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...

Today I figured I'd get a head start on our New Year's dessert.  All I have energy for is a roll cake, but I thought I'd decorate it with the number 2024.  But, nothing is ever as simple as one thinks! I printed out a sheet of numbers to trace onto the parchment and used the biggest font possible. It still looked smaller than I wanted and I planned to enlarge it in the copy machine, then promptly forgot about it.  I realized this too late, after I'd already piped the numbers!   For the decorative slurry, I used  Gemma Stafford's recipe . I colored it green, which my mother always said was the color of hope.  I hope for a better year next year, after 2023 took my mother. I used a vanilla roll cake recipe from Martha Stewart and ran into a bit of trouble when I realized I was short on cake flour.  I had to substitute 1/4 cup of AP flour. I realized too late that I should have added 1/4 teaspoon additional baking powder, to help give it some lift. Ne...

 I had a hard time deciding what to make for St Valentine's Day this year. I'm eager to decorate a layer cake, but we were in Vermont over the weekend and the beginning of the week was busy.  Ultimately I decided to make a roll cake. I love making roll cakes because they are easy and always make an impression. I used  this recipe  from King Arthur Baking for a chocolate roll cake with chocolate whipped cream filling. I decided to forego the chocolate glaze on top in the interest of cutting back a bit on sugar, and on time. I'm sure it would have elevated the cake, but it was good without it too. So for this recipe, the baking time is 10-12 minutes and although at 10 minutes a toothpick inserted in the center came out clean, the cake wasn't springing back to the touch the way I expected. I left it in the oven for 12 minutes plus one minute more with the oven turned off. I should have taken it out at 10-11 minutes, because it's a bit of a thicker sponge and it did tas...