Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

  I'm always busy in the kitchen - too much so for my taste - but with having to shop and cook dinner so often, and clean up afterwards, I haven't done much baking aside from regularly baking bagels, and the odd banana muffins or olive bread.  So it was that much more fun to spend a few hours in the kitchen recalling my skills, using my equipment, and trying a new recipe to make something delicious and pretty. St. Patrick's day is one of those little holidays we enjoy celebrating because it breaks up the routine, is festive, and is an excuse to decorate and eat something different. This year we went with simple cube steaks with mushrooms and onions, colcannon, and my dessert.  I decided to make a roll cake with shamrock decorations. I used  this recipe  from Haniela's. I've seen her amazing cookie decorating videos, but had never made one of her recipes.  Honestly I chose it because it came with a downloadable PDF for the shamrock decorations. I made the ba...

  The first bake of 2025 was a Yule Log for our Epiphany celebration! Bubby really wanted the Yule Log that we didn't get to have for Christmas dinner and I promised him I would make one.  By the time January 5th came around, I wasn't so much in the mood, but I wasn't about to let him down. However, I also wanted to make the simplest Yule Log possible.   I ended up trying  this recipe  from Taste of Home because it seemed the simplest. I followed the cake recipe to the letter and checked it at 12 minutes. This is really a long time for a roll cake and I wished I'd checked it sooner, because the cake was already pulling away from the sides of the pan. I took it out immediately and rolled it up onto parchment paper that I'd dusted with confectioners sugar. When I unrolled the cake to put in the filling, I was not happy to see that the entire top "crust" of the cake stuck to the parchment.  I filled it anyway, and rolled it back up. With a spatula I took ...

Teddy Bear Forest Cake Usually I make a Yule Log for Christmas dessert. But this year we were visiting Sis, and she wanted something different. I'd come prepared to make the Yule Log, with several of my favorite recipes from over the years, bakers chocolate bars for the ganache, and piping bags and tips for the meringue mushrooms. However, what Sis really wanted was a simple vanilla cake with chocolate frosting. Why not? It would be a challenge to figure out what to do. I've made cakes in Sis' kitchen before, and I've left some equipment there including 6" cake pans, cake strips, cooling racks, and bakers sheets. Small offset spatulas, cake rounds, measuring cups and spoons and a beautiful lime green Kitchen Aid stand mixer with a glass bowl are there too. As it turns out, what would have been really useful is an oven thermometer. Boy does Sis' oven run hot! I used Butternut Bakery's recipe for a 2 layer cake. I decided on a 2-layer cake to avoid making 2 b...

 On this Thanksgiving, our family decided to have a mixed menu, including some traditional items like roasted turkey breast, mashed potatoes and stuffing, but also some different things like baked haddock, bay scallops and kale with chestnuts. We spent Thanksgiving at Grandpa's house, and we arrived the day before on Wednesday after a 3 hour drive. This seemed like a good year to try a dessert that was not pumpkin pie. I remembered that Uncle S. had talked about how much he used to like penuche frosting as a kid. So, I decided to make a cake with penuche frosting, and ended up choosing this recipe from King Arthur Baking.  This way we wouldn't have to travel several hours with a perishable pie in the car, and I wouldn't have to make a pumpkin pie in someone else's kitchen, rolling out pie dough and deciding when the custard is done. The latter is difficult enough in my own kitchen! I used two kinds of apples for the cake, Granny Smith and Pink Lady. I'd brought a sc...

Parmesan Cheese Gougères This week our book club got together for the final meeting of the year. We went to a friend's house and she said beforehand that she wanted to make dessert.  I usually bring dessert, so I decided to find an appetizer I could bake. Not sure how, but I thought of Gougères . I'm glad I did!  They're a favorite of my sister's so maybe I was channeling her.  The Gougères recipe is very simple: Pâte à Choux with added cheese, piped into small rounds and baked. But it's also very exacting!  I've made Pâte à Choux many times before, using Sally's Bake Blog's recipe.  Here  is that recipe. But I couldn't find the gougères recipe I've used before in my baking binder, so I started taking a look at other websites. I decided to combine  Brown Eyed Baker's  recipe and  King Arthur Baking's  recipe, using Parmesan cheese since that's what I had at hand.  But when I started cooking the dough, it wasn't coming together int...

Lately I've made lots of seasonal food: Mushroom & Chestnut Soup, Roasted Delicata Squash, and a couple of weeks ago my Pumpkin Chocolate Chip cookies.  I still had pumpkin puree left over and I was making chili for dinner tonight. So it was the perfect occasion to make Pumpkin Bread .  So easy, so good! Here  is the recipe, from King Arthur Baking.  I halved the ingredients to make one loaf. It did take longer than usual to bake to 190F: almost 45 minutes instead of 30-35. I'm not sure why this happened. By then I had to eat, right before a zoom meeting. Not a problem to cut a slice from the hot loaf and eat it right away! And I admit, after the zoom meeting was over I cut another (thick) slice and enjoyed that as well. It's that good! Pumpkin Bread