Connor worked on Saturday night, so we celebrated his birthday on Sunday. Marissa is in town for a wedding, which was also on Saturday, so it worked out perfectly since she could then celebrate with her brother too.

This is the cake I made for him. I found the image on Pinterest, of course. No need for an actual recipe. Use your favorite cake recipe or a box mix. Frost with your favorite icing, I used a chocolate buttercream, recipe included. Then decorate and trim with KitKat bars, M&M’s, and a ribbon. That’s all there is to it!

Connor’s Candy & Cake Birthday Cake

Chocolate Butter Frosting
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3 to 4 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup milk, half-and-half, or cream

Two 9-inch round cakes (from 1 box cake mix)

Three 4.5-ounce Giant Kit Kat Bars
One 12.6-ounce bag of M&M’s
Kitchen string
Ribbon

Chocolate Butter Frosting:  In the bowl of a standing mixer, cream together the butter and vanilla.

Mix in the cocoa powder.

Add the powdered sugar alternately with the cream. Beat until light and fluffy. If necessary, adjust the consistency with more milk or sugar.

Place one of the cake layers on a cake stand or platter and frost the top with the frosting. Place the second layer on top and frost the top and the sides.

Immediately after the cake is frosted, begin placing the individual Kit Kat sticks to the sides of the cake, leaving a very small space in between each Kit Kat (you need to do this before the frosting has time to dry and set up.)

Three giant packages is the exact amount you need to completely surround the cake.

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I found this cake on Pinterest. I made it for the first class of my three-week series of cooking classes at Les Gourmettes. It was a brunch menu and the cake was a hit.

The recipe makes one cake. In some of the photos, there are two cakes since I needed to make two for the class.

Cinnamon Roll Cake

Cake
2 ¾ cups flour, divided
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 package yeast
1/4 cup milk
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup cold tap water
1 egg, room temperature
Filling
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
1 ½  tablespoons ground cinnamon
1/4 cup sugar
Vanilla Maple Glaze
1 ½ cups powdered sugar
1 tablespoon milk
2 tablespoons pure maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Cake: Place 2 ¼ cups of the flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer and blend together until combined.

Heat the milk and butter together in the microwave until the butter is melted. Add the cold water and test the mixture to be sure it is not too hot but just warm to touch, test on your wrist as you would a baby bottle.  Stir the butter mixture into the flour mixture.  Add the egg and just enough of the remaining 1/2 cup of flour to make a soft dough. The dough will be ready when it gently pulls away from the side of the bowl and has an elastic consistency.  On a clean surface that is just lightly dusted with flour, knead the dough for about 3 minutes.

Form a ball and place in a lightly greased bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let rise for 30 minutes.

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For the past six weeks, Connor has been working at Mark Tarbell’s The Tavern. He is the dishwasher and although they feed him dinner, he has not gotten the one item he sees that he really wants… the coconut cream pie.

So of course, I made it for him. That’s what moms do.

He gave it a thumbs up.

I have plenty of photos to accompany the crust-making part of the recipe. But my dad was here while I was making the filling. He can be very distracting, so no photos of that part, sorry.

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Yesterday morning I opened my computer and did what I do each morning. I checked my email, I made sure my blog post was posted correctly, and then I went on Facebook. The first thing I saw on FB was a post from my high school and FB friend, Cynthia.

Did you see that? A dare was issued to me on social media. I had to try this recipe now! I was dared! So yes, I made it. And yes, it’s pretty great. Although there were some serious omissions in the original recipe…

… such as the importance of placing the bottom round of dough onto parchment paper or a baking sheet before adding the filling. Let me tell you, it is impossible to move the dough with the filling on it from the counter to a baking sheet! But no worries, I suffered through that error and I’ve rewritten the recipe to reflect such an important detail.

I also amped up the filling to my liking and added other little details that were obviously done on the original recipe but not mentioned in the instructions, such as using an egg wash and placing seeds on the center section.

All in all, a great recipe that just needs a bit more explaining and details. And it really is easier than it looks to make. It would be perfect for Easter! Trust me, you can do it!

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On Tuesday night at Les Gourmettes Cooking School, we had two very charming gentlemen teach a class on Burmese cooking. Robert Carmack and Morrison Polkinghorne also happen to be the authors of The Burma Cookbook – Recipes from the Land of a Million Pagodas.

