Amy Scott's Thoughts

Spiced Butter Pecan Cupcakes!

I love to bake, but I will admit that I am not a baking purist. I don’t make everything from scratch. I love cake mix and brownie mix. I have been known to use all forms of pie crust from dry mix to frozen. It’s hard to beat the ease and taste of these items. Trying to make things from scratch is always a fun challenge, but sometimes it’s just easier to use the box. I have learned though that even with boxed mixes, you can still put a personal spin on things and make it semi-homemade.

All dressed up in autumn colors!

That is exactly that I did for my class snack this week! I started with a box of Butter Pecan cake mix and a container of Whipped Butter Cream frosting. After a little bit of tweaking, these items didn’t stay in their original form. I did a little research to see what pairs well with the flavors and went with my natural attraction for autumn flavors. I added about a teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice to the cake mix. The spices mixed with the nuttiness went very well together! Normally, I would have gone for just cinnamon as the addition, but I figured a mixed spice would take it up to the next level.

For the frosting, as weird as this sounds, I added a tablespoon of breakfast syrup and a teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice. I had read that butter pecan pairs well with maple and caramel, so that is why I added a little syrup to the frosting. Adding the spices almost makes it the perfect base for a french toast like taste. The great thing about these cupcakes is how the nutty flavor and the spices really balance our the sweet of the frosting. I had to try one just to make sure they were safe and oh yeah, they were good. Real good. I think my husband had three!

Last week, I was attempting a trickier snack that didn’t turn out (I’ll do it again now that I’ve learned a few things) and I needed something quickly to substitute. I used my trusty brownie mix from Costco and then I added peanut-butter and mini Reese’s Pieces. Small changes and additions can take something that anyone can make into something uniquely from you. My personality is usually the type that colors in the lines, but when it comes to baking, I love exploring new flavor combinations. It’s fun to experiment and take a basic treat into something semi-homemade!

I used to think I was the type of person who always colored inside the lines. I never strayed from the given directions. Always followed the rules. However, the more I bake, the more of a rebel I become. Why do a recipe exactly like it says? Why not put my own twist on things! Tuesday nights have become my regular night in the kitchen to get in touch with my creative side. Tonight was no exception!

Earlier this week I saw a recipe for an ice cream pizza that I just had take a closer look at. After careful examination, I decided that it could use some improvement. First off, I don’t have a pizza pan, but the picture really looked like a pie, so I went with the pie inspiration. Also, fudge, vanilla ice cream and peanuts are nice, but I think we could take this up a notch by going with a chocolate peanut-butter theme. I’m not a huge fan on peanuts on the top of ice cream, so I decided on mini-sized Reese’s Pieces. Instead of more fudge on top, I used Reese’s hard shell. Noticing a theme? So here is a layer by layer shot of my dessert.

Layer One – Chocolate Chip Cookie Crust

Layer Two – Hot Fudge

Layer Three – Chocolate Peanut-Butter Ice Cream

Layer Four – Whipped Cream

Layer Five – Reese’s Pieces

Layer Six – Reese’s Hard Shell Topping & more Reese’s Pieces

Final Frozen Result

My first pie cake really was a flop. Yes, it tasted good, but it didn’t firm up right. I’m honestly surprised my class of 5th/6th grade girls ate it without questioning or objecting! They are super nice. However, after the first attempt, I just couldn’t get improvements out of my head. I kept thinking about all the things I could do different. After much brainstorming, I settled on a red, white and blue theme for the upcoming 4th of July holiday. Instead of just strawberries, I added blueberries to the filling mix. I also used white cake mix instead of yellow for a more pure white color. My original plan was going to be strawberries with lemon cake. My sister than suggested blueberries with lemon cake. I found a way to do it all. I didn’t want the color of lemon cake, but I wanted the flavor. I added lemon extract to the white cake mix so I could get the flavor without the color. The cake turned out super tasty (I made a little cake with the leftover batter). After letting the pie firm up a bit, I plan on diving into it! I learned a lot from my mistakes and I’m glad that I tried it again! If at first you don’t succeed, try try again!

Or should I say pie pie again!

Double Take Pie Cake #2

The Inspiration!

It probably is!

