OperationLayla Bake Sale

If you read my blog (thank you) you probably like food about as much as I do… specifically baked goods. Am I right? Well, here is a chance to get freshly baked, baked goods delivered right to your front door. #OperationLayla is hosting a bake sale right now!

Please check out “Bake Sale Info” for a detailed description of how this Bake Sale works.


Each item below starts with a minimum bid of $15, and to officially bid on any particular item, you must leave a comment with at least a $1 (one dollar) raise in price. All buyers have until 11 pm EST to submit their bid.


Thank you very much for your generous contributions and support. We will try our best to moderate the comments throughout the day. If you would like to comment anonymously or have any questions or concerns, please email OperationBakeSale@gmail.com. Happy bidding!

I’m donating Chocolate Covered Rice Cereal Bars, gluten free - of course. However, since I’m in the middle of finals right now, I wasn’t able to make them this weekend and take a picture for the website… so I drew one.


Mmmmm, don’t THOSE look tasty? The upside is these will be extra fresh when I mail them out :)

HAPPY BIDDING!!

Flourless Chocolate Torte

Remember this picture?
It was taken the night I made this cake/torte, at the event I made the cake/torte for… Christmas Eve. Flourless chocolate tortes were one of my favorite restaurant desserts before I went gluten free. Thank goodness, I can still eat one of my favorite desserts without having to modify it in anyway – Yay! As much as I like them, however, I’d never baked one myself before. So, when Jane’s mom, Sandy, asked me to bring a dessert for Christmas Eve, my choice was easy.

My first step, of course, was to Google “Flourless Chocolate Cake”. Naturally, this resulted in hundred, if not, thousands of results. Ultimately, I decided on this recipe from Macrina Bakery , found on Gluten Free Girl.

(Click recipe to enlarge)

You guys, this cake is TO.DIE.FOR! DELICIOUS! and it look pretty, if I do say so myself. The only problem – I don’t think it was supposed the cave in like it did. Do you see the sides? They’re all caved in and the top is too.


I should probably do a little research to see if I did something wrong. Perhaps I mix things too much… or baked it too long. Oh, well! We all ate and enjoyed it :)

Frenchie Kisses: ...and then there was CAKE!

*For those of you new to my blog, I also blog for Weddingbee as Mrs French Bulldog. I'm really behind on my recaps, but I like to post them here after I've posted them over there.*

After dinner, mingling and other wedding reception type things it was time for cake.


When we started planning our wedding I saw a picture of a cake buffet and fell in love. I wanted a cake buffet. I loved the look and also liked that it meant I could have several cake flavors.


Our baker had an amazing book filled with amazing she’d made for other weddings. I hope she wasn’t disappointed with how simple we wanted our cakes decorated, but I had a vision, you know?


We had three different flavors: champagne with champagne buttercream icing, almond with raspberry filling and almond buttercream icing, and chocolate with chocolate mousse filing and chocolate buttercream icing. Our favorite was the champagne and that is what we chose to cut into for out cake cutting.


We chose to cut out favorite flavor, Champagne, for our cake cutting. The top and bottom tier of the main cake were supposed to be the champagne flavor. We didn’t want to cut the top layer because we wanted to save it for our first anniversary. That meant we had to slice into the bottom tier, which was much easier in theory, but we managed ;-) Heck, when there is cake involved, I’ll make it work.


We cut and served the cake with the same silver cake server my parents used at their wedding.


Mr Frenchie is lactose intolerant and had run out of Lactaid pills at lunch, right before the wedding. Since, his meal was dairy-free he hadn’t run into any issues until it was time to eat cake with buttercream frosting. I had to try hard to get him a piece of just cake. I ended up serving him a teeny tiny piece and he gave me this HUGE bite. I kept telling him to make it smaller, which I’m sure looked funny to our guests.

While our caterer sliced the cake for our guest, we took the opportunity to thank everyone for coming and say a special thank you to my parent’s for throwing us such a wonderful wedding.

Our champagne glasses were from a set we found at Mr Frenchie’s Grandmother’s house. She past away before I was able to meet her, but about a month before the wedding Mr Frenchie and I drove out the her house to pick up a few things. FIL Frenchie told us we could have anything from the house that we wanted and I knew those glasses would be perfect when I spotted them.


