Hello Kitty Cake V

Oh, the ever popular Hello Kitty party decor at Party City. This is the fifth cake I've done to match it. I love Hello Kitty and it's fun to come up with new ways to incorporate the colors and elements. This cake was for Olivia, who turned 5. I worked with Olivia's mom a few years back and we were pregnant at the same time. I imagine our boss was thrilled to have two of us on maternity at the same time. Oh, well.
Olivia's mom wanted fondant swags and a Hello Kitty figure. The HK is RKT (a little fat). The cake is chocolate vanilla marble with chocolate buttercream.

Elmo Sesame Street Cake

This cake was for Carolina (LOVE that name! We almost named both our daughters that, but alas, other names won out), who turned 2. Her favorite Sesame Street characters are Elmo, Cookie Monster and Abby Cadabby. Elmo's body is cake, but his head and limbs are RKT. The rest of the decorations are fondant and gumpaste.

Green Orchid Cake

A 50th birthday cake for my husband's business partner. Green orchids are made from gumpaste/fondant, wrapped in satin ribbon. Cakes were red velvet and carrot with vanilla filling.

Star Wars Cake

A Star Wars cake for Coleman, who apparently loves Darth Maul. His mom wanted a positive influence as well, so Yoda made it on there, too.

 

The cake was dark chocolate with cookie butter filling.

Salted Caramel Apple Bars

Ahhh, fall. I grew up in Salt Lake City, where there are distinct seasons. And fall was not my favorite because it meant school started and it was right before winter. Now that I live in Southern California, I love fall because it means sweaters, soups and pretending that it's chilly (I now really think 68 is chilly. What's wrong with me?), even though it's sunny and warm outside.
Ok, well it was pretend fall last week- for a few days it was rainy and chilly- like 65! Then it got warm again. I'm not complaining. But to make it seem more like fall, I decided to make some apple bars. I bought these huge organic granny smith apples and decided I wanted to put them in a yummy recipe. I don't really do fruit and desserts that much, especially pie, so I wanted something different. I stumbled upon Two Peas and their Pod's recipe for Salted Caramel Apple Crumb bars and decided to try it out.
The recipe starts out with making a salted caramel sauce, which is pretty easy. I got a little worried once I added the TWELVE TABLESPOONS OF BUTTER that it was too greasy, especially since it's followed by 1 cup of heavy cream, but once the sauce cooled, it was fine. And delicious.
The rest of the recipe is a cinch- two bowls (well, I only used two), no stand mixer, mix, press, pour and bake. Love it.

Sorry for the bad photo

This is best eaten the day of because the golden brown topping and crust gets soggy. Also, I added one teaspoon of vanilla to the caramel sauce before letting it cool. Get the recipe here!

Train Cake

This cake was for Aiden a couple months ago, who turned 1. The cake was chocolate with vanilla filling.

TWD- Pumpkin Bagels

I really love bagels. When I was in high school, we would go to lunch at Einsteins all the time. I loved bagel sandwiches. Then I went through my stage where I thought I shouldn't eat 500 calories of bread. Then I got married and while we were living in Virginia, I discovered Panera. And now I'm back to loving bagels (seriously, get the Cinnamon crunch with Hazelnut cream cheese).
This week's TWD is for bagels. Making bagels is time intensive and involves quite a few steps. First, you make the dough of yeast, sugar, shortening, salt and flour. I added about a 1/2 cup pumpkin puree and used half whole wheat flour. Once it's risen for about an hour, you refrigerate it overnight. Then you shape the dough into balls, poke a hole in it and pull it so it looks like a ring. I found it interesting how active the dough still is- in the picture below, all the bagels were shaped the same way, but the top left was shaped first and the bottom right last (I know, they're not on dishtowels. Sometimes I don't follow directions):

After they've been shaped you boil them for about 90 seconds. They come out looking like soggy, wrinkly doughnuts (again, I know there's no cornmeal under these (see above) :)).

Then you brush them with egg whites and sprinkle them with whatever. I chose sesame seeds for some and cinnamon sugar for the rest. 

These baked up beautifully and were so delicious. They had the signature chewy outside and had the perfect texture inside.

This was my lunch after they came out of the oven- ham, provolone, basil, tomatoes and olive oil. I couldn't wait to eat before taking the picture, ok? Don't judge me.

Heather has the recipe!