Oh, Food Network Magazine… It’s been my inspiration for so many baking projects as of late. I always get excited when the magazine arrives. I carefully pour over each page and note all the things that I think I could make (aka bake – that’s the only thing that really catches my eye… something about the sugar content…hmm). As always, there was a project that I wanted to try. I couldn’t pass up the fun idea of a pie cake! It’s a layered project where you bake yellow cake and take it out while it’s still wobbly. You add your fruit layer. Then you add the pie crust and finish baking it. I looked at the picture and it seemed complicated. However, I’ve been pretty successful with my other attempts from FNM so I guess I got a little cocky. I thought I could handle it. Sadly, my dessert looks nothing like the picture. I’m pretty sure it will taste okay, but that desired appearance means a lot to me and I flopped it.

So my first problem… I probably used too much batter. It’s hard to judge filling the pan pie 2/3 of the way full. Unless it’s labeled, I’m really bad at eye-balling things. Next problem, I decided to use cherry pie filling instead of strawberries. I tired to get as much of the cherry goo off as possible, but I didn’t work out in my favor. The cherries just weighed too much and they penetrated the baked layer of the cake causing the unbaked insides to ooze out. Not pretty… trust me. This made for a mixture of cherries and cake batter on top. The whole point is to hide the cake underneath the berries, but that didn’t work out so well. So much for the surprise element. I also probably needed another can of cherries to cover the top completely. I just assumed 2 cans was enough.

The End Result

This was  my first attempt at lattice work on the pie crust. I didn’t do such a super job of cutting the strips evenly. I knew I should have used a ruler! Anyway, for some reason the crust didn’t want to brown too much and I had a fear that I would bake all the moisture out the cake. After resetting the timer numerous times, I figured things were as good as they were going to get.

Like I said before, I’m sure it’s going to taste fine. However, I try to make all my goodies look phenomenal when serving them to my 5th/6th grade girls. Let’s be honest, kids can be picky. They can make a decision about something just from looking at it. I really want them to give it a chance. I might need to have a back up snack just in case for some reason this pie cake was a total flop.

I might have to try this again and redeem myself. Maybe now I’ll be able to pull off the picture perfect pie cake. Or maybe this is just how my cooking experiments will go… try it… mess it up… move on. I still have many other fun treats to create. Maybe pie cakes won’t be my specialty.  Oh well. Jesus still loves me!

Cake 1

I’ve loved my subscription to Food Network Magazine (thanks E&A)! Every month when it arrives, I get all excited to sit down and pour over it. I usually also end up hungry by the time I’m done! I find it very inspiring, but I’ll be honest, all I’ve made out the magazine is dessert. I can’t help it! It’s what I’m drawn to! SUGAR!

This month they had a whole section on ice cream cake. One of the recipes calls for a spring form pan which I don’t own, so I decided to go for the cake that I had all the supplies for. I settled on the Neapolitan Ice Cream Sandwich Cake. It was pretty simple in design, but you’ll never believe the mess it made in my kitchen! Melting, sticky ice cream all over! For those who know how OCD I am, you would proud of some of my recent kitchen messes! You’d hardly believe I was capable of making them!

The process starts by lining a loaf pan with tin foil. The bottom layer is 5 ice cream sandwiches. Add a layer of strawberry ice cream, another layer of ice cream sandwiches, and a layer of mint chocolate chip. The final layer is crushed cookie crumbles. As you can imagine, it’s back into the freezer to firm up the dessert (4 hours according the recipe – that seems like a long time when you’re dreaming of ice cream cake).  Using the tin foil – the cake comes easily out the pan. Once the cake is inverted onto a platter, the foil is peeled off,  From there the finishing touch is topping the cake with chocolate shell topping.

Cake 2

I found that the chocolate shell topping was a bit tricky. I made two cakes and for the first one I used the topping just at room temperature. This means it came out at the consistency of frosting. For the second cake, I soaked the topping in hot water which thinned the texture. Both options turned out well, but they were both different.

The first cake went to my class of girls last night. I was a little disappointed with the look of the cakes at the very beginning because the lines weren’t as crisp and clean as I would have liked. However, when I sliced the cake and served it, each slice looked beautiful and the layers looked great. The girls loved the cake and I have to admit, so did I! It was super tasty and super easy to make! It’s been fun to explore new desserts and try new things. I think I might have to get a spring form pan in the near future so I can try the second ice cream cake that caught my eye! Yum yum!

It would be ideal if both happened, but sometimes you can only settle for one! I would choose tasty if I had the choice. I’m guessing the rest of you would as well!

Jeremy and I are in the middle of an experiment. We’re trying to eat everything in our freezer, frig and pantry before we go shopping. We are doing a good job, but now we have to get creative when it comes to making things. We wanted to use the blueberries in our freezer and make a dessert with the limited items we have.

