That is fabulous work. Ever do pastry professionally?

Thank you! I haven't before, but have been thinking about it lately, although it's soooooooooooo time consuming. Possibility with a partner.

Don't know where you live, but I'm sure you could get piece work with those pics as your resume. Good money in cake decorating.

And much easier than opening your own shop! Bubs clearly has talent!

Thanks guys! I'm assuming you'll be customers when I'm officially in business!?!?

Dinner tonight (actually more like a dessert dinner): pancake made from a box (just add water). The reason it is so big is because I don't understand how to get the batter to stop spreading the width of the pan, in order to make multiple, smaller pancakes. So now, I just make one big one. I put butter and honey on it. No syrup ever. It's yummy. But I only ever manage to finish half of it, since it is pretty thick.

Yummy, Katie! If you wanted to make the batter thicker you could add flour, or if it was thick enough just pour less into the pan (or you could thin out the batter, allow it to cover the whole pan and make crepes).

One of the reasons I am happiest that I went to culinary school was that they taught in terms of how recipes are a sum of balanced ingredients. A book that sums up nicely is: Michael Ruhlman's Ratio (though really it is more of a cheat sheet to cooking than recipes).

For example the entry in that book for Pancakes is:
"2 Parts Flour: 2 Parts Liquid :1 Part Egg : 1/2 Part Butter" (Though actually I think that it should say 1/2 part fat, since savory herbed olive oil pancakes are great too.)

Most of the time I don't use a recipe when I bake, because I love experimenting since I feel that I have a pretty solid foundation as to how ingredient ratios change recipes. If I do use a recipe, I only use those that are by weight (I only own one old measuring cup lol). How do you all feel about baking w/o recipes? Do you all use weight measurements too?

Katie,
add less water
or
let batter sit for a few minutes to let the flour better absorb the water.

Cupcakes for the QuadJacks Crew:

Love the little suits you put on top.

I hate that she didn't bring any to dinner later that night.

Not baking, more like stewing...
I do fail at 99.9999% of normal adult activities like cooking/cleaning, but I do make homemade dog food for Rylee once per week consisting of brown rice, mixed veggies and ground turkey. She 's it and sits in the kitchen for hours while it is cooking! It's pretty much the easiest thing in the world for me to make, since everything comes in a bag. Frozen veggies, bagged rice and frozen ground turkey meat. I just dump it all in, add water and slow cook for about 3-4 hours.

If Oscar could recognize that that picture is representing food he would want, he would be drooling right now.

Usually when I order delivery I get a side of steamed veggies and he gobbles up all the cauliflower/broccoli.

EDIT: I thought this was the dog thread, oops.

Yea Rylee loves them too. She looooooves carrots and while I'm making this, I even give her a few of the frozen pieces to chew on.

While I'm not incompetent in the kitchen, most of my cooking skillz involve a BBQ and a dead cow.

And why concentrate on baked goods when your mommy makes stuff like this



That's right. Pineapple Upsidedown Cup Cakes.

Stolen from SomethingAwful: Cheesecake in a jar.

Those look cute, Gobbo.

I wanted to bake something as healthy as possible using pumpkin. So I made these:



For a yield of ~26 muffins, I used about 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 2 cans of organic pumpkin, 4 eggs, 1 cup milk, 2 cups whole wheat flour, 1 cup cranberries. (Also a little vanilla, salt, cinnamon, all spice, and nutmeg.)

I could make them taste better by topping them with vanilla buttercream or mixing in chocolate chips, but the whole point is that they're somewhat healthy, and not overtly sweet. I like how moist they are, which is what I was going for with the ratio of wet to dry ingredients that I decided to use. I'm freezing most of them for a brunch around Thanksgiving, when I'll have a ton of family in town.

What do I have to do to receive a package of these from you in the mail?
Seriously. Name your price. I will do anything.

Pretty sure these are not real and this account has been hacked and the person is spamming TWSS with unattainable deliciousness.
Should this poster desire to continue posting, confirmation that these delectable treats exist is required.
You have my mailing address. kthx.

Ha, Ha. Confirmation will be easier when you move to Vegas and can partake in tasting.

Let me see what my plans are next Sunday and check into shipping options.

Otherwise it sounds like a baking party in Vegas is in order.

omg where has this thread been all my life!

I am a baking fiend, especially lately, and I wish I'd taken more/better pics of my creations so I could post them here. This is what little I have:



Pear pie I made last week. Freaking delicious. Will be made again for Thanksgiving, and likely many times thereafter.

Cupcakes for the bf's birthday (werewolves, ldo):



Sundried tomato mac 'n cheese:



Be jealous of my cow kettle. Yes, the cowbell rings when the water boils .

Also made almond stuffed dates wrapped in bacon, which were amazing. They're even better with 1/4 teaspoon of goat cheese stuffed in with the almond, but I made them as an appetizer to a main dish that featured goat cheese, so I refrained this time. No pics of dates, sadly.

Hooray, welcome to the thread! the werewolf cupcakes, and if I wasn't an electric kettle devotee, I would snap-buy that cow kettle!

Better.

I tried to make Pillsbury chocolate chip cookies from the PACKAGE tonight.
How the hell can this get screwed up?

Well, about a minute until they were supposed to be done I went and checked on them because I smelled burning. The tops were burning yet the bottoms were not and they were super soft still...The package said set temp at 350 which I did...




So I hop on twitter asking for help and hotjenny tells me to turn the oven temp down to 300. Which I did. But they were not able to be saved.



This the twitter convo that followed which I thought was really funny: