A lesson in buttercream

Ok I'm done stalling kittens lets get down to it. Today I am going to talk about the most common frosting you will see. 90 percent of cupcakes will be topped with a buttercream. It is very sweet and easily dyed and piped. Around here we like a lighter more whipped frosting that I will do next week but for now we are creaming some butter.

I'm pretty sure that stain is chocolate but I'm not willing to test that theory.

Look how easy that bitch is! As long as you have any kind of mechanical mixer (of the arms of a Greek deity) you can make this frosting. It's four ingredients that I keep in my kitchen at all times. First things first, you can pretty much always tell that you are making a buttercream when the first thing you do is cream some butter. And before any of you start, no it doesn't have to be butter. The first time I ever made a frosting it was crisco based (with mint) and it was almost 10 years ago in a Gourmet Cooking class I took. It's where I learned to make a rose out of frosting, a skill I have never used since. Ok, I'm rambling time for a picture.

classy!

After the butter and the sugar, you just need to add whatever flavor you want and milk it until you get the right texture. You might notice that in that picture there is very little frosting. This caused me much distress after I started using it and realized that I didn't even have enough to cover half my cookies. The lesson in all of this is don't make half a batch unless you want to wind up crying on the floor. So after doing that and starting from scratch to make it all over again you end up with something that looks wonderfully tasty. 

Pink is the tastiest color

I made it strawberry because that sounded damn good, and it totally was. I really wanted to pipe the frosting onto the cookies but didn't have enough. I used a butter knife and some pink sprinkles to make it look as pretty as possible. I did not the best job, which is sad because I've made this before. I promise next week there will be no hysterics as I bring you my favorite frosting of all time. What could it be?! Oh hold on I almost forgot...

Cookies!

For my favorite thing of the week, I went back to youtube. I found this awesome channel packed full of show tunes in a bunch of different languages. Have you ever wondered what rent would sound like in Hungarian? Or perhaps what a group of Brazilians sounds like singing Sondheim? Well wonder no more because all your answers are right there. Notable mentions: "The Circle of Life" in Japanese and "We Both Reached for the Gun" in Dutch.

Sugar cookies, you're the one!

Welcome back to my kitchen, all my whiskers-in-training. This Saturday is my mother-in-laws birthday and because I'm not one of those people who hate their spouses mom, I made her cookies. I have attempted to make sugar cookies in the past and I can't say I was pleased. After all the mixing, cooling, rolling, cookie cuttering and baking, I was left with sad, thin stars with burnt edges. I was determined not to let that happen again. I used this recipe mostly because it needed no refrigeration or rolling pins. I will give you a quick rundown of my experience with it but there's not much I can add about it. The blog I found it on was cute, easy to print, had great pictures and was hilarious. In short, I think I hate that bitch. Why you gotta make me look bad! In contrast to all of that, I am going to start with this picture.

Eww

That is what the first step looks like. You aren't going to see that in any of those fancy pictures. Really though, why would you want too. That is unsalted butter and vegetable shortening. I am strongly urging you not to taste it. It's probably gross. You add sugar to that which apparently makes it edible and according to my husband "not bad." After that you mix the vanilla and eggs. I have more graphic pictures of these stages but I cant' in good conscience show you those. I'll just skip to the part where it looks like cookies. 

Yay it looks like food!

The source material then says to scoop them out with a rounded tablespoon onto the parchment paper. To that I said that I "don't give a hot damn!" and used my Little melon baller looking mother fucker. She also said it's supposed to make 26 cookies and I ended up with around 34 so....whoops. Then bake them for around 8 minutes and let it stay on the hot baking sheet to get the bottoms a little browner, then cool.  

A winner is me!

There you go friends, a sugar cookie recipe that even I can't screw up. Tomorrow I will tell you all about the adventure in buttercream. It...didn't go great. To wrap things up I leave you with my favorite thing for this week which is this random meme from two years ago. Yes two years ago, yes it's still my favorite thing, that is how amazing it is.  That's all for today kittens, tune in tomorrow! Same internet time, Same internet channel!

Back from the Dead: Part 2

Welcome back, my wonderful whiskers! It's finally November, a month of turkeys and parades and month long holidays! I might not have any of the first two things, but I am proud to introduce you to No-Bake November! It's totally the coolest holiday that I just invented right now. All this month I will be focusing on non baked goods, specifically frostings. Just to clarify, I will be baking this month. I mean, I have to have something to put the frosting on. And if it turns out interesting in any way then you will get a special Thursday quick blog. So do you remember yesterday when I said I made ganache for the first time? Let me tell you all about it!

