Baker's Dozen: A Batch of Sweet Links

Um, adorable! Lemon-shaped macarons.

Speaking of lemon...how 'bout lemon-flavored Yoda cookies?

I hope you didn't miss these cookie props!

Which girl scout cookie tastes best in a shake? Find out here.

Let's kiss: potato kisses!

Happy birthday...to Oreos!

mmm...homemade Brown Sugar Pop-Tarts!

Homemade Fig Newtons? Sweet!

Of course, everyone knows Fig Newtons are better when dipped in chocolate and put on a stick.

A cake fit for a princess, with cones for towers.

A puddle I'd like to jump into: fudge puddle cookies.

Pretty in pink: Battenberg Cake.

A different type of crab-cake!

Speaking of seaside cakes: here's a very cute one!

Breakfast, but sweet: blueberry oatmeal popovers!

Pound of Fresh: Pound Cake Sandwich Recipe

Here are two facts:

1. Sandwiches are tasty.

2. Pound cake is delicious.

But what about when you combine these toothsome treats in one sweet, dessert-sandwich form? 

I think you probably know where I'm going with this. Friends, I'd like to share with you one of my favorite--and incidentally, one of the easiest--recipes I know: the Pound Cake Sandwich.

This is a sandwich that satisfies: two thick slices of pound cake with delicious (pink is best) frosting in the middle--a hefty treat that will fill your belly for breakfast, soothe rumblings at lunch, and will definitely spoil your dinner. Here's how you make it:

Pound Cake Sandwich

Makes one (easily duplicated)

Ingredients

• 2 thick slices of pound cake (plain or a flavor, you choose your own adventure)
• 2-3 tablespoons pink frosting

Procedure

1. Place two slices of poundcake side-by-side in a mirror-image direction.
2. spread each slice with 1 to 1.5 tablespoons of frosting. 
3. Sandwich the two frosted sides together.

4. Eat.

Cookie Props: A Tutorial from Sugarlicious by Meaghan Mountford

CakeSpy Note: This is an excerpt from Sugarlicious  by Meaghan Mountford; you can enter to win a copy here! Photography by Abby Greenawalt.

What's cuter than a cookie pop? How about a cookie prop pop? These adorable pops are decorated like accessories, so you can play with your food--and then eat it, too!

Prop Cookie Pops

Recipes

• cookie dough
• royal icing

Supplies

• mustache, bowtie and eyeglasses template (link: http://www.scribd.com/doc/81007914/Prop-Cookie-Pop-Template)
• cookie or lollipop sticks
• gel paste food coloring (brown, black, white, red and blue)
• 6 decorating bags
• 3 couplers
• 4 decorating tips, two size 2, one size 3 and one size 5
• rubberbands

*Find cookie sticks, decorating bags, couplers and tips at the craft store. For food coloring, I suggest Americolor Soft Gel Pastes, found online or in specialty stores.

1. Roll out chilled cookie dough on a floured surface about 3/8-inch thick, cut out your mustaches, bow ties and eyeglasses with the templates, insert sticks and bake according to the recipe. Let cool completely.

2. Prepare royal icing according to the recipe, divide and tint. Use any preferred colors for the mustaches (such as brown or gray), bow ties and eyeglass frames. You’ll also need black and white. I used black, white, brown, bright blue and red. Prepare 3 decorating bags with couplers and 3 different size tips. Fill the bag with the size 3 tip with the black icing, the bag with the size 5 tip with the brown icing, and the bag with the size 2 tip with half of the white icing. Cover and reserve the rest of the white icing and the blue and red icing. Close the bags tightly with rubber bands.

3. Outline your eyeglasses, mustaches and bowties with the black icing as shown. Let set about 15 minutes.

 

4. For the mustache, pipe the brown icing to fill the mustache, piping in the direction of the “hair” growth so the lines of icing look like hair. Let dry overnight before handling.

For the eyeglasses, pipe to fill the frames with brown icing. Flood white icing in the glass area. To flood, thin the reserved white icing with water, a few drops at a time, until the consistency of thick glue. Fill an empty decorating bag with the thinned icing, snip ¼-inch from the tip, and loosely pipe back and forth to fill the cookie. Use a toothpick to encourage the icing as needed until the entire space is filled. Let dry several hours; then pipe highlights on top of the white icing with the black icing after switching to a size 2 decorating tip. Let dry overnight before handling.

