CAKEBRAIN’S CHRISTMAS COOKIES 2009

Rudolph Sugar Cookies

From a quadruple batch of Sugar Cookie dough (from Martha Stewart’s Sugar Cookie recipe), I made a whole herd of reindeer, a veritable snowstorm of Tiffany Snowflake Cookies, and a forest of Christmas Tree cookies.   I divided up a batch of royal icing and tinted it using Teal coloured gel paste for the snowflakes and brown gel paste for the reindeer.   The reindeer noses were Wilton red-coloured candy sprinkles and the eyes were flat white confetti sprinkles coloured with a black food pen. 

This year, my chocolate flavoured cookie was  a Pierre Hermé  recipe from his book Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé.  Last year I had so much success with the beautiful Vanilla Bean Chocolate Diamonds (pictured below),
  
that I contemplated making Hermé’s Chocolate Sparklers recipe, but since I already made a batch of my slice and bake Vanilla Bean Butter Cookies, I thought it would be nice to have a piped one for the different shape.  I decided the Viennese Chocolate Sablés would be perfect.  They are piped with a large star tip ( I used Wilton 1M) and though the dough is soft, this didn’t help for ease of piping…it was pretty stiff and difficult to pipe.  I had to ensure I didn’t fill my bag too full or it became almost impossible to pipe properly.  Check the bottom of this post for the recipe.

XMAS BLING FOR OREO WREATHS

This is the lazy-man’s Christmas cookie.  I searched high and low for the White Chocolate covered Oreos I decorated with snowflakes last year, but I couldn’t find any.

Instead, these Oreo Wreaths caught my eye.  They didn’t look particularly festive so I thought I ought to add some Christmas bling to them.  I employed my new gadget:  the Cuisipro Decorator Pen to pipe the melted coloured white chocolate.  The pen was okay but white chocolate isn’t exactly the easiest product to pipe with at the best of times.  

The pen works like a syringe.  You remove the tip, pull on the syringe to suck up the melted white chocolate or whatever icing or frosting you’re using and proceed to squeeze the silicone body of the pen to get the product flowing.  Sometimes I had to push the plunger to get the chocolate coming out or to get rid of an air bubble…and I had a couple of close calls where a big blob of chocolate burst from the tip, but I had a custard cup nearby to catch the drip so it wasn’t so bad.

CHOCOLATE VELVET FUDGE CAKE

My nifty new NordicWare bundt pan is called "Bavarian".  I purchased it at the CookShop in City Square and immediately started looking for new recipes to try out.  I have Rose Levy Beranbaum's new book, Rose's Heavenly Cakes, which is chock full of interesting recipes.  I chose the "Chocolate Velvet Fudge Cake" because I had all the ingredients in my pantry and it seemed so straight-forward.

After taking the pictures of the whole baked cake, I was impressed by the intricate grooves that showed up quite nicely in the cake.  I took a hot sliver of the chocolate bundt and ate it.  It was soft and fine textured but left a dry taste in my mouth, kind of like the dryness of cocoa powder.  I was perplexed.  It looked moist inside.  It seemed chocolatey.  It wasn’t over-baked.  In fact, I followed the instructions for a dark metal pan by baking it at 325degrees F and I took the cake out at the 50 minute mark.  I weighed my ingredients instead of using volume measurements.  I think perhaps this is just the way the cake is meant to be. 

Anyhoo, the girls liked it.  However, I wanted something to help the dry mouth feel and so I decided to make a chocolate glaze.  I mean, how can you go wrong by adding more chocolate?

In a glass measuring cup, I quickly melted 4 oz of dark chocolate pieces in the microwave along with 4 tablespoons of butter.  I stirred in 1 Tablespoon of corn syrup and mixed thoroughly.  While it was still warm, I poured it over the whole cake.  It looked so lovely.  Bebe came up and took a peek.  She said, “Mommy, it looks like a really big chocolate doughnut!”.  She licked her lips. 
 
It did look like a huge glazed chocolate doughnut.  The girls liked the cake much better with the glaze and it does go well with a cup of milk or some tea.  My mother of course, didn’t really dig it because she likes “wet” cakes. 

HOMEMADE VANILLA EXTRACT

Homemade Vanilla Extract is the ultimate culinary act of recycling.  In my home, none of those expensive vanilla beans go to waste.  I use real vanilla beans in various ways.  The whole bean is split and scraped of its seeds for custards and is used in my baking.  The empty seed pods are sometimes ground up finely with sugar to add gorgeous speck of vanilla flavour to cookie doughs, and if I'm not making cookies that day, the empty pods are simply submerged in a huge bottle of vodka where I have been soaking other used vanilla pods.  I sometimes even put a few whole split pods in the vodka bottle, seeds and all, to give it an extra vanilla boost.  Reader, you must join me in my duty to spread the vanilla love so continue the jump for some cool ideas.