Holiday Baking!
As I mentioned in my earlier Christmas post I spent several days (almost a week!) baking things. It would've gone much faster if I had had my assistant (bro) helping me out but he didn't arrive until much later when everything was nearly done. :(
I made gingerbread cookies and 4 different flavors of cake balls/truffles: pumpkin spice, chocolate mint, gingerbread, and vanilla-milk chocolate.
It's been a long while since I made gingerbread cookies and I've never made cake balls before but when I saw them they looked so delicious and cute I had to try. And try indeed. They are usually coated with chocolate and I really hate working with chocolate. So very much. ARGH! >:(
Since I was working solo I didn't take pictures of every single step since my hands were often covered with something sticky.
Here are all the ingredients plus some extra used to make everything.
I first started with the pumpkin spice cake which was my favorite. Mmmmm. <3
Afterwards I made a tiny yellow cake and with the leftover batter I added some cocoa powder, a little melted chocolate and a few drops of peppermint extract. Then I made the ginger cake.
All four cakes after they finished baking. :3
While they were baking I made the gingerbread cookie dough which I wrapped up and put in the fridge for the next day.
Then I made the cream cheese frosting for the pumpkin spice and gingerbread cake balls. I added some cinnamon to make it more festive and yummy. :3
I wanted the centers of the cake balls to be creamy frosting so.....
I piped some cream cheese frosting into these little blobs and put them in the freezer.
While those were in the freezer and after the cakes cooled I took a couple forks and reduced each one to crumbs and set them aside.
After and hour or so I added part of the leftover frosting to the pumpkin spice crumbs and pulled out the frosting from the freezer and tried to cover them with cake and roll them into a ball. It didn't work out so well (probably because the frosting wasn't frozen solid) so I mixed the attempt-to-freeze frosting into the crumbs like recipe originally instructed. Then I rolled and rolled and rolled.
Pictured above are the gingerbread balls. They took FOREVER to roll (because I'm a perfectionist) so I only got the pumpkin and ginger ones done before going to bed. I would've done the other two but it was 3am and I still needed to make the buttercream for them. I didn't think anyone would appreciate hearing the mixer at top speed for 15+ minutes at that hour. XD
So the next day I made vanilla buttercream for the yellow cake and with the extra buttercream I made it choocolate and rolled those two and put them in the freezer with the others.
Then I turned on the oven to bake the gingerbread cookies but there was this smoke and a wierd smell like burning plastic coming out of it and I didn't want that to mess up the flavor of the cookies. So I let whatever it was burn and saved the cookies for later.
It was time to coat the balls with chocolate. See? I even went and got a chocolate thermometer at the baking supply store to help me temper it properly. (I hate tempering so much!)
So that the thermometer will read the temperature of the chocolate and not the metal bowl I taped it at an angle so it won't touch anything but the chocolate.
Here's the orage-colored white chocolate for the pumpkin balls. While I was raising the temp to 120 degrees I realized too late that I didn't prepare a bowl of cold water to cool it down quickly! D: So as the temp was climbing I decided to use the kitchen hose to spray cold water on the bottom on the bowl. As I was standing at the sink and preparing to do that my mom's bf sneaks up behind and scares me into leaning and inch further forward than I wanted and a tablespoon of water ended up in the chocolate. It is VERY BAD to get even ONE drop of water in chocolate because it "seizes" and becomes a gross clump of mess. So that batch was ruined. I was really upset! >:'(
Fail chocolate after it finally dried 6 HOURS later! ARGH!
So I had to use the leftover orange white chocolate and later added the white white chocolate that I was planning to use for the gingerbread balls. I managed to temper it properly and it made a nice pale orange color after I added the white white chocolate when I was running out of chocolate. I dipped the pumpkin balls in it. Then I noticed they started to crack. ARGH!! Stupid me! I had forgotten to warm the balls to room temperature before dipping. They had come straight out of the freezer.
; n ;
So much fail.
I put the balls in the warm oven for a couple minutes to warm them up and that worked out well.
After my mom got back from the radio station I had her help me decorate the mint chocolate balls. I tempered some dark chocolate, twice because it went a few degrees too high once I had it tempered correctly and had to start over again with the same chocolate. ARGH!! Stupid chocolate! I hate you! After I dipped the chocolate my mom sprinkled the green sugar before it hardened a minute later.
