My recent baking fun.

It has been a long time since I have been able to blog about my baking adventures, so I thought I would tell you about the ones I have taken pictures of.

My first one, I am extra excited about, because it is the first recipe that is 100% my own! I have baked quite a few quiches since we moved to New Zealand, and each time I find new ways to make it better, and in turn, it has turned into a recipe that I call my own. I am writing it down, and look out soon for a post on Carla's Quiche Recipe, where I will share it with you :) Here it is with my messy notes on the recipe.

This next one is an Oreo Peanut Butter Pie, which I found originally from Bakerella. She found the recipe from Pioneer Woman, and here is the story behind the pies. A blogger named Jennie lost her husband just over a month ago, and she asked for people to support her by making Peanut Butter Pies for Mikey, her husband, and give it to someone they love. So I made mine be Oreo Peanut Butter Pie for Matty.

Here is Jennies blog, if you are interested. It is sad, but good. www.injennieskitchen.com
Here is Bakerella's blog again www.bakerella.com
And here is the original recipe of the pie http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/06/another-pie/

This is an amazingly great pie, but very rich. Be careful but please make and enjoy. It's worth it! :)

Here's another fun one from Bakerella. I just cannot get enough of her blog, and these were just so fun to make! Go see the post.  http://www.bakerella.com/goodie-goodie/

Here's another recipe from Pioneer Woman. These were another huge hit for Matty, so be careful if you make these. Youll never get away from making them, but they are good and definitely worth it. My suggestion is to make them mini's, to make yourself feel better, because they are Muffins that taste like Donuts...

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2010/07/muffins-that-taste-like-doughnuts/ 

The last picture I have are of Lemon Crisps. They are delish cookies with lemon juice, lemon zest and almonds in them. YUM. I had tons of fun making them with my friend Tiffany one Saturday. They were very good and they went fast. I will try to find the recipe online and show it to you, because I cant find it right now.

Just a side note, as we are staying at least until July next year, I will be looking into going to baking school here! Im very excited about it! If schooling here doesnt work out, I am going to look into some classes for cake decorating and look into schooling back home when we get there. I am really loving this new advenrure in life and cant wait to see what else God has in store for it :)

Happy birthday to me!

Another one from Bakerella's site that I have been wanting to try for a long time. I have to be honest and say that I have never had red velvet cake before. I know! I figured what a better time to try it for the first time and make it for the first time, than my birthday!

Bakerella has the best recipes ever, and this red velvet cake just looked so scrumptious and soft, and man, when it was done, I was sure glad I chose her recipe! Look how pretty the red looks.

Matty taking pictures of me frosting the cake. 

You would never know the red is underneath lol. 

But goodness that looks good when you cut into it. YUM! 

So pretty! 

It was so yummy and it was a perfect addition to my wonderful 24th birthday. I had a lot of fun making it, and I learned what I would do differently next time. It is definitely not as pretty as Bakerella's, but I'd like to think it tasted just as good ;-)

Here's the post I got the idea from:

http://www.bakerella.com/red-velvet-cake/ 

Bakerella, I did enjoy my heart out! :)

Congrats to Matty!

I am so proud of my husband! His first episode that he worked on for Penguins of Madagascar aired last night in the US on Nickelodeon. I am just so happy for him and so so proud of him! His first professional work. WOW.

I wanted to show him how proud I was of him, so I went in search of a great recipe. Where was the first place I looked you ask? Bakerella of course! You cant go wrong on her site! She is genius, such an insipration, and frankly, has the best recipes ever! Go see her site (www.bakerella.com). Anyway, I looked and I found!

Chocolate Crackle Cookies. So YUM! And what fun they were to make too! I had to take pictures of the progress, because it was just so much fun, and they were so pretty!

You start out with butter and brown sugar. You cream it, then add eggs, vanilla and melted chocolate. Of course you are suppose to do this in a stand mixer or using a hnd mixer, but we all know I dont own a stand mixer, and of course, after 2 months of using my hand mixer, it died on me. I know. I guess next time Ill put out more than $15 for it...

So... I stuck with the whisk. And it worked pretty well for me, and for this next picture, it made it look really pretty. This is where you add the melted chocolate to the butter sugar mixture. So fun!

Then you add the dry ingredients which is flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt to the mixture, as well as milk. Divide the mixture and put it in the fridge for a couple hours. I put mine in the freezer because I only had a couple hours to make them before Matt got home and discovered his surprise. Then you take the batter and divide it into equal squares, roll into balls and get ready to dip. In the picture is the batter which I divided with a knife (thank you Bakerella!), and my dippings, granulated sugar (I used caster sugar) and powdered sugar. 

Then you dip! First in the granulated sugar, then the icing sugar. I took a cute picture of the steps. 

Drop the dipped cookie balls onto a baking sheet covered with parchment paper and bake away! It was SO much fun to watch them in the oven then when you take them out, this is what you get! 

