I had a vision of what I wanted this post to look like.  It involved some FO's, UFO's and other things.  And as I checked my calendar this weekend, yesterday to be exact, I realized that this date crept up on me faster than I had anticipated (last year it zipped right by).

So here's to Two.  Two cupcakes for the two years I've been in blogland.  Thank you for all your inspiration, ideas, support and sharing in the many crazy passions and addictions I've developed these past two years.  I hope to be able to share more with you (and more often -- I feel guilty for not being able to update as often as I like).  Let these cupcakes be the first new thing I share with you.  They were baked today for a friend's birthday dinner.  I made vanilla cupcakes with chocolate buttercream and chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream and vice versa.  I used recipes from the "More from Magnolia" cookbook and my spanking new KitchenAid mixer... yahoo!  Definitely expect some more cooking and baking around these parts.

**also to be referred to as "Don't trust your oven" and "A nifty lesson in not wasting food"

Yearly, our family has a special celebration to commemorate the anniversary of our family business. During the celebration, we invite Buddhist monks to come chant and perform a blessing. Part of this blessing ritual naturally involves food. So everyone usually helps out and cooks for it. It's pretty much your basic Thai spread of goodies, papaya salad, barbecue chicken, sticky rice, laab and some other things, included in that are of course Thai desserts. I decided that this year I wanted to do something different. I was going to make bread and cake. The bread I pulled off rather quickly. I made quick whole wheat and molasses bread that my current baking partner in crime sent me in exchange for the no knead bread virius I infected her with. If you haven't already tried it, it's damn good and worth a trip to the store to get whole wheat flour (btw, one bag of whole wheat flour will give you 5 loaves of bread -- I bought the flour less than a week ago and I've already used it up. Made a loaf for myself, one for B's family, one for each of my aunts and one for the blessing. I didn't eat it all up myself!). And the cake I decided on was the Red Velvet cake again from "More from Magnolia."

I started becoming more serious with my baking ever since the great Christmas gift of 2006, the pistachio green KitchenAid mixer. I've been reading around a bit and also experimenting. One of the things I've learned is that your oven may be lying to you. Not only do I have a hot spot in the back left of my oven, but my oven isn't always as hot as it says it is. So I purchased an oven thermometer to keep it in check. And adjusting the oven temperature as necessarily. The oven is nice and consistent with cupcakes, given that I only bake one pan at a time, but at this point I'm not so sure about cakes.

I decided to bake the cakes the night before and frost them in the morning. When I put the cakes in, the oven was at 350. Popped all three pans in and shut the door. I was pretty quick about it as not so the oven wouldn't loose too much heat. Five minutes later I checked and the oven was at 300. I freaked out so I upped the temp to 400 just to get the heat back up again. Another five minutes passed and the temp was at 450, holy charred cupcakes! So I knocked the temp down to 300 and opened the oven door for a while to let some of the heat escape. Another 5 minutes went by and could already smell a slight burnt odor. Peaking into the oven, I see that the cake in the back left is looking very lopsided, really flat at where the corner is. So I spin it around and then wait 5 more minutes befoore rotating the pans. Things aren't looking too good at this point as the other cakes are also showing signs of being charred. The cakes finally come out and I already know that I'll have to start over. Not only were lots of the edges burnt, but they were charred.

The next morning I woke up early to get to the store to pick up more cake flour. I proceeded as I did the night before except that I preheated the oven to 375, put in the cakes and then dropped the temp to 350. Everything went much more smoothly this time. I baby sat the oven but the temp ended up staying consistent. The cakes looked awesome and no burning smell was detected. The only thing wrong with the cakes were that they weren't very level.

I decided not to even out the layers by slicing the tops off. I didn't want a short cake, nor did I want to mess up. So I decided to handle it by strategically placing the layers on so that the cake evened itself out.

