow dish for dipping/coating warm doughnuts.

Directions for Doughnuts
In a large mixing bowl, dissolve yeast in 1/4 cup of warm water, then add warm milk, egg, sugar, butter and flour. Mix well for a few minutes (electric mixer for 2, or 5 minutes by hand). Cover dough for at least a hour, or overnight for breakfast doughnuts. (Overnight makes doughnuts that are more chewy textured)

On a lightly floured surface, roll out doughnut dough with a rolling pin about 1/2 an inch thick. Cut doughnuts with a cutter (I used a coffee cup), then a smaller cutter (I used an apple juice bottle top) for the centers. You can set aside the doughnut holes with the doughnuts or re-roll them for another doughnut or two. Let cut doughnuts set another half an hour to rise one last time before frying.

When doughnuts have risen, heat oil in a wide shallow pan to about 350 degrees (medium heat). Test one of the doughnut holes in the oil – it should bubble and quickly brown the doughnut hole. Fry one doughnut at a time until you get the hang of it – I burned a couple. Watch carefully, as doughnuts will begin to brown along the edge in a few seconds. Flip doughnut over to brown the other side. (I used some take-out chopsticks, made it really easy to flip)  It may take a few tries – a light to medium brown doughnut is done enough.

Let your doughnuts cool on a rack or on some paper towels to drain off the excess oil, then dip into your icing, let it harden a little bit and then enjoy! Fresh, Dairy-free doughnuts!

Tip: To keep the icing from getting dried out and crunchy in between dipping, I made my own double boiler out of two bowls to keep the icing at a nice warm gooey temperature. Just boil some water for your bottom bowl and plop your bowl with icing on top. A quick whirl with your whisk before dipping and the icing gets runny and smooth so you can plunk your doughnut down and give it a nice sugary coat. 

^.^ Piggy

Korean Food: Mandoo (Korean Dumplings) A Peanut Gallery Favorite

Today in Piggy's Kitchen: Korean Dumplings (만두 -- Mandoo)

One of the favorite dinners at our house for the peanut gallery (my kids) is a big steamy pile of dumplings. The kids will inhale them like they've been starving for a week. Once they arrive on the dinner table, it's practically a skirmish with forks and chopsticks, and sometimes they won't bother with utensils, little grabby fingers dive for the dumpling plate.

I make the dumplings very simple in our house. There's probably about a million different ways you can make them, with the variety of things you can put inside as stuffing, but my kids prefer to keep it simple.

What you will need for some basic Dumplings:
Wonton Skins,  Ground Beef,  Tofu,  Green Onions, Garlic,  Soy Sauce, Sesame Oil

Use a food processor and puree the tofu block down.

Mix with the ground beef and add in the chopped green onions and minced garlic.

Mix together until it is all well blended. (Yeah it looks gross, but I promise it's tasty!)

Let the mixture rest for 30 minutes before making dumplings to give it a chance to soak up the flavor. Put a small spoonful of your meat mixture in the center of the wonton skin. Wet the edges of the wonton skin and fold in half to bring the edges together. Set on tray and place your finished wontons in the freezer to solidify. Bring water to a hard boil and place steamer in the pot of water. (I have a nifty little fold out steamer that I got at the Korean Market)
Spray the steaming rack with PAM to avoid the dumplings from sticking to the steamer. Let dumplings cool and enjoy. If you have kids, grab yourself a few before they inhale them all, like my kids do!

Birthday Ideas

So later this month, my oldest will celebrate her 6th birthday. I'm hoping to make it our family tradition that for each birthday, they will get a customized cake of their choosing for their special day. So far the list is long for the customized cake possibilities. Last year's cake, which was my first attempt at baking a 3D customized cake, was a princess cake. The base (the cake part) was Barbie's dress. Thinking back about it, I think it was okay, but could have been much much better.

Updated to add the picture of the Barbie Cake!  (See, it was kind of a mess of icing all over the place, not very professional looking)

I can't find a picture of it to post, but I guess that's a good thing that I can't, it's not a cake that I would really be that proud to show off. The Marshmallow fondant was too sticky and it was really just a giant glob of pink. 

Last year was really just testing the waters in terms of baking and my lack of skills with baking and decorating really showed. As the photo of my husband's cake shows, I need some work in the drawing department. Poor Cow. It looks so sad on the top of the cake. 

Fast forward to earlier this year, 2010! I learned some techniques and played with fondant more to get better acquainted with it. Plus I invested in some actual baking tools too, I'm sure that helped.

Earlier this year was our "baby's" 3rd birthday. His request was SpongeBob. That one turned out much better, and also took a lot more time to create.  All our cakes must be dairy free since they kids have allergies to dairy, so that is one of the main reasons why I choose to make them, along with the fact that I do enjoy baking and creating. Here is the finished Spongebob cake, which took me a total of 5 hours to craft. Much better in comparison to last year's cake for the hubby, if I do say so myself.

What will this year's birthday cake be for my oldest? She has about a week to decide for sure whether it will be Tinkerbell or Winnie the Pooh or something else that she thinks of to add to the already long list of choices.

    ^.^
~Piggy~

Growing Green Onions

So I read on another website that if you plant the root ends of a green onion, that it will grow back! (Therefore, giving you a free green onion for each that were paid for, if they really do grow) So I thought I would give that a shot last night, while making dinner, I went through three green onions, so I took the little root ends and planted each one in a little pot and watered them down. 


This morning, I came down to find that they have grown slightly overnight! 

This blog will just be a place for me to post my trials and errors while exploring the baking world and my attempt at growing plants. I'm really enjoying baking, I've made some fresh from scratch doughnuts; I woke up at 4am to make them last week, and my french bread for our Italian dinner last week was well received; there were only crumbs of the golden loaf I'd baked earlier that afternoon. 

    ^_^ 
~Piggy~