As promised, here are my latest kitchen trials. I have been slowly working through my stockpiled
Pinterest recipes, even though we all know that for every recipe I try I pin five more. Pinterest will probably be the death of me someday... or at least the death of my diet. Three experiments, here we go...
Experiment #1
Cinnamon Swirl Bundt Cake
Recipe taken from
Mom's Who Think:
I had some anxiety about getting the darn thing out of this particular bundt pan, but buttering and flouring the heck out of it worked wonders. I should have adjusted baking time though, it turned out a little crispy but still delicious.
Perfect with a cup of coffee, the cake wasn't too sweet but the cinnamon brown sugar filling more than made up for it. I decided against the walnuts though, I'm kind of a weirdo and texture is huge to me. For some reason to me nuts ruin the texture of baked goods.
Experiment #2
Pumpkin Bread with Pumpkin Buttercream and Salted Caramel Drizzle
Recipe taken from
Nancy Creative:
"Naked" bread before being iced. It was moist and pumpkin-y and definitely yummy. I didn't use either zest and didn't have canola oil so I used vegetable oil and it still came out pretty well. The buttercream wasn't that sweet and was definitely pumpkin-y as well and complemented the loaf quite well.
As you can see I left out the nuts. Again. I probably have some childhood trauma having to do with nuts or something, my dislike of nuts in baked goods runs deep. But I have no problem eating dark chocolate covered almonds, go figure.
Instead of nuts, I drizzled the iced and finished loaf with salted caramel sauce. And yes, I tend to get impatient and spread my icing before things have cooled completely. Mea culpa. It still tasted good. I discovered how easy it was to make
salted caramel sauce again while on Pinterest, so now I've always got a jar of it in my fridge. Always. It goes on ice cream, I use it to make salted caramel buttercream, it gets drizzled on chocolate chip cookies, I use it to fill chocolate cupcakes, and can pretty much go on anything. It went perfectly with the pumpkin loaf.
Experiment #3
Vanilla Cupcakes filled with Manjar and a Manjar/Vanilla Buttercream swirl icing
I made these for the sole purpose of learning how to do a dual icing swirl, and to practice filling cupcakes. I get a lot of recipes from
Brown Eyed Baker and the vanilla cake and vanilla buttercream recipes came from her blog.
Cooled cupcakes, vanilla buttercream, manjar icing and manjar in the piping bag read to fill the cupcakes. I was introduced to manjar by my husband, he had a lot of it when he lived in South America. I didn't understand the difference between manjar and caramel until I tasted it and realized it was dulce de leche. I guess the name "manjar" is a Paraguayan thing. I had it for the first time when hubs had picked up a can of sweetened condensed milk on a whim while we were at the grocery store, and when we got home he stripped the label off, poked two holes in the lid and put the can in a sauce pan of water. He watched the stove for four hours adding water to the sauce pan until he declared the manjar done and we had it on toast. When I made his mom's
birthday cake she wanted chocolate with a manjar icing, and I knew that with a toddler I wasn't about to be watching the stove for hours on end. After a quick search I discovered that I could get the same result by submerging the cans in water in my crockpot and leaving it on high for 8 hours. I also discovered that I could make the manjar into a beautiful icing by whipping it in my stand mixer on medium high for a minute to loosen it up and then adding a tablespoon or two of milk and a little powdered sugar. That's what's in the bowl on the top. The piping bag just has the whipped manjar in it. In hind sight, I should have added a little milk when I whipped it because I got the worst hand cramps trying to squeeze the thick dulce de leche out of the bag and into the cupcakes. And as for the dual icing swirl...
I did it! Vanilla buttercream in one piping bag, manjar icing in another, cut the bottom half inch off each bag and put them into a third piping bag that was already tipped and voila! Icing swirl accomplished. Helpful hint though -- don't over fill the piping bags in the middle, in fact only fill them up about halfway. I discovered this the hard way, and by cleaning up all the excess icing that came out the top of the bags and fell all over my parents kitchen floor, stove, sink, counters... you get the idea. But it worked!
So there you have it -- my last batch of Pinterest recipe trials. I try to keep track of all my trials
here but I'm a little behind... working on it.