FIL Frenchie was very happy we found someway to incorporate her into our wedding day.

So Far...

The Beginning

Gettin' Sassy

Me & My Bridesmaids

Mr Frenchie's Morning

Waiting to go down the aisle

The "I Do"s

The Big 'Oops'

Family Portraits

Portraits with my New Husband

We're Here and We're Married
Birdie Details

Papa Frenchie’s Speech

***Note: All photos, unless otherwise noted, are by the fabulously talented, and super awesome to know, Ohana Photographers***

Exciting Stuff

Next Monday I’m back in school. I feel badly that I’ve neglected my blog this past break from school, but I’ve needed. Also, I just didn’t have the drive to blog lately. Maybe school with kick start my creative juices? Let’s hope!

Here’s a little hint about some upcoming things, I’m really excited about…

Pic1, Pic2, Pic3, Pic4

Have a great weekend! And, come back here on Monday for an exciting announcement!

4th of July Flag Cake

I mentioned on the last Five for Friday that Hubs offered to help me make this flag cake.

Source

Last week my friend Laura of Happy Hour With a Housewife, posted this flag cake on her Facebook wall. I showed it to Hubs and there was no 'bringing guacamole instead'. The deal, however, was that I needed him to help me, because, HELLO, this looks involved Kids! (I totally overused commas in that last sentence huh? All my readers with English majors just hit ‘unsubscribe’… although, if you’re still here after all the other messed up sentences I’ve posted before, you must be used to it by now).

So, anywhoodle, Sunday morning (because why not wait until the last minute) I went to the store to buy 2 boxes of white cake mix. If you’ve been following my blog for awhile you know that I like to make things from scratch, when I can, box cake wasn’t my first choice. I just knew it would be easier and make to correct amount of cake I needed. Guess what? I wasn’t the only one who wanted white cake mix for the 4th of July. Crazy huh? That was when I decided to bake the cake from scratch and that was also when I decided to spend the entire morning baking and decorating a cake, that later NO ONE WOULD EAT!* But I’ll get there…

For the best directions on how to construct the cake So Wonderful, So Marvelous and read this post. Here is the diagram she, and her friend Stephanie, made to show how the cake is constructed.

Source

There are also a couple of pictures posted on the process. I, of course, didn’t take any pictures of my process. I should have though because at my house there were many different sized bowl, a scale and math involved… FAR TOO MUCH MATH! and in the end, I didn’t bake enough blue.


See I don’t have 2 layers (1-red, 1-white) next to my blue, because my blue was too small. However, it still looks like a flag and no one at the party knew it was supposed to look better. So, GO US! Also, Hubs, who isn’t a big ‘cake person’ raved about how tasty it was – so I’m pretty proud of that. Take THAT, box cake :)

Which cake recipe did I use? I very very slightly altered this one and made 3 batches, although I would recommend making 4.

Click Recipe to Enlarge

Which frosting recipe did I use? I very very slightly altered this one.

Click Recipe to Enlarge

This was by far the best Cream Cheese Frosting I’ve every made. I credit the Crisco. Since, I can’t use butter because of the Hubs tummy, I had been using margarine. The Crisco makes it much fluffier and tastier.

I added some fresh (local and organic) fruit to make it a bit prettier and more festive.


You can see the mess I made of the counter behind. I loaded the cake onto my Wilton Cake Caddy just in time to change into my Red, White & Blue and head out the door.

* Okay, I mentioned no one ate our cake… which isn’t entirely true, but mostly. Our good friends invited us to their friends party in San Diego. Don’t get me wrong here, we had a lot of fun and the Hosts were awesome to have us and their friends were great. But, really how great can they be if they don’t like a flag cake? The more popular cakes present included a store bought hamburger cake, chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles, and chocolate chip cookies. Someone did cut my cake to show off how awesome the inside was, but didn’t eat the slice they cut out. Jane (my Bestie), me and the girl Jane talked into eating my cake where the only people that had a slice at the party. Hubs had to slices yesterday (1 for breakfast and 1 for dinner). I have half this cake left… I’m thinking of bringing it to work tomorrow.

Did you make anything festive for the 4th of July?

