I am not above resorting to cake mixes when it comes to baking with the kids and they are especially handy to pull out when looking for a rainy day activity.  So the kids and I decided to take on an ambitious project and bake what’s known as a rainbow cake. I found my inspiration on Meg Durksen’s site, Whatever. We mixed up two boxes on white cake and divided into four eight inch pans. Quinn selected the colours (blue, green, purple and pink–how appetizing!). We even used pre-made icing on the cakes. In the end we had dinner with my parents and my sister and used the cake as a stand in for my sister’s birthday cake (she was going to be out of the country for her birthday) and everyone enjoyed the cake in all its colourful glory–especially the kids.

‘Tis the season for strawberries and rhubarb and what better way to marry these two otherwise incongruous fruit (I don’t even know if rhubarb qualifies as fruit or a leafy green) than in a pie. So taking the lead that so many others have lately–like Deb over at Smitten Kitchen–I washed and hulled the berries we picked at Whittamore’s Farm on Saturday(most of which ended up in the jars of jam now lining my kitchen counter), made the pastry from Canadian Living, mixed up the fruit with the other ingredients (see Smitten Kitchen site for the recipe), threw it all together and baked up the most heavenly smelling delight that my poor nostrils have smelled in a long time. I had to throw in the nostril reference since I am at the tail end of a terrible summer flu. My body is still in recovery mode and I think the best medicine will be a slice of that pie that’s currently sitting on my stove cooling…beckoning…teasing me to no end! I’m tempted to spend the upcoming Canada Day picking more berries just so I can make more of these pies before berry season is over for another year. What, oh what is a girl to do???

Yesterday wasn’t just the first day of Spring, it was also Nowruz or the Persian New Year. After about a month of fasting from sun-up to sun-down, those who observe the religion break it with an incredible feast. My family had the privilege of celebrating this occasion with long time family friends who are Baha’i and boy they didn’t disappoint with the meal. It was four courses with a definite middle eastern theme. It began with babaganoush, hummus and warm pita bread and some finger-sized dolmades. Our second course was salad that was more Mediterranean in flavour with yummy olives and feta sprinkled throughout. The third course was the show stopper with an amazing salmon (or was it rainbow trout?), rice and lentils, a curried chicken that was so flavourful and aromatic I could have inhaled it in and a lovely cinnamon scented rice dish with cubes of chicken, cranberry currants, raisins and I’m sure other yummy stuff I’m missing. The meal ended with an array of desserts and of course I had to contribute. So I whipped up a batch of precious looking mini cupcakes and decorated them in chocolate ganache and a pretty purple royal icing rose and leaves, which I thought fitting for Spring. It was a memorable meal and a great way to kick off the new year.

Mini Cupcakes for Nowruz

It’s rather ironic that tonight of all nights I choose to sit down and write a post about my son’s birthday cake, since I am forbidden from eating such things at the moment. Forbidden might be a strong word to use given that my ban from indulging in such sweet pastries is self imposed. I am on a Spring cleanse. That means many delectables are off limits for a week and a half. And so I must satisfy my cravings through the only means I know how: eye candy. Literally.

My younger son turned three last week and I got it into my head several weeks back that I had to make him a spectacular cake. Put my new found cake decorating skills to work and turn out something fabulous. Being the over ambitious person that I am and with only borrowed time to do it, I thought I was picking a rather easy design in the form of a Lego cake. Lego has become a favourite past time for my boys so I thought it fitting to make a cake in the shape of bricks. The bonus came in the form of a Lego man cake mold from a neighbour. So I started by baking Ina Garten’s flag cake as well as her chocolate butter cream cake. I baked slab cakes AND mini cupcakes. Once baked, cooled and refrigerated, I sliced the slab cakes in thirds and constructed two rectangular cakes, four layers high alternating the flag cake with the chocolate cake. I topped them off with the mini cupcakes, all with a mocha butter cream that I kind of made up a recipe for. Once crumb coated and cooled, I applied home-made marshmallow fondant. I know, I know, I’m crazy. I just could have bought the fondant from the store, but no, I had to make this damn cake FROM SCRATCH! I didn’t love the way the fondant turned out but it was definitely more malleable than the store-bought kind. To make myself super crazy I decided the two bricks needed to sit atop one slab cake, which I covered in green fondant (that one was store-bought). And with a star tip I decorated the Lego man in coloured vanilla butter cream. I think I must have made enough cake to feed a small army. While there were plenty of leftovers there was no man left in sight. He was devoured by the kids and the adults had to satisfy their sweet tooths with the giant bricks of cake (too bad!).