Isnt it just gorgeous?!?! I loved them so much, and let me tell you, they are a major treat for the mouth too! 

So Matty came home right after they came out of the oven, so the apartment smelled great, and he asked what I made. I told him to look on the table and he saw these. Man they looked good (and no its not becuase I am so good, they just turn out this good on their own!)

This is what he saw. I was just too proud of him not to do anything. It wasnt much, but it was a good reason to do something I love and give him something he loves. They are so pretty and so so good to eat. YUM. 

Congrats Matty! I love you so much and I am so proud of you! :)

So here is the post that I found on Bakerellas site for these. Hers look even better than mine! http://www.bakerella.com/chocolate-crackles/

And here is the original recipe, which came from Martha Stewart.
http://www.marthastewart.com/281209/chocolate-crackle-cookies

The New Apartment

Hello again! I am very sorry it has been so long since I have last posted anything. I had to take quite the break after the bake sale. We also got the great pleasure of moving out of our tiny little apartment and moving into one that actually feels like a home rather than a hotel. It is SOOO nice and of course the best part is the new improved kitchen! :) It is much much bigger and I can actually move around in it now. It took me a while to start baking in it; we had so much to do with moving in and then Matt's parents came and visited us (see our Walkers Go Kiwi site for that post: www.walkersgokiwi.blogspot.com), so there hasnt been too much room for baking in that time frame. But now that I can, I thought that I would give a tour of the new place. You can see how we live over here in NZ too :)

Here is the entrance and a little bit of the kitchen. To the right is the table and behind that, you can see our drying rack with towels and jeans drying away. We have a tumble dryer, but MAN that takes up a ton of power, so this is the way to go! And the little R2D2 that is standing in front of the drying rack is a DE-humidifier. Yeah I know! I didnt know those were possible either, but we can cure world thirst with ours alone! I have to empty it at least once a day! I know!

Of course the creme de la creme is the kitchen (for me at least- Matty may beg to differ haha). SO SO much bigger with lots of counter space and i have a REAL oven! I can't even explain how happy it makes me! It took me a long time to get used to the controls though; things are way different here, including how to use an oven! And the best part is my freshly baked banana bread on the edge of the counter :)

Oh yep, a better picture of it :) and my friend the oven.

The view from the kitchen. Our living area and the balcony. You cant tell, but we have a great view! A beautiful tree outside and we get to see some fun birds in the morning. The best part about the view is at night we can see the Sky Tower all lit up through the tree. It's great.

Our bedroom! We have an actual bedroom! Oh how nice that is!

And I know you wanted to see the bathroom haha. But I had to show it to show that it is WAY bigger than before. We are happy :)

I hope you enjoyed the tour of our new apartment! I will be posting again VERY soon, as I am now starting to bake again, and I even got the pleasure of selling some of my goodies to Oktobor, so I will tell you all about that soon! :)

<3

Bake Sale for Japan

I wanted to take my cake balls further than I have before, and I found the perfect excuse to do this over the weekend. At Matt's work, some of the animators (mostly Tiffany) decided to do a bake sale for relief efforts in Japan. We all thought this was a great idea and decided to do another baking day at Kate's place.

I already knew that the pops would take a long time so I made the cake the day before, and I also went to the store to get some candy for the decorations on my pops. You can cheat, and look down the blog a bit to see what I made, but let me tell you what it is and why I did them.

The bake sale was to take place at Oktobor, where Matty works; they animate (and do other things) for the TV show Penguins of Madagascar, so I thought it would be really cute to make the cake pops little penguins. I took a picture off of google as my model, then went to the store to see what I could find to use as the wings, beak and feet. Here is what the candies looked like before and after cutting them into the shapes I needed.

 I am so glad that I did some prep the day before, because even without doing that I was in way over my head! I dont know how Bakerella does this so well, because I was super exhausted and I didnt even get nearly as many done as I wanted to. But man was it fun! Here I am at the beginning of dipping.

Yum, chocolate!

This is Kate, getting me back for the picture I put of her on the last blog post :) haha.

Some pops that had been sitting for a while in the fridge and a fresh batch going in.

Here I am starting out the decorating process. They started with a layer of dark chocolate as the base and I am making the eyes and the body with white chocolate. My lovely mom :) sent me some food writers from the states, because I havent been able to find them here, and I used the black marker to make the pupils of the penguin.

And here I am with one of my finished products! This is another victory pose; I couldnt believe I actually did it! I have to say that I was pretty proud of myself, for these only being the third time I have made cake balls, and my first time actually making them into something. I do, however, also have to say that I was expecting to get about 40 of these made, and only 16 made it to penguin shapes. I was really afraid I was going to be at Kate's house until it was time to take them to Oktobor! But luckily, I got enough done, and the rest just stayed chocolate.

Matty said that I gave birth to 16 penguins! And let me tell you, it was hard labor! Haha :) Here's my babies.

And a close up...

