Zebra Cake

As seen in my previous post, I attempted to make the Rose Ombre Cake for my grandma.  I wanted the cake to be something really special because it was her 80th birthday.  For my dad's birthday, I wanted to make something simpler and healthier (because the previous cake was super rich!).  So after changing my mind several times on what recipe I should use, I somehow remembered a recipe that I really wanted to try: the zebra cake!  Although I really wanted to make the cake for a long time, I never had the courage to make it.  Today when I finally made it, it was so much easier than I thought it would be.  This cake would be really difficult to mess up.  The cake wasn't grossly sweet because I cut the sugar down to 3/4 cups.  The texture of the cake was normal.  It was moist enough, but not super moist.  The bad part was that this cake was a bit bland, so you might want to make the zebra cake with a different cake recipe.  On the bright side, this cake is very pretty and I am sure that people will be impressed by all the stripes this cake has. 

Zebra Cake
Recipe slightly adapted from King Arthur Flour.

Red Velvet and Light Cheddar Cheese "Ombre" Rose Cake

The month of September is always a busy one for me.  Lots of my friends have their birthdays in this month.  This week it was my grandma's birthday on Sunday, then Tuesday was my uncle's birthday, today is my dad and K's birthday, on Friday is my best friend's birthday and on Saturday is another close friend's birthday.  So many people I know are born in this month!

This year was my grandma's 80th birthday.  So in order to celebrate this significant event, my parents and close relatives decided to have a surprise birthday party for her.  After several weeks of planning, the special day finally arrived.  For my grandma's birthday, the reception was held at my Uncle's church and several trays of food were ordered from a buffet.  Around 40 relatives showed up to celebrate her birthday.  Because it was a surprise party, my mom and I had to trick my grandma into getting on the car with us so we could bring her to the place.  My mom told her that she needed help with choosing some meat at the supermarket to barbeque.  At first, my grandma argued that it was too late to bbq meat among other things, but then after my mom's persuading she finally relented.  Then I had to bring this cake onto the car and because this cake was too difficult to put into a box or container, I had to hold it on my lap.  Bringing a cake on the car was suspicious because my grandma had no idea that there was going to be a surprise party, so I had to make up a story of how I wanted a special decoration for the cake and we needed to go to this particular store to buy the decoration.  Luckily, she fell for the story.  When we finally arrived at the church, everything was revealed to her and she had a blast at the party.  She was really happy and that was awesome.  All the lies were worth it. ;)

In order to celebrate her special day, I decided to bake a cake for her.  I quickly found this recipe on Honey Bee Sweet's blog.  It was not a hard decision to make because I had seen a few ombre rose cakes on tumblr and I really wanted to try making that type of cake.

Although this cake took me around 4-5 hours total to make it, it was worth it.  The cake is delicious!  Although I kind of messed up on the cheesecake part, many people still complimented me on the cake, saying that the cake tasted amazing, etc...  Also, the roses on the cake really impress people.  However, mine were a bit sloppy because of the hot weather and my hot hands.  At one point, the frosting was so soft that it wouldn't stay on the cake and slid right off like this.  In addition, I wasn't able to make my cake an ombre rose cake.  I was able to make it two different colors, but ran out of time to tint the frosting darker. 

Red Velvet and Light Cheddar Cheese "Ombre" Rose Cake
Recipe from Honey Bee Sweets.  Please refer to her blog for the recipe.

Funfetti Cupcake

So remember how I was supposed to post all my recipes from the Crazy Day?  Well, I haven't finished posting all those recipes yet.  One of the things I made on that day was funfetti cupcakes.  They turned out surprisingly well, even though they were the cupcakes that required 3 egg whites and I typically don't do so well with recipes that require egg whites.  Anyway, I didn't take any good pictures of the cupcake and only got a picture of a half eaten one. :P  So yesterday I decided to make some funfetti cupcakes again, except with a different recipe.  Something I didn't like about the first funfetti cupcakes I made was that they were too sweet.  In fact, they were sickening sweet.  Unless you have a major sweet tooth, you will not like that cupcake.  I'm really happy with the funfetti cupcakes I made this time though.  They were soft, moist and not too sweet.  I also made some frosting that turned out alright.  The cupcakes look really cute with the sprinkles in them.

Funfetti Cupcakes
Recipe from Sweet Tooth

Monkey Bread

The first time I made monkey bread was in a summer school cooking class.  Mr. I. introduced the recipe to the students and we made the easy version of monkey bread.  We used canned biscuit dough and cut each piece of dough into four pieces and rolled them into balls.  Then, we dipped the dough balls in butter and cinnamon sugar.  This was such a fun recipe.  My family enjoyed what I brought home so much that we made monkey bread several times at home.

While surfing the web, looking at recipes, I found this monkey bread recipe that starts from scratch.  I didn't actually make the monkey bread until a year later.  The recipe was really simple and the bread was very soft and fluffy. It also wasn't too sweet. (I didn't make a glaze.  Actually, I kind of forgot about...but the bread was sweet enough already so it didn't matter.)  This is definitely a must make recipe.  Monkey bread is like the best part of cinnamon rolls - the gooey, yummy centers.

Monkey Bread
Recipe from the Brown Eyed Baker, very slightly adapted.

Black and White Cookies

I always wanted to try making black and white cookies, but I never got the chance to because these cookies are very time consuming.  When I finally made these cookies, I was a little surprised at how cake-like the batter was.  Also, the cookies were easier to make than I thought they would be.  The hard part was frosting the cookies and making the chocolate frosting.  Because of the chocolate frosting, I spent around 3 hours, hands on, making these cookies.

These cookies were pretty good.  You'll like them if you like cake-like cookies.  The only downside of these cookies was that the icing was really sweet...and I put a really thick icing on these cookies when I was trying to make sure the icing looked perfect.  So I guess if I ever make these cookies again, I will spread less icing onto the cookies.  Also, one problem I encountered was the texture of the chocolate icing.  I don't know what I did wrong, but not only was the icing not very pretty, it was also really, really hard to spread.  I spent around half an hour trying to get the icing to the right consistency, but it still ended up different from the white icing.  In the end, I was extremely frustrated and vowed that I would never make these cookies again because icing these cookies was just too time consuming.  We'll see if I keep that vow. XD

I actually made these cookies for my brother because he wanted to bring some treats for his band council.  After he came back from his band activity, he told me that many people enjoyed the cookies.  However, there was one guy who said that my cookie batter was not mixed well enough...  :(  My brother consoled me by saying that the guy who said that was a very critical person, hahaha.

Black and White Cookies
Recipe from Simply Sifted.

Actually I have the hard copy of this recipe in my America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book, but I found the recipe online already so I will just give you the link instead of retyping up the same recipe.