Candy | Shake Bake and Party

April 4, 2012
by Angela 6 Comments

Cadbury Dream

While scrolling through Pinterest the other day (instead of doing something productive like laundry) I came across a recipe for a jelly bean martini. With all the delicious varieties or Easter candy available you would think there would be tons of Easter themed cocktails but I have only seen a few. I thought of all the different types of jelly beans, coconut eggs, peanut butter eggs, Cadbury Creme Eggs…

There had to be a Cadbury Creme Egg Cocktail! I did a search. I found a recipe for a Cadbury Caramel Cream Martini. While that sounds delicious, in my opinion nothing beats the taste of the original Cadbury Creme Egg.

Since I couldn’t find a recipe I decided to invent my own! I got some Cadbury Creme Eggs at the drugstore (buy one get one free – yes!) and then headed to the liquor store. I didn’t really know what type of liquor I wanted to use but came upon the vodka section first.

PB&J vodka, cucumber vodka, bacon vodka (breakfast martini anyone?), a vodka flavor called Dude that is the color of Mountain Dew…there are so many bizarre vodka flavors out there that I was half hoping to spot one called Cadbury Creme Egg. Alas, I did not, so I headed to the next aisle. I was considering the Baileys when I saw something called RumChata – a rum cream.

I had never heard of this before but I thought – cream, Creme Egg, sounds good! I brought it home and as soon as I opened it I knew it wasn’t going to work. All I could smell was cinnamon. Definitely not an ingredient I want to mix with my chocolate egg. Since I opened it, I tried a little nip of the RumChata and it is REALLY GOOD stuff. I will definitely be experimenting with that in the future, but I had a Cadbury Creme Egg Cocktail to concoct.

I decided to try to use some of the Pinnacle Chocolate Whipped I had on the shelf. I poured a shot of that into my trusty Magic Bullet, then added a splash of chocolate milk (I used chocolate soy milk since that was all I had). Next I chopped up a Cadbury Creme Egg (messy!), dumped that in there with some ice and blended. I think adding the ice before I blended the creme egg might not have been the best idea because the creme filling got a little hard from the cold and I had to chop at it quite a bit with a spoon to break it down. So if you want to make this I’d suggest blending the egg and the liquids first, then adding ice and you definitely want to make this because it was AWESOME! I rimmed my martini glass with some of the leftover yellow sanding sugar I had from making Peeps Bunny Cookies, poured in my mixture and voila! The Cadbury Dream was born…

Cheers to the Easter Bunny!

March 25, 2012
by Angela 6 Comments

Foghat, Thunderbirds and a First Birthday

In January my friend’s son had his first birthday. I made the cake, cupcakes and cookie favors. I will share some pics of those with you shortly, but first some other firsts…

The first time I laid eyes on my all time favorite stuffed animal, my Bedtime Bear Care Bear..

Can you see the love?

I was 4. I am now 32. I cannot sleep without that bear under my arm.

My first time operating heavy machinery…

My first pet, our dog Britt…

He was awesome. He loved pizza crusts. He would beg for one, we would oblige, he would run with it into another room and then run back to beg for another. We figured he was scarfing them down but he was actually depositing them into a pile behind my dad’s recliner.

My first car was a 1986 Ford Thunderbird. For some reason it was dubbed the Thunderchicken. For some other reason, I don’t seem to have any pictures of it.

My first concert…No, it wasn’t New Kids on the Block or Debbie Gibson (although my first ever perfume was Electric Youth). My first concert was the WDRE Fest – June 2, 1996. Here was the lineup: No Doubt, 311, Filter, Toadies, Cracker, Fishbone, Gravity Kills, The Nixons, God Lives Underwater and Spin Doctors. I’d say that was a damn good first concert. My first “classic rock” show (At the time, this referenced music from the 60′s and 70′s. Apparently now classic rock includes bands that I grew up listening to, like Bon Jovi, which means I am officially old) followed two months later.

I was sixteen and I went with my mom. The bands were Iron Butterfly and Foghat. I watched women with a good ten years on my mother, women who looked like they could have been my teachers at school, screaming like teenagers and rushing the stage trying to grab the drummer from Foghat’s ass. It was a good time.

