New home for my baking!

As some of you may have noticed, this blog of late has been sliding away from the geeky and into the more domestic. Okay, that's an over simplification - but it is quite clear that as I've been doing more and more baking, I've been posting about it here. And this really isn't the place for that - this blog was meant to be about games, and writing, and design, and things like that.

So, my baking stuff has a new home: Silly Kitten Bakery! I won't be removing the baking posts I've already written here, but I will be rewriting them for the baking site. I also won't be posting baking stuff here in future, unless I'm doing a particularly geeky design. (Wheatley cookies are planned for the not-too-distant future!)

I will now return Rae's Nonsense to the geeky nonsense. Starting tomorrow. Because I'm sick today, and I'm not entirely sure my thoughts will be coherent. You have no idea how many times I've had to backspace and rewrite this post to make it make sense...

Want a lemon? No? How about a cookie instead?

(This is a very picture-heavy post, sorry!) My baking addiction is moving ever forward. This week's adventure in baking involved taking a sugar cookie recipe I haven't tried before and altering it slightly. All the while I was hoping I wouldn't mess it all up.

And it worked! Lemon sugar cookies!

If you want to see the recipe I used, head over to Sweetopia (you have to scroll down a bit to get to the recipe itself). I swapped vanilla extract for lemon extract. Note that I halved this recipe, and still ended up with 50 cookies!

Once they were baked and cooled, I made a batch of royal icing, also with a recipe from Sweetopia (seriously, I love this site, it's amazing!). I used egg white powder instead of meringue powder, since the former is much easier to find in a grocery store than the latter! The icing also used lemon extract instead of vanilla. I halved this recipe, with plenty of icing for all the cookies and a little bit left over.

I made most of the icing yellow, but set aside a little bit to stay white for the top layer of decorations. But first - icing the base layer!

This part is getting easier, although I will say, I am rubbish at free-hand drawing, especially when it comes to making a proper circle! You'll notice some of the cookies have icing shapes which are anything but circular...

Once all the cookies had their base layer, I had to leave them 24 hours to make sure the icing was completely set and dry. Doing the next bit before the base layer hardened would have left me with 50 little disasters.

Once the base layer was dry, I got out my white icing and starting piping on the decorations. The goal here was to make the cookies look like lemon slices, to go with the lemon flavour I was aiming for. (I very nearly posted yet another picture of the completed cookies here, but there's one at the top, and I think this post already has enough pictures, don't you?)

So, there you have it! My very own lemon sugar cookies. They're not perfect by any stretch, but I had a lot of fun making them. Now I just need to figure out who's going to eat them all. Especially since I'm already gearing up to make a different kind of cookie this weekend!

Cookies are an always food!

Have I mentioned this baking obsession I've developed? Have I mentioned how much I love making cookies? Have I mentioned how much I love decorating said cookies? (I know I've mentioned how much I love eating cookies, so we won't go over that one again.)

I made more cookies this week. I spotted some egg-shaped cookie cutters, and decided I need to make Easter egg cookies. So I bought them, and proceeded to do exactly that. Look! Easter cookies!

Now, I'll say right off the bat that some of these are awful. I'm still learning all sorts of different things about decorating, such as piping and icing consistency. Especially about icing consistency. What you can probably guess from these pictures is that when I did the first layer of icing, the blue and the yellow, it wasn't quite right.

There are lots of ugly little holes in the blue and yellow where I didn't quite spread the icing enough. It didn't help that at this point, I had a minor - but very funny - kitchen disaster when one of my icing bags exploded* and I got blue icing all over my hands, the counter, and most of the cookies I had done by then. (All these pictures are from the second batch of decorating, not the disastrous first.)

Thankfully, when I did the plain white icing decorations on top of the coloured base, it didn't look quite so bad. The icing came out much better, and I really enjoyed doing the designs on these.

So much so, that I have the nasty suspicion that it won't be very long before I'm making more cookies. Just so I can decorate them. And, you know, eat them. And maybe share them. If there are any left.

*Okay, maybe exploded is too strong a word. Really, the bag just split down the side. But the end result was the same. Icing everywhere.

Cookie dough!

I like cookie dough. Quite a few of my friends probably remember the moaning they heard from me when I made sugar cookies at Christmas time. The dough was amazingly good, and I would have been perfectly happy to sit and eat it all without making any cookies at all.

