Bake Sale

Last weekend I took a day off of work to bake for 12 hours.  The Middle River Friends Church was having a Craft and Bake Sale that my Mother-in-law, Cathie, was working at.  After talking to her I wanted to help, so I started by putting together my menu.  This is usually the easiest part for most bakers; decide what you want to make.  I pulled out my giant cookbook (400+ pages) and I flipped to my favorite recipe, French Silk Pie.  Cathie also asked me to make a Cherry Pie so I pulled that recipe out too.  Then I just started turning pages and pulling out anything that looked good.  In the end I decided on Gingersnap Cookies, Buttermilk Cupcakes, Chocolate Cupcakes, French Silk Pie, Cherry Pie, Buttermilk Pie, Coffee Cake Muffins, Banana Bread and Pumpkin Bread.

The next step of baking this much food is to put together a list of all the ingredients.  I start with the first recipe and a blank sheet of notebook paper, then basically rewrite the ingredient list.  The second recipe ingredients get added to the first and so on until you've gone through all your recipes, in the end you will have a list similar to this:

Shortening: 3/4 c
Brown Sugar: 1c, 1c, 1/3c
Eggs: 1, 3, 3, 3, 2
Egg yolks: 4,  4
Flour; 1c, 2c, 2c, 1 3/4c, 3T, 1/3c, 1 3/4c, 2c
Ginger: 1t

Next is simplifying the food list by adding together everything you listed:

Shortening: 3/4c
Brown Sugar: 2 1/3c
Eggs and yolks: 20
Flour: 10 1/2 c, 1/3c, 3T
Ginger: 1t

Then I pull everything on my list out of my cabinets.  If I don't have to buy more it goes on one side and if I need to add it to my grocery list it goes on the other.   I typically try to have this much done 2 days before I'm going to bake so that I don't forget anything.

While I'm making all these lists I also write down the name of the recipe, how long it needs to be in the oven, and what temperature the oven needs to be at:

Gingersnaps: 8-10, 375°F
Buttermilk Pie: 55, 450 reduce 350°F
Buttermilk Cupcakes: 22, 350°F
Chocolate Cupcakes: 27, 350°F
Banana Bread: 60, 325°F
Pumpkin Bread: 70, 325°F
French Silk Pie: 25, 450°F
Cherry Pie: 40, 425°F
Coffee Cake Muffins: 25, 375°F

Then decide what order to cook things in to manage the time I will be in the kitchen.  In the end this is the order I went with:

Turn on oven to 350°F
Gingersnaps: make the dough and place in fridge to chill
Buttermilk Cupcakes: make batter, place in oven to bake.
Chocolate Cupcakes: while yellow cupcakes are in the oven, make batter and have it ready to go in the oven when the other cupcakes come out.
Turn the oven up to 450°F
French Silk Pie: While the oven is rising in temp, roll out dough for crust, dock it, and fill it with pie beans (or pie weights).  (I ended up making 2 of these pies because the one I promised to start with was sold before the bake sale began.)
Cherry Pie: While the French Silk Pie crust is in the oven I rolled out the dough for this pie, heated the filling, and got the second crust cut for the lattice top. 
Buttermilk Pie: This pie is one crust, and a very simple filling it was ready to go in as soon as the Cherry Pie came out.  This is also a pie that reduces temperature so I was able to get my oven back down to the temp to bake everything else.
Coffee Cake Muffins: make batter and streusel, place in the oven when the pie comes out.
Gingersnap Cookies: I make all my rounds for these while the Coffee Cake Muffins are in the oven, then I work on other things while they are baking.
Banana Bread: The recipe I have only makes one loaf, I made 2 batches of batter and made 1 normal loaf, and 6 mini loaves.
French Silk Pie: While the Banana Bread is in the oven I worked on the chocolate mousse for both pies.
Pumpkin Bread: When the Banana Bread is close to being done I make the batter then put it in the oven.
French Silk Pie: Now that the last thing is in the oven I can work on the whipped cream to finish this pie.

The last thing to do is frosting and packaging.  Some of them I finished while other things were in the oven, once the Cherry Pie was cool I was able to put it in the box then into the frige, same with the Buttermilk Pie.  The cupcakes all were placed in cake pans for storage, then set on the dining room table until I was ready to frost, and the Gingersnaps were bagged up when they were cool.