Then for the gingerbread balls I wasn't sure what to do with them.... It was too late to go out and buy more white chocolate and grocery store chocolate doesn't work that well for this anyway. :\
So I tried making a small batch of glace icing for the vanilla balls...
Which turned out to be total fail. I had attempted to make it by hand and well... :(
I washed some dishes and made attempt #2 with the mixer. As you can see it turned out much better.
*sigh*
A few failed attempts. They were taking too damn long to dry and were too sticky and just oozed everywhere. Ugh! So messy.
So decided to bake the gingerbread cookies since I couldn't think of what to do with the balls at the moment. Tomorrow I would go and get a cooling rack which I could seriously use.
Here are the cutters I used. Perhaps you recognize one of them? :3
Cut and baked.
I got this snowflake cookie mold pan and I used the gingerbread scraps to make a batch of snowflake cookies. It seems I put too much dough so it puffed up a lot. They were like little cakes. Which is what cookies are basically.
I trimmed the edges with scissors after they cooled and they looked a whole lot better.
The next day I went and got a cooling rack and decided to try dipping the gingerballs in royal icing since I needed some to decorate the gingerbread cookies anyway. I flavored it with a little (colorless) vanilla and a few drops of wintermint. More than I had intended. :(
I ended up watering it down quite a bit so that the balls could easily roll around in it. Toothpicks were very handy with this process.
Since they were still wet when I finished...
I sprinkled some cinnamon on top and set them aside to dry.
Afterwards I decided that I would cover the vanilla balls with milk chocolate since I've once witnessed the recipient consume milk chocolate before. This was store bought milk chocolate and it behaved very oddly when I attempted to temper it. It was like it was always in a semi-solid state and never flowed well and took forever to harden as hard as it was going to get which wasn't very hard. :(
Since I had some leftover chocolate I decided to cover the bottoms of the snowflake cookies with it.
While those were drying I decided to color some of the royal icing I had set aside and decorate the gingerbread cookies. The red for the band on the tophats never got red enough so while it was wet I sprinkled red sugar on them. Then after 40 minutes or so I piped the holly on them. Since the icing had been watered down a bit the leaves didn't hold their shape as well as it normally would have.
I cleaned up and that was the end of this day.
The next morning I checked the gingerballs and they had not dried yet! It had been over 12 hours and they were still tacky which made them incredibly difficult to remove from the rack without leaving huge finger marks. Gloves helped a bit but not much. >:( The next day they still weren't completely dry but they were easier to handle.
Here's a box that I prepared for someone. :3
The next day I worked on some more decorating. I found some sparkly white decorating gel at the baking store so I got it and since a certain someone likes sparkly lizards I decorated their cake balls with little lizards. Again, the toothpick was very handy.
Look how cute! <3
These were really hard to handle since the chocolate wasn't made properly and would melt in your hand. :( Also this chocolate bloomed as well as some of the dark chocolate ones too. I hate tempering chocolate!! So very much. >:(
Here are some of the finished cake balls. I had a total of over 100. I forgot to count them so I'm not sure how many there were exactly.
My favorite was the pumpkin ones. A lot of people liked the gingerbread ones the best (which my brother likes to call "Santa's Jolly Ginger Balls"). I thought they were kinda disappointing but that may be becuase of how much of a pain in the ass they were.
I didn't feel like decorating the snowflake cookies so I coated them in powdered sugar.
And here are the finished gingerbread cookies! :D
It was time to decorate with gold dust! :D
I originally got the edible gold dust some time back for something else I plan to do in the future.
You take some extract which has fast drying alcohol and mix the powder in it and use a brush to apply it to whatever. In my case I covered the pumpkin balls in it and a handful of them had little puzzle pieces painted on them. Sadly I forgot to take pictures of those.
I also painted some of the gingerbread cookies...
Here they are as they appeared the next morning when I used chocolate to pipe faces and arms on them. The messed up one was the first one I did... what happened was that the chocolate was hardening too quick and clogged the tip. I squeezed real hard and it went everywhere.
The saddest little brokenhearted Layton snowman ever. ;_;
I crumbled him up and used him as ice cream topping. He was delicious.
So that's it. It took forever and ever and my hands hurt a lot. At several points they were totally bright red. At the end it felt like I had hundreds of tiny little cuts on my hands and the dry winter air doesn't help much. I don't think I'll be baking anything again for a while. And I don't even want to look at chocolate again for a long time. Unless it's strictly for eating and I don't have to make it into something.
