Decorating Cookies

I will be posting more step by step directions in the future but for now I'll just be posting some of the fun cookies I'm made in the past.

These were made for the same baby shower as the cake pop post! With an urban babies wear black theme.

Sorry the photo is sideways, I still haven't figured out how to fix this simple problem yet. Over the past few years I have found out that Halloween is such a fabulous holiday for decorating because you always have SO many options!

Baby bump cookies!!

Lovely for Valentines days!

 I made these for Willie's birthday in 2011. That was quite the cool experience!

Valentines again!

 This was made for the Dripping Springs baseball team mascot.

 This cookie was especially cool just because it was about 2 inches wide by and inch and a half tall.

These next few were created for a friend of mine's bachelorette party!

Who doesn't love a sunny day??

More Halloween!! My favorite is the pumpkin on the right end, makes me giggle every time!

Fire man themed party!

Oh how I DO LOVE decorating Christmas cookies!!

So much fun!

Thanksgiving!

Hope y'all enjoyed. Just a peek into some of the fun things I've been lucky enough to do in my career.

Trinket Tuesday: Spread the Love

Quite a few of my favorite blogs have weekly or monthly posts. While looking around my house trying to think of what exactly I could write about on a weekly basis I couldn't help but notice my collection of trinkets.
Although I plan on writing quite a few posts about food, desserts, travels and my beautiful dachshund, I might have trouble searching for inspiration, and trinkets I doubt I'll ever run out of.
Trinket collecting is something I am very VERY good at, I see tiny things and very similar to my obsession with photography my trinket collecting is my way of documenting my life. My way of looking at something and saying, "Oh yes that copper zombie cookie cutter was purchased the day I registered for my wedding at Sur La Table." Or, "my Olive Wood spoon I got on my honeymoon in Italy".
I'm figuring out slowly that I really love the idea that someday my life will tell a story. Maybe one day it'll be a story worth telling. One that will keep my kids or grandchildren or great grandchildren in awe. The way I am when hearing the stories of my family's past. I hope that one day, my kids will have these trinkets, photos and stories to look back on and be able to feel my presence the way I feel my grandmother when I read her old cookbooks.
And on that note!
TRINKET TUESDAY!!
Today's trinket is a new one. I found this little gem at a Market Day in Georgetown TX. I was lucky enough to be able to spend time with my Mother-in-Law and my Grandmother-in-Law. It was a lovely sunny Saturday, a perfect day for three generations of Weber women to do some shopping. One of the very first things I spotted was this little guy.

It looks like your everyday silver spreader right?

On the contrary! How adorable is this??? A simple reminder to...:)
These are a couple other things I found photo worthy.

And one more of Dory just to hold you over till next time :)

Cake Pops!

Today I have the honor of baking for my friend Sarah.
Sarah's sister is having a bouncing baby girl, and is being thrown a baby shower. So Sarah has commissioned me to bake her some goodies.

She requested a cake, some decorated cookies, and cake pops!
Though I have quite the experience in cake balls I am new to cake pops.
Cake Balls = chocolate covered orbs of mashed up cake and frosting, or ganache in my case.
Cake Pop = chocolate dipped cake sphere.

Now some of you out there might think a cake pop is just a cake ball on a stick. I'm sure in some circles you might just be right, but not here and not in this ladies kitchen!
Cake pops are tiny little ADORABLE spheres of cake that are baked in this easy bake oven looking contraption.

My mother-in-law got me this toy for Christmas this past year and this has been my first excuse to use it!
If I can be honest for a moment, I bake cakes for a living y'all.... we're talking 75 POUNDS of cake batter into around 50 cakes. That is one flavor. For one round. Of one type of cake. That will last one week at the bakery that I work at.

This cute tiny little baby thing makes 12 spheres..... 12.... what kind of number is that?! 250? Oh yeah no problem! 12?.... I don't even know what to do with that.... But here's the catch! These baby cakes bake in, wait for it.....4 MINUTES!

WHAT?!?!?

I know right?
Crazy magic going on in the Weber house.
I digress.

In this baby world of tiny numbers and infinitesimal amounts these cake pops are born therefore blowing my mind.

So in the same amount of time that you would be baking your typical 8 inch round cake, you can bake like 50 or 60 cake pops!

This thing is awesome! Exclamation points!

It heats up in like 2.5 minutes takes 4 minutes to bake and seriously turns out perfect product every time.

Onward we go!
Since I am new to this blogging thing I completely forgot to take pictures or document the actual batter making process but once you have mixed your favorite cake batter together you pour it into either a pastry bag or a gallon Ziploc bag, snip the end and pipe about a tablespoon of batter into each of the wells. Close and latch the cute lil barbie baker.
Set a timer (which I continually forgot to do, I never set timers)
Once the timer has gone off, instead of risking burning your fingers or malforming the spheres by picking them out one at a time grab two oven mits, pick up the whole thing and dump the little buggers out onto a sheet tray and allow to cool.

Now this will work best if you wrap these guys up really well in saran wrap (after they have cooled completely) and freeze over night.
You want them frozen solid!
Once you are ready to start dipping i would recommend you get everything set up before you even take the baby cakes out of the freezer. Once the cake get soft and defrosts you can run into some problems of it falling off the stick into the dipping chocolate.

Next topic of discussion: dipping chocolate. Normally I'm a huge advocate of using good quality, pure chocolate. But in this case the consistency can be a little thick, so this is where the candy melts come in.