When I was icing the cakes, I noticed that one of the layers was a lot smaller in diameter than the others, and also that when I pulled it out of the pan, it had pulled away from the sides and had more browned edges. One of my pans is lying to me (I guess that's what happens when you have 3-9" pans purchased at different times). Anyways, I tried to hide that by putting that layer at the bottom. I'm not so sure that it was the smartest thing to do as I had a hard time icing the sides. Frosting cakes isn't as easy as I thought it would be. The filling and top is easy, but the sides were my downfall. I was trying to be as even as I could, making everything as smooth as possible. As hard as I tried, I couldn't hide the ridge of the second layer, but I blame that on the shrunken bottom later. Now that I look back on it, I probably should have went for the fluffy, highly "wavey" frosting style that they showed in photo. It probably would have hidden that ridge a lot beter. Oh well. For my first attempt at baking a cake from scratch from start to finish, including the frosting, I don't think I did too bad.

The verdict from the masses? We shall see. The cake didn't get done in time for the blessing but I dropped it off last night and they should be cutting into it today. I've used this recipe to make cupcakes and they turned out great. So I'm hoping it goes over well with them. I think they might be put off by it since it's a red cake and not strawberry.

Once the cake was done, I still had 3 layers left from the second attempt. I didn't want to just throw it out since only the edges were burnt and the middles were perfectly fine. I had a lightbulb moment and decided to make a mini-cake with it by cutting off the burnt edges.

The first thing I did was find a round object I could use as a cookie cutter. I found a tuperware that was the perfect size, centered it over the cake and pressed down until I cut through the entire layer.

It worked fine, but as I was pressing down on it, it dawned on me that tuperware isn't the accurate cutting tool since it's got a pretty blunt edge. As a result, the edges weren't very clean.

For the next two layers I used the tuperware only to mark a circle and used a serrated knife to do the cutting. Much better.

All three layers are done and I'm now left with some rings to snack on (the non-burnt parts of it at least).

I had a feeling that I wasn't going to have enough frosting to cover the entire mini-cake. At the very least, I wanted enough for the filling and the top layer. If Miette can get away with selling a partially frosted cake, referred to as a tomboy, why can't I?

I present to you yaiAnn's Red Velvet tomboy.

And it's mine, aaaall mine. mamaFasu would be proud, don't you think? (and I actally think it looks better than the regular cake -- click for size comparison.)

Okay, maybe there's a little of both things happening around these parts. I haven't been knitting that much (I haven't stopped altogehter, don't worry), and I haven't been kneading at all. If you haven't noticed, yaiAnn has been turning in to a baking blog as of late. My latest obession has been with bread, the no knead variety. How can you resist churning out something like this with little to NO effort. ZERO. People, I didn't even break a sweat making this. I'm not sure what pushed me over the edge to make this bread, but it was a damn good reason to finally break down and buy the french oven I've been coveting for years. If you haven't heard about it because you've been living under a rock for the past 3-4 months like I have, the no knead bread phenomena has been rocking the foodie blog world for the past few months. It's honestly like magic. Just follow the recipe and in a mere matter of minutes you have this. close up here 19 hours later, you'll have this. close up here 3-4 hours later, you'll have this. It's like magic! The bread even crackled as it was cooling. It kind of scared me, especially since I went a little overboard with the cornmeal/flour dusting before it went in the oven. Taste test? Love it.. something I'm definitely making in the future.. as a matter of fact, there are two rising as we speak. Let's spread the bread love all around.

I'm currently drowning in lots of work, pardon the absence. I've really been meaning to post about knitting and sewing, but the darn work thing gets in the way. Anyways, just wanted to update you with some breadie news. If you haven't heard, A Year in Bread is a place that I'll be spending a lot of time on the next 12 months. I hope to expand my baking skills to beyond my standard vanilla and chocolate cupcakes, as well as the occassional hi-hat, to something more savory and everyday (whoever said there was something wrong with eating cupcakes everyday?). So as I climb out of the huge pile of work I have to get through. Let's dream of bread and baked goods and when I emerge from the other side, I will have FOs to show you (overdue FOs, but FOs nonetheless).

