Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Jackie's Birthday Cupcakes

Big Cupcake 5

Yet another continuation from Jackie's engagement/birthday celebration.

Chocolate Cupcake 2

For the cupcakes I made the same cupcakes I had made for Jae's birthday last month.  It was such a big hit with my girls I thought I'd do it again.  Unfortunately, I didn't have time to make a bigger cake for Jackie so I ended up making a bigger cupcake for her.  

In my post for Giant Red Velvet Cupcakes I used a souffle ramekin.  I wanted to do something a little different so I baked it in this square dish.

Big Cupcake 2

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Jackie's Birthday Cookies

J Cookies

As a continuation from my last post, these are cookies I made for Jackie's birthday.  Jackie's good friend, Judy, and I were in charge of getting together the list of people and setting up the dinner so we could celebrate her birthday and engagement.  We ate at a restaurant at Downtown Disney and decided to decorate the tables.  Judy got her balloons and I decided to make these J cookies not only as party favors for Jackie's friends to take home but also to double as decorations for the table top.

When I stuck in the skewers in the J's there was this really ugly dent right where it went in.  There really was no avoiding it unless I made the cookies 1/2" thick.  I try not to make the thickness of the cookies no bigger than necessary.  Otherwise, it looks too huge and bulky.

J

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Jackie's Wedding Dress Cookies

Wedding Dress Cookies

One of my very good friends got engaged a couple of weeks ago and came back with her boyfriend to California to celebrate their engagement as well as her 26th birthday. 

Jackie's Engaged!
(photo was taken with my phone so please excuse the quality..)

One of the things I made for her were these wedding dress cookies.  In decorating sugar cookies with Royal Icing there are a couple rule of thumbs I keep.  

Wedding Dress Outline 123

In outlining, ALWAYS, top to bottom, left to right, stop and start at corners or anywhere there's a break in a smooth line.  In the photo above the first box I did the first line from the top to the bottom of the dress.  Then I did the left side, again, top to bottom.  Lastly, I went from left to right on the bottom of the dress.  For some reason sticking to these rules have helped me to have nice straight lines. 

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Happy Anniversary... Nads' Bakery!


Disneyland Cake
(An "audition" cake I made for one of Disneyland's hotel.  I didn't get the job..)
So.. today marks the 1 year anniversary of the start of this blog.  I can't believe it's been a year since my very first post.  Before I follow-up on my last post on Father's Day and my friend's birthday/engagement, I thought I'd take a brief moment to look on past posts that I am very fond of. 

In no particular order, here are my top 5 posts.

Mr. Marshmallow Snow Man - December 5th, 2009

 Snow man

With credit to Martha Stewart's Cupcake Book I made my own spin on this cute Christmas cupcake.  I just think the finished product was so freaking cute.


The Shake Shack - April 30th, 2010

ShakeShack_Dripping

More than the food, which was fabulous don't get me wrong, it was one of the best eating experiences during my visit to Philly.. although this was was in New York.  The weather was like a gorgeous day in California, I had a delicious mushroom burger LOADED with cheese, a scrumptious ice cream cone with a dear friend in a beautiful park.  Plus.. I really liked the photos I took.  Haha they turned out really well.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Father's Day and Jackie's Birthday/Engagement Celebration... to come.

Appa and Steak

Lots of things happened since my last post on Thursday.  Over a span of 3 days I managed to make about a gallon of garlic mashed potatoes, decorate 35 regular and about 40 mini sugar cookies, 24 chocolate cupcakes plus one big cupcake, 57 carrot cupcakes, 30 or so white chocolate L's in script, and an 11inch fruit tart plus 2 smaller ones. 

Needless to say I'm a bit tired.  I didn't take photos of everything I listed above but I have plenty of great photos and "How To's" coming your way so please be patient as I sort through the masses of photos I took.  It will come soon.

