Christmas Cookies!

I've been decorating Christmas cookies since I was a little girl. Every year I try different shapes and sizes, collecting unique cutters and decorations. This year I started with a tasty gingerbread recipe from Cook's Illustrated which resulted in delightful Rudolphs:
And some fun candy canes:

For months I've been baking butter cookies, perfecting the recipe until I've found the right balance of ingredients and cooking times. Here's an example of one of my newest cutters, a poinsettia!:

My favorite shape of the year is this elfish candy cane. It's a bit larger than what I usually do but it is such a fun shape and I found this interesting decorating pattern in the Williams Sonoma catalog.

Holiday Cranberry Vinegar

This holiday season many of my gifts are going to be homemade foodstuffs. (Who can resist?) I started with these flavored vinegars. Mom and I visited a cranberry bog in October where I picked up three pounds of fresh New England cranberries for $6.00! My freezer is filled with them so they are going to be featured in many of the goodies I'll be baking this week. I love this vinegar drizzled on salads. It's so tasty that I rarely need any oil (but I do make a ginger oil that goes perfectly with it. More on that later)

Puff Pastry Cornucoppia

This year I decided to make my favorite Puff Pastry Cornucoppias. I wasn't doing the major cooking for Thanksgiving dinner so I thought these would be my special contribution. They were a big hit, some guests filled them with steamed green beans, others with a mixed nut and dried fruit combination. Either way they were very delicious!

I start by making a cone out of aluminum foil:


Then I wrap 1/2" strips of puff pastry around the cones:

Here they are coming out of the oven:


Once the aluminum foil cone is removed (very gently!) they're ready to be filled!

Baby Shower Cake

I was so excited to create a cake for a baby shower that was contemporary and without any typical baby themes. So I searched the internet for ideas and found myself going back to the website where I consistently find inspiration, fabulousstationery.com. It is filled with tons of amazing graphic patterns. I've not only purchased stationery from them but used many of their designs as inspirations for cake patterns.





So this cake was inspired by their design titled, "Zany Zinnias" The flowers are made from dyed white chocolate which allows me to get a very fine detail that holds its shape unlike anything else I've found.

Autumn inspiration

This is a cake I made for a friend's housewarming last year. I've always been fascinated by autumn leaves and wanted to capture their beautiful color- in cake!


Each of the leaves is done in the same technique as my previously posted butterfly cake.


White chocolate is dyed multiple colors and swirled to give the leaves their "season changing" effect. Unlike the butterflies, where I drew a template before hand, I use real leaves to get the texture and veining that you find in nature.

Halloween Cookies

Cookies and Halloween, two of my favorite things! I recently borrowed a series of vampire books from a colleague of a friend and I wanted to make something as a "thank you" So I baked and decorated the cookies you see here. The skeletons in the coffins and the fangs were my favorite! I use a simple butter cookie recipe from Cook's Illustrated and royal icing.

Train Cake

So I've been busy baking lately. Last weekend I created a cake for a friend's 2 year old son. It met the typical requirements for toddlers: some chocolate cake, some vanilla cake and (of course!) Thomas the Tank Engine!

Southern Dinner

Every Sunday night my neighbors and I take turns cooking dinner then watch True Blood on HBO. Since the show is set in Louisiana, we always love the subtle nuances about the South. My culinary heritage is based in Kentucky where my mother, grandmothers and great grandmothers all learned to cook. This week it was my turn to make dinner and I thought it would be fun to prepare all the dishes I so fondly remember enjoying in my great grandmother's house in Glasgow, Kentucky. The menu included baked, smoked ham, fresh coleslaw, collard greens that had been simmering for hours in smoked turkey stock, corn pudding and fresh buttermilk biscuits. I made baked beans too but forgot them in the kitchen! During the show I served Nilla wafer pudding - homemade vanilla pudding with fresh, sliced bananas and Nilla wafers. It was addictive!

The Weekend

Not a lot of cooking going on today. Thought I'd post some photos of last year's trip to Martha's Vineyard. We love going to the pick-your-own farm and creating our own flower bouquets.

The essential cake components

Today I'm showing you the basic building blocks of a really good cake. It's not just the spongey goodnes but also the filling, frosting and decoration! Here are images of a deep, rich, decadent ganache - made of chopped, melted bittersweet chocolate and heavy cream. That's it! once it cools it become spreadable like frosting. I use ganache to fill my chocolate cakes - just like you would find in a truffle. Next comes the frosting. I'm very particular about this - I never use shortening! Always butter. The best I can find. My favorite frosting has white chocolate, cream cheese and butter - no confectioners sugar! I use it on my very special cakes or on cakes in the hot days of summer - the white chocolate really holds up well. Next we have decorations. I'm a big fan of melted white chocolate. I can draw anything with it and then infill with any color that suits the design. Here is an example of the chocolate dyed blue and drawn very free-hand into multiple "doo-dads". These components were all used in the Dark Chocolate Wedding Cake earlier in my postings.

Bruins Cake

In honor of their Stanley Cup win I am bringing back the Bruins themed birthday cake that I made a couple of years ago.  Congratulations Bruins!

This cake was for a 6 year old who is a big Boston Bruins fan. His birthday party was at an ice skating rink and they needed a vanilla and a chocolate cake, so the hockey puck was created! The decorations (doo-dads as I call them) are made from molded chocolate. My favorite pieces are the hockey stick candles.

Cookies, cookies everywhere!

One of my friends works for a company whose logo is a wolf. So I've been making these custom shaped cookies for her to take on her trips to design firms. I attach one of her business cards to each package and it makes a lovely, personal gift for her customers. Her son loves Thomas the Tank Engine so I created cookies with all of Thomas' friends for his birthday party.

Red Sox Cake

This was a groom's cake for a friend who is a fanatical Red Sox fan. Their wedding day was a scorcher - high humidity and high temperatures! This cake is my special lemon butter pound cake with a lemon cream and fresh raspberry filling - very refreshing on a hot summer day.

Baby Shower cake

This isn't your typical baby shower cake! We took a departure from your every day decoration of booties, bottles or blocks and used baby animals with bright colors. One of the party games was to make a baby using play-dough. A room full or architects were very creative and molded baby alligators, baby Simpson's and baby birds - still in the eggs!

Pies for the 4th of July!

These pies represent the colors of the American flag; red (cherry), white (s'mores cheesecake) and blue (blueberry of course!) I used a lobster cookie cutter to get the shapes on the top crust of the cherry pie.

Butterflies everywhere

These butterflies are made from white chocolate that has been dyed with food coloring. The technique is quite simple; draw the outline with dark chocolate then fill in the wings and body with colored chocolate. The whole process has the look of watercolor painting - which I love.