The class was not only informative and delicious but really fun – thanks to Robert and Morrison and their exceptionally outgoing and fun personalities.

For dessert they made one of the most popular of all Burmese desserts, a semolina cake.  Semolina is the coarse, purified wheat middlings of durum wheat used in making pasta, breakfast cereals, puddings and couscous.

The book is beautiful, the guys were great and the cake was sublime.

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I have a loyal follower who has commented here a couple of times, but most often she emails me with comments and kind words.

The day after Christmas, Sharon, emailed me the photo below and said,

“A friend sent this; have you tried muffin pancakes?”

Pancakes in muffin tins, no I haven’t tried that, but it looks and sounds kind of like Dutch Baby Pancakes, also known as German Pancakes, and what we’ve always called a Magic Pancake Basket.

My first intuition was to use my magic pancake batter, then instead of pouring the batter into a cast iron skillet, use the muffin tins and see if it would turn out the same. But since the photo Sharon shared indicated that regular pancake batter was used, I decided to go that route.

I used a classic lemon pancake batter I found in The Joy of Cooking, only adapting slightly, substituting yogurt for sour cream.

After about 9 of the 15 minutes of baking time, I could see that the pancakes were not going to puff up and create a crater in the center, as the photo showed. I pulled them out and used a spoon to press down on the muffin and make a crater of my own in the center. I then returned them to oven to finish baking and that worked just fine. They were cute little pancake muffin baskets and they tasted great! Next time, I’ll use my Magic Pancake batter though. I’m sharing both recipes with you today.

Thanks for the inspiration, Sharon. Even if it did take me over 6 weeks to get to.

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There is so much I have to tell you about this recipe that I hardly know where to begin. So, how about at the beginning?

Almost exactly one year ago, on January 30, 2013, I wrote about how Marissa and I had gone into a kitchen store in San Francisco and found wonderful watercolor postcards of famous dishes from various San Francisco restaurants. We framed the postcards and they now hang in Marissa’s kitchen. One dish, in particular, caught our fancy. It is a breakfast muffin from Craftsman & Wolves.

The next day, 1/31/13, I tried to recreate “The Rebel Within” at home. Although the end product was tasty, it was not at all what I was looking for… there was no runny egg yolk in the middle of a baked muffin.

Fast-forward almost a year to January 22, 2014, when I wrote about how Marissa and I finally went to Craftsman & Wolves and tasted “The Rebel Within” for ourselves and about my renewed passion to try to recreate it at home.

Just as I had done back in January 2013, I went online to research what I could about how it would be possible to bake a whole egg in a muffin and get it to be “soft-boiled” with a runny yolk.

Via

First, I stumbled upon this website and read up on “egg cookery” – I then found out that two wonderful women had “cracked the code” to The Rebel Within. They went through dozens of eggs and baked more muffins than I would have ever had the patience to bake… and they did it!

Via

Tuesday morning, I used their method.  The result?

Although my “Rebel Within” was not as beautiful, as perfect, or as tall and well-shaped as the muffins at Craftsman & Wolves or as the muffins the brilliant women at Follow Me Foodie baked, it tasted exactly like the muffin Marissa and I enjoyed at Craftsman & Wolves!  And the yolk – it was perfectly runny!

If you would like to make this masterpiece at home, I’ve posted the recipe here, the majority of which is copy/pasted from the Follow Me Foodie post, with just bits and pieces of my own additions and omissions.

I still strongly suggest you go to the Follow Me Foodie recipe post and read from top to bottom about their trials and tests and all of their tips and suggestions. It’s truly amazing and a really good read, even if you do not plan to bake the muffins. There’s a whole boatload of interesting information, dedication, perseverance and patience to be seen there!

If you don’t have the time to read it all, allow me to let you in on a few of the notes that I found to be more important:

The recipe makes six muffins. Even so, I suggest you start with 12 eggs, as I did when you’re making the Extra-Soft Boiled Eggs. Of the 12 eggs I started with, seven turned out perfectly.

Another two would have been “usable” but were less than perfect … and the remaining three … completely unusable.

It is imperative that you “warm” the eggs before dropping them in the boiling water. Use hot tap water to do so. I actually brought the eggs to room temperature first, and then let them sit in the hot tap water for the amount of time it took the water that the eggs would be cooked in to come to a boil. Even so, two of the eggs cracked almost immediately as they were placed in the boiling water. I took those out and discarded them straight off the bat. They were two of the “completely unusable” eggs mentioned above.

