Baking Day!

Happy Wednesday!

When I went to Canada, one of the things I was looking forward to was having a baking day with my cousin Taylor. You may remember her from when she did a guest post as the Queen of Halloween.

We had so many ideas of what we wanted to bake. The day after I returned from Punta Cana, Taylor had an event to go to and she wanted to make donut cupcakes as inspired by this Youtube video by Cupcake Jemma. We recruited my other cousin Emma who was in town for a visit and we got to work.

We started at Michael's to get these donut-shaped baking pans. Lucky Taylor had some 40% off coupons so she got a great deal. We got the ingredients and made two different recipes. We even had enough left over to make lots of mini cupcakes.

We made the best cream cheese icing and added red food colouring until it was just the perfect shade of pink. The trickiest part was melting the icing and dipping in the donuts. If the icing was too hot, it looked too runny and if it was too cool, it didn't glaze properly.

All in all, it was an awesome afternoon, although I wish there had been more taste testing lol.

Fast forward to a few days later when we attempted cake decorating. We had been looking forward to this for months. I had pre-made the cakes so all we had to do was the fun part - decorating. Except I think we both weren't 100% in it. We were looking at wallpaper online and procrastinating. We were just going to do one cake and freeze some of the other layers but then my mom decided she also wanted a cake to eat so we had to make more icing.

And this is where we failed.

Our icing was not blended properly, and the temperature wasn't right so it was melting. It was a complete baking disaster! We managed to fix up one cake so that it looked decent but the other was hideous. Luckily we do have some baking skills and it all tasted delicious! So we cut it up and served it (mostly so we wouldn't have to look at that ugly cake anymore). It was definitely not the glorious cake decorating afternoon we had planned.

So we had one success and one failure in the kitchen.

But I was reminded of how much I love baking and trying new recipes. And yes, I even miss cake decorating. I read a book not too long ago and one of the characters described how cooking was almost meditative to him, and that after a long day he loved going home and following a recipe and making something delicious to eat. And that's what baking is (usually) for me. I love watching videos on technique or finding new recipes to try. I am feeling really inspired to start practicing again and get back into it. Hopefully Tj's colleagues like to eat a lot of treats haha.

Have a great week :)