NYT's Quick Whole Wheat and Molasses Bread, Lighter version

Yes, could it be? It is knitting. Way, long overdue FO's that I have yet to show off to the blogosphere. These FOs were destined to be shown off in a post titled "The first knits in the new year" as B and I wore them on NYE as we attempted to watch the fireworks from the lookout point off the Arguello gate in the Presidio (unfortunately the eucalyptus trees blocked 99.1% of our view). They proved worthy however, keeping us nice and toasty for celebrating the ringing in of 2007.

Pattern: Bea Ellis Nordic Hat Kit
Started: December 2006
Finished: December 2006

If you recall, my first colorwork experience was with the Candy Cane hat from Handknit Holidays. This was a great follow-up project. If I had read up on color dominance earlier, made the green dominant for the main motif (more on that to come). But aside from that, the hat has been well loved and worn pretty regularly. That's one of the only things you can ask for right? Oh, the gratuitous guts shot? Here you go.

Pattern: Endpaper Mitts, Eunny Jang
Yarn: Knitpicks Palette
Started: December 20, 2006
Finished: December 29, 2006

First let me start by saying, the Italian tubular cast-on is my new best friend! There is no way I will be using waste yarn to do 1x1 tubular cast-on any longer! Too bad I can't say the same for 2x2 tubular cast-on. I tried figuring out a technique, but it didn't work. But if any of you have insight on how to figure it out, please let me know.

This was my third colorwork project and I used this not only to practice, but also as an experiment in color dominance to see how much difference it makes when knitting. I held blue on the left in on one mitt and grey on the left in the other. You can barely notice a difference in the photo above, but when you look at them side by side, you can definitely the colors playing themselves out.

Left: Blue dominant, Right: Grey dominant

Whichever color is dominant will pop or stand out more. You can really see the effects on the wrong side of the knitting. How do you determine which color should be dominant? (The following answer is based on my amateur experience in colorwork so please correct me if I'm wrong) In the case of the hat, you would want the motif to stand out and the background color to fall behind. So the green would be dominant. With the mitts, you would have to make a judgement on which design element you want to stand out. Do you want the diamonds to pop (blue dominant), or do you want the diagonal lines to be the focus (grey dominant)? Once you determine which color you'd like to be dominant, make sure this stays in your left hand. I knit colorwork with both hands. I learned the English method and then switched over to Continental about a year later. So the transition to two handed knitting for colorwork wasn't too bad (I just had to remind my right hand what to do). Veronique has a great explaination of color dominance as well as explaining her method of holding yarn for color dominance for English knitting. And of course, here is Nona's explanation of color dominance.

Is this thing on?

I love baking

and other craftastic things like sewing

and knitting

After my first babycake experience with the red velvet cake, I fell in love with it. I was inspired by Miette's tomboy. It's a no fuss way to frost a cake that also offers a visual variety from your traditionally frosted cakes. I had another opportunity to bake another cake last weekend as it was someone's birthday. I decided to make the Devil's Food Cake with Seven Minute Icing, again from More from Magnolia. The cake is a simple straight forward recipe. The frosting, however was similar to a meringue and took me a bit more than seven minutes to make. Frosted and ready to go, I put the cake in my trusty carrier and away I went. The cake, however, wasn't destined for local delivery. The cake was for one of my triathlon club's coaches and was to be presented at our annual training weekend, 200 miles away from San Francisco. My car was packed to capacity and I made sure the carrier was well lodged between items so that it wouldn't slide around in transport. The one thing I hadn't accounted for was the temperature and oh, also maybe one slightly steep grade that probably had a part to play in this..

Ack! Yes, I was very very sad. The top two layers slid off the bottom layer and rested against the side of the carrier. We were able to remove the top of the carrier and put the layers back on, but nothing could be done about the icing that oozed and got squeezed off of the cake. All I could do was present it to him with the "nice" side showing and hope that they thought the process of cutting the cake squeezed out the frosting. Despite the slide the cake made, it got two thumbs up!

