Baking BRAVELY!!

Do you remember how at the end of my last post, I said that you should stay tuned because we were doing some big baking projects? Well I wasn't kidding - we've done a LOT in the past week. For my mom's birthday last year, my Uncle Tata and Aunt Shayshay bought her the Bravetart cookbook. This is a very special cookbook and won a James Beard award, which is a very important award in the culinary world. We hadn't used the book yet, so quarantine after school was done for the year seemed like the perfect time! A really interesting thing about this cookbook is that the author Stella Parks has recipes for making homemade versions of some famous packaged desserts. My brother and sister and I had never seen the real versions of most of these before, but my mom showed us pictures and it seemed like it would be fun to try to make on our own.

The first thing that we made was Hostess cupcakes. Do you know that this was only the second time that my mom had ever made cupcakes in her entire life?! And the first time was when she made them for my tie-dye project for Harvest Day! I could not BELIEVE that!! But these cupcakes are definitely more complicated than most. First you make a cream filling, and we did it wrong the first time and had to do it again!! Then you bake your cupcakes, and once they are cool, you use a cookie cutter or other small circular object (we used the back of a large piping tip) to pull a small plug out of the center.

You have to save the plugs that you pull out because you put them back in later.

Then you pipe in your filling.

We actually made this entire recipe twice (more on that later). But the first time we filled them with a traditional piping bag and the second time we filled them with this injector. We thought that the injector was much easier!

Next you push your cupcake plugs back in.

And then you cover them in chocolate ganache and pipe squiggles of icing over the top.

I thought that these looked very cute when they were finished!

So after we were completely done with these, my mom was closing the cookbook and realized that we'd made the creme filling wrong the second time too!!!!! We went back and forth on whether or not we wanted to bother remaking these. They are a lot of work! But I decided that I did. I'd never had a Hostess cupcake before and I wanted to try one that was made the right way. We all agreed that the second time was better, so I'm glad that we did it! The cake part is very moist. It's made with lots of coconut oil. And the ganache and icing on top are hard, but then when you bite into it, the cake and filling are soft. I liked that combination. We brought the first kind to Kelsie and Chelsea though. I feel bad that they didn't get the second version, but the first version was good too.

Our next project was making Twinkies. First you bake vanilla cakes in a special pan that's called a canoe pan. Something that is very interesting about this recipe is that you put club soda into the batter.

You can see the bubbles from the club soda in the batter! And I think you can also see why this is called a canoe pan! The injector that we liked using for the cupcakes, actually came with this pan.

We used our injector again to fill the Twinkies. The filling that you use is the same for the Hostess cupcakes and the Twinkies, so I was glad that we finally made it correctly.

This is what the cakes looked like when they were done. I think that the carbonation from the club soda made them very fluffy and light.

And this is what they looked like when we broke them open.

We all liked the Hostess cupcakes more than the Twinkies, but the Twinkies were good too and they're MUCH easier to make.

Remember how we made the Hostess cupcake filling incorrectly twice? Well that's because the recipe comes from a different recipe in the book called marshmallow cream. To make the Hostess filling, you have to change the steps at the end, and we forgot to do that. So we ended up with marshmallow creme that we didn't use. The marshmallow creme recipe is part of a recipe for making oatmeal creme pies. My mom had never eaten them growing up, but they're supposed to be like a brand called Little Debbie. We didn't want the marshmallow creme to go to waste though, so we decided to make the whole recipe. But THEN, after we baked the cookies, we decided that we didn't like the marshmallow creme. It tasted okay, but it was too gelatinous to pipe and the texture wouldn't have been right for a creme pie. We think that it got messed up because we had a problem with our candy thermometer. SO we made the cookies because we didn't want to waste the marshmallow creme, but then we had to find a new recipe because we didn't want to waste our cookies! The whole thing was ridiculous!!!! But we'd made a cake the night before that I'll tell you about in my next post and decided that the frosting from that would be perfect. SO we re-made that frosting, and FINALLY we had our oatmeal creme pies. My brother really loved these! He said they were his favorite thing that we've made in all of quarantine after our inside-out carrot cake cookies. So I'm glad that we made them in the end!

This marshmallow frosting is very sweet, but we loved it!

My sister saw a picture of our next recipe in the cookbook and picked it as something that she wanted to try. They were cookies topped with homemade sprinkles. It turns out that sprinkles aren't that hard to make and it was a really fun project! First we made icing, and then we divided it into different bowls. We used gel food coloring to dye each bowl of icing a different color. Then we piped long thin lines, and left them to dry overnight.

We had to use a very thin tip, and so you had to squeeze really hard to get the icing out.

This is what it looked like drying overnight.

Then my mom chopped them into little pieces.

Don't these look beautiful?

We used them on top of the cookies that my sister wanted to make, but my brother also had a really good idea for something else that we might do with the sprinkles. Every year we make a special stamp for our holiday cards where we take a picture of some new way that we have made an H and a heart. One year we made it at the beach with shells. Another year we used rose petals and last year we used spray paint chalk on the sidewalk outside our house. So my brother suggested that maybe we use the sprinkles for our holiday stamp this year. I'll post a picture of our stamps at the end of the year if we succeed!!

The cookies that we made are called Lofthouse cookies. None of us had ever heard of them before, but apparently they are very popular soft frosted cookies that come out around the holidays. My brother and sister and I loved these! My brother said they made his top three.

Don't our sprinkles look great?!

Cooking from Bravetart was really fun, but it's too much work for every day tea time. However there are a few more recipes that I definitely want to try, so I'm not done with it yet!!!