I think it was well worth the effort, and while I’m nowhere near as talented as some of the crazy cake decorators who do this for a living, I did give myself a pat on the back for my attempt. I’ll leave it to you to be the judge. Unfortunately I can’t give you a taste, but I can leave you with the recipe for the mocha butter cream.

Lego Cake

MOCHA BUTTER CREAM RECIPE

1 cup unsalted butter (room temperature)

3/4 cup vegetable shortening

4 cups of icing sugar (sifted)

1/4 cocoa powder (sifted)

2 Tbsp. (give or take) strong brewed coffee

Cream the butter and shortening together

Add the icing sugar and cocoa powder and whip until fluffy, adding the coffee to thin consistency of icing as necessary.

What a cute tasty looking Lego man!

So I have evidence that I’ve actually learned something in the last 2 months at my cake decorating class. Probably the most important lesson learned was to give up trying to make royal icing with egg whites and go with meringue powder. It resulted in the most fluffy, sweet yet pliable icing for creating delicate roses, branches and leaves that now decorate my cake. While this past week’s class was supposed to be a trial run at putting fondant over a cake dummy, I decided to stay up into the wee hours baking a heavenly white cake and whipping up a batch of butter cream frosting so that I could do the real thing. I added blue food colouring gel to the fondant and it came out a lovely Tiffany blue. I piped the bottom edge of the cake with royal icing beads and then added brown food colouring gel to make the branches. The roses were so-so, but I can live with imperfection on a cake like this–heck, it was my first attempt! And the finishing touch was definitely the green leaves. That was Margaret’s suggestion (she’s our instructor) and the piping tip #352 is an absolute dream. The leaves were the most fun to do. I took lots of pictures but we aren’t tucking into the cake until Friday. Hopefully it will be well worth the wait because the cake is staring back at me from underneath the glass cake plate saying “eat me” and I’m doing everything in my power to resist temptation.

Blue Fondant cake

Royal icing details

I’ve been taking a cake decorating class for the past 5 weeks every Tuesday night for 2 hours with my girlfriend. Up until last night I felt fairly confident in my abilities to construct a cake and make it look half decent with buttercream, but then came royal icing. Ugh! Being the ambitious A-type that I am, I made my icing from scratch using egg whites and icing sugar instead of store-bought meringue powder. It looked great and tasted great but it was useless when it came to making apple blossoms, drop flowers and especially roses. So I think I’ll be heading to the store in the next couple of days to pick me up some meringue powder, or even better, store-bought royal icing. In the meantime I thought I’d share pictures of the rosettes we practiced making about 3 classes ago and the cake I successfully decorated last week and then proceeded to share with my colleagues at work. You can tell from the picture I’m so over winter and ready to get into my garden. But that’s another story.

