Cupcakes with Sinful Frosting

These are the cupcakes I was in the midst of making while writing the last post. The frosting was so amazingly good that I felt like I had to blog about them right away (and before I forgot)! The 'cake' part was pretty bad- super gummy and stiff. I may or may not have made the batter wrong (I followed the recipe exactly but there were chunks of butter in the batter--weird), but either way, I won't be making these again. I do need to find a good white cake recipe in the next two weeks though!

The frosting was absolutely AMAZING. Magnolia Bakery has always been my favorite (to the point where I would purposely route flights through JFK with long layovers so I could leave the airport to go get one), so I adapted their Vanilla Frosting recipe to get one that is even better.

Vanilla Frosting

adapted from Magnolia Bakery

makes enough for 12 cupcakes

3/4 stick unsalted butter, room temperature

3 cups confectioners' sugar

1/4 c. vanilla soy milk

1 t. vanilla

Combine butter, 2 cups confectioners' sugar, soy milk and vanilla in a stand mixer with a paddle attachment. Mix until creamy, about 2-3 minutes, scraping down sides as needed. Add the remaining confectioners' sugar 1/2 cup at a time until spreadable consistency is reached. Enjoy!

Home

Home. That word encompasses more than it seems to. Home means organic food. It means whole grains, making meals without excessive amounts of oil, an oven (!), normal altitude, and a whole lot more. It means I am currently making homemade funfetti cupcakes with an amazing vanilla frosting. Being home has been so much more than what I was expecting.

To say the least, I have been contently baking every day since I have been back in Davis. A short list of my favorites have been the whole wheat pita bread, bagels, pesto and pine nut bread, vegan chocolate chip cookies, and vegan pumpkin walnut bread. So many more things have gone into and come out of the oven that I can't even begin to list it all. I also FINALLY got a KitchenAid Stand Mixer (Professional!), after spending 20 minutes one night making Swiss Buttercream with my hand mixer.

One of the most exciting parts about being home has been my job. That is the last thing that I ever thought I would say, but I am very proud and glad to say that I got a job at a small bakery in Davis. I was hired to make cookies and scones, but have been "promoted" and have now learned to make the (award-winning) cakes, and am learning to make the limited amount of food that the bakery offers. The job could not be more perfect for me. It pushes me a bit over my baking boundaries and I have met some really great people. It makes me feel like my current dream of opening a bakery isn't too much of a reach, and like I really would be happy doing so. As I move up the line of cooks, I am curious to see how I feel about also making food-- If I were to open a bakery, would I want to make food also? Questions like these always go through my mind, as well as quickly recognizing all the things I would do differently if I owned the bakery.

As advice from a bakery friend, I am going to start trying to take good pictures of my finished products, both for this blog and for a baking portfolio. I will definitely be making all of my favorites again and will be sure to remember to take pictures and update Traveling Baker!

P.S. I have gotten most items on the wishlist (everything except the cookbook set) plus way, way more. My mother has realized that my sanity relies on my baking and is generously paying for many of my ingredients and supplies. Thanks mamacita!

Wishlist

So that I don't forget...

Pizza Stone

Candy Thermometer

Williams Sonoma "Baking and Cooking Cookbook Boxed Set"

Mini loaf pans

El Cocuy/New Creations

Workspace plus the two bagels. My first time trying!

Finished bagels with poppyseeds, cut in half with butter. YUM!
Banana blackberry bread. I filled the loaf pan a little too high and put a few too many blackberries so it baked for three hours instead of one and was still a little doughy inside! Won't be making this again...

And. I baked granola for El Cocuy.

Bread and Bagels

Well the bread turned out surprisingly well despite the yeast mishap and my lack of remembering to put it in the steam oven thing first. It looks horrible but tastes good, that's all that matters! It actually tastes like normal bread, which is nice (not full of sugar). Making the bagels also SUCKED because they never rose! I put them in like three different warm places in the room and the yeast just like never activated...I ended up with nine mini bagels though, that were kinda decent, and gave three to a homeless indigenous person, gave three others away and came home with three (great math there, Anna). I don't have pictures because my camera battery was dead, but they were ugly anyway. I might go bake granola on Wednesday so that I have food while I'm in the mountains for nine days. Hopefully I won't starve!

Christmas Baking

Ahhh. Christmas baking. It's almost like we are back home, having a real Christmas with real trees and snow! One downside..it was about seventy-five degrees out. Now, don't get me wrong, the weather was totally amazing, but it was totally wrong for the day we had planned to Christmas bake! Lots of other things were Christmas-y though: we had a Christmas Classics radio station playing, a......okay, I guess that was really all that was Christmas-y. The tree was fake, the house was tiny and hot, and the recipes weren't American (I was baking with two German girls..), but overall it was nice to have a day baking with friends!

Our finished Linzer cookies, with the fake tree in the background. We had to make do with what we had, meaning no rolling pin, no cookie cutters, and only jam whose first ingredient was sugar, not fruit!

Holding the tray of cookies we made! The actual cookies weren't that sweet, but the super-sweet marmalade definitely made up for the lack of sweetness in the dough. I actually loved eating the dough before it was baked! :) But it seems that I always eat about half the cookie dough before I bake it, anyway.

We didn't have a scale or any method of American measurements, so we estimated the whole thing. They turned out pretty well despite having nothing that we would usually make them with. According to Zissy, they tasted nothing like German Christmas cookies... They definitely weren't my type of cookie, so I didn't take any home, but the whole experience was really fun.

A few recipes that have caught my eye and I hope to make this week:

Chocolate Banana Bread

Butternut Squash Gnocci

Berry Banana Bread

Mini Bagels (since I haven't had a bagel in six months!)

Bran Enriched White Bread

Pictures Of My Workspace And A Bread Mishap

A picture of the bakery at work with Zissy and Jannin. The big ovens are to the right, out of the picture, and the refrigerators are to the left, out of the picture.

The big oven and the rising chamber! I love the big oven, although I don't like that it is gas.

Me mixing the almojabana mass together. We only use our hands in the bakery! There is nothing electric used for mixing, only the scale for weighing. I am breaking the number one rule by wearing my rings--oops!

My attempted white bread that I wrote about in the last post...had a little accident with the yeast.

Basically what happened is that I noticed the bread wasn't rising properly...I decided to leave it over the weekend to see what it would do. When I got home though, I was reading baking blogs (but really, what else do I do?!) and I realized that "active dry yeast" and "instant yeast" were different things. I never knew that because I have only used fresh yeast while working in the Servimos bakery, so I didn't "proof" the active dry yeast. The recipe called for instant yeast, and in English I probably would have recognized that there is a difference, but because I buy the ingredients in Spanish I didn't recognize that they are two different things! Instant yeast doesn't exist here, so I need to start proofing active dry yeast when I want to make bread. I will try and bake this one anyway, but will most likely end up making a new mass on Monday. I feel like I am learning new things about baking almost every day, and that makes me so happy! I want to get to the point where I know exactly what each ingredient does so I can make up my own recipes :)