For the bow ties, use empty decorating bags to flood the blow tie with red or blue icing. Let the icing set several hours and pipe dots using the white icing in the decorating bag. Let dry overnight before handling. 

Sweets for Your Sweet: Chocolate Covered Chocolates Recipe for Serious Eats

Let's get one thing straight. There is nothing necessary about coating your Valentine's Day chocolates with more chocolate. But oh, does it ever taste good.

The process is really quite simple: melt some chocolate, dip your chocolates in it, and then let them set until solid. You can create a lovely visual by choosing a chocolate coating that complements the chocolates you're dipping: dip dark chocolates in white chocolate for a pretty finish, or coat milk chocolates in dark chocolate for a lovely flavor and visual contrast.

You'll be rewarded with an extremely decadent treat that will melt in your hand, but tastes better when it melts in your mouth.

For the full entry and recipe, visit Serious Eats!

CakeSpy Undercover: Chocolate Chip Cookies from Cameo Cakes, Brielle NJ

This is a chocolate chip cookie.

But.

This is not just any chocolate chip cookie.

This one has the extremely high status of being SpyMom's pick as "the best chocolate chip cookies on the Jersey Shore". And SpyMom (who is also a famous children's book illustrator, btw) knows her cookies. After all, I credit her as the one who taught me everything I know about sweets.

Now, I will confess: as a bona fide lover of soft and fat chocolate chip cookies, I was a bit dubious. These looked suspiciously flat and crispy. But one bite took away all my fears.

Crispy, yes, but extremely buttery and flavorful. They shatter in the mouth in a sort of caramelly-brown-sugary explosion, which is punctuated by deep, dark, rich chocolate nuggets. Somehow, I found my soft-cookie-loving-self loving this cookie, and wanting more. 

I knew SpyMom wouldn't lead me astray. 

But if you are simply not to be brought over to the crispy cookie camp, don't fret: Cameo Cakes has plenty of other good stuff. For instance butter cookies, festively decorated:

...and crumb cake (one of my personal favorite foods):

...and all manner of other pastries, cookies, and bread-type things. They do wedding cakes too!

Basically, whether you look to the cookie or not, you'll probably find something you like at this charming Brielle, NJ bakery.

Cameo Cakes, 406 Union Avenue, Brielle, NJ; online here.

Sugarlicious: A Blog Tour and Giveaway

It's official: we have a tie.

Not that there was a contest, of course, but I have to concede that when it comes to Most Adorable Book Ever, I think that  my book now has to share the title with Sugarlicious , the newest release by Meaghan Mountford of The Decorated Cookie and Edible Crafts Gossip. I'm happy to share the title, though, because it truly is delicious, and the author is totally sweet.

Here's some info about the book:

Sugarlicious is filled with over 200 colorful pages of ideas for decorating cute and clever sweets, including cookies, marshmallows, cupcakes, cakes, cake pops, petits fours and candy clay. You’ll learn to put sweets on sticks, color icing and frosting, pipe with a decorating bag, make fondant decorations, use edible writers and icing sheets, paint and stamp with food coloring, decorate with candies and sprinkles, and so much more. Froggy cupcakes, milkshake cake pops, mustache and bow tie cookie pops, sparkly marshmallows, a lawn ornament cake and pretty painted petits fours are just a tiny sampling of what’s inside.

And here's some proof of the cuteness:

And you can win a copy, along with other awesome stuff! The prize is a copy of Sugarlicious and the prize pack (photo attached), which includes a Sugarlicious apron, hot pink oven mitt, spatula, post-it notes, and a little recipe booklet. 

How do you enter? It's so easy. You just leave a comment on this post and tell me about either the cutest dessert you've ever made OR eaten! You get entered TWICE if you post a link to a recipe or photo of it!

The winner will be chosen at random next Saturday, February 18; due to shipping fees, we are only able to offer this giveaway to US and Canadian entrants. If you can't wait to see if you won, you can buy Sugarlicious here. Good luck!

Baker's Dozen: A Batch of Sweet Links

The best Valentine's Day present: MY BOOK.

A sweet slice of life--and pie history!

More sweet history, and a recipe: Calabrian Love Knots!

Totally sweet--homemade Conversation Hearts!

Chew on this: Al Dente blog loves my Conversation Hearts!

Let's spoon. I want a party spoon.

Spirited chocolate covered cherry milkshake...be still my beating heart!

Hello, delicious: Neapolitan Whoopie Pies!

Read about this heart-shaped cake I ate in Paris. Yeaaaah.