The final result was lemon-blueberry scones with a lemon glaze.  Honestly, I made a mess in the kitchen. A big one! They also didn’t turn out beautiful and well shaped like the scones you might find at Starbucks. Oh well! I should have waited until after dinner, but I had one right away just to make sure that they tasted okay. Let me tell you – they were awesome! Yay!

So here are the lessons learned today: Simple ideas might not be simple to execute and messes can be worth the results!

I moved to Lewis County at age 12 and I quickly learned something about our rural home – we had bunnies, lots of bunnies. I’m not talking the kind that you keep in a cage and take out to pet. I’m talking about wild rabbits. Now I’m sure rabbit is a more appropriate term for these animals, but in my mind they are bunnies and always will be. Bunnies just sounds cuter and less likely to give you rabies. Okay, now for those of you who follow my blog, I’m sure you know that I am not a nature girl. I don’t enjoy raising animals (unless you consider my one fluffy, 12 pound dog something to raised like livestock), I don’t hunt or kill animals for sport or fun, I don’t have animal posters or calendars around my house. My philosophy with animals is leave them alone and hope they leave me alone. So why a blog about bunnies???

Because marshmallows come in bunny shapes! You should know by now that marshmallows are something I keep around my house (more than animals). A couple of weeks ago, I was at Walmart looking through the spring/Easter section. I was looking at the baking cups and admiring all the cute designs and patterns. I settled on getting mini-cupcake baking cups that look like flowers. I really liked the full size cups that looked like flowers, but the cost for just 12 baking cups was absurd. I like to spice up my baking with cute elements, but I will not spend an arm and a leg on it. Especially since my treats are going to be ingested by 10 year olds, not the judges of cupcake wars. Maybe then I would spring for the high class baking supplies. Once my baking cups were selected I went happily along the way to do the rest of my shopping. Jeremy and I have a flow at Walmart that starts in the toiletries section and works around through home then cleaning to our final destination – the food section! As I was picking out my cereal, I noticed an end cap with Easter marshmallows all over it! Many different kinds in spring pastel colors! It was beautiful! In that moment, it all came to me! I would use my mini-flower baking cups to make cupcakes that I would use green frosting on like grass and then put the bunny shaped marshmallows on top! Once I saw the vision for this baking project I had to go for it! I do realize that grass doesn’t grow inside flowers, so the chance of a bunny sitting on grass inside of a flower is very slim in nature, but I figure in the cupcake world it wouldn’t be a problem!

Last night, I was feeling a bit brain dead and was contemplating what snack to make for my class. I knew that I had chocolate chips and part of me just thought a basic chocolate chip cookie would be easy and not take a lot of effort. However, my desire to always do something bigger and better took over. I decided to make a new recipe… Apparently you really need to bake the cookies on parchment paper – something I don’t keep in the house, but probably will from this point on. I have such great faith in my favorite baking sheets that I hoped the cookies would turn out okay without the parchment paper. They sure tasted good, but they were a challenge to get off the sheets and some cracked and now look a little strange. Making major mistakes is a perfectionist’s nightmare! Some you might have served the cookies I made to my class because they taste good and overall look like cookies, but I won’t. I have too high of standards (aka pride… I don’t want to be made fun of by my class who happen to be 15+ years younger than me. Yup, pride does weird things to a person). It was already late in the evening, but I knew I had another baking project idea up my sleeve – the flower bunnies! I baked the cupcakes last night before bed and then decorated them this morning. Now I should remember that chocolate cake makes the pattern on baking cups show up less and unless I wanted to double cup my cakes, I was in a pickle. So yes, next time, yellow cake will be used when I have a patterned baking cup. However, despite the chocolate color, I think they turned out pretty cute. I used my Pampered Chef frosting bottles to create the grass like effect and started from the outside and worked my way around to the inside of the cupcake. After the green grass was laid, a bunny was promptly placed on top. I’m hoping the bunny that is placed in the fresh frosting will allow the frosting to dry around it and cement the bunny in place.

The funny thing about all of this is the baking project I’m sharing is very appropriate for spring. Today it is snowing! I can look outside my window and see snowflakes falling down! So crazy! I realize that spring is still a couple weeks away and that the bunnies that surround my home probably won’t be out of a couple more weeks… so I guess this project is a prelude to spring, a glimpse at what is come! The season where the bunnies awaken and multiply, because we all know that is what bunnies do best!

PS – Happy Leap Year!