You know, except for the whole raw eggs thing.

Yeah, okay, a little bit probably won't do any harm. But I'm a bit paranoid about food poisoning these days. And I couldn't justify the risk of being ill just for a bowl full of amazing nom-ness. I was not entirely happy with that, but lived with it.

Thankfully, there is an alternative. Egg free cookie dough! I made the chocolate chip cookie dough last night (without the chocolate chips, but only because I don't have any). It's lovely, and it's definitely hitting the spot for my cookie dough craving! Nom!

Alien cake!

It's another baking adventure! This time, the mission was to make a cake. But not just any cake. I was going to make a cake shaped like this:

Yep. It's a Space Invaders cake! I got this cake tin as a Christmas present (thank you!), and have been just waiting for a chance to try it out. The one thing I noticed was that the tin, as well as the recipe itself on the box, called for a rather small cake. We can't very well have a small cake, now can we?

My solution (okay, some credit to the boyfriend!) was to make two cakes and turn it into a alien-themed Victoria sponge cake. Which worked out relatively well.

I used a mixed fruit jam on one side, and some home-made vanilla buttercream on the other.

Then I smushed the two of them together and topped it with a layer of marzipan! (That, I have to add, was a total disaster. I just do not get along with things you have to roll out like that. Marzipan, frozen block pastry... I really should know better by now.)

What I've learned from this? Is that at the moment, I'm really, really bad at cake decorating. I clearly do not have enough practise, as I'm still adamant that this cake looks like quite the little mess. On the upside, the cake has at least passed the taste test and has been met with the boyfriend's approval, so can't be that bad, right? Besides, lacking in practise just means I have a perfectly good excuse to make more...

Cupcakes!

The baking addiction continues! Not long after Christmas, I made cupcakes.

A lot of cupcakes.

Then I took out the decorating kit the other half gifted me with, and had fun playing with buttercream icing. And food colouring. Once again, you can definitely tell which ones I was more practised with. All the same, it was really fun.

My favourite is most definitely the lion. (At least, I think it looks like a lion. The other half agrees, but he could be humouring me.) However, I have to say, cupcakes are not my favourite things to decorate. I liked doing the cookies better, though this does make a nice change. Next time in baking adventures, cake! ... Assuming it survives the oven.

Sugar cookies, nom!

Something I've discovered over the recent Christmas season is that I apparently have a fondness for baking. Despite the fact that I am a well seasoned banana bread maker, I never stopped to think about baking other things. That changed in December, when I decided to make some sugar cookies with the recipe I found here.

I quickly discovered that even just mixing the cookie dough was fun for me. Without a mixer, I was doing it by hand - and as I'm sure anyone who's done so before, creaming butter and sugar by hand is not exactly easy. Even so, I was very happy with how the dough turned out. I even had to stop myself from just sitting down and eating it there and then! (Luckily, common sense won out, and I didn't make myself ill by eating a mixture with raw egg in it...)

Of course, with it being Christmas time and all, we had to use the Christmas shapes cookie cutters I've had for ages and never touched. We ended up making a few more cookies than I expected, but considering how good the dough was, I figured that could only be a good thing. They went in the oven, and came out looking (and tasting) even more amazing.

Now, plain sugar cookies are just fine, and almost half the cookies remained exactly as they came out of the oven. However, I was getting the itch to have some fun with the rest of them. Out came a quick and easy icing made with icing sugar, milk, and vanilla. Then came out the food colouring and various cake decorations. The result looked a bit like this:

About half of these were decorated by me. You can kind of tell which ones I started with, and which ones were the last few I did, purely because they get slightly better as I continued (I hope!). I did this by putting the icing into plastic sandwich bags and snipping off the tiniest bit of the corner. This let me squeeze the icing out to make the different designs. I have to say, this was by far the most fun I've had baking in a long time.

The last picture here is of my favourite cookie (and another one behind it just to make the picture look nice). This was the last one I made, and took the most care with. As a result, I banned everyone in the house from eating it. It would stay in the box until every other cookie was gone, and then I would get to eat the cookie I was so proud of.

I have done yet more baking since making these, so there will be more stuff to follow. I get the feeling I'm going to be doing a lot of baking this year!