Green buttercream rosettes

Spring Vanilla Buttercream Cake

More often than not my older son complains about how life isn’t fair, he never gets to do anything, he fundamentally disagrees with the concept of sharing, life isn’t fair and did I mention life isn’t fair? But once a year my son gets exactly what he wants: his choice of birthday cake. He usually puts his “order” in the day after his last birthday, so that gives me roughly 364 days to think about how I’m going to do it. Believe me, it’s a lot of pressure and expectation to live up to when the order is coming from your 5 year-old child. And with each passing year, the cake requests are becoming more involved and elaborate. Years 1 to 3 were baked and designed for my whims, but Quinn quickly caught on and for his fourth birthday he requested a Buzz Lightyear cake. Rather than kill myself trying to pipe a Disney character in buttercream, I got a fabulous cake topper (which Quinn got to keep afterwards and add to his astounding toy collection) and iced the cake in coordinating colours. The character cake theme continued for his fifth birthday upon which he requested a Batman cake, only this time he also requested the cake be a lemon cake, so I dutifully complied, making Martha Stewart’s knock-out 1-2-3-4 Lemon Cake with homemade lemon curd in the middle. I did a simple yellow buttercream icing with the Batman symbol in black piping. And once again, this year Quinn wanted the same flavoured cake, but this time he wanted the Incredible Hulk. In rather out of character fashion, I left the planning of the cake decorating to the last minute. In fact I had no idea how or what I was going to do because I’m definitely no visual artist and was not even going to attempt to pipe the Hulk in icing. So I panicked. After scouring online and failing to find a Hulk cake topper that I could buy in the next 24 hours, I headed over to the bakery at the grocery store. Sure enough the kind baker behind the counter told me he would go in the back and look for the Hulk cake topper. God must have been smiling down upon me that day because sure enough the baker returned with the cake topper (which, again will be added to my children’s ever expanding collection of toys). With cake topper in hand I headed home to embark on the icing. I should backtrack a bit and let you know I baked the slab cakes on a Thursday night and decorated them on Saturday afternoon for a Sunday morning party. Saturday rolled around and my girlfriend, Karen, who is taking the cake decorating class with me, came over after offering to help me with the cake. Unlike Karen, who always has a vision and a plan for her children’s birthday cakes and who incidentally, is a bonafide artiste, I am a bit of a MacGyver when it comes to decorating a cake–no plan, just some icing, a piping bag and toothpicks. We settled on a pale grey for the base colour and a fabulous green for the “trim.” Karen came up with this great idea to melt sugar, add food colouring and then pour it on to a sheet of parchment to dry, which we could then use as a plaque for writing on. We added other details like the blue and green sugar and shards of the candy to make it look like the Hulk was about to smash the words on the plaque. I’m pretty pleased with how the cake turned out (as you’ll see in the pictures). I must be a glutton for punishment because I’ve already asked my son what kind of cake he wants for his next birthday. His answer: “a lemon cake again!”

Aaaarrrgh! I'm the Incredible Hulk!

Eat Me!?*@!?!

If you’ve ever been stuck with leftovers and are feeling stymmied about what to do with the dribs and drabs of last night’s dinner, fear not. Seize the opportunity to get creative in the kitchen with that sorry looking piece of chicken or that less-than-full-bowl of spaghetti. For me it was a not-quite-full serving of cooked basmati rice. It sat in the fridge fora day or so while I mulled over whether or not to add it to the next night’s dinner or save it for a special project. Since it didn’t make the cut for dinner, I decided to turn it into dessert, although I could eat this dessert morning, noon or night since it is the ultimate in comfort foods. Rice pudding, if made the right way, can be the perfect compliment to any meal or mood. For me that usually comes at night when I’m parked in front of the television in my sweats. I consider rice pudding guilt-free indulgence. Maybe it’s because it’s made with rice and eggs and milk. I just omit the sugar from that mental list and voila: a healthy snack.

So I got out my oven proof Corningware dish and put my concoction together unaided by a recipe. You must think I’m nuts but the ingredients required to make a sweet custard pudding never deviate. The basic requirements involve eggs, milk and sugar. Add to this a dash of vanilla extract, cinnamon and some golden raisins and you’ve got yourself heaven in a bowl. Oh yes, and don’t forget the heaping cup of cooked rice! I have yet to experiment with the flavour profile because really, who wants to mess with a good thing? But I might go out on a limb next time and try some orange or chocolate. Once I combined all the ingredients I popped it into the oven and baked it until creamy (sorry, I didn’t watch the clock), every now and again stirring it so the custard on top wouldn’t burn. I would say it came out a little on the sweet side, but I’ve got a sweet tooth so it didn’t bother me. Adjust the sugar depending on how tolerant your own personal sweet tooth is and sit down with a big bowl of warm rice pudding on a chilly night, under a cozy blanket with a good book (or movie) and you’ll never want to leave your house again.

Home-Made Rice Pudding

1 to 1/2 cups of cooked white rice

2 eggs

2 cups 2%milk (the higher the milk fat content, the creamier the custard)

3/4 of a cup of sugar

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tsp. cinnamon

1/2 cup of golden raisins

Mix all ingredients together and bake at 350 degrees until the custard is creamy. Stir every ten minutes to avoid burning.