Red Burgundy Velvet Cake

After a couple conversations about Christmas dinner it was determined that the Hubs and I (read I) would bring dessert, more specifically a Red Velvet Cake. I've been wanting to make a Red Velvet cake for quite sometime now and after seeing this tasty cake on Playing House I was dead set on making one... sans the cheesecake though, because I knew I'd have no time.
Christmas Eve Eve I went I stopped by Sur La Table on my lunch break, in attempt to find true red food coloring. The 'red' I had a hope was 'mauve'. Sadly all I could find was 'burgandy', but I did find a super cute cake tester and the cake caddy I've had my eye on.

After a quick Google search to find a winning Red Velvet Cake recipe I decided on this recipe on the Food Network website by Cakeman Raven.

Red Burgundy Velvet Cake

Recipe by Cakeman Raven found here

Ingredients
Vegetable oil for the pans
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon fine salt
1 teaspoon cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
1 cup buttermilk, at room temperature
2 large eggs, at room temperature
2 tablespoons red burgundy food coloring (1 ounce)
1 teaspoon white distilled vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Cream Cheese Frosting, recipe follows

Directions
1 - Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly oil and flour 3 (9 by 1 1/2-inch round) cake pans.

2 - In a large bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder. In another large bowl, whisk together the oil, buttermilk, eggs, food coloring, vinegar, and vanilla.

3 - Using a standing mixer, mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until just combined and a smooth batter is formed.

4 - Divide the cake batter evenly among the prepared cake pans. Place the pans in the oven evenly spaced apart. Bake, rotating the pans halfway through the cooking, until the cake pulls away from the side of the pans, and a toothpick inserted in the center of the cakes comes out clean, about 30 minutes.

5 - Remove the cakes from the oven and run a knife around the edges to loosen them from the sides of the pans. One at a time, invert the cakes onto a plate and then re-invert them onto a cooling rack, rounded-sides up. Let cool completely.

6 - Frost the cake

Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients
1 pound cream cheese, softened
4 cups sifted confectioners' sugar
2 sticks maragarine (1 cup), softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

1 - In a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or with a hand-held electric mixer in a large bowl, mix the cream cheese, sugar, and butter on low speed until incorporated.

2 - Increase the speed to high, and mix until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. (Occasionally turn the mixer off, and scrape the down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula.)

3 - Reduce the speed of the mixer to low. Add the vanilla, raise the speed to high and mix briefly until fluffy (scrape down the bowl occasionally).

4 - Store in the refrigerator until somewhat stiff, before using. (May be stored in the refrigerator for 3 days.)

His Favorite: Carrot Cake

Our first married Thanksgiving was spent at my parent's house. One of the good things about not hosting Thanksgiving is not having to make everything. We made mashed potatoes and a dessert.

The Hubs was in charge of the mashed potatoes and as much as I would like to share that recipe, because they are the tastiest mashed potatoes you will ever eat AND they are dairy free, he just kinda throws in a bunch of spices, margarine, Almond Milk and chicken broth until they taste right. I'm sure everyone has a recipe they make like that... mine is my hamburgers.

I was in charge of dessert. I was just going to make the Cooking Light pumpkin pie again, but then I found out we were going to someone else's house for dessert and they were already making a Gluten Free Pumpkin Pie. We couldn't very well have TWO pumpkin pies, so I decided to make a carrot cake. They extra fun part was I got to use my newly acquired cake decorating skillz to impress everyone. Who doesn't like impressing people?

The recipe I used is from Chuck-a-Rama's website.

Chuck-A-Rama (for those of you who don't know) is a Buffet chain. We've never been but the Hubs Mom lived near one in St George, UT... there is a Golden Corral right across the street and we've been there. The Hubs LOVES buffets and the only time I ever really go with him is when we visit his mom in St George. Since he only gets to go to one, Golden Corral always wins because it has a better reputation.

Ingredients
1 1/2 Cups Sugar
1 1/2 Cups Flour
1 Teaspoon Baking Soda
1 Teaspoon Cinnamon
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
1/3 Cup Pecans, Chopped (My sister is allergic to Walnuts)
1/3 Unsweetened Apple Sauce (Used instead of Oil)
2 Eggs
1 Teaspoon Vanilla
3 1/4 Cups Carrots, Shredded
(Note: I didn't add the raisins because we don't like them)

The Hubs grating the carrots for me. Those Pecan Pies are a joke gift for my FIL.