Hey it's this guy again!

As an introduction, I want to say that I picked the easiest recipe I could find. I wanted to learn some basics before going crazy. I used this recipe because it had only two ingredients and it looked exactly like what I wanted to top my cheesecakes with. All you really need is 12 oz of chocolate and a cup of heavy whipping cream, which took me forever to find at the store. I used semi-sweet chocolate chunks because I already had that. 

This looks more right

You start by bringing the cream to a boil and then immediately removing it from heat. I used a fucking huge pot so I added a little more cream to compensate from what would get stuck to the sides. Also I kept the heat probably a little lower than I probably needed too. Yes it took forever but I didn't scorch it and that's rare for me. Once it hits a noticeable boil, pour it right on top of the chocolate. The tricky part is making sure you stir it enough so that everything melts equally but not so much that it starts to whip.

Unless you are into that kinda thing

I somehow found the exact right stirring equation because it looked and tasted great. I used my little melon baller looking mother fucker to spoon it onto the cheesecakes. Then I shook them around less gently then I should have, to make it even on top. Pop them in the fridge for a few hours and baby, you've got a stew going. 

Mmm, stew

I had lots of ideas for what to put on top of them to make it prettier but in the end, what's prettier than ganache. It's got a surface so shiny you can almost watch yourself eat it. I would suggest doing that too because it's a memory you are going to want to keep for a lifetime. Adding to the list of favorite things I have this week is Jacksmith. It's a flipline game similar to all the papa's cooking games except you make weapons and then fight with them.

Back From the Dead

I've recently come upon the knowledge that I'm popular and that people have missed reading my baked rambles. This is a new feeling for me so I am going to bask in my internet glory with a bonus blog post this week. Ya know to make up for being a lazy bum this whole month. I'm not going to be focusing on any one recipe today but I have been working on some things.

Things like this!

First things first my little kitten whiskerers, Happy fricking Halloween! I'm dressed up in a hooded cookie monster bathrobe with matching pajama pants. Yes I am that badass. While we are on the subject of cookies, do you remember when I made these? A few weeks ago I made a three pack of oatmeal chip cookies for my husband. It included dark chocolate, cinnamon and my new favorite flavor for just about anything, mint. I did not think mint and oatmeal would go together but oh my god, seriously you just gotta make them. I would suggest keeping some Andes chips around all the time because they are great. Even if you dont want to make anything with them, I just eat them out of the bag by the handful. Next, I wanna talk a little about why I was so lazy this month. It looked a little something like this:

I'm the one that looks like an anthropomorphised cat

That's the whole cast for "Honeymoon at Graveside Manor". Look how cute we are! If you've never done live theatre then you can't understand how exhausting it is. Especially when you get the honor of playing someone who starts having a slight mental breakdown. It wears at your mental health a little. So I'm going to call the rest of October my mental health restoration month.  But now the show is closed, the set is gone and the fancy furniture has all returned to the fancy places we borrowed it from. Which means I am going to be working extra hard all November to bring you the bloggiest of posts and the postiest of blogs. Here's a sneak peak for tomorrows.

I'm pretty sure this is how you do it

Yes, my dear friends I made ganache for the first time in my life and it wasn't all that scary. But before I get to that I have to tell you about that obviously mint chocolate cheesecake I made. I used chocolate graham crackers for the crust (which was amazing) and I added the Andes mints that I'm obsessed with, right into the cream cheese. I dyed it green to make it taste mintier because shut up it totally works that way. It was my favorite cheesecake so far and you can bet your sweet ass that I will be doing more mix in cheesecakes in the future. I'm sorry for not having any cool halloween themed bakes this year....WAIT! I totally did make something halloweeny. Just give me one second to find the picture.In the meantime...  

BAM!

That's ghosts and pumpkin patches, So don't let anyone ever tell you that kitten whiskers doesn't like the holidays. To prove it even further, my favorite thing(s) of the week are Tabletop part one and part two of this awesome game Betrayal at the House on the Hill. It's spooky and fun and smart and complex and great. I bought it and played it last night. I died but I still had a great time rooting for my fellow heroes while hope grew dim, and if that doesn't sell you then maybe we aren't even friends.