Jackie and Balloons

I'm still trying to recover from the jam packed weekend but spending time with loved ones are always worth it.

Stay tuned...

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Neat Stuff: Moo

 Box

About a month and a half ago I was sorting through my email and found something that got pushed aside.  Since I've gotten my BlackBerry I get all my emails immediately and I often open it and close it without bothering to really read it thinking I'll go back and read it later.  Then, of course, I forget about it.  One of the emails I brushed off was an email from FoodBuzz.  They send me emails quite frequently so I thought it was something unimportant.

Box 2

Upon deeper inspection I realized it was telling me that I could get free "business" cards from a site called, Moo.  They're actually cards to tell people about your blog.  I guess all the featured publishers of Foodbuzz get a box of free cards.  When I went to the website to order it, I was disappointed to find out that I couldn't customize the photo in the back with my own.  But, the default photos are beautiful nonetheless.

Cards

When I counted there was about 35 different cards.  

Cards 2

Some, of course, I liked more than others...

Dessert Cards

They're small.. maybe about half the size of normal business cards.  Very cute but I feel like the chances of people losing it are greatly increased.  But, for something that was completely free (they paid for shipping too!) they'll do just fine. 

Info

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

World of Color

 World of Color Show

A friend of mine works for Disney and one of the great benefits of working for the Disney company is that they get the first showing of all the new attractions.  Last week, we were able to go see the new water show at California Adventure called World of Color.  If you've seen the water show in front of the Bellagio in Las Vegas then you'll have an idea of what this show looks like.

Pacific Wharf

Even though we got special tickets to see the show, we still had to get in line to get a fast pass then come back and wait.  Before we went, we got lunch at the Pacific Wharf Cafe where they sell bread bowls by Boudin's

Bakery Case

Sunday, June 13, 2010

The Boiling Crab

~A brief break from desserts~
 
Boiling Crab

The Boiling Crab
14241 Euclid St.
Garden Grove, CA 92842
(714) 265-2722

On Friday, my brothers and I went to The Boiling Crab for dinner.  I've heard about this place for a while now but never had a chance to make it out.  As much as I've heard about it... I realized I didn't know much about it.  I knew they had seafood but I didn't know how it was served... which I'll get to.

Water

The place is infamous for their waitlist.  Before we went my brother made a comment about how we should get ready to wait at least an hour... even more so considering it was on a Friday night.  We got there and it turns out it was only a about a 30 minute wait.  As we waited, I took out my camera and started shooting.  I told my brothers to smile and this is what they gave me:

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Disaster. Period.

Lately, I've been on a macaron making frenzy.  I thought after the last failed attempt I had a good handle on what I had done wrong so when I went to make the vanilla macarons for the second time I was pretty confident. 

That confidence was met with a fierce B....itch slap in the face as I took these out of the oven:

Cracked Out

It wasn't the same cracks as the previous ones.  This time, it was straight out spewing out in all different sides and even exploding on top.

Cracked Out 3

And my personal favorite... 

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Macarons vs. Macaroons

Macaron vs Macaroon

A while back I saw a post on Cake Spy on Macarons vs Macaroons that I thought was a great post.  When I was on my French macaron baking spree I passed them off to some friends.  I often got confused looks as they reached out to grab a macaron then asked:

"What's the difference between this macaron and the other macaroon?"

The post on Cake Spy gives a pretty good answer.  What I want to do in this post is highlight some similarities and differences between the two in terms of making them and of course, the delight of eating them.  


Macaron vs Macaroon 2

PROS
It's SUPER Easy to Make - When the steps to make it can be boiled down to about 3 steps, it's as easy as baking gets.  

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Neat Stuff: Duff's Stuff

Duff's Grafiti

A few weeks ago I was at Michael's and discovered Ace of Cakes' Duff Goldman's new line of cake decorating supplies.

IMG00214-20100518-1208

From cake mixes to fondant to "Graffiti".

IMG00215-20100518-1209