I haven't had much time this last week to do much of anything. I am planning to make a birthday cake for my husband in the very near future. So since I haven't gotten to do anything interesting, I went and dug up some stuff I made in the past. 

I'm big on making cupcakes. I love them, there's so much you can do with them. 

These were a set of four different types of cupcakes that I made for my friend, Mark's, birthday. He was having a party and I wanted to do something special for him. 

These were just coloured vanilla cupcakes with plain white vanilla icing. I decorated them with coloured candy stars and coloured sugar. 

These cupcakes were orange, lemon cupcakes. I mixed the lemon flavoured batter with yellow food colouring and orange flavoured batter with orange food colouring and then swirled them together in the cupcake tins. I did the same with the icing. 

These were the second best of the batch. These were neapolitan cupcakes. As the lemon-orange ones, I separated the batter and flavoured and coloured them to taste and look like strawberry, vanilla and chocolate ice cream. I topped them with fluffy vanilla icing, a fresh strawberry half and then drizzled with chocolate.

These were the hit of the night. These were pina colada cupcakes. I flavoured them with both real coconut and pineapple. I decorated them with fluffy icing and rolled them in dried coconut. I put a sour cherry candy on top and used coloured licorice to look like straws. They were so moist and tasty, and not to mention look really cool. 

These were from a different night. I made these with real apple and then tried to make them look like the apples that I used to make them. I used tissue and tooth picks to make the leaves, unfortunately and inedible garnish. 

These were the very first rainbow cupcakes that I ever made. They are pretty much the same as the ones I made for Mark's party. But since they were the first I made, they deserved to be shown too. 

So that's all I have for now. I have pictures for previous recipes that I've posted, but haven't pulled them from the camera yet. I'll do that soon. Maybe next post, I'll update the old ones with the pictures I have. 

But for now, ciao!

Banana Bread

I have known this recipe all my life. But you know something? I don't know if this recipe came from my late Oma or from my Mom. They both made it all the time, but I don't know who's recipe it was. Either way, I have always loved it!

In later years, one of my Mom's friends told her to try making it with chocolate chips. It was like the recipe was reborn into something even more fantastic! I never did like it when nuts were added (that was my Mom's favourite), but chocolate chips! Oh my god! I fell in love all over again.

Now my Mom hasn't done much for baking in recent years and the torch has been passed to me to do the baking for the family. I still make this whenever I have old bananas in the house that are too black to eat.

I've heard of people throwing the bananas in the freezer to blacken them, but I prefer to use bananas that have been left out to the point of turning completely black. I have no idea why it tastes better and why you don't die from eating rotten bananas, I just know that unless they are black, the banana bread just doesn't taste as good.

Now on to the recipe!

You will need:

• ⅓ c. shortening
• ⅔ c. sugar
• 2 well beaten eggs
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 c. mashed blackened bananas 
• 1 ¾ c. flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• ¼ tsp. salt
• 1 c. chopped walnuts (optional)
• 1 c. [milk]chocolate chips (optional)


• bread tin or muffin/cupcake tin


Preheat the oven to 350°F.


Cream together the shortening and sugar until smooth and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla and blend together well. Set aside. In another bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, alternating with the mashed banana. 


Grease a bread tin with shortening. You can also grease the muffin/cupcake tin. I don't like using papers for banana bread. But if you're looking to making cleaning easier, use the papers. Fill what ever type of baking tin you have approximately half full with the batter. Bake for 50-55 minutes of until a tooth pick comes out clean. 


This recipe doesn't turn out that dark. If the tops of the bread turns brown, you've baked it for too long and it will be dry. If you dried it out, it can be salvaged if you put it in the microwave for about a minute with a glass of water. I recommend only doing this with the portion you will eat and just wrap up the rest for later. 


This recipe also freezes very well. I often make banana cupcakes and throw them in the freezer for my husband to take to lunch with him. He usually just takes one out of the freezer on his way to work, leaves it on his desk and by lunch , it's defrosted and good to eat. 


I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I have over the years.

Graham Cracker Almond Cookies

This past Saturday I threw a surprise birthday party for my Mother in Law's 60th birthday. I made it to be a pot luck BBQ. Not everyone brought something and not everyone who brought something made it themselves. Though one super great big hit was this peanut brittle type stuff that Bill's Auntie Roberta brought. Everyone asked who made it and can they have the recipe and just yesterday, she sent me an email with it. It's surprisingly easy considering how good it is! So, today I am trying it out. 