Sumbitches

In a perfect world everyone would either be watching How I met your Mother, or they'd be dead. It's literally been my favorite show for at least the last five years. The last season started this week and I am extremely sad-cited. If you watched it then you know exactly what I did this week. If you didn't, I'm sorry that your tv exploded or your mom died, because seriously what other reason could you have. The quote goes down like this.  "Lily: I don't care if they are poison, there's chocolate, peanut butter and caramel in these sumbitches. The Mother: I call them sumbitches!" From that moment on I couldn't concentrate on anything else but making those delicious sounding sumbitches.

Damn you sumbitches are fine!

My first step was some intense googling to see if the recipe already existed somewhere. At the time it didn't, so I don't was anyone saying to me how these aren't the sumbitches that herpderpnews.com posted. I figured it out first, so fuck you herpderpnews and all of your herpderp affiliates. I started with a recipe for peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. For the most part I followed all the rules except that I halfed the chips and replaced them with caramel cubes cut into smaller cubes. Oh and I also mixed the flour in wrong and almost forgot to add sugar again which seems to be a theme with me. But once everything was mixed up together it looked really tasty.

You can barely see the fuck ups

I tried using the little melon baller looking mother fucker to get the perfect sumbitches but I wasn't sure if enough caramel was getting into each one so I molded most of them by hand. That means they were probably a little bigger than a normal cookie but not quite a monster. Now I'm feeling really judgmental about cookie sizes. Who am I to say that these plus sized cookies aren't normal. Big is beautiful! Somehow or another though I ended up with 25 cookies. That's right, 25.

One lonely sumbitch

I felt so bad leaving him there but there was no chance in hell I was going to wait around for one sumbitch. I baked all the other for 10 or so minutes and took that chance to eat a turkey sammich and it was good. When I took them out of the oven I was for some reason surprised to find that they looked a little...

Oozy is the word I would use

Caramel is sticky and obviously melts. This should not have been a shock to me. I am le dumb. Some of them turned out really nice looking though. I am really pleased with my sumbitches and I do intend to make them again. Even though trying to remove them from the baking sheet was harder than expected. I was accused of adding glue which I promptly did not deny. Oozy and gluey are apparantly great things when it comes to sumbitches because I made them at 4 and they were all gone by 8. I even got a quote! "Those sumbitches are fucking fuck!" says my friend Nick. To which I can only respond "Is that a good thing?" His answer: Oh yeah.

That's all for today my little whiskers but unfortunatly I have some bad news. Because next week is hell week I wont be doing a vaginal fantasy blog this month. I am really sad about it so I might end up just posting some photos. But I will give you two favorite things to make up for it. The first one has to be How I met your mother on cbs.com for all the exploded tv havers and mom funeral attenders. The second one is for anyone interesed in more food based humor. Don't Mess with a Chef is a great new blog from a friend of mine and it features actual food. So what are you waiting for!

Pinspiration Vol.2: Lemons and Blueberries!

I'm back my little whisking buddies! I know it was a tough week without me but I brought my A game this week to make up for it. Not only is this a pinterest inspired post, it is also is some advanced learning for me. I'm doing a lot of things I've never done before and I find that exciting.This week I was clinging to the last vestiges of summer and made Lemon Blueberry Bars. If you click that link, you will be unable to resist making these. You can almost smell the lemon through the interwebs. We start with the one thing I know how to do and that is: making a graham cracker crust. The scary part of that for me was the lemon zest. Believe it or not, I've never zested anything before. It's probably not that hard to believe if you know me. I'm not great at a lot of things. Oh but before I forget, here is a photo.

It was only after I took the photo that I realized the zester is upside down.

Because it's motherfucking fall, I was left with the saddest looking lemons I've ever seen. That one was the biggest in the bag and I swear there is some camera trickery involved here to make it look normal sized. Also, I had to go to a completely different store to get blueberries. "Thanks big unnamed smiley face store." She said dripping with sarcasm. But despite all that, zesting a lemon wasn't nearly as hard as I expected it to be.

Pretty and tasty! Just like me....wait what?

Can I just stop for a moment to say that I fucking love lemons. When all the heavy drinkers are doing the shots, I steal all the lemon slices. Ha ha take that jerks! That being said, this smelled amazing! In fact it was so tasty that I almost forgot to add sugar. Almost. Form that into a crust shape and then bake it for 10 minutes. The second thing I've never done before is separate an egg all by myself. The first one I broke but the second one I mastered. I even did the professional back and forth shell action.