To add to my work, and to see the smile on Cathie's face when I dopped everything off I also made bite sized versions of everything to go in small boxes for all the ladies working at the sale:

Starting from the upper left hand corner: Bite sized Cherry Pies, Mini Coffee Cake Muffins, Mini Buttermilk Cupcakes, Mini Chocolate Cupcakes, Bite sized French Silk Pie, Mini loaf Banana Bread, slices of Pumpkin Bread.

By the time I was done my feet hurt and my hands were slightly wrinkly from washing so many dishes, but I was very happy to see all my hard work.

I will be posting all the recipes later this weekend, along with how to make a mini versions.

Measuring Shot Glass

This is my new favorite kitchen gadget. You can't really tell by the picture, but this little shot glass is marked down the sides with all manner of measuring mechanisms. It's does ounces, milliliters, teaspoons and tablespoons just to start.

It's indispensable when you're making a salad dressing that you've halved from something else and you need three teaspoons of something. Rather than measuring out three teaspoons of whatever with the regular spoon, you just pour right into the shot glass as if it were a regular measuring cup and stop when you hit three teaspoons.

I got mine at Reading Terminal Station in Philly last week and have used it three times since then. The best part? I paid about five bucks for mine, but online they're available for $2.99. Can you beat it? I didn't think so.

Source: Zaccardi's

Kitty Litter Cake

• 1 spice or German chocolate cake mix
• 1 white cake mix
• 1 large pkg vanilla instant pudding mix
• 1 pkg vanilla sandwich cookies
• Green food coloring
• 12 small Tootsie Rolls
• New, cleaned litter box
• New, cleaned litter scooper

Prepare the cake mix according to the directions on the box. Use any size pan. Allow the cake to cool to room temperature.

Prepare the pudding mix and put it in the refrigerator for now.

Crumble the white sandwich cookies in small batches in a food processor (scrape often to get every little piece) or by hand. Set aside all but about 1/4 cup.

Measure 1/4 cup of cookie crumbs and add a few drops of green food coloring to it. Mix with a fork or shake everything in a jar.

Crumble the room temperature cake into a large bowl. Toss it gently with half of the remaining white cookie crumbs and enough chilled pudding to moisten (not soak) the crumbs.

Put the cookie crumbs and pudding mixture into a brand new, clean litter box.

Heat three unwrapped Tootsie rolls in a microwave safe dish and until they're soft and pliable. Pinch the ends so they are no longer blunt--you want them to look convincingly like what cats put in the litter box, right? Repeat this process with as many Tootsie rolls as you'd like to add, microwaving them in batches of three.

Bury the shaped Tootsie rolls in mixture and sprinkle them with the other half of the cookie crumbs.

Scatter the green cookie crumbs lightly over the top. This will mimic real litter, where many of the grains are often blue or green.

Shape 3 more Tootsie rolls and scrape them on top of the cake. One can hang over the side of the litter box. Sprinkle them lightly with cookie crumbs.

Place the box on a newspaper and sprinkle a few of the cookie crumbs around. Serve with a brand new, cleaned litter scooper for that extra touch!

Warnings!
Keep your cat/dog away from the cake. They might try to eat it and could get sick from the Tootsie rolls. They probably won't mistake it for a real litter box, but it's better to be safe than sorry in this case!

Although it looks fun, using a real kitty litter scoop and cat box is not a good idea. Food grade plastic is different than other plastics and while it sometimes is the same it doesn't have to be. Plasticizers that are not meant for ingestion can leak into the cake. Perhaps you could use a colorful cake pan instead.

If you want to preserve the look of using a real litter box, but are worried about the plastic, it couldn't hurt to line the inside of the litter box with plastic wrap, and just lean the scoop against the side as a decoration.

For safety reasons, (i.e.toxic plastic) rather than use the real litter box, you may want to use an aluminum baking pan, which you could place into the kitty litter pan. It has the same gross effect.



Notes: I've never tried this, but it looks fun. The warnings seem a little obvious, but you never know who you're dealing with out there, I guess.

Source: Wikipedia

Meatcake

This is the coolest thing I've seen come out of a kitchen in a long time.


It's a Meatcake, and that's exactly what it sounds like.




Source: Black Widow Bakery.