This weekend's baking adventure took me away from cakes over to cookies. I'm not a huge fan of Rachel Ray. In fact, I can't really stand her and find her down right annoying. However, her magazine actually surprised me. The Every Day Challenge in the April 2007 issue is "Cookie Jar" and today, I decided to bake ALL three recipes. What I love about these recipes, is that I didn't have to go out and buy a thing. The premise to this feature in the magazine is that they are made only with ingredients from the "Every Day essentials list" -- not sure what this is yet, as I've only purchased of her magazines, but I'm assuming it refers to pantry items. Pretty good concept if you ask me. So without further adieu, I present to you my April 2007 Every Day Challege, yaiAnn's Cookie Jar.

L-R from back: Jumbo Chocolate Chip Cookies, Brown Sugar Shortbread, and Lemon Cookies

Jumbo Chocolate Chip cookies, 8 ingredients, but no vanilla. I thought this was odd, but proceeded anyways. It's a very quick recipe, except that my cookies weren't quite "jumbo." The recipe is supposed to yield 12 cookies and ended up with 12. I did find the culprit though. The recipe reads, "Drop heaping tablespoonfuls of dough." I don't know about you but I read that as a one heaping tablespoon, which probalby came out to close to 2 tablespoons full of dough. Is "tablespoonfuls" a word? Should it say "tablespoonsful"? either way, I think it would have been a little more helpful to give an approximation of how much dough a heaping "tablespoonfuls" is. So if you plan to drop 1 heaping tablespoon of dough, the cookies should be done in about 15 minutes, instead of the 20 minutes as written. Because of my measurement misinterpretation, my cookies didn't quite come out like the photo. The cookies they show in the photo are quite thin and I prefer mine to be a little thicker, being crisp on the outside and chewy in the middle. I had one pan that came out pretty thin and thought it would be just burnt, but they're actually pretty good. They remind me of a lacey cookie. And the absence of vanilla? Didn't notice it. Overall the cookies were pretty good. Not the best I ever had, but I would definitely make them again -- and also with the correct amount of tablespoonfuls.

Brown Sugar Shortbread, 3 ingredients (butter, flour and brown sugar) and REALLY simple to make. However, I was NOT jazzed by this recipe at all. I've never had homemade shortbread so this isn't a fair comparison, but the consistency wasn't what I imagined. It was very soft and pliable. I'm not sure if it needs to dry out overnight, but if it does, it wasn't stated in the recipe. Flavorwise, I wasn't impressed. It reminded me of just eating a "crumble" topping, but it didn't feel like the ingredients even blended together. It was kind of like eating.. sandy butter. Does that make sense? Is this worth trying one more time just to see if it comes out different? Eh, I'd rather save my butter, brown sugar and flour for something else.

Lemon Cookies, 7 ingredients, and smells so yummy while it's mixing I had to stop myself from wanting to eat the batter raw (And I'm not a fan of eating cookie dough at all). These cookies are the most labor intensive out of the three, but they look so pretty and smell so good while you're mixing it up, they're worth it.

The flavor is lemony and not too sweet. It's a light, refreshing cookie. It's firm but not chewy in the middle, but also not crispy. It's definitely got some snap, but if you undercook it a bit, you may get that chewy texture. Would I make these again? Yes! Just the perfect thing if you've got extra lemons. My favorite part about these cookies is that you roll them in sugar before you bake them so they've got that sugar sparkle.

One of the lessons I've learned in my cookie adventure this weekend is to take the cookies out JUST before you think they're ready. For both the chocolate chip cookies and the lemon cookies, the recipe instructs you to take them out when the edges turn golden. I think the time period from "golden" to "more than golden" is a short window, so if you wait too long, you'll get really hard bottomed cookies. This is what more than golden looked like for me. For the lemon ones, these aren't ideal. It changes the flavor dramatically. They're not burnt, but it makes a significant difference in the flavor.