I made gingerbread cookies and 4 different flavors of cake balls/truffles: pumpkin spice, chocolate mint, gingerbread, and vanilla-milk chocolate.
It's been a long while since I made gingerbread cookies and I've never made cake balls before but when I saw them they looked so delicious and cute I had to try. And try indeed. They are usually coated with chocolate and I really hate working with chocolate. So very much. ARGH! >:(
Since I was working solo I didn't take pictures of every single step since my hands were often covered with something sticky.
Here are all the ingredients plus some extra used to make everything.
I first started with the pumpkin spice cake which was my favorite. Mmmmm. <3
Afterwards I made a tiny yellow cake and with the leftover batter I added some cocoa powder, a little melted chocolate and a few drops of peppermint extract. Then I made the ginger cake.
All four cakes after they finished baking. :3
While they were baking I made the gingerbread cookie dough which I wrapped up and put in the fridge for the next day.
Then I made the cream cheese frosting for the pumpkin spice and gingerbread cake balls. I added some cinnamon to make it more festive and yummy. :3
I wanted the centers of the cake balls to be creamy frosting so.....
I piped some cream cheese frosting into these little blobs and put them in the freezer.
While those were in the freezer and after the cakes cooled I took a couple forks and reduced each one to crumbs and set them aside.
After and hour or so I added part of the leftover frosting to the pumpkin spice crumbs and pulled out the frosting from the freezer and tried to cover them with cake and roll them into a ball. It didn't work out so well (probably because the frosting wasn't frozen solid) so I mixed the attempt-to-freeze frosting into the crumbs like recipe originally instructed. Then I rolled and rolled and rolled.
Pictured above are the gingerbread balls. They took FOREVER to roll (because I'm a perfectionist) so I only got the pumpkin and ginger ones done before going to bed. I would've done the other two but it was 3am and I still needed to make the buttercream for them. I didn't think anyone would appreciate hearing the mixer at top speed for 15+ minutes at that hour. XD
So the next day I made vanilla buttercream for the yellow cake and with the extra buttercream I made it choocolate and rolled those two and put them in the freezer with the others.
Then I turned on the oven to bake the gingerbread cookies but there was this smoke and a wierd smell like burning plastic coming out of it and I didn't want that to mess up the flavor of the cookies. So I let whatever it was burn and saved the cookies for later.
It was time to coat the balls with chocolate. See? I even went and got a chocolate thermometer at the baking supply store to help me temper it properly. (I hate tempering so much!)
So that the thermometer will read the temperature of the chocolate and not the metal bowl I taped it at an angle so it won't touch anything but the chocolate.
Here's the orage-colored white chocolate for the pumpkin balls. While I was raising the temp to 120 degrees I realized too late that I didn't prepare a bowl of cold water to cool it down quickly! D: So as the temp was climbing I decided to use the kitchen hose to spray cold water on the bottom on the bowl. As I was standing at the sink and preparing to do that my mom's bf sneaks up behind and scares me into leaning and inch further forward than I wanted and a tablespoon of water ended up in the chocolate. It is VERY BAD to get even ONE drop of water in chocolate because it "seizes" and becomes a gross clump of mess. So that batch was ruined. I was really upset! >:'(
Fail chocolate after it finally dried 6 HOURS later! ARGH!
So I had to use the leftover orange white chocolate and later added the white white chocolate that I was planning to use for the gingerbread balls. I managed to temper it properly and it made a nice pale orange color after I added the white white chocolate when I was running out of chocolate. I dipped the pumpkin balls in it. Then I noticed they started to crack. ARGH!! Stupid me! I had forgotten to warm the balls to room temperature before dipping. They had come straight out of the freezer.
; n ;
So much fail.
I put the balls in the warm oven for a couple minutes to warm them up and that worked out well.
After my mom got back from the radio station I had her help me decorate the mint chocolate balls. I tempered some dark chocolate, twice because it went a few degrees too high once I had it tempered correctly and had to start over again with the same chocolate. ARGH!! Stupid chocolate! I hate you! After I dipped the chocolate my mom sprinkled the green sugar before it hardened a minute later.
Then for the gingerbread balls I wasn't sure what to do with them.... It was too late to go out and buy more white chocolate and grocery store chocolate doesn't work that well for this anyway. :\
So I tried making a small batch of glace icing for the vanilla balls...
