Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

Bubby's friend was coming over after a bike ride and I wanted to make them a Halloween-themed treat.  I've been wanting to make a spiderweb cake for a while.  I sure came away with some do's and don'ts! I chose to use  this recipe  from King Arthur Baking.  Not sure why but I had my heart set on making it in an 8x8 square pan, and this recipe fit the bill. It's a recipe that calls for no eggs and no butter! I was a bit anxious about greasing but not flouring the pan, but the cake didn't stick to the sides when cutting it so that was fine.  The cake baked for 32 minutes (should have been 31) in my Corning Ware pan. Had I used an aluminum pan I'm sure it would have been ready much sooner.   I'd never made ganache using chocolate chips and I wanted to try it so this was my opportunity.  This recipe also calls for half and half rather than heavy cream, for the ganache.  It was more difficult to melt the chocolate chips and incorporate the in...

I made these Sugar Pumpkin Cookies for a bake sale for an after-school club of Bubby's. I relied on my old Martha Stewart recipe for the cookies and  my favorite royal icing recipe . I used 10 tablespoons of water which worked out great on this particular day (it does depend on the level of humidity on any given day). Lately I'd been adding 9 tablespoons then had to add extra water afterwards. I don't have any orange food coloring, so I made an orange color using red and yellow. It was a bit peachy but once piped it was OK. I used brown for the stems.  With such flowy icing, I piped the two outer sections of the pumpkin on a few cookies at a time, let them set for a few minutes, then went back and piped the middle section and the stem.  In this way the icing didn't flow together (as happened with the first few cookies I piped) and I was able to show the three distinct sections I wanted.  In spite of the low humidity on this day these took almost 24 hours to dry, so ...

 Bubby was bored with bagels, fruit or cereal for breakfast - but refusing to try eggs or any other kind of savory food. When I spied one over ripe banana in the fruit basket, I thought a few banana muffins would be in order. I decided to try  this simple recipe I found online. I didn't have chocolate chips - they all went in last week's banana bread - so I added a scant half cup of walnuts instead. The recipe calls for 5 minutes at 425 then 12-15 minutes at 350. I may have left them in the oven longer than 5 minutes at 425 because I was using the timer on my phone and the battery gave out without my noticing it. Still, after 15 minutes a toothpick was not yet coming out clean. So I ended up baking them a few minutes longer than the recipe mentioned. Well these muffins were a bit disappointing! They lacked flavor and were very dry. I think the recipe needs more sugar, and something to thin out the batter. When spooning them into the muffin tin I did notice the batter was very...