Slice N Bake Easter Bunny Cookies

After seeing the Pillsbury ready-to-bake cookies, I was determined to create my own. It's no easy task but after multiple attempts, I've finally got it! Due to the amount of work attached to producing these cookies, they will be a limited edition. If you got a cookie, then I must like you a lot.

First attempt was an embarrassment...Instead of a bunny image, the ears were squashed and they looked like little piglets instead. I had no choice but to eat them all by myself...life's tough!

I kept my second batch of dough as cold as possible. If the butter started melting from my hands I would put it back into the fridge to chill. After a 3 hour session of watching The Mentalist in between runs to the fridge, I had a nice log of cookie dough.This time the ears were perfect, but only they ended up on the side of the cheek. I wanted to cry.

I didn't have to remake the whole thing thank god. I sliced it open and re-pieced it together the correct way. Don't think I would have tried it a third time if that didn't work. It's honestly one of those things where I can say I've done it and never doing it again. Ever!

The cookies were amazing. Fantastic recipe from Smitten Kitchen. The secret must be in the icing sugar because Thierry's Almond Sable cookies also call for icing sugar and the cookies come out nice and crispy.

Ingredients:
(slightly adapted from Smitten's Kitchen)

2 Sticks salted butter
2/3 cups icing sugar
2 egg yolks
2 1/2 cups flour

Cream together butter and icing sugar. Add egg yolks and mix well. Add flour and mix until dough forms.

Then it's a matter of forming the bunny cookie. If you don't have patience, skip this step and proceed to rolling the dough into a log and refrigerate.

Divide the dough into 3rd's. Divide one of those thirds into half and add one of the halves onto another third. you should have 3 unequal portions: sm, med, lg.

dye the small one purple, med one pink, and leave the lg in it's original colour.

I can't help you much from this point on because it's going to be a game of trial and error. What you wanna do is roll out a bunch of logs and shape them into the bunny's eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. Then you gotta stack them together and wrap it in the lg piece of dough to form a log. The tricky part is making sure everything is in the right proportion and nothing gets squashed. Good luck and don't get discouraged if it doesn't work out!

Easter Deviled Eggs

Toying with the technique of the Chinese Tea Eggs, I decided to make the same pattern on my Easter eggs. At first I was just gonna dye them and leave them like that but then I decided that that was a little dull and tasteless as well.

These bright colours probably scared my housemates because they looked at me with great uncertainty before reaching for one. |And I must admit, I wouldn't eat them either on a regular basis. But hey, it's Easter and you gotta have those colours!

Same procedure as you would with the Tea Eggs : Boil the eggs as you normally would. Then lightly crack the surface and  roll it on your counter, pressing gently with your palm so you get smaller crackers all over. Then drop them into a ziplock back filled with diluted food colouring. Squeeze out as much air as you can and set it in the fridge over night. 

Filling:
12 egg yolks
1/2 cup mayo
2 tsp paprika
salt and pepper to taste

Fill a piping bag with the yolk mixture and pipe into egg whites. Enjoy!

Green Velvet Cake

St. Patties is just two days away!! It doesn't seem too long ago the last time I was funneling wine and soliciting free pizza outside of Little Caesars. Let's hope this year doesn't get as crazy...or, at least I wanna stay up past 5 pm. Working the next day will be an episode, keeping in mind that my job requires a lot of driving.

The recipe I used for this cake is from Crumb Boss but it was wayyyyy too sweet. I'm going to adjust the measurements here so you don't have to go into a sugar coma like I did.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cup sugar
2 sticks butter
2 eggs

2 1/2 cup cake flour
1 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk
2 tsp gel green color
1 tbsp vinegar
1/2 tsp baking soda

Cream together sugar and butter until pale and fluffy. 

Add eggs one at a time and whisk until incorporated.

Combine all the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix it slightly.

When you combine the baking soda and vinegar, it's going to bubble up like a science experiment. Red velvet cakes didn't always have artificial colour added to them. Initially, the red was caused by a chemical reaction from combining the baking soda, vinegar, and cocoa powder. I guess people liked the red a little too much and decided to enhance it.

When you are happy with the colour, pour into buttered/floured pans and bake at 350 until done...I baked mine in 8-inch pans so it took me about 35.

I wanted my cake to be smaller so I cut out 6-inch rounds from the 8-inch cake. It did two things: It made my cake look taller than it really is, and it gets rid of the over-cooked edges.

go to my carrot cake recipe for the cream cheese frosting. I don't usually do this, but because the cake was so green, I crumb-coated it first. Didn't wanna risk getting green crumbs all mixed up in the icing.

Refrigerate the crumb-coated cake until set then do the final coat.