The first time I was a bridesmaid (sharing this one because I LOVED my hair!)…

First time I ever saw the Pacific Ocean…

There are some firsts that thankfully went undocumented… The first time I threw up from drinking too much (Mad Dog 20/20 Orange – it will never again pass my lips), the first time I was called Ma’am, the first (and only) time I watched the movie Twilight (I still have nightmares about the bad acting…”Your hand, it’s so cold!”).

Then there was the little man’s first birthday. It was my first time making a crown shaped cake! They had chosen a prince theme so I also made cupcakes with blue chocolate crowns on top and of course, I made #1 cookies.

AJ has many, many firsts ahead and despite my ever advancing age, hopefully I do too!

March 5, 2012
by Angela 3 Comments

Lego My Organic Waffle

So tonight I was sitting around making myself hungry watching Diners Drive-Ins and Dives. I wandered into the kitchen in search of something tasty for dinner and for some reason decided to make waffles. Not just any old waffles though – organic blueberry waffles. Sounded wholesome, smelled great heating up in my toaster, tasted…like cardboard. I didn’t think it was possible to mess up a frozen waffle. I was wrong. I won’t name names, but this was just not right.

Back in front of the TV, completely unfulfilled and Guy Fieri is mocking me with some delicious looking pizzas. I think about the crummy, disappointing waffles. Then I think “leggo my Eggo!” which then reminds of LEGOS which leads me to today’s post. LEGO Man cookies!!

My coworker was having a LEGO themed birthday party for her son and she asked me to make cookies for favors. We decided on a cookie in the shape of the LEGO Man’s head, and chocolate LEGO bricks. I found a LEGO shaped chocolate mold on eBay (what CAN’T you find on eBay?! ((oh yeah, you can’t find a LEGO Man head shaped cookie cutter, so I made a template out of a coffee can lid))

Here are my cookies, lined up and ready to decorate.

I knew I wanted a smoother finish on these cookies than I had on my angel cookies so I Googled how to decorate cookies with royal icing. The short version is that you make the royal icing per the recipe, outline the cookies, then water down the icing to a very runny consistency which you then use to “flood” the cookie. The outline can be done in the same color you will be using to flood, or it can be done in a different color. For the look I wanted, I went with black (more on THAT disaster after the pictures!) then flooded with yellow.

(note my handy mustard squeezy bottle – perfect for dispensing runny icing!)

You may be thinking to yourself, “What disaster? They look pretty damn good!” Just as I learned tonight that the word ORGANIC in relation to waffles really means DRYWALL, on that night I learned that it is really hard to make icing black. I knew that it wouldn’t be as simple as mixing some black gel color into the white icing (because black + white = gray) so I also Googled how to deal with that ahead of time. All I had to do was make a different color first – blue,brown, dark green, mix of everything?! – and THEN add the black. Well, I tried that and got gray. I had also read to try adding cocoa powder so I dumped some of that in there with a little more black gel color. STILL gray. Finally in desperation I mixed in ALL of the black gel color I had. Black icing accomplished!!!!

So I outlined and flooded and let them dry overnight, then I piped on the faces the next day.

Once they were dry I started bagging them up with my chocolate LEGO blocks…

….only to discover that apparently dumping an entire pot of black gel color (along with other colors and cocoa powder) into your royal icing can really dry it out. : / The faces on my poor LEGO Men started flaking off!!! I packed them up as carefully as possible, boxed them, took them in to my coworker, apologized and told her not to move the damn things until she was ready to give them away. Luckily they survived the trip and she was really happy with them (at least that’s what she told me!). I had two coworkers who saw them ask if they were supposed to be computers, so it would seem that there are people who actually have never seen LEGOs before – who knew?

Anyway, I hope that someone out there can learn from my mistakes. Organic Blueberry Waffles suck, and don’t over-color your royal icing. I have since read that Americolor Super Black gel paste does the trick, and I have a bottle of it just waiting to be used next week when I attempt to make Pot of Gold cookies for St. Patrick’s Day! Stay tuned…