Kind of a "best of", part 2

Alright, where were we? Fondant! Right. So since I really enjoyed the fondant course, I did a second course at the same place, this time tackling edible flowers...


Well, let me just tell you: I'm a rose girl through and through. Who needs lilies anyway? Even though they might look a lot easier to make, they're not. The roses on the other hand I loved. So much apparently that I smashed one of the kitchen floor not 10 minutes after these pictures were taken. Good thing I'm a bit of an overachiever and did two during the course.


Cookies! I LOVE cookies. For some reason, though, I only seem to make them on Christmas. But then I usually go to town and spend days in the kitchen until I'm satisfied. Fortunately for me, my old workplace had a Christmas tradition where you could bring in Christmas cookies, people could buy them and the money got donated to a good cause. So fortunately for my hips, I didn't have to eat all of this by myself (...and that was only a little part of what was actually there):


Another one of my obsessions is peanut butter...


Mind you, I hate the stuff right out of the jar. It needs to either be incorporated in any type of baked good or come in a package that says "Reese's". These were Peanut Butter Choc Chip Cupcakes with a Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Frosting. Hmmm....Peanut Butter...


This was the birthday cake I made for my other former boss. It was probably one of the more involved cakes I've ever made. It had a chocolate base (...I just realized that apparently I only take pictures of all the cakes that have chocolate in them. I swear, I do make non-chocolate cakes occasionally), white choc and hazelnut ganache, chocolate panna cotta and red berry mascarpone mousse as well as a raspberry glaze. It was enclosed in a thin sheet of chocolate and I even made the decorations myself (which I'm very proud of, even though that was probably the easiest part of the whole cake).

Alright, I think that's enough for now. As I said in part 1, I hope to actually start blogging for real very soon, but bear with me if it takes a little while to actually find an event to bake for (if I bake for myself, I will have to eat it all myself - and my hips seriously won't thank me for it).

Thank you for stopping by!

♥ Nicole

PS: If you are interested in any of the recipes, I will try my best to find and recreate them (that is: find them in my folder of of recipes where I'm sure I've bookmarked them somewhere), so let me know if you're interested in a particular recipe!

Kind of a "best of", Part 1

So, as I haven't gotten around to baking at all lately (and let's not talk about my recent sewing misadventures...), I'm just gonna start of with a bit of a "best of" my baking adventures. Which isn't really a "best of" considering I usually forget to take pictures of most of the stuff I make. So actually, this is more of a "stuff I remembered to photograph" collection...so to speak. ANYWAY. As you will soon realize, I'm not exactly what you'd call a "good photographer" yet. At least not when it comes to food. So far, taking pictures of what I've made has mainly been an afterthought and you can really see that in a lot of pictures. I promise I will try to make more of an effort in the future (considering that now I might not be the only one looking at them yet) and, hopefully, my pictures will improve soon. What also makes taking great pictures with a nice setup a tad difficult is that I usually bake for other people's birthdays, so I can't really deliver photos of the inside of almost anything, because, well, it would be kinda rude to gift people with cakes that are missing a piece. But I'm grateful for any advice you might want to give me! No recipes yet in this post (...that'll happen as soon as I don't forget to write down what I'm doing while I'm doing it), because some of this pictures are from like, a year or two ago and I can barely remember what the stuff WAS, much less how I made it (...most of the time I barely remember what I had for breakfast). Yeah, I know, so far, I'm probably the worst food blogger in the history of food bloggers. Please forgive me. I promise to do better in the future. On basically every aspect of blogging. I swear! But let's get to the most important stuff: the food. So, what to start with?


This was an Almond & Peach Galette I did a couple of years back. First time I ever made frangipane....and I'm still preeeetty sure frangipane was neither supposed to look like that nor taste like that. Looked great, though! (And got eaten anyway. ;))


These were Coconut Cupcakes with a Peach Frosting that also did not quite turn out how they were supposed to if I remember correctly (are you starting to see a trend here?). So they got doused in coconut flakes and something pretty got popped on top and nobody even realized that that wasn't how they were supposed to look like.


My former boss's 40th birthday cake, which was a chocolate cake with orange mascarpone mousse. It had like, 5 layers and weighed over 4 pounds. The chocolate cake is my tried and tested recipe, but I wasn't too convinced when it came to the oranges. They tasted a bit bitter after a while, so next time I'd probably make it with a different fruit.


Another birthday cake, this one for a former colleague of mine. It was a bit of a joke, because she always has a big bowl of candy on her desk at the office and I probably stopped by there half a dozen times a day to get my sugar fix (which was apparently far more often than anybody else). The cake itself looked very different from the inside. It was a chocolate cake with a choc ganache and red berry mousse.


Ah, my first attempts at working with fondant. I did a course at a local shop here and this was the result and I actually quite liked how the blue one turned out. So naturally, after managing not to ruin a cake on the first try, I was convinced I'm a fondant master now and decided to make another fondant cake in honor of J.K. Rowling's new book (which I didn't realize at the time would suck - the book that is...well ok, the cake as well). Turns out: I'm not a fondant master by a long shot. Let's just leave it at that.

Alright, more in part 2! ♥ Nicole

PS: If you are interested in any of the recipes, I will try my best to find and recreate them (that is: find them in my folder of of recipes where I'm sure I've bookmarked them somewhere), so let me know if you're interested in a particular recipe!