Which turned out to be total fail. I had attempted to make it by hand and well... :(
I washed some dishes and made attempt #2 with the mixer. As you can see it turned out much better.
*sigh*
A few failed attempts. They were taking too damn long to dry and were too sticky and just oozed everywhere. Ugh! So messy.
So decided to bake the gingerbread cookies since I couldn't think of what to do with the balls at the moment. Tomorrow I would go and get a cooling rack which I could seriously use.
Here are the cutters I used. Perhaps you recognize one of them? :3
Cut and baked.
I got this snowflake cookie mold pan and I used the gingerbread scraps to make a batch of snowflake cookies. It seems I put too much dough so it puffed up a lot. They were like little cakes. Which is what cookies are basically.
I trimmed the edges with scissors after they cooled and they looked a whole lot better.
The next day I went and got a cooling rack and decided to try dipping the gingerballs in royal icing since I needed some to decorate the gingerbread cookies anyway. I flavored it with a little (colorless) vanilla and a few drops of wintermint. More than I had intended. :(
I ended up watering it down quite a bit so that the balls could easily roll around in it. Toothpicks were very handy with this process.
Since they were still wet when I finished...
I sprinkled some cinnamon on top and set them aside to dry.
Afterwards I decided that I would cover the vanilla balls with milk chocolate since I've once witnessed the recipient consume milk chocolate before. This was store bought milk chocolate and it behaved very oddly when I attempted to temper it. It was like it was always in a semi-solid state and never flowed well and took forever to harden as hard as it was going to get which wasn't very hard. :(
Since I had some leftover chocolate I decided to cover the bottoms of the snowflake cookies with it.
While those were drying I decided to color some of the royal icing I had set aside and decorate the gingerbread cookies. The red for the band on the tophats never got red enough so while it was wet I sprinkled red sugar on them. Then after 40 minutes or so I piped the holly on them. Since the icing had been watered down a bit the leaves didn't hold their shape as well as it normally would have.
I cleaned up and that was the end of this day.
The next morning I checked the gingerballs and they had not dried yet! It had been over 12 hours and they were still tacky which made them incredibly difficult to remove from the rack without leaving huge finger marks. Gloves helped a bit but not much. >:( The next day they still weren't completely dry but they were easier to handle.
Here's a box that I prepared for someone. :3
The next day I worked on some more decorating. I found some sparkly white decorating gel at the baking store so I got it and since a certain someone likes sparkly lizards I decorated their cake balls with little lizards. Again, the toothpick was very handy.
Look how cute! <3
These were really hard to handle since the chocolate wasn't made properly and would melt in your hand. :( Also this chocolate bloomed as well as some of the dark chocolate ones too. I hate tempering chocolate!! So very much. >:(
Here are some of the finished cake balls. I had a total of over 100. I forgot to count them so I'm not sure how many there were exactly.
My favorite was the pumpkin ones. A lot of people liked the gingerbread ones the best (which my brother likes to call "Santa's Jolly Ginger Balls"). I thought they were kinda disappointing but that may be becuase of how much of a pain in the ass they were.
I didn't feel like decorating the snowflake cookies so I coated them in powdered sugar.
And here are the finished gingerbread cookies! :D
It was time to decorate with gold dust! :D
I originally got the edible gold dust some time back for something else I plan to do in the future.
You take some extract which has fast drying alcohol and mix the powder in it and use a brush to apply it to whatever. In my case I covered the pumpkin balls in it and a handful of them had little puzzle pieces painted on them. Sadly I forgot to take pictures of those.
I also painted some of the gingerbread cookies...
Here they are as they appeared the next morning when I used chocolate to pipe faces and arms on them. The messed up one was the first one I did... what happened was that the chocolate was hardening too quick and clogged the tip. I squeezed real hard and it went everywhere.
The saddest little brokenhearted Layton snowman ever. ;_;
I crumbled him up and used him as ice cream topping. He was delicious.
So that's it. It took forever and ever and my hands hurt a lot. At several points they were totally bright red. At the end it felt like I had hundreds of tiny little cuts on my hands and the dry winter air doesn't help much. I don't think I'll be baking anything again for a while. And I don't even want to look at chocolate again for a long time. Unless it's strictly for eating and I don't have to make it into something.