Sweets for your sweet: a Valentine's Day Cupcake Tutorial!

Cute: Crushed Conversation Heart Cookie Pops!

Conversation Heart Nanaimo Bars: they say "I love you", even though they don't have mouths.

Um, hi. Have we talked about Almond Blondies?

Sweet memories: Conversation Heart Cream Pie!

Cupcake Shops: Don't call yourself Sprinkles...unless you're Sprinkles.

Pop-tarts ice cream sandwiches: what true love tastes like.

Wine for your valentine: Red Wine Valentine cookies!

And finally, I promise this will make you smile.

Seeking Sweetness: Daily Snapshot, Sugar Free Die Zone

CakeSpy Note: if you follow me on facebook or Twitter, you probably know I'm partial to adding bits of sweetness to my daily surroundings, via sidewalk chalk, small cutouts, and the like--I call it "gentle street art". Here's where I post a daily feel-good photo, for no particular reason other than to showcase these sweet little nothings, in hopes that they'll make you smile.

And this one is pretty self explanitory: that's about how I feel about THAT. 

Scouting Sweetness: Neapolitan Cream Pie in a Samoas Cookie Crust

Recently, I was handed a secret spy mission by a super-sweet establishment.

Oh, you've probably heard of them...or at least their cookies.

Yup: I'm talking about the Girl Scouts. Of Western Washington, to be specific. When these sweet Scouts announced their recipe contest, in advance of their cookie sale to the public (March 2-18, and you can find them via cookie locator, as well as an app, which will be updated closer to the date of the sale), I knew I had to be part of it.

But before anything else...I received a super secret spy package (spoiler: it included cookies). Cue the "Mission: Impossible" music, and off to baking.

Would I make a grasshopper pie, using a Thin Mint crust? Would I make Samoas cupcakes? Would I make 'em into milkshakes and call it a day?

No, no, no.

First, I tried a lemonade cake festooned with the lemony crescent meltaway cookies known as Savannah Smiles...and while it was tasty, it was a little garish, and not quite special enough.

And then, it hit. Perhaps inspired by recent CakeSpy contest winner Molly, mixed with a little bit of these candies that I adore, I decided to go for a Neapolitan Triple-threat. 

And O.M.G. was this thing good. Employing a Samoas cookie crust, which became crisp and caramelly and so rich it almost (but not quite) hurt, it got even better with three flavors of milky, creamy pudding on top--and then got even more delicious (and cuter, in my opinion) with a garnish of whipped cream and even more cookies on top.

If you're scouting sweetness, you've certainly found it with this recipe!

Neapolitan Cream Pie in a Samoas Cookie Crust

For the Crust:

• 2 boxes of Samoas cookies--save 4-6 cookies, but with the rest, ground coarsely by hand or in a food processor
• 6 tablespoons butter, melted

For the filling:

• 1 large package instant vanilla pudding (5.1 ounce size)
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup chocolate milk
• 1/2 cup strawberry milk

To Finish: Whipped cream, and lots of it.

Methodology:

1. Make the crust. Directions Mix the cookie crumbs and melted butter until well blended . Press mixture into a 9 inch greased pie plate (you need more butter or shortening to grease it because the caramel from the cookies will make them stick to the pan!). Also, you might want to flour or wet your hands first, because this business gets sticky. Bake at 375 degrees F (190 degrees C) for 5-7 minutes. Cool for at least an hour, or until the shell is at room temperature. You can put it in the fridge to chill more rapidly, too.
2. Divide the pudding mix into three equal portions. Place each portion in a medium-sized bowl.
3. First, mix 1/2 cup of strawberry milk with one portion of pudding mix, whisking until smooth; pour on top of  baked pie shell.
4. Next, mix 1/2 cup of regular whole milk with a second portion of pudding mix, whisking until smooth; pour on top of the chocolate pudding layer, and gently spread to cover the layer entirely.
5. Finally, mix 1/2 cup of chocolate milk with the final portion of pudding mix, whisking until smooth; pour on top of the milk layer, and gently spread to cover the layer entirely.
6. Finally, top it all off with a very generous helping of whipped cream right before serving. Garnish with your left-over Samoas!

Connect with the Girl Scouts of Western Washington online: http://www.facebook.com/GirlScoutsWW and https://twitter.com/#!/GirlScoutsWW; the Twitter hash tag is: #GSCookieRecipe.