You will need:

• 1 cup butter (do not use margarine!)
• ¾ cup brown sugar
• graham crackers
• 3½ oz. sliced almonds 


• glass jelly roll pan
• tin foil

Before I go on, I have to say that I mixed things up a bit and decided to use pecans instead of almonds. I like to save my almonds for an awesome coffee short bread recipe I have. 


Melt butter and sugar together over medium heat, bringing to a gentle boil for 5 minutes. Careful to stir enough to not let it burn (butter and sugar can and will burn really quickly). When it's a syrupy consistency, it's ready. 


While melting the butter and brown sugar, I lined my pan with tin foil and greased it well with butter. Then I lined the bottom with whole graham crackers and used halfies for the end row. 


I used my food processor to lightly chop the nuts. Then sprinkle them as even as possible over top the graham crackers. 


When the butter and sugar mixture is ready, pour it very gently over the the top of the graham crackers and nuts. If you pour too fast, all the nuts will end up at the edges of the pan. 


Bake the whole thing at 375°F for 10 minutes. 


When it's done, be very careful with the pan. The liquid is very hot and will burn very badly if you get it on your skin. 


Let it cool to room temperature before breaking it up into cookie sized pieces. 


And then eat them up like there's no tomorrow because they're just that good!


Hope you like it!

Black bottom cupcakes!

I got this recipe a few years ago from my friend, Jenn. I begged her for it after she brought these over for a party one time. Over the years, I have played around allot with the recipe. Everything from simply putting food colouring into the cream cheese mixture to make black and orange cup cakes for Halloween, to changing the flavours from chocolate to something else.


I will share the original recipe for those who like to stick to the basics, as well as a few of my tried and tested variations that turned out super good!


Original recipe:

1 - 8 oz. package of creamcheese
1 egg, slightly beaten
⅓ c. sugar
1 - 6 oz. package of chocolate chips

Blend all ingredients together and set aside. 

1 cup sugar
1½ cups flour
¼ cup cocoa powder
1 tsp. salt
1 cup water
1 tbsp. vinegar
1 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 350°F. Blend all ingredients together. Fill lined muffin tins about ½ full of the cake batter. Drop large spoonfuls of the cream cheese mixture on top of the batter. Bake 20-25 minutes.

My variations:

First of all, I have all sorts of shapes and sizes of small cake tins. I have plain ones, I have mini ones, I have fairy cake tins, large and small, and I even have an odd tall and skinny shaped win from Ikea that I don't know what the style is called. Each different tin that I have used, it takes a different time to bake. It has taken as little as 15 minutes, but never longer than 25 minutes to bake. 

I also beat the crap out of the cream cheese mixture with an electric mixer until the volume of the mix pretty much doubles. I find it makes the cream cheese mixture go alot further without making it taste less. I prefer the cheesecake part of the cup cakes over the chocolate cake part, so if it seems like there's more of it, I think it tastes better.

When I make the chocolate cream cheese version, I always double the amount of cocoa powder in the cake mixture and I always use milk chocolate chips. In my opinion that tastes best, and it must, since they usually don't last long enough to even cool down when I make them.

The coconut variation that I make, I add the same amount of unsweetened coconut to the mixtures as would be for chocolate chips in the cream cheese and cocoa powder in the batter. I also add coconut extract instead of vanilla. 

The white chocolate raspberry ones I make, I put in ½ cup of unsweetened raspberry jam (usually the no sugar added Smuckers stuff), cherry extract instead of vanilla and a few drops of red food colouring in the batter. If I don't add the food colouring, the colour they turn out looks putrid. Tastes good, but looks awful. In the cream cheese mixture, I don't add the sugar or chocolate chips, but instead put ½ cup of white hot chocolate powder. The brand I use is from Second Cup. 

When I make them "backwards", I leave the cake mixture just as vanilla flavoured. I sometimes sneak some real vanilla bean in there, but only if I have it on hand. It's not dire and tastes fine without, just tastes better with. I put the ½ cup of cocoa I would normally put in the batter, into the cream cheese mixture and put white chocolate chips in, instead of milk chocolate chips. 

So there's my novel on one simple recipe, lol! 

New to Blogger.

I look forward to writing about all my silly adventures in the kitchen. I love cooking and baking and I make up things or modify recipes all the time. Why not share and get even more ideas? That's what the internet is so great for!