Funfetti Cookies

Sesame Street Cake

Filled with fresh blueberries

 Crumb coat of cream cheese frosting

 Border made with sprinkles

Cake toppers made with a Cricut

Cake Decorating Party

My Niece, The Future Baker

I can't believe that Cake4Kids.org's second annual CakeOff-4Kids event is already taking place next month!  I entered last year and won the best decorated category but this year, I wanted a chance to taste the 50 cakes by other volunteers.  However, my 10 year old niece will be entering the kids' 15 and under category.  In preparation for the event, she asked to come over and make a cake for her Dad's birthday party this past weekend.  She did an amazing job!  I was quite impressed with her piping skills.

Cake was Baking Illustrated's Yellow Layer Cake which is now a go to yellow cake recipe for me.  It wasn't too sweet and very fluffy.  She frosted the cake with the Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate Frosting.  The writing was done with melted candy melts.

Red Velvet Cupcakes Comparison

With Valentine's day around the corner, I noticed a lot of red velvet cupcakes posts popping up around the blogosphere lately.  I have a pretty good go to red velvet cake recipe; however, I noticed a lot of people were praising Cakeman Raven's recipe.  Because I had a tub of cream cheese frosting begging to be used soon, I decided to do a quick comparison.

The two recipes are nearly identical except for the use of cake flour vs all purpose flour, oil vs butter, and teaspoon vs tablespoon for cocoa powder.  I did a smashup of the two recipes and came up with the following to compare BUTTER vs OIL.

Red Velvet Cupcakes
A Baked By Jen Original
Makes about 24 cupcakes

3 cups cake flour
2 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup butter or vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon red gel-paste food color
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp vinegar


Preheat oven to 350.  Line 2 muffin baking pans with 12 standard size baking cups.


Sift dry ingredients together and set aside.

Place butter/oil and sugar in bowl of electric mixer and beat at medium-speed until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Dissolve the gel paste into the vanilla. With the mixer on low, add mixture. Add vinegar.

Add flour mixture alternately with buttermilk in two batches. Scrape bowl and mix just long enough to combine. 

Pour batter into prepared pans and bake for 16-18 minutes or until toothpick inserted into the center of cupcake comes out with a few crumbs clinging to the toothpick.  Cool in pans for 10 minutes and then place on cooling rack to cool to room temperature.




butter vs oil - top view


butter vs oil - side view


butter vs oil - inside view

The batch made with oil looked a lot better, a nice dome and even appeared to look more moist with the shiny top.  However, in my opinion, the batch made with butter was much more superior in taste.  Also, the cake was fluffier, more tender with a tighter crumb.

Photo Credit: Dennis Ha Photography
(Disclaimer: Patches didn't actually eat the cupcake.)

Halloween Sugar Cookies

I couldn't possibly let Halloween pass on by without baking something for the occasion.  So, I gave another try at decorating sugar cookies.  I think this time around I got a better handle on working with sugar cookie dough and royal icing.

What I found very helpful was rolling out the dough in between two parchment papers to desire thickness and placing it on a cookie sheet and placing it into the fridge to chill.  This speed up the process and made the dough very manageable.  HOWEVER!  I did make one mistake which was rolling the dough out too thin.  The icing to cookie ratio was quite overwhelming even for a "sugar" cookie.

Have a fun and safe weekend!

Sugar Cookies
slightly adapted from Cake Central
Makes about 2-3 dozen cookies

1 cup unsalted butter

1 cup white sugar

1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp almond extract

3 cups all purpose flour

1-1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add egg and extracts.  Mix well.

Shift dry ingredients in a medium bowl and add a little at a time into the butter mixture.

Mix until flour is completely incorporated and dough comes together.

Roll out dough in between two parchment papers.  Place dough and parchment paper on a cookie sheet and place in fridge to chill.  Continue until all of the dough has been used up.  First batch should be chilled and ready to cut into desired shapes.

Bake at 350F for 8-10 minutes.

Reroll leftover dough and repeat the process.

Royal Icing

slightly adapted from Wilton

Makes about 3 cups of icing

2 tablespoons of meringue powder

4 cups of confectioners' sugar

6 tablespoons of warm water

1/4 tsp of almond extract

Beat all ingredients until icing form peaks (7-10 minutes at low speed with heavy duty mixer or 10-12 minutes with hand held mixer at high speed).

For stiffer icing, use 1 tablespoon less water.

For flooding, add 1 tsp of water at a time until proper consistency is reached.