What I did was start with a good quality dark chocolate.I melted that together with a little bit of the candy melts white chocolate to help out with the consistency. Works like a charm.

Once your chocolate is nice and melty and you have everything set up, go and retrieve about 10 cake spheres from the freezer. Doing this in stages will prevent any cake-tastrophies.

You dip the top of the stick into chocolate.

Then insert into cold cake sphere.

Place the now cake pop into a holding mechanism. My mechanism of choice is a green floral foam block.

Alright now you have about 10 pre-dunked cake pops on your foam block. I would say about 20 pops fit on one block for me, so once you have those 20, put the whole foam block back into the freezer until you have stuck all your remaining cake pops.

Once the chocolate holding the ball onto the stick has hardened and is set, you can now dip the pop into your chocolate. You want a full coating, making sure the dipping chocolate touches the stick ensuring you have a good seal.

The next step, I think is one people know of but don't do enough of. So I'll say it slowly.

SHAKE

AS

MUCH

CHOCOLATE

OFF

OF

THE

CAKE

POP

AS

YOU

CAN.

 This is how much extra chocolate you can get by tapping the cake pops after dipping.

Good, now that we have that settled. Jiggle said cake pop to get rid on any remaining chocolate ridges. While the chocolate is still wet, you can add things like sprinkles, dragees (pronounced drah-zjays... see I thought this would help but I might have just made it more confusing) jimmies or sanding sugar.

Set back in holding mechanism to properly dry and set.
If you are doing stripes or piping a design now is the time to do so.

ah-like-zees!



Voila!

Cake Pops!

Now you can go and create and enjoy!
I'm telling you, baked goods are one of the fastest ways to make friends!

Side note: This entry took me three days to make.... that's a long time. I need to figure out a faster  way to upload the photos or something...I was dying. I ended up cutting quite a bit of photos just so I could get this post up! Oh well, live and learn I suppose.

Photography

So between my iPhone, my point and shoot and my (big girl) canon t2i, I Lauren, am a self proclaimed photo-holic.

I've always been one to drool over old family photos or ask to hear all the stories behind photo albums. I love the way, that like a smell or taste, you recognize something and for that one moment you are transported back to a different time. A time with friends, or a time on vacation. In my case the 8,764,485,792 billion seconds I spend with Dory.

(she's my favorite subject, she tends to hang around...)

All throughout college I absolutely stinkin ADORED my little point and shoot Casio Exilim! Everyone in our group of friends always knew that no matter what we were doing; be it studying, hanging out, going to North Gate it was going to be recorded. Which was fun. You have certain friends that understand, they also enjoy being able to look back and remember. They appreciate the flash in their eyes (Mel), and the "OK, one... two... three!" Then there are those who groan the instant they see you reaching for something even remotely camera shaped (Josh). Those are some of my favorite people to take pictures of, they make the best faces. They may be stink faces but they are faces none the less.

Alas as college went on, my durable, sturdy, incredible point-n-shoot finally kicked the bucket. After that first one none of the rest really seemed to hold a battery life, respond quick enough or just took "wonky" photos. While in culinary school, I had two small cameras, one for action shots, anything that would require me to take consecutive shots, and one just for up close "in your cupcake" pictures. The one that took the best pictures took so stinking long to load once it was finished, the next photo op had already dissipated. So in the years following culinary school I pretty much stuck with my point and shoot I found on woot.com.

Until the day that changed my life, my glorious iPhone entered my hands and my heart forever. I was....and still am a photo taking fool! I currently have 4,280 photos on my phone.... I'm serious. This is no exaggeration. I literally have more photos than music on there! I love how easy it is to take such incredible photos with my phone and then *almost* professionally edit them using instagram.

Funnily enough however I just recently got into instagram. Obviously I'm 100% sucked in. I believe I posted 5 or 6 photos all in the first day.

As of this past birthday I have acquired a "real" camera. My amazing husband, decided to splurge and get me a canon rebel t2i. I'm  so excited! I've only had this sucker for two weeks and I've already taken and saved* over 300 photos!

*I'm sure I've deleted about 4,000 "unworthy" photos.

I'm fascinated with learning all the intricacies that come along with digital photography. I want to learn to take amazing pictures. I want to have the really extra crazy fancy version of Photoshop. I want to be able to take those engagement style photos, that have that cool washed out, but bright, somehow vintage/modern at the same time effect.

I WANT THAT.

This is a photo of my cousin's beautiful daughter the day I got my camera.

(PS, I honestly feel sorry for my poor future children, their lives will be documented so incredibly closely I believe we might actually be able to watch their hair grow)

I look forward to baby photo shoots, and Dory/baby pictures. I look foreword to being able to show Brian more than just where "the button" is at.

So hopefully this blog will be an opportunity for me to share my growth, and progression through my learning process!

Let's see how this goes!

So I've been toying around with the idea of starting a blog for quite some time now.
I really am curious to see if this is something I will stick with or walk away from.
I'm sure occasionally this post will be for rants and raves, recipes, and memories. I can guarantee you will find misspellings, a lack of format, and a heinous misuse of the English language. So if that bothers you, either take a chill pill, and continue reading or check out my dad's blog (adventurehunts.blogspot.com).

My name is Lauren.

I am...
currently a cake decorator

a newlywed

an iPhone addict

a dachshund owner

amongst the best friends in the world

married to my best friend

obsessed with baking.