Directions
1 - Peel carrots.
2 - Shred carrots using a 1/16 of an inch shredder hole.
3 - Place first 7 ingredients in a large mixing bowl and mix by hand.
4 - Add all remaining ingredients and mix by hand until well blended.
5 - Place mix into a greased round 9 inch cake pan and bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until done.

I also cut a piece of parchment paper and put it at the bottom of the pan, this makes getting the cake out after it's baked MUCH easier.

6 - Let cool and frost with cream cheese frosting.

Frosting Ingredients

1 Pound Fat Free Cream Cheese
1/2 Cup Margarine
1 3/4 Cups Powdered Sugar
2 Teaspoon Vanilla

Directions
1. Place first 2 ingredients in a bowl and beat until smooth.
2. Scrape the bowl with a rubber spatula.
3. Add remaining ingredients and beat until light and fluffy.

The recipe on the website for the frosting was missing some measurements. I tried to find another recipe online but most of them called for butter instead of margarine and less cream cheese. If my sister hadn't tried to substitute margarine for butter in the frosting for my mom's birthday last year I would have just done that in a recipe with actual measurements. But since she did, I know this could happen.

The frosting melted at room temp!

I figured the extra cream cheese would keep it from melting like my mom's birthday cake. I just guessed on their measurements and I'm pretty sure I guessed right because the icing worked well and tasted delish!

I wish I'd taken a picture of the cake out of the box, but we were so excited to eat it after dinner, I forgot.

Back to School: Cake Decorating Class

My sister's birthday was the weekend after the Hubs and I got back from our honeymoon (in September) and I had NO clue what to get my sister for her birthday. Jen loves to bake, and she's pretty good at it, but neither of us could decorate or properly ice a cake to save our lives. Enter a cake decorating class. Sadly it was all booked up in September so we hung out on the waiting list and made it into the November class.

This past Saturday my sister Jen and I, got up bright and early for our cake decorating class in Laguna Beach.

Not the most attractive picture.

I knew I should have brought my own apron! It is so much cuter :)

We were supposed to bring our own 9" round by 3'tall white cake. Neither Jen nor I had a cake pan that would make a 3" tall cake, so we assumed the best solution was to make a layered cake... and so did the girl who answered the phone at the Culinary Institute. We quickly learned when we arrived that we were NOT supposed to bring a layered cake because our teacher was going to teach us how to tort, level and fill out cakes. Information that would have been helpful to know before I made the grossest vanilla filling in the world.

You can also see here that my cake fell apart when I took it out of the pan. Next time I will definitely use parchment paper or wait for the cake to fully cool... or both. My cake also stuck to this plate so I never got to transfer it to the cardboard cake round and doily I purchased.

The first thing we learned was how to tort and level the cake. Our instructor had this awesome tool!

Source

I NEED one of these, it is WAY easier than using a serrated knife! When I use a knife, my cakes alway end up sloped in one direction.

This is the lady across from me's cake torted (cut in half), leveled and with an icing damn to keep her filling inside.

Next we got to icing! I learned how to properly ice a cake and have it look smooth.

You can't even tell how ugly my cake was under all that icing.

Next we practiced different techniques and icing tips on a plastic practice board. My favorite (and I think everyone else's too) were the roses.

The rose on the left is the instructors and the one on the right is mine.

We call made about 5 roses and put them in the fridge to harden up while we learned how to do leaves, vines and sweetpeas. My sweetpeas looked a little more like rose buds to me, so I decided to use them as a part of my border when it came time to decorate our cakes.

There you have it... my very first decorated cake! Watch out world, there will forever be flowers on my cupcakes. You know, if I'm not too lazy to make all the different colored icings and get the tips out.

**Cake decorating class tip: BRING a cake box! I called ahead of time to see if they would be supplying cake boxes for us to bring our decorated cakes home in. I was told yes, but there were no boxes. This was pretty difficult to transport home fully iced.

**We used all Wilton materials in this class, so I can only assume this was very similar to a Wilton class one can take at Michaels.