My appetite has excellent timing. It’s been “on leave” for a while. Ironically, my stomach isn’t fond of the food that I like to eat. In fact, my entire digestive tract doesn’t like anything I put down my gullet. Humor me here for a minute: imagine eating a simple meal; it could be toast with peanut butter and a banana with a glass of O.J. in the morning. Or maybe a bowl of soup and tuna sandwich for lunch. Now imagine not feeling the slightest bit hungry when you’re supposed to be eating those meals and a full three hours later you feel as though you’re going to upchuck the sandwich, salad and the full breakfast. These have been the joys (or misfortunes) of my dining experiences as of late. I brought this to my doctor’s attention several months ago. This was followed by some tests, which included drinking the most awful chalky concoction after which I was expertly tipped flat on a cold metal table while having my innards X-ray’d. I’ve even been injecting with radioactive nuclear medicine, which I’ve been assured will not shorten my lifespan nor make me glow in the dark. Neither of these tests has revealed the great mystery of my incredible indigestion. However the doctor decided to put me on a prescription strength anti-acid, which I think has helped my case. I no longer wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling of someone’s fist forcing its way up my esophagus. But the most miraculous improvement has been my appetite and it couldn’t have returned at a better time. Thanksgiving weekend is a glutton’s wet dream come true. It’s the harvest. There is no shortage of good, fresh food. So I decided to embrace the spirit of the holiday and cook and bake for my family while up in prime harvest territory: at the cottage. Saturday’s dinner consisted of chicken stew with chickpeas, sweet and yellow potatoes and sweet onion. We had a fabulous salad of fresh lettuces on the side and not one but TWO pumpkin pies! We only polished off one of the pies, but that meant I could use the dish to bake the most scrumptious apple pie for the Thanksgiving dinner. I decided to pay homage to the slow food movement by making beer-braised beef short ribs, steamed savoy cabbage with roasted chestnuts and garlic mashed potatoes. Yes, I roasted the chestnuts and the garlic. And let’s not forget the pies that came at the end of the meal. It was one of those meals that makes you want to hibernate for the winter or put on a cable-knit sweater and cozy up by a fire. And guess what? Not a single bout of indigestion the entire weekend (you know I’m going to live to regret writing that down). Boy was I thankful this weekend, if for no other reason than I was able to enjoy a good meal with my family for the first time in months. To tell you the truth I would have been just as happy eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich if it meant  I could eat without fear of my food revisiting me in the middle of the night. But having a good meal go down certainly doesn’t hurt.

Beer braised beef short ribs

Garlic mashed potatoes

Savoy cabbage and chestnuts

Not one, but TWO kinds of pie!

You know it’s harvest season in Ontario when the peaches are out at the Farmers’ Markets. I like a good juicy peach to sink my teeth into at this time of year, but what I love even better is the peach crisp I make with them. In years past I would buy a basket or two, wait to for the fruit to get nice an ripe and that have at ‘em but always with some apprehension? Was the fruit ripe enough? Would I be able to get the peel off easily when I blanched them? Would the fruit come away from the pit easily? Well, any misgivings I had about the success rate of my peeling and pitting process are now a thing of the past. I learned from a very helpful lady selling peaches at the market that I needed to wait for the “Freestone” variety, and not use the “Clingstone” variety. So I waited a week and picked up a couple baskets at the Metro Square Farmers’ Market this past week. As the name would suggest, the flesh “clings” to the pit, whereas the freestone variety comes away from the pit with ease. And rather than blanch the fruit in hot water for 30 seconds followed by a quick dip in ice water, I pulled out my handy dandy Zyliss serrated peeler, which made the entire peeling and pitting process an absolute dream. I think I cut down the entire prep time by at least half. I peeled and sliced about a dozen peaches into a corning ware dish. To that I added a 3/4 cup mixture of granulated and light brown sugar along with a couple tablespoons of flour to absorb the liquid. For the crisp I combined half a pound (yes, that’s half a brick) of butter with a couple cups of flour, a cup of quick oats (not instant), another half cup of the light brown sugar and just a smidge of salt (I use sea salt). I baked it until the fruit essentially starts to bubble up through the crisp, but I usually know it’s ready before I’ve even laid eyes on it because my entire house smells like the aroma of butter, sugar and baked peaches….mmmmm! My first crisp of the harvest season must have been a hit at my nephew’s birthday party, because most of it was gone. I even got complimented on the crisp by Alannah, a professional baker, which made me feel pretty darn good. I wish you could smell and taste this crisp through the screen it really is that good and I really don’t take credit for it; the peaches do all the work. I just put the ingredients all together. You’ll have to try it while Freestone peaches are still in season, or you could be mishugina like me and make a whole wack of them assembly line-style and stick them in the freezer (unbaked) until you need them for a special occasion. Nothing beats a fresh Ontario peach. Nothing.

Freestone Peaches

Peach Crisp