I crumbled up the cut-outs from the cake and decorated the sides and top with it. For the shamrock pattern on top, I just placed a cookie cutter on top and filled the inside of it with crumbs then removed the cutter. I will use the remaining crumbs and icing to make cake pops!

Chinese Tea Eggs

These tea eggs are a classic in China and they are my sister's favorite. The eggs are first hard boiled so that you can take a crack at the shell. Then they are boiled again in a dark liquid that's made from black tea, soy sauce, and spices.

I never liked eggs as a kid so I've always avoided tea eggs until recently. Since I've learnt to appreciate eggs as one of the most versatile ingredients, I am now attempting to include it more often in my diet.

I would make a big batch of these and have 2 for breakfast everyday. I still throw out the yolk because no matter how hard I try, I cannot begin to like the texture and taste. The whites, however, has a rich and slightly salty flavour from the tea and soy sauce mixture.

There's no real science to it. Par boil your eggs first so you can crack the shells.

Combine 1/4 cup loose black tea, 1/2 cup dark soy sauce, 2 cinnamon sticks, 3 star anise, 1 tsp coriander seeds, 1 tsp cardamom, enough water to cover the eggs.


Bring the liquid up to a boil with the eggs then turn off the heat and let it sit for 12-24 hours in the fridge. 

Chocolate Clusters

I'm not sure if you are familiar with "OMG's Chocolate clusters" that popped on the shelves of most Canadian grocery stores a while ago. I believe it was on Dragon's Den and damn... they are expensive. For a little pkg containing 135g, they charge a ridiculous amount of $5.29. I can probably make a half kilo of them for that much. Plus, it's more fun if you are making it yourself anyway right?

I've tried making them twice and found that if you temper the chocolate first, your life will be made much easier. Tempered chocolate takes seconds to harden whereas un-tempered takes hours. What you do is take 2/3 of your chocolate and melt it in the microwave. When it reaches 110 degrees, add in the rest of the chocolate and stir until they are melted. This will bring down the temperature of the chocolate. Microwave again on 10 sec intervals until the whole batch of chocolate reaches 87 degrees Fahrenheit. This starts the crystallizing process so that the chocolate hardens right away when dipped.

Coconut Tuiles

I feel terrible that I haven't updated this blog for so long. A lot has changed since Christmas and I must have let it become my excuse to take a vacation.

So I haven't been able to bake all that much; instead of brainstorming new ideas, I found myself going back to the same recipes over and over for special occasions and gifts. The extra time I had I spent job hunting. I'd say it paid off. I will be starting a job with Pepsi next week as a Territory Sales Rep. 

It was a lengthy interview process and I honestly didn't expect to be hired. I had a terrible first interview cause the HR guy called out of the blue and asked me what my favorite Pepsi product was...I obviously didn't have time to prep so I had no idea. And it would be dumb to say Diet Pepsi cause it was so obvious to the point that I questioned whether or not Pepsi was actually a PepsiCo product. 

Then I didn't hear back from him for weeks and one morning he called and asked me if I've been getting any of the emails he sent. I said no and he said he sent out a couple emails the week before asking if I could do a second interview with the HR manager and the zone manager. I had the second interview and everything was good until they asked me :"what motivates you?" and I blurted out:" money (duh)". They laughed and it seemed fine but then I talked to my sister after and she goes :" Annie! you NEVER tell them money motivates you!". 

And somehow, I got to the third interview, and somehow got the job. I jokingly said to Anna "who's dumb enough to hire me?" 

So for the entire month of January I have been packing and getting my shit together for the move. I had to figure out how to buy a car, insure a car, and oh yea! get my license. Fast forward a month and I'm in my sister's apartment DT Toronto, writing a blog post that was long over due.

Coconut Tuiles was another one of Thierry's recipes. These alone made all those volunteer hours at Thierry worth it. They taste like chips, but sweet. and they cost almost a dollar per cookie at the bakery. The ingredients are not complicated but they take a frickin long time to make.

I usually make a decent sized batch and leave it in the fridge for up to 2 weeks. Then every time I need to go somewhere, I'll make a tray of them (10-12) to bring along.

Christmas Macarons

My technique is getting closer and closer to perfection! My friend wanted to order 4 dozens so he can give them out as Christmas gifts, and that is a perfectly good reason for me to get into the kitchen again. I've been at a constant battle with my parents regarding this baking thing. Long story short, my mom doesn't want me baking at all and never wants to hear the word "cake" around the house. Putting my negotiation skills to work, I've gotten it to baking once a week, and a full day's worth. At least with a good 10 hours, I can create something cool.

