Blue Velvet is the Best Velvet

Today, Derek and I celebrate what we call our "nananiversary." This just so happens to be our third nananiversary. This is similar to an unbirthday, but with much more importance. Three years ago, Derek and I went to the Justice of the Peace and married six months before our big wedding. This will come as a shock to no one who understands military life. There was a large chance Derek would be deploying before our big wedding in April, so he wanted to make sure we were legally wed in the event the worst case scenario happened when he was at war, and that I would be provided for if this occurred. This is the reality that we live in, and I have an absolutely amazing husband that does everything in his power to ensure I am content and have a life that I consider to be an absolute dream. I am still not sure someone as cranky and uppity as I can be deserves such a devoted partner! I consider myself very fortunate, and I baked a blue velvet cake to celebrate our big "non-aversary" (I also bought us some bitchin' games for the Nintendo64 Derek got me). I think this is how we ended up coining it as our nananiversary...because we didn't truly become husband and wife until we took our vows in front of God, our family, and our friends on April 7, 2012 in Oak Arbor Church, nestled in the woods in Rochester, Michigan. Cue the slideshow...

My creation: Abstract meets organization- the cake version of D and me, pretty much.

Celebrating our J.P. ceremony with friends at one of Clovis's "finest," a.k.a, "most expensive" restaurants.

We like each other so much, we married each other twice. As you can see, cake has always played an important part in our relationship...

I literally start drooling when I think about how good our wedding cake was. Chocolate with a chocolate ganache and butter cream icing with cornelli lace decoration. I mean, not that the rest of the wedding wasn't absolutely spectacular- because it was- but cake tasting and cake eating were probably some of my favorite parts of the whole experience. Also, my wonderful stepdad (who also shares his birthday with our nananiversary so selflessly), made the coolest groom's cake to ever exist:

Yes, that IS an AC130H Spectre Gunship cake, complete with working lights and props.

Again, cake is really important to my entire family. So I wanted to learn how to do cornelli lace to make a tribute to the greatest cake in the world (the cake of destiny, if you will). When I found out how easy it was, I nearly kicked myself for not saving a couple hundred bucks and making the wedding cake my damn self. I am clearly in the wrong line of work with this whole noble college instructor business, trying to teach adults how to write proficiently. Let them eat cake, and let me show you how to let them! Let me also fail at brevity!

Yeah, its a box cake...but we're gonna make it taste like a bakery cake! Really!

I know, I know, I'm usually on an "everything from scratch" kick, but Duncan Hines really got their stuff together with this blue velvet box cake. Just make a few changes, and you'll have a much richer-tasting cake. Use milk instead of water, double the amount of butter, and add an extra egg. I am a huge fan of blue velvet cake. It is not NEARLY as heavy as red velvet, and frankly, I like to be able to eat what some may call an absurdly large piece of cake without feeling like I may sink if knocked into a puddle of water. They say absurd, I say shut up. So we'll be skipping the mixing of ingredients and baking info here because they're totes magotes on the box. On to the frosting!!

Ahh, Crisco sandwiched between extract, a baker's dream.

I did use homemade frosting for this cake because I wanted to be able to use the paper towel trick to smooth things out. This frosting is super easy to whip up, minus the fact that you and everything you own will be covered with powdered sugar after you make it. Just combine one cup of Crisco with a teaspoon of vanilla and half a teaspoon of almond extracts. Once these have blended nicely, add in one cup of powdered sugar, and mix. Then add another cup of powdered sugar, and mix. Then add two tablespoons of milk, and mix. Repeat the sugar/sugar/milk/duck/duck/goose business one more time. If you want to dye your frosting, use gel frosting and do it at the very end. Since I was going for more of an angelic/romantic (yeah, on purpose, whataboutit?) look, I wanted plain white frosting.

Stack your cakes, frosting in between the two levels, of course.

Do not forget the all-important crumb coat!! Then place in the freezer for 20 minutes so it can harden,
like most things do when you place them in the freezer for 20 minutes.

Then use the remainder of the frosting to frost the cake, and place back in the freezer for 20 minutes.
Once you remove it, take your Viva paper towel and use it to smooth out any lumps or bumps.

