Zebra cake!? What on earth could that be? If you’re imagining a cake striped like a zebra, then you’d be correct! This cake comes out perfectly soft and moist with very light flavors and, more importantly, looks fantastically impressive! The elaborate design is really the only reason I desired to make this cake in the first place because it seemed very fun and different, not like your everyday plain, one colored cake.
I first came across a recipe for zebra cake when browsing My Kitchen Snippets and, although very intriguing, I figured it would be much too time consuming to actually create. Boy was I wrong! In fact, making the striped pattern couldn’t be any easier! All it involves is constantly alternating between vanilla and chocolate batter, a few tablespoons dropped in the center at a time. The magic of physics does most of the work for you by allowing the layers to spread out more and more as you add on another.
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After secretly stalking and anxiously awaiting the reveal of new challenges for months, I finally went and joined the Daring Bakers for myself! It was a good thing too because for this challenge we had to make chocolate eclairs, but not just any chocolate eclairs! Oh no, sir! These sugarcoated little creatures come from none other than Pierre Hermé, a famous and fantastically gifted French pastry chef that’s an inspiration for me and I’m sure for many, many more.
Before I go any further, I’d like to note that I wrote this entire entry and then Firefox screwed me over and I lost it all. Yes, Firefox, I am very angry at you right now! If your rival IE didn’t suck so much I’d probably make him my new best friend instead. WHAT DO YOU SAY TO THAT, FIREFOX!?
Anyways, this challenge was hosted by Tony and Meeta. You can go to their blogs in order to view the original recipe because it is incredibly long and I am feeling way too lazy to post all it. (However, do not let the length discourage you from making these eclairs because they are fantastic and definitely not as hard as they seem. In fact, I’d say this is was one of the easier challenges I’ve seen the Daring Bakers do so far.) Their posts are also much more graphic than mine would have ever been and having a visual is always a good thing when baking something foreign.
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Popularity: 4% [?]
I first made the cinnamon shortbread cookies because I had egg yolks left over from a previous recipe. However, when I made them again I completely forgot about that and ended up with two egg whites left over. Having forgotten that the royal icing I use would have used up the egg whites, I saved them overnight instead. I didn’t want to risk using old egg whites in icing (bacteria and all) so I had to crack open a few more eggs, leaving me with two yolks.
So there I was with two eggs, separated and stored in the fridge, just waiting to be used. Wasting perfectly good eggs wouldn’t be sensible so what was I going to do with them? Make pumpkin bread of course!
I absolutely love pumpkin bread and a recipe that I previously tried a few months ago had been a complete let down so I definitely wanted to give it another go. I searched through the usual food blogs I go to and finally found a recipe at Genesis of a Cook.
Now, not to be a plug whore or anything, but that site is freaking amazing. Everything Tarah makes always looks sooo good and she is constantly updating every few days with more tantalizing recipes. The site basically becomes one big tease when combined with photos of her food. How could you not fall for making something?
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Popularity: 1% [?]
Happy late Fourth of July! I don’t particularly enjoy the food that goes along with this holiday, being vegetarian and all, but I definitely wasn’t going to let a holiday pass without using it as an excuse to bake! My dad requested the cinnamon shortbread cookies so I had to make some. I had originally planned on a delicious white chocolate blueberry tart, but I couldn’t find our tart pan and wasn’t about to waste money on another so the cookies were the only thing I made.
The one that reads, “Hola Amigo” was done by my sister around the time when I had grown extremely tired of decorating and my sister had wanted to have some fun with icing. I always forget that decorating is only fun at the very beginning when everything is new and the creative juices are flowing and then it all becomes repetitive, dull, and time consuming. Ha! I make it sound so awful, but it’s really not that bad. I swear!
Just out of the oven! I let my sister cut these ones because I was too busy decorating.
Starting to pipe on an outline. I really need to improve on this because I tend to have wobbly lines and my end points are never very clean. That is why you’ll see white points at the end of a lot of lines. I guess it’s fine considering this was only my second time decorating cookies.
My messy work station. I used Martha Stewart’s method of putting the thinned out icing in squeeze bottles. It was substantially easier than the last time and there wasn’t any mess from gravity causing the thin icing to ooze out of the frosting tips.
The end! There were a ton of cookies in the end even though a lot were eaten before and during decorating.
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Well, macaroons called for four egg whites and I couldn’t possibly let the yolks go to waste! I searched far and wide for a recipe that called for egg yolks in hopes of finding some deliciously sinful dessert that required four yolks or at least two. Considering I didn’t want the yolks to sit out forever and become infested with salmonella, I quickly gave up searching for recipes on google and just settled on using Recipezaar’s lovely filter.
I don’t know what brilliant person decided that Recipezaar needed a filter, but it was an incredibly genius idea. I tend to go to that site because their filter has so many options that it makes it so easy to find what you’re looking for. All I had to do was search by ingredient (egg yolks) and category (dessert) and VOILA! I found a recipe that I liked. Now this recipe didn’t actually even use as many egg yolks as I liked, but HEY, the picture looked good and all the reviews made me want to try it even more so I caved on this recipe.
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Popularity: 4% [?]