It is totally one of those "What Asian Mom Says" as much as I don't want to admit. My parents usually don't care about what I do so I don't know what it is that they have against baking. Anyways, so a few weeks ago I made these macarons and I had to attempt it twice before getting the colours perfect. The texture was perfect on the first try but since I used liquid food colouring, the batter was pale and too runny. The "retry" looked great with bright colours and a perfectly "puffed-up" cookie, but texture was off cause I didn't give the trays a good tap before leaving it to dry out.

I feel like no matter how hard I try to explain, it will never be good enough. One of these days I promise to make a how-to-video. For the time being, here is another set of instructions. Refer to the first Macaron post for ingredients and measurements.

Instructions:

First combine icing sugar and ground almonds in a food processor and blend until super fine and powdery. Sift through a fine strainer and re-process any crumbs that wouldn't go through the strainer. I know it's annoying and time consuming but just do it... it makes a huge difference in the cookie.

Weigh out your egg whites and almond mixture and divide them into equal portions, by weight, depending on the different flavours you want to make. I made 4 different ones : Apple Spice, Cranberry, Pumpkin, and lime.

Make a paste with your first set of egg whites and almond mixture. It should be thick and just barely stir-able with a spatula. Add your GEL food colouring and flavourings at this point before you add the Italian meringue. Add way more food colouring than you think you need because once you add the meringue, the colour will lighten up quite a bit.

Apple Spice: Freshly grated nutmeg, cinnamon stick, cloves (to taste), no food colouring
Cranberry: No flavouring, pink food colouring
Pumpkin: Freshly grated nutmeg, cinnamon stick, ground ginger, cloves, all spice(to taste), orange food colouring
Lime: Lime zest (to taste), green food colouring

I really hate putting a measurement to these recipes cause I didn't actually measure mine. If I have to, then I'd just say about 1-2 tsp of each ingredient.

Making the meringue:

Combine sugar and water in a sauce pan and bring it to 121 degrees Celsius or 244 degrees Fahrenheit. Let it reach 119 C/240 C then turn of the heat and let it reach temperature with the remaining heat from the burner. Start whipping your egg whites with a tsp of lemon juice. Once the egg whites reach medium peaks, pour the syrup in a thin stream with the mixer on medium speed. Once all the syrup has gone in, turn the mixer on high and let it go for 15 minutes to cool. Divide into equal portions and add to the almond paste mixtures.

Combining the paste and the meringue will be difficult at first because they have such different textures. At Thierry we use our hands, wearing gloves of course, to scoop the paste from the bottom and mush it with the  meringue on top. Switch to a spatula when it gets to a work-able consistency.

The difficult part is getting it to the perfect consistency for piping. You wanna smear the mixture on the side of the bowl then scrape it to the centre over and over until it reaches a ribbon stage. If you scoop up some batter in your spatula and let it fall back into the bowl, it should fall in a thick strip and make ribbon patterns in the bowl for a few seconds before disappearing into the rest of the batter. (I'm so sorry if that doesn't make any sense at all).

Put the batter into a piping bag and pipe equal sized rounds onto parchment. Once you get a full tray, pick up the tray and tap/bang on the bottom of the trap to get the rounds to flatten completely. Every time I skip this process, there will be air gaps in the cookies, making them extremely susceptible to breaking.

Leave them to dry out at room temperature for an hour then bake for 12 minutes in a 325 F oven.
Let cool and stack all the parchment paper on top of each other in one tray, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 3 days before filling with buttercream.

Butter cream recipe:
1 cup of unsalted butter
4 cups icing sugar

Apple Spice:
Poached apples for the centre:  2 peeled and cored and cubed apples, 1 cup sugar, 3/4 cup water, 1 cinnamon stick, 4 cloves, grated nutmeg, juice of 1 lemon. Bring it up to a boil until the sugar dissolves the let it cool and soak in the syrup over night or for up to a week. When you are ready to use, pat apples dry with paper towel.
Buttercream: same spices used in the macaron shell.

Cranberry:
Roasted Cranberries: Combine 1 pkg fresh cranberries with 1 cup sugar and cook until they start poping. Add some water to it so you can strain out the juices separate it from the whole cranberries. Add some cranberry juice to the butter cream and save the whole cranberries for the centre.

Pumpkin:
Buttercream: Cook canned pumpkin purée over medium heat to concentrate the flavours and evaporate the liquid. Add the purée to the buttercream along with the standard pumpkin pie spices.

Lime:
Lemon curd: 2 egg yolks, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/3 cup lemon juice, 3 tbsp flour. Cook over low heat until mixutre has thickened. Add in cubed, unsalted butter to the mixture, about 3 tbsp, stir until completely dissolved then refrigerate.
Add lemon curd to buttercream.