Via

The Follow Me Foodie women used bacon for their recipe, I used breakfast sausage, just as they do at the C&W. As much as I love bacon, I’d suggest going with sausage for this.

Be certain to boil the eggs for EXACTLY 4 minutes and 30 seconds. If you want to achieve that runny yolk, this is the most important part of the recipe.

The Follow Me Foodie women suggest that you either use a popover pan or a large muffin tin. I have 2 popover pans, so of course, I used a popover pan. I can’t begin to imagine how it would work in a muffin tin. It wouldn’t be tall enough.

If you don’t own a popover pan, buy one or borrow one! If you live anywhere near me, you can borrow mine.

Once the muffins were done baking and had cooled, I found it easiest to remove them by placing a baking sheet on top and flipping it over, then gently lifting the popover pan off. Because of how much they overflowed, I feared that the tops would rip off if I tried to “lift” them out of the molds individually. This is the method that worked for me.

Finally, when peeling the extra-soft boiled eggs, take care to gently crack all over. While peeling the last couple of eggs, my mind was wandering and I failed to do so. The egg on the left is what happened as a result of not cracking all over. The egg on the right is an example of how to do it correctly.

Oh, and to those of you who so generously and selflessly volunteered to be taste-testers … I’ll have to soft-boil and bake up another batch. Those first six muffins are long gone, my friends!

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Many of the guests at Tram’s Baby Shower had expressed interest in the recipes for the brunch food I served.  In fact, Tram commented that yesterday’s post was a “Cliffhanger” since so many of her friends were hoping for the recipes and I said that the recipes would be coming tomorrow.

That actually made me laugh. A Cliffhanger? Me?

No, I just have so much to share about the shower that I have to break it up into a week’s worth of posts. So, today I shall give you all the recipes!

It sounds more daunting than it actually is because all but one of the recipes have already been posted here on the blog. See, no Cliffhanger to be had. Most of them, I made exactly as previously written and a couple of the others – have a few tweaks. Let’s get to it!

First up, The Granola Bar.

I made a double batch of my Glinda’s Wickedly Delicious Granola. It is my take on a recipe from my friend and colleague, Gwen Ashley Walters.

To accompany the granola, there were bowls of fresh blackberries, blueberries, and strawberries, plus lemon curd, low-fat vanilla yogurt, and, my favorite store-bought yogurt of all time, Greek Gods brand Honey yogurt.

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As I’ve told you many times before, I am NOT a baker.

I don’t like to bake.
I don’t have the patience to bake.
I am not skilled at baking.

That being said – I baked these cupcakes… and they are The BOMB!

Seriously! I gave Connor one to sample and his eyes rolled back in his head with delight! He made me promise him that I would make them for his birthday in May. That is a promise I intend to keep!

The recipe came from HERE.

If every recipe on bakersroyale.com is as scrumptious as these cupcakes, and if YOU love to bake, you should be going to this site every day from here on out!

All I did was change them from standard cupcakes to mini cupcakes. Otherwise, I followed the recipe almost as written and they were perfection! So much so, that I could eat the caramel frosting, with a huge spoon, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

OK, maybe not! The frosting alone has a pound of butter – but to be fair, there was quite a bit of frosting left over, even after all the cupcakes were made.

To prevent me from using a spoon to eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I put it in the trash and then dumped the nasty contents of my Roomba on top of it!

I can’t have that sort of temptation around here!

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The final Thanksgiving leftovers recipe of the season is a dessert, using up the last of your mashed sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and whipped cream. It’s a wintertime take on strawberry shortcake.

If your sweet potatoes weren’t mashed, mash them before making these biscuits.

Oh, and did you know that you can buy powdered buttermilk? I’m not certain if I’ve mentioned this product before, but it sure is handy to have when you have all the ingredients for a recipe … except buttermilk. And isn’t that the point of using up leftovers – being able to use what you have and not having to make a special trip to the grocery store? It’s simple to use. Just as with powdered regular milk, you just mix it with water.

One last note – One of the secrets to light and flaky biscuits is to not overwork the dough. When handled with a light touch you should be able to see specks of the fat, whether that is butter, as in this recipe, or vegetable shortening or lard. Less is better when it comes to biscuits.

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