While my cake was freezing, I went ahead and whipped up another half a batch of the homemade frosting. This is for the cornelli lace, so it needs to be super thin. So, half a cup of Crisco, half a teaspoon of vanilla, a dash of almond, two cups of powdered sugar, but keep the four tablespoons of milk to thin things out. The thing about cornelli lace, you gotta use a lot of pressure while doing it, so unless you enjoy having claw hands and forcing arthritis on yourself, thin that icing out, yo! But man alive, it is so much fun and so EASY to do. Place your icing into a piping bag with a number 1 or number 2 Wilton tip. Then you just go crazy with the swirly lines! I call this the amoeba effect. Never have single-celled organisms looked so tasty.

You just don't want the lace to intersect or touch at any point.
Start at the very bottom of the cake, and swirl around making various "s" shapes.

I later added a border at the bottom of the cake,
so this is why I worked my way from bottom to top with my squiggly lines.

You don't want to be able to tell where the cornelli lace starts or ends, either.
Once I added my top and bottom borders, I filled in more lace at the top.

Why? Why did I not know how easy this was? It is one of those things that when executed properly, makes you look like a friggin' cake genius. And I think we all know how much I like looking like ANY kind of genius, so this is right up my alley. I now must resist the urge to cornelli lace all the things. I also tried a new border technique for this cake, and its success has made my head so large it is hard to fit through normal, non-genius sized doorways. Let me teach you my ways, oh normal-headed one.

Start by fitting tip 21 to a piping bag, and add in decorator-consistency frosting.
I wanted a color that nicely accented the cake's white frosting,
so I went with the same blue of the cake itself.

Now, make an S shape on the bottom of your cake,
ensuring you have space under the first "hump."

Then, bury your tip in the hump, and draw another S shape.
This will cross OVER the top of your first S.

Repeat this S-hump filling (teehee, that sounds naughty) around the entire border.

Now you can see why this is called a rope technique. I simply repeated the same process on the top of the cake, and it really does look like a braided rope. Man, I love it when things work according to plan. Surprise, surprise, I added sprinkles. They will never go out of cake fashion!

This. This is my masterpiece. My tasty, tasty masterpiece. I mentioned this was for my husband, right? I waited for him to come home to eat any, I SWEAR. This is another one of the few instances when my husband doesn't lose the battle with my insane OCD tendencies. Also, the fact that I made sure our wedding anniversaries are exactly six months apart to the day- I made things super easy for him with my uberorganization. Did I mention my birthday is on January 7th as well? He pretty much just has to check the calendar on the 7th of each month to make sure nothing important is going on. Why yes, I do think this makes me sound like a good wife and not someone who is in desperate need of a padded cell.

Get in mah bellay!

Yeah, we totally cut the cake Sunday evening after I finished decorating it. Wait two whole days? I think I've made it vehemently clear it was hard enough just to wait for him to come home from watching football, let alone wait TWO WHOLE DAYS? Pfft...we all know I have literally no will power when it comes to cake. She is my mistress. Always tempting me and later filling me with regret (and calories). At least we indulge as a married couple, right? If eating a lot of cake together is the worst thing we're doing, I think we're solid. My husband seems to have a tapeworm that keeps him in impossibly good shape (we call him Tommy Tapes...seriously), and I have Jillian Michaels to kick my uppity, cake-eating ass.

This cake also paired nicely with the bouquet Derek bought me!
A Fox family win!

We're going to enjoy eating this cake for the next few days, until our insides are completely dyed blue (this gives me the opportunity to say 'I blue myself' at least five times). After a romantic trip, or my idea of a romantic trip, to go watch hockey and drink in a real bar, I'll be back next week to blog about making more treats for your pampered pooch! Til next time, my fellow eaters!

I Excel at Eating My Feelings: A Story About Pie and Peebs.

We'll get to the Autumn tree cherry pie eventually, I promise.

I spend most days with my feelings switched to the "sarcastic apathy" position. When something comes along and causes me to step outside my comfort zone, I usually try to stay busy cooking, cleaning, baking, decorating, whatever, until the catalyst for change has receded and I can go back to feeling better about myself and my unwavering witticism. On occasion, something can happen that causes me to actually have to stop all those robotic, repetitive motions that help me cope with change and deal with what's going on.