Batter Chatter: Interview with Kristin of Meringue Bake Shop, Orange County

What's a "Whacky Cake"? Read on.In the modern world, it seems like just about every other person has some sort of a baking business, be it their bread and butter or a little something on the side.

Sadly, a lot of businesses like this fizzle out. But Meringue Bake Shop, located in Orange County, CA and run by baker Kristin Ausk and her husband Lyle, is an inspiring exception. While they don't have a retail storefront (yet), they've been going for four years and have a loyal following at farmer's markets in the area; as they put it, "While our name may have 'shop' in it, we are currently a catering business working out of a commercial kitchen in Fullerton. But we have our eyes set on the future and so our name reflects that."

Until that sweet day, let's learn more about what keeps them going strong, shall we? (Hint: it may or may not include buttered and toasted Pop-Tarts):

How has Meringue Bake Shop changed since you established it four years ago? Hmmm. I honestly don't feel like much has changed. I'm sure a lot has, like we are now at farmers markets and are consistently busy instead of having one or two orders a month but I guess it just feels like business as usual. We have received some great press and accolades from industry experts so that has helped us grow. Occasionally someone will come up to me and be excited to meet me and that kinda freaks me out, but in a good way. That certainly wouldn't have happened a few years ago.

Your world-famous PushCakes seem to have inspired some...for lack of a better word...copycats. How do you deal with people who are a little too "inspired" by your business? Ha well.... I am going to be honest and say that it is challenging for me to deal with. And I am trying to learn to let go and just accept that it's a great idea and so of course people are going to want to make it their own. Look at Bakerella! But it does upset me when someone talks about it as if they came up with pushcakes or use the name I invented and tell me they had no idea. Or purposefully go around and try to "steal my thunder" so to speak by following my press around the internet to tout their version. That's just not nice. And I was bummed when I found out someone is publishing a book about the very idea, someone who isn't even in the business and ultimately will get all the credit for it. But I digress! I really owe its wide spread popularity to you, for doing the first official post about PushCakes here on Cakespy!

Shucks! I'm blushing. OK, so...PushCakes were one of the items that brought your business to the public eye in a big way. How big a part of your business are they today? Right now pushcakes are probably 40% of my business. I'd like to get that to at least 75%. I am working on an online storefront so I can spread the pushcake love all over the states. But since I only do this part time, and a lot on my own, it's going to take longer than I'd like. Plus it's just me and my husband baking, creating and assembling these and we've only got 4 hands between us!

Tell me more about your "whacky cake", that lovely thing with a funny name pictured at the top of this post. The whacky cake is based off an idea I saw in a Donna Hay magazine a year or so ago. My friend Sharon from Cupcakes and Cutlery showed me the cake and told me that I just had to make it my own. I found a company in Australia that is making something with a chocolate mold in the shape of a cake that you break open with a hammer. I believe they call them smash cakes. What makes mine different is that underneath that chocolate dome and layer of delicious candy, you'll find our yummy cake and buttercream. So after eating some sugar, you can eat more sugar! Everyone's happy! So far I've just been making them for kids parties but they would great for marriage proposals, gender reveal parties, milestone birthdays or even for graduations. We can put anything inside the cake as long as it's small.

What flavor would your last-meal cake be? It would have to be a slice of Le Bete Noire. It's a cake made at Extraordinary Desserts in San Diego. The cake is comprised of layers of a creamy semi-sweet chocolate mousse, vanilla crème brûlée, chocolate ganache, dark chocolate cakes and moistened with Madagascar vanilla bean syrup.

Pop-tarts or toaster strudel? DUH! Pop-tarts baby! I eat mine toasted with salted butter and cut into fourths. shhhh

What is, in your opinion, the ideal cake-to-frosting ratio on a cupcake? I personally prefer 1/3 buttercream to 2/3 cake.

Can you name some bakers who truly inspire you? Oh yes. Elisa Strauss, Karen Krasne, Kari Haskell, Carrie Fields, Julie Desmeules, Rosie from Sweetapolita, and you!

If money were no object, what would you love to do next with your business? Open a real shop! One with a case full of cupcakes, cookies, diner cakes, bars and puddings. A pink and white checked floor, tinsel lampshades, turquoise vinyl booths, a cakespy mural in my kitchen, a glitter toilet (yea you heard me!), a space for parties and a retro jukebox playing daft punk, madonna, rodrigo y gabriel, abba, squeeze, and zz top (among others). ;)

For more awesome, visit the Meringue Bake Shop website or find them on Facebook.