Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

This year I made several dozen  Decorated Sugar Cookies,  some for us to enjoy and some to send to my family and friends in the Caribbean. When I send them baked goods I always try to mail the package on a Monday, in hopes they will arrive by the following Saturday at latest, and avoid an overnight in a post office somewhere. I made one batch of  Chocolate Sugar Cookies  and one batch Vanilla . I used an egg shaped cutter, a large bunny head cutter, and a bunny cutter.  I always use  this royal icing recipe  from Sallys Bake Blog and although I'm not the biggest fan of royal icing, I think it does have a pretty good taste and never fails to dry no matter how much water I end up adding.  I do recommend this recipe.  I made five colors: a blue, a pink, a green, a yellow, and a purple.  Pretty basic! I flooded the bunnies in pink and the eggs in blue.  My original idea was to do a floral design, inspired by  this tutorial  from the amazing cookie decorator Haniela. But it didn't w

 I tried making Bagels a long time ago just to see what it was like and had made them a couple of times.  I found it was a lot of work for 8 bagels, and I preferred the store-bought ones. Then, the Pandemic happened. Bagel shops were closed, we weren't going into any stores and I started making bagels regularly. I enjoyed it, but it was certainly time consuming and let's face it, I'm more of a sweets baker and decorator than a bread maker. At the beginning of the Pandemic there were serious flour shortages, and as soon as they became available I ordered many bags of bread flour from King Arthur Flour.  Once things reopened and we ventured out, I stopped making bagels regularly although Bubby is a fan and would sometimes request them. Now, however, one of our local bagel shops has hugely increased their prices, and the other one has become pretty skanky.  So it looks like I'm going to be putting bagel-making into my regular kitchen duties rotation, along with salad-dres

Remembering a cake I made last June to donate through Icing Smiles. Icing Smiles is an organization that provides cakes to critically ill children. I had signed up a long time prior and was thrilled when an opportunity came up that fit my abilities. A long story ensued. There are two types of cakes one can make through Icing Smiles: a Dream Cake and a Fun Cake. A Dream Cake is usually more elaborate, two-tiered, etc. I accepted an opportunity for a Fun Cake since I'm not a professional baker nor am I that experienced. The child was a little boy named Abdiel who lives in nearby Holyoke and was turning 5 years old. The directives I received were for a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse-themed cake and that it needed to be for 40 people. I only got this information after accepting the request and it gave me pause. I'd never made a cake that big, and it was for more servings than a Fun Cake is supposed to have. But I didn't want to back out. And at least their requested flavor was simply v

 It's a good thing everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's day because we love to celebrate. We decorate a little bit and I set the table with a festive shamrock tablecloth. As I get older and more family members are missing I find that I enjoy these low-key smaller holidays more than days like Christmas, New Years or, God forbid, birthdays.  This year our menu included Guinness beef stew, sauteed green cabbage and potato "farls". Dessert was Chocolate Guinness cupcakes with Guinness buttercream . I used this recipe  from Sally's Baking Addiction and I'm just going to go ahead and say that they were absolutely scrumptious. I wish could have eaten several!  The recipe calls for reducing most of a bottle of Guinness to use in the batter and the frosting. That was my first time reducing beer, and with this kind of stout it made for a bit of a bitter reduction but of course once coupled with all the brown sugar in the batter they balanced each other out wonderfully

With St. Patty's Day coming up, it was time to make some Irish soda bread  to have with our morning coffee. On this blustery and snowy day, school was canceled and most of our town is without power. But our lights are on, so I decided to try  this recipe  from Sally's Baking blog. I made it before a few years ago and it came out beautiful, but it was a bit less successful this time. It seemed that no matter how much I floured the counter and my hands, the dough was too wet and sticky to be able to knead.  I think what happened is that instead of measuring into cups I weighed my ingredients and the weights in the recipe were off. I just wouldn't have thought to check their math prior to getting started, and only realized this when trouble shooting afterwards. Eventually I got annoyed and just dumped the dough on the baking sheet and roughly formed it into a round shape.  After 12 minutes in the oven I scored it with a knife.  Poor bread, I also forgot to tent it halfway thro

We had two trays of blueberries that were too soft to eat, and leftover sour cream to boot. Seemed like the perfect time to try this Blueberry Muffin Bread recipe. A pretty straightforward recipe but of course I had to go in with my tweaks. I didn't have a 9"loaf pan, only an 8".  So I decided to use my smaller Simax glass Bundt pan. Technically the amount of batter should have fit just right, but as soon as I transferred the batter into the pan, I could tell the pan was too big. With this, I knew I'd have to watch the baking time, which was 55 minutes in the recipe.  To my surprise, the cake was done at 35 minutes and looked overbaked.  So the whole reason for using the Bundt pan, which is to make a decorative top, didn't work out.  However, I was pleasantly surprised when the cake still turned out moist and didn't feel overbaked. It does just taste like a blueberry muffin, as well, so it can only imagine how nice this cake must be when baked in the pan it