Pictured: Yummy?

Next it was time to grow some balls and do the thing I was scared of the most. Thing i'd never done before three, juice several tiny lemons. I somehow was "lucky" enough not to get any pictures of this but I swear it happened. Let me start off by saying that our juicer is a piece of shit. It's so terrible I couldn't even find a picture on google images that looked bad enough. It's similar to this one, except shitty and made of plastic. It probably took me close to a half hour to squash enough tiny lemons to equal one half cup of juice. Painstaking, is the word I would choose to describe it. So you mix all that crap together and zest some more lemons, which I most assuredly didn't measure. Oh well, graters gonna grate. 

Is it tasty yet?

I'll be honest, I got pretty worried at this point. Mostly because this smell like ass. So much ass. I even double checked the website to make sure I wrote everything down right. I did, so what up! Without considering any other options I baked it. Just like the rules say I kept it in the the oven for 15 minutes. Then I played skyrim so I'm sure however long they said to let it cool I at least doubled it. Then I fridged it for probably less time than I should have so whatever. 

I wanna stick my face in that so bad!

It made the whole house smell great and I couldn't wait to taste it. I'm the only one home today so you are only getting my opinion which is *drool*. I hardly ever eat the stuff I make, so for me to enjoy this so much is crazy. I am totally going to make this again when I get a better juicer, probably with strawberries. Sorry again for taking a week off, I can't say that it wont happen again because in two weeks my show "Honeymoon at Graveside Manor" opens. I'm going to get pretty busy, fighting ghosts and what not. My favorite thing this week though has to be "Good Mythical Morning" Rhett and Link's morning show. They make one every weekday for the past like 2 years or something. My husband and I are watching all of them in order and it is awesome.

Tiny Gay Rainbow Cupcakes

It's the first Friday of the month and that means I baked something fun and literary-inspired for the ladies and gentlemen in my Vaginal Fantasy book club! I always get so excited about it and I usually spend the whole month planning what I want to make. August's book was Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner and it featured a male/male romance, or so I was told because I didn't finish it. We had an alternate book about lesbians too but I didn't finish that one either. I'm bad at book clubbing, but at least I can make a fine ass cupcake.

Tasty tasty words

 I think you know me well enough by now to know that there are several rules here I didn't exactly follow. Let's start at the top, I didn't make tie-dye cupcakes. I have in the past and they are totally awesome but for gay pride, I thought the rainbow was the only sensible pick. Next, I thought vanilla was way too straight-laced. Instead I mixed strawberry and raspberry extracts, so it was fruity and fabulous. Lastly, you know full well I didn't make 12 cupcakes. If you've ever read this blog before you know I made 24 mini cakes. Gaykes. Following the rest of the rules as closely as possible you should end up with this concoction.

Thanks Timmy!

 This is where it gets a little interesting. You have to separate that into as many colors as you want and then dye them. I made six different colors because fuck the difference between indigo and violet. I just now googled the gay pride flag and learned that there is normally only six colors and now I feel good about myself. Yay for me. You want to make sure that you get the pigments right pretty quickly because trying not to over-mix becomes hard if you stir it six times to get the purple just right.

I am that person.

 This is the point where you would start the tie dying. In a normal sized cupcake pan throw in colors at random until they are all full. Or if you are feeling more refined you can make the world's most perfect rainbow flag ever. I'm not even joking look at how cute this is.

Damn it! It's backwards

 Oh I forgot until right now that broke another rule. It's says bake for 20 minutes but I'm thinking I only baked them for 15 because they are small. Then you just wait for them to cool, frost them up with your favorite icing, place them in a delicate circle and you've got something fancy.

Pictured: Fine Ass'dness

I bought some gay bacon strips (also known as Airheads Extremes) for the top to be little gay flags but I lost them. I only found them later, an hour into book club after I had already had my fair share of fancy wine. There are no pictures of this unfortunately but they really helped bring out the fruity flavor of the cakes which I'm sure is a metaphor for something. My favorite thing this week was going to be Release the Mooks 3. It's a fun physics flash game where it's totally appropriate to find yourself shouting "You wobbly mook fucker!" I say "was going to be" because this happened and there was much rejoicing.