Cranberry cake

I bought a lot of cranberries when they were onsale.  Without a plan for what to do with them.  I made a pork roast with one bag, and this is what I did with the next one.  Cranberry cake!

Beautiful and shimmering before baking.

Baked!

Wine glass on a car carpet with cake.  This is my life.

Coffee cake mug cake

Ok, so I have to admit that when I first tried a mug cake, I felt like I was involved in some sort of blasphemy.  Personally, I almost never use a cake mix, and if I do, I feel I MUST confess it to the recipient of the cake.  So at first, I felt like mug cakes sort of fell into this weird category of cake.

But now, I have seen the light.  Ok, a mug cake is not baked in the oven, so it has the tendency to be a bit more rubbery, however...you mix up all the ingredients from scratch in a mug.  It's basically the same process as a cake, so why am I beating myself up over this?  It's actually the perfect kind of cake for me.  I can do something fun and new and all in 5 minutes after the kids are in bed.  A quick cake fix!

So I tried one supposed to be made with Biscoff, but instead I used TJs cookie butter.  The cookie butter is awesome, and I was excited to try something flavored with it.  But the mug cake was just a rubbery mess.  Blech!

But the next one I tried...now this was good!  A coffee cake mug cake.  Recipe here.  This actually was the one that sold me on mug cakes not being blasphemy.  It actually has multiple steps resembling creaming of butter and sugar, etc, which made me feel like I was making a mini cake.  And I do love all things mini ;)

Alas, I am rambling, and linking all over the place.  Here is a picture of the mug cake!  But in a glass, cause the mugs were dirty.  And you can see the whole thing too :)

Not too beautiful, but it was yummy.  A tad rubbery, but the topping was delicious, and it hit the spot for an evening cake craving.  I'm excited to start trying some more mug cakes.  Perhaps I'll try making my own!

Birthday Cake for Jesus

This year I wanted to start the tradition of making a birthday cake for Jesus.  I figured this would be a fun way to teach my kids what Christmas is all about, given that Emeline is totally on board with birthday cake.  Ok, maybe she wont completely understand Christmas, but I think it would be a good, fun, and delicious start.

So then I got to thinking...what kind of cake does one make for Jesus' birthday?  Sounds a little daunting to me...  I tried to let go of the pressure of making a birthday cake for God, and I remembered a fun cake I saw online a while back.  Apparently, layers are all the rage right now, and this was an easy way of making a very multiple layered cake.  

Pic and recipe here.

It looked fun, simple enough recipe, and festive for Christmas.  Our small group for church was also going to have a Birthday Party for Jesus, so I decided to do a test run of the cake for this party.  The recipe calls for a white cake mix and a red velvet mix, but I'm not a fan of mixes, so I just made each from scratch and followed the instructions for layering.  Here are some pics of the process.

Sifted flour...(yes that's a beer in the background.  Strawberry or raspberry flavored hefeweizen to be exact.  Just what one needs for an afternoon of baking)

Adding in the red cocoa powder for the red velvet cake.

 

 

Both cake batters ready to be poured into the three pans.  (Still working on my hef.)

First layer of red.  I plopped them down then spread it even.

First layer all baked.

Second layer of white baking on top.  It's hard to spread the batter over hot cake.  

So the layers started to get uneven.

The baking process got kinda messy, and I learned you really need to make sure each layer is quite firm, before putting the next on.  Needless to say some of my layers fell into each other.

Here's all three layers stacked with a crumb coat.

45 min of chilling later, and the rest of the icing on.  I made some squiggles on the side for fun.  I'm happy with how it turned out.

 

I decided to add some red sprinkles for more festivities, but I think I prefer it all white.  Oh well.  The kids will like it.

Ok, now here are some fun pics of Jesus' birthday party.  Candles lit!

Kids, having heard the nativity story, all ready to blow out candles. 

 

 

 

And my favorite photo of all....the kids...devouring the leftovers when left unattended.  LOL.  I bet it was instigated by mine ;).  She loves CAKE!

And here's a slice.  You can see the layers fell into each other and it got kinda marbled looking.  But still festive!

 

So version one...I learned I needed to wait longer to cook the layers, but baking all those layers for so long made the cake quite dry.  So I did some research on getting some super moist cake recipes  to try to combat the dryness.  I settled on two recipes from Bakerella.  Instead of a white cake, I used her yellow cake recipe and substituted egg whites for the whole eggs to get it more white.  Unfortunately, I didn't plan well, so I did have one egg yolk in there.  Here's a pic of her yellow cake and a link to the recipe.

http://www.bakerella.com/finally-i-found-it/

She also touted that she found a very moist red velvet recipe.  It also seemed less labor intensive than my first try, so I gave that a shot also.  Here's a pic from her and the link.

http://www.bakerella.com/red-velvet-cake/

So I mixed that up and followed the same process above.  The white cake was less white, but still looked nice with the red.  And ooooh...the red is really RED.  I love it.  I tried to bake each layer longer to avoid the layers collapsing, and I think it turned out better.  Here are the three finished layers all stacked.

And here it is iced.  I left off the sprinkles this time.

And here it is all sliced!  Better looking layers this time.  

So the recipes from Bakerella turned out great.  I think my version was still more dry than the recipes would be on their own, but it was still much more moist than my original version.  I was very pleased.  It was a super sweet cake though, and a lot of it.  But it was fun to make, and then improve upon.  

Happy Birthday Jesus!

I think maybe next year I'll try the layered idea again, but maybe try this one!

My view

I had a rare moment (that is an understatement) to sit and read a bit of a book the other day. Both girls were napping, the house was clean, and I was trying to stay quiet to keep the naps going. So I sat down to read a bit. I may never pick up the book again, but the moment was beautiful. And so was my view.