Party Snacks

My neighbor was having a party the other day and we had some left over whipping cream in the fridge. My neighbors know i like to bake and I like to take advantage of such parties to bake. So i decided, since we had just enough cream, why not make the nice and easy recipe of cream puffs. While it takes a while to do all the cooking, baking, scooping, and filling, it really doesn't take much effort at all. I might suggest making sure you have all the ingredients before you start. I didn't and i had to borrow some eggs from my neighbors... Anyway it's a crowd pleasing dessert. Because I started making it later, I arrived late to the party but I wasn't even in the house yet when people started pulling them off the tray. By the time I got to the kitchen, there were only four left. Three of those were quickly devoured and the last one only lasted as long as it did because someone set a cake in front of it and people didn't see it.

Sorry the picture is so bad, i forgot to take a picture before i wrapped them up. I promise to post a picture the next time i remember to take a picture.

Because this was a short blog i decided I'd tell you about other crowd-pleasing party snacks! Over the Summer my church got together to watch "I Am Number Four" (which is a pretty good movie by the way but the book is better, I highly recommend both). I took a tray of snacks for everyone to enjoy. The tray was compiled with homemade rice crispy treats, very easy to make, and some chocolate biscotti. The rice crispies have always been highly liked. Last Thanksgiving, my cousin spent the a lot of time hanging out around the treats. My pastor was in love with them. So if your planning a party and you need a quick, easy, and highly lovable, this is for you. The biscotti, not as many people liked. That's really all I can say about it. It would be a good treat with tea, but for a party, not so much. Eat it as something that is just a treat for home, not a crowd.

All these recipes can be found on the recipe page, and on the technique page you can find the best way to melt chocolate quickly and without hassle.

(Rice Crispy Treats)

(Chocolate with White Chocolate Chips Biscotti)

Welcome!

Well hello there my fellow humans! I am truly sorry that i have not posted in a while. Well this post is about the two welcomes i have made since last posting. 1. I welcomed, along with the rest of my family, Miss Julie from a land far far away, to our home and i welcomed her with a new recipe i had learned, which can be found on the recipe page. 2. Using the same new recipe I welcomed, to my city, nearly two months later, my new pastor.

For both cakes i uses a whipped ganache filling, which is basically a chocolate whipped cream, and very delicious. It makes it all nice and moist and delectable. I used a box mix cake and put the whipped ganache in between the layers and had multiple people tell me, "This cake is really good! And I don't even like cake!" It's a crowd pleaser, that's for sure! Time to talk about the individual cakes:

Well the first one, the one I made for Julie, it was chocolate through and through. Chocolate cake, chocolate whipped ganache, chocolate buttercream icing (all made available on the recipe page.)

 (Chocolate cake with chocolate whipped ganache filling.)

So this cake was rather simple. I baked, I put the filling in the middle, I iced it, then decorated it in a very simple manner. When putting the ganache in the middle, I had the problem with the weight of the cake squeezing the ganache out. I will go into detail on how i fixed this problem in just a minute. So for Julie's cake I did a simple shell border around the bottom in pink icing and then wrote Julie's name in more pink icing (pink was her favorite color.) After that the cake still looked a little plain so i took out of my freezer, some modeling chocolate roses i has used on my birthday cake. Since they don't taste very good anyway, its a good idea to freeze your modeling chocolate creations for re-use, however my recipe was no good so i will not post it. Using some of the leftover icing i glued the roses to the cake and voila! I had a quick and simple cake that was gorgeous and delicious!

(Julie's welcome cake. Quick,simple, and delicious!)

So now for my new Pastor's cake. Pastor Angela had been preaching at our church for several weeks before i was able to give her the cake due to the fact that i was out of town on a mission trip. This cake, as far as the baking went, was very similar to the previous one. It was a box mix cake and it had a whipped ganache filling and buttercream icing. You have all heard of how i said the cake weight was pushing the ganache out, well with this one i solved it. After making the ganache and was ready to use it, i put it in the fridge until it was firmer, then quickly filled the cake. You can put the filling in either by piping it or by spreading it with a spoon or icing knife, i use and icing knife. After filling it i put it back in the fridge to firm up, after that i pulled it back out and iced it and then put it into the fridge once more. This repeated cooling system keeps everything from loosing its shape and pushing out. After I was done with the repeated refrigerating, i pulled it out one more time to decorate. Unsure of her favorite color i chose more feminine colors, pink and yellow.

(Pastor Angela's cake from top.)

Unsure how to decorate it, I started out basic. I Put columns down the side every few inches, then repeated the shell border at the bottom in yellow. Around the top I put also in yellow i put dots around the top edge. Feeling it was too much yellow, I put tiny pink dots on top of the yellow ones and around the shell base. Noticing it was still incomplete, I tried a technique i learned from watching "Cake Boss." I piped the icing out of a small round tip and let gravity pull it down until i came to the point where it looked some what like drapes. To cover the ugly spots where the drapes came together I put little pink flower. And then of course i piped "Welcome Pastor Angela" on top, and enunciated it by putting yellow lines around it, evening the colors once more.

(Pastor Angela's cake from the side-ish.)