Chocolate Frosting

Happy New Year's Eve!

I am trying something new today - posting from my iPad.  So, if anything looks weird, it's not intentional!  We'll see how this goes.

I have written before on the favorite chocolate cake around here.  It's on every Hershey's Cocoa container - Perfectly Chocolate Cake.   The Perfectly Chocolate Frosting that goes with it is the best chocolate frosting ever!  I had been having a little trouble with the frosting being smooth, due to the way the ingredients are added, but I have played with it and gotten a frosting that I get rather excited about!   Since the butter and cocoa mixture are warm from melting the butter, when I would add the milk, the chocolate would cool and there would be thicker bits of cocoa throughout the frosting.  What I have started doing is making the frosting in the pan that I melt the butter in.   This way there is not any drastic change in temperature and rapid cooling.  (Note: turn the burner off)  I add part of the powdered sugar first, mix it really well with the hand mixer, then add a small amount of the milk.  At this point it looks like it is never going to be smooth, but it gets the sugar and cocoa mixture evenly incorporated so that there are not any clumps of chocolate.  Then repeat with the rest of the powdered sugar and milk.  I just keep mixing and using a spatula to move the icing from the sides of the pan.  I do this for much longer than seems necessary, and add a little more milk if it seems a little too thick.  It becomes this beautiful smooth velvety frosting.  A key thing is to not get caught up in the excitement of the pretty frosting and forget to add the vanilla at the end.  This has happened to me and I was the only one that noticed, but it tastes much better with vanilla.  And, it will keep you from wondering why the cake tasted different this time, and waking up in the middle of the night saying - of course it was different, I forgot the vanilla in the frosting!   A few times I was afraid to add more milk and then regretted it because the frosting was a little harder to spread.  Plus, sprinkles stick a lot better to a moister frosting.

I purchased a Wilton Cake Caddy with the turntable base - this makes all the difference in frosting a round cake!  I can focus on the frosting, not the rotating of the cake.   This also stores the cake very well, which always seems to be a problem with layer cakes - airtight, no smashing the icing....

I had bought the disposable 9x13 cake pans so I could easily take a cake to an dinner and not worry about how I was going to transport it and deal with a pan/platter.  I love making the cakes in these pans!  Since it's not a layer cake and due to the shape of the pans, the cake is a little more dense and so moist!  The clear plastic lids are great too!  

These are not new inventions, but things I just started using and am quite happy with!

Below are a bunch of cakes I have made over the past year.  I guess I didn't take a picture of the first one I made in the disposable pan; it was so beautiful and just pretty icing, not overloaded with sprinkles.  Not that you can have too many sprinkles, but the icing was beautiful.

Now I need to go make one of these cakes to frost with white icing for our New Year's Eve dinner. :-)

Peanut Butter Cookies - Plain, Kisses & Turkeys

I am sitting here, on the last cold Monday morning of 2013, enjoying the fireplace and the Christmas tree.  Even though I love the Christmas lights and decorations, I am ready for them to come down and move forward.   I cannot believe the year is over and am shocked that I have done so little blogging - I even missed by blog-iversary.   I have so many things that I have wanted to write about, I just haven't gotten to it.  I am the typical perfectionist - handicapped by wanting things to be just right.   But I see that if I wait until I have the time to do my blog and re-check it 50 times before posting, it will never get done.  As my two loyal readers have urged me to just do it and not worry about it being perfect.....I will try!  I am not one for New Year's Resolutions, but that will be mine this year!

I guess I will start with a new favorite cookie.  Just before Thanksgiving, I found a recipe for peanut butter cup turkey cookies on Bake at 350.  They are so adorable, I had to make them!  The cookie is great and decorating them to look like turkeys was a lot of fun.  I made them for Little C and her friend.  They put the peanut butter cups and eyes on the turkeys.  The white chocolate chips were a little difficult to stick in to the peanut butter cups, but we managed, without too many mangled turkey faces.

You start with a large peanut butter cookie and attach a small peanut butter cup with melted chocolate for the body.  White chocolate chips with melted chocolate make the eyes.  Then colored peanut butter frosting is used for the beak, feet and feathers.  Now, I hate to admit this because it is quite ridiculous, but in my state of trying to do too much in one day, I got a little confused when I was decorating.  Of course I didn't slow down to look at the recipe picture, and even though it didn't seem right, I put the beak where the feet were supposed to be.  Ugh!  Once I realized it, it was a slightly easy fix.  The girls didn't notice, so it was ok.  What's a little confusion about Turkey anatomy whey there is a cookie loaded with frosting and candy!?!?  They were still super cute!

The recipe makes a lot of cookies and I didn't decorate all of them.  The plain cookies are great too and freeze well.  When Mr. SBQ tasted them, he said they would be a good cookie base for Peanut Blossoms.  Perfect!  Last year I made the recipe off the Hershey Kisses bag and wasn't thrilled with how they turned out.   I made the Peanut Blossoms on Christmas Eve, using this recipe and they were wonderful.  Yay!

For the turkey cookies, I used a larger cookie scoop, and for the kiss cookies, I used the small cookie scoop.  I made the balls of dough, rolled them in sugar, baked for about 10 minutes, pressed the kisses in to each cookie and placed on the cooling rack.  One thing about these cookies, they don't need to bake as long as it seems.  I usually flip one cookie over while they are still in the oven - if it is getting golden on the bottom, I take them out no matter what the tops look like.  I usually let them cool on the pan for about 5 minutes.  These I just left on the pan until we had all the kisses in place.

Here is the basic cookie recipe slightly adapted from Imperial Sugar. (the link will take you to the full recipe for the turkey cookies)

Peanut Butter Cookies
3 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
Dash of sea salt
1 cup unsalted butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup light brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup smooth peanut butter


Preheat oven to 350.  Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.
In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, baking soda and salt together.  Set aside.
In a large bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugars together until light and fluffy.  Beat in the eggs and vanilla until combined.  Add in the peanut butter and mix until smooth.
Stir in the flour mixture.
Scoop the dough onto the prepared sheets (2T/large scoop for large cookies - bake about 13 minutes; Small scoop for peanut blossom cookies- bake about 10 minutes).  For the turkey cookies or just a large cookie, flatten slightly - I use a ramekin dipped in sugar.  For the smaller cookies, there is no need to flatten.
Bake until the cookies are golden and baked through. 

The Perfect Peanut Blossom Cookie

Turkey Peanut Butter Cup Cookies