Pumpkin Whoopie Pies with Cream Cheese Frosting

My nephew was over at my place on Saturday and I used his request to bake something together to finally tackle the infamous whoopie pies.  I've been bookmarking so many whoopie pie recipes that I knew I needed to just own the book, Whoopie Pies.  Was so excited when my brother's girlfriend gave me a copy as a thank you gift for a cake I made.

First recipe out of the book and it was a hit.  I don't know why I waited this long to make my first whoopie pie.  Expect to see a lot more soon!

My First Cake4Kids Cake

The cake requests are finally starting to roll in for Cake4Kids.  I kept this one fairly simple as it was a very last minute request.  I completely forgot about the vanilla buttercream frosting crusting up or else I would've definitely used the Viva Towel Method.  Not too bad for someone who likes to hide everything under fondant right?

I "cheated" and doctored a box of Duncan Hines Classic Yellow Cake for this one.  The cake was out of this world good.  I even ate every last bit of the scraps to prove it.  I used the Original WASC cake recipe from Cake Central which has me reconsidering my self-proclaimed ban on box cake mixes.  Don't get me wrong, I'm actually envious of how box cake mixes can always yield a moist and delicious cake.  It's just that it's always been my thing to bake from scratch.  I can see this as the perfect alternative to pound cake for stacking and carving.

The Best Carrot Cupcakes

When I came across Marzipan's blog post about the best carrot cake recipe, I had to add that to my to bake list as my own version was only okay.  I adapted this recipe into cupcakes in order to give some to one friend today and some to another friend tomorrow.  Because I wanted a slight crust to the frosting like the ones from those specialty cupcake stores, I tried a new cream cheese frosting from Cake Central.  To hint that these were carrot flavor, I threw on some orange sprinkles.

I'm not a huge carrot cake fan as the two friends which will be receiving these cupcakes but I tried one and did like it a lot.  I left out the raisins and the nuts by request; however, I think it would've shined a lot more with them.

Cupcake Bites

 I'm going to be baking a few different cake flavors in the next two weeks for a tasting; so, I had to make room in my freezer which was already full of cake scraps.  I had bags of lemon cake, chocolate cake, strawberry cake, and vanilla cake.  Unfortunately, I had to toss the bag of strawberry cake and vanilla cake as those suffered from freezer burn.  After my last somewhat successful attempt at one of Bakerella's creations, I decided to give it another go.  This time, I was inspired by her cupcake bites featured on The Pioneer Woman Cooks.

First, I started out by throwing the lemon cake and chocolate cake scraps into my food processor and giving it a few quick pulses to turn them into uniform size crumbs.  Then, I added a bit of vanilla buttercream frosting and mixed everything together until I got a consistency I wanted.  (No pictures of this step because I didn't realize how blurry they were until I uploaded them.)

Next, I rolled the mixture into cake truffles and placed them in the fridge for a few hours.  Just before taking them out of the fridge, I microwaved the chocolate candy melts in a plastic bag.  This made it easier to fill the candy mold.  Then, I dropped the cake ball right on top of the blob.  At this point, I realized all my cake balls were a bit too big for the mold but I really didn't want to reroll.  So, it made it a little trickier to handle during the second coating.

A few seconds in the freezer and they all fell out of the mold a lot easier than I expected.  I was trying to pry them out at first but then realized they just fall out when you flip the tray upside down, hah!

Then, I filled a condiment bowl with the pink candy melts and simply dunked the exposed top, trying to cover everything up until the edge of the chocolate covering.  To finish off the cupcake look, I added a bunch of sprinkles.

National Donut Day

Funny that The Perfect Mini Donut Maker my brother ordered arrived at our front door yesterday evening.  Just in time for National Donut Day.  The mini cake donuts (adapted from Williams-Sonoma) weren't bad but they weren't what I was expecting.  They tasted like mini yellow cakes more than mini cake donuts.

 The Perfect Mini Donut Maker

Mmm...Donuts!

Powdered Sugar Glaze (adapted from BH&G New Cook Book) and Sprinkles

Hello Kitty Cake Pops

Inspired by Bakerella's blog, I jumped into making my first batch of cake pops.  After losing a few heads and ears in the bowl of candy melts, I made a good two dozen cake pops before calling it quits.  At the same time, my edible ink pens were refusing to write on smoothly anymore.  The bow was made using jumbo sprinkles and mini m&m's.  Thank goodness these things freeze well as I still have another two dozen cake truffles left.

Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes

I've been waiting months for the perfect excuse to make these cupcakes ever since I saw them on Smitten Kitchen.  Much better than the ones I made last year as these chocolate stout cupcakes included a "shot" of chocolate whiskey ganache along with the baileys irish cream frosting.