The bake sale took place at Oktobor, in the kitchen area. Here is Tiff's amazing cheddar and jalapeno cookies, and she even cut out "Japan" and some hearts! Too cute!

Here's all the goodies we were selling. Kate made some lemon slice and hedgehog. Those both seemed to be a big hit. Tiff made her savory cookies and some chocolate cupcakes. Dan's wife made rice crispy treats and strawberry white chocolate chip cookies, Mercedes made some other cupcakes (not sure what they were), Claudia made two amazing cakes that were gone before you could blink your eyes. Cant remember what either of them were though either, and I made my cake pops, which were chocolate cake with white chocolate chips and chocolate frosting.  We didnt expect a lot of people to contribute and eat the goodies, but boy were we wrong! It was gone in a matter of 30 minutes!

Here is Dan (and Tiff's Matt behind him) holding a cake pop to take to his kid at home :) 

Our money jar. In the end, we raised over $700 that is all going to the relief fund for Japan. Pretty cool! 

The amazing Tiffany who organized the whole thing! We are all thankful for her for doing that. She is holding a cake pop. I still am not sure if she has eaten it. She just couldnt find it in her heart to kill the cute little thing! :) 

On the last post, I said that I was so jealous to be in Kate's apartment and whether I said it or not, I got a little spoiled baking in her great kitchen. Well I can no longer say that, and unfortunately my blog is no longer going to be valid being called "Cooking Without a Kitchen". As of tomorrow, we will be in a new (and much bigger) apartment. I will have to show pictures of what it looks like when we get in there, but the kitchen is also much bigger and there is an actual oven. So unfortunately, my blog name isnt as valid, but the point will still stand; that I am learning to bake in a new country and discovering my passion for it! :) We are excited!

The Bake Off :)

For the bake off, I didnt make anything out of my recipe book, but believe me, I had enough to do! Kate, the one who invited me over, asked me to make a cheesecake called Chocolate Liquer Cheesecake. She wanted me to make it because it was yet another :) coworkers b-day, and she has been wanting to have this cake. I gotta tell you, I was quite nervous to make this cheesecake, as I had never made one before, and Kate just thinks that I am a great baker (thank you Kate for the confidence), but I was not so confident when she told me that her mom always gets stressed when making this one. Oh man, Im thinking, how am I gonna be able to do this? There was a lot of pressure, and I was very nervous. So this cake has chocolate "bisquits" or cookies, butter and coffee liquer as the base, cream cheese (lots and lots of it), sugar, chocolate, whipped cream, and more coffee liquer and some peppermint liquer mixed in. YUM! Here I am, contemplating the recipe and hoping that all will go well. :)

Here it is with everything except the whipped cream. Already looks yum yum yummy!

So I forgot to mention that the whipped cream, was just cream that had to be whipped. Oh yeah, and Matt wont let me not mention this part - I thought that we had the right kind and the right amount of whipped cream. When I realized that I didnt, guess to had to be runner to get the right stuff? Matty of course! The store is not very close to where we were either, so he literally had to RUN to the store and get back in time so the mixture didnt get ruined. Now he can say that he contributed to the bake off haha :)

Me mixing in the whipped cream.

Here is Kate, although you cant see her face, but making her peanut butter cookies, which turned out super yummy, even though we were all having issues baking things, thanks to the different climate. I never realized how much climate changes can effect baking.

Here is my victory pose, after Kate told me the cheesecake looked and tasted exactly the way it was suppose to! Oh success!

Here is what the finished product looked like. We had it yesterday, and man it was so great! Nick appreciated it (b-day boy), and we paired it with canned whipped cream and frozen raspberries. YUM-O!

Here is Tiffany, who is making her yummy savory cookies, which had cheddar cheese and jalapenos in them. I have to stay I wasnt too sure about these, but YUM YUM YUM. I even got the recipe from her, so I can make them sometime.

Here are the three bakers of the day. Me, Tiff and Kate. We are already pretty exhausted by this point, and we arent even close to done with our baking adventures.

Kate eating her cookie batter before she even baked them. How dare her lol. She will probably kill me for putting this picture up too! :)

I did lie a little bit before when I said that I didnt make anything out of my recipe book. I wanted to make cake balls compliments of Bakerella. Her website says to make any kind of cake that you want, so I chose one out my recipe book. It was chocolate with white chocolate chips, and chocolate frosting. So I made it the day before the bake off, just so I wasnt taking up too much of the oven on the day. I am so glad I did, not for that reason, but because I was already exhausted and I only made the two things! So here are the cake balls before they got dipped.

Here they are being dipped in chocolate melts.

Heres Tiff's finished savory cookies.

Haha, although Im not asleep here, I was sure wishing I was!

Kate's yummy peanut butter cookies.

Tiff also made chocolate chip cookies and M&M cookies. Man they were all so great!

We had such a fun day and we all got to enjoy them on Saturday then also yesterday for Nick's b-day. It was a lot of fun, and although note very soon, I do want to do that again! :)