Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

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

Chocolate Cake with Smarties Recently a friend lost her grandma and was very sad about it. In a casual conversation I said we should make a dinner featuring some of her grandma's dishes and my friend mentioned that they had a tradition of making a cake and decorating it with Smarties. I thought that was a great idea! A few months later we were organizing a dinner among friends and I decided to make her a Chocolate Cake  decorated with Smarties in memory of her grandmother.  European Smarties are different from American Smarties which are a sour candy.  The European ones are like pastel-colored M & Ms. I was surprised to be able to find them in a local specialty shop! They were expensive, and since it's November all they had was a Christmas variety in red and green.  Later on I saw some candy at Trader Joe's that looked exactly like the Euro Smarties in all the colors, unfortunately too late for this cake but I plan to try them for future reference! I wanted to m...

 It was so hard to say goodbye to summer this year, but I'm finally in the mood for Fall. Yes, now that it's mid-November! Better late than never.   It was the last session of this Fall's watercolor class.  I wanted to bring something for the other ladies and you can't go wrong with Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies .  I just love  this recipe  from Sally's Bake Blog.  It's so easy and you don't even need a mixer.   I used a 1.5 tablespoon cookie scoop like the recipe calls for, but instead of 18 I ended up getting at least 25 cookies.  I was tired and made the dough the night before, then froze the individual cookie scoops. It was super easy in the morning to bake them and let them cool for an hour before I had to get to class. I didn't get any pictures, but I brought along a pretty Fall plate that I have in the shape of a pumpkin and I arranged them on that.  Everybody liked them, several people said they were so good and one fr...

  Scary Halloween Mummy  Chocolate Cupcakes Halloween is such a favorite holiday of mine! No stressful and obligatory family gatherings, dressing up in costumes and lots of sweet treats. What's not to love?  This year I decided to make Chocolate Cupcakes  for us to enjoy and just to spread the love.  I used  this recipe  from Sugar & Sparrow's blog. I followed the recipe and the batter was so liquid and barely filling the cupcake wells in half. Although the recipe says it makes 15 cupcakes, each portion just looked so scant I ended up dividing the batter among the 12 cupcakes in the pan.  Well, that showed me!  These cupcakes really rise and some of them turned out pretty big.  Next time, I'll make 14. I'd planned to do a simple "mummy" decoration with the frosting, so it really wasn't a problem that some of them were so domed. The strips of the mummy's wrapping are done with a basketweave piping tip done in a bit of a random pattern...