It comes as no secret to anyone that people aren't my cup of tea; my heart was made to love and nurture animals. The word "pet" simply does not justify what the animals that past or present make up my home mean to me. They are my family, my children, and last week we lost the world's spikiest daughter to a congenital heart defect. We took Peebs into the vet thinking she had pneumonia due to her lack of appetite and labored breathing that happened in a matter of one night. It came as a huge gut punch when the vet and tech took her back to X-ray and her heart failed; after the vet's many attempts to revive her, she died on the table in X-ray alone, without her people by her side. Nothing any of us could have done would've prevented this from happening. It was simply her time, but this never makes things any easier.

The face that starts a million "Awwws."

I have always been so unbelievably fascinated by Peeberton: how something could be so small and delicate, yet strong-willed and so tough was incredible. She was pretty much the animal version of me, and I was her person. I was one of two people in this entire world who she would actually let give her belly rubs and the occasional butt scratch (we all love them). I made it my mission to give her the best life a hedgehog could ever have from the instant she became ours. My favorite moments were spent watching her chow down on fruits, eggs, chicken, etc., and when we had time alone, to stretch out on the couch and wrap her in her blanket before laying down and placing her on my chest. Feeling her little feet shuffle around on me until she found the perfect spot and plopped down (with more oomph than any other one pound creature, might I add)  made my heart burst. It it odd to think that such a small, bristly creature could bring such a large, much needed softness into my heart. I am rendered with an unbelievable crushing guilt that her life was cut so short. Every time I go into her room in the morning to open the blinds, my heart feels so very empty now that she is not there to help me greet the day and generally be cranky about having to be awake in the first place...like I said, we got each other. Until we leave this house, I will forever tell her goodnight when I close the blinds at night, too.

I am not good at expressing my feelings outside of the written word. I could never fight back the pain and tell people how even though she is gone, she is still in my soul- in my introverted and quiet ways, in my devotion to my "people," in my perseverance to keep fighting no matter how big the problem is compared to me- she is my 'spirit hedge' now. And how lucky I am to have loved and cared for a creature so much that saying goodbye to her is so hard.

My hedge, my heart.

In the days following her passing, I spent a lot of time baking up a storm to help me sort out my emotions, so that I could subsequently eat my feelings. I may or may not have wanted to just have ice cream for dinner one night. What can I say...its better than driving to the nearest Costco to obtain their entire supply of Pinot Grigio to drink my feelings. I've never had an ice cream hangover before, and I refuse to believe that a food so good could ever cause pain beyond a brain freeze (and if you're mixing the proper ratio of ice cream to hot fudge to Andes mint chips- this never happens). Along with cinnamon caramel pull-apart rolls I made for brunch this weekend, I also made my mother's homemade cherry pie recipe. This is the next best thing to getting an actual hug from my mother when I'm feeling down in the dumps.

Because it is absolutely delicious and fall-themed.

This ain't canned-filling pie, oh no. Way better than that. I mean, there is a can with fruit involved, but not that simple fruit cobbler stuff. While I initially wanted to carve a hedgehog into the pie, I decided that unbelievable cuteness would've rendered me unwilling to ever cut and actually eat the pie, so instead I carved a tree losing its leaves into the top of the pie. I will explain how to do that in just a moment, but first let me show you how simple this delish pie is to make!

So I used pre-made pie crust, gimme a break, its been a tough week.

You could make your very own pie crust if you like. I've done so before, but find the pre-made Pillsbury pie crusts are simply the greatest thing ever when you want a pie that works excellently as a serving dish for vanilla ice cream- golden brown and crisped to perfection. So here's what you need for the ultimate comfort food pie:

• Two pie crusts @ room temperature (the Pillsbury stuff comes with two, yet another reason to cut corners!)
• 1 can TART cherries in their juice- not cherry pie filling- just Oregon canned tart cherries that even I can find at my shitty Walmart in the fruit aisle next to cereal
• 3/4 C sugar
• 1/4 tsp of almond extract (the only extract better than vanilla)
• 1/8 tsp of salt
• 3 TBS of flour
• 2 TBS of butter- that's where the nice "hugging" feeling from Mom comes from. Thanks, butter.

Yeah, I occasionally eat a cherry or two during this process.

Dump all of the ingredients except butter (and the crust, obviously) together in a bowl and mix. Boom- there's your pie filling. I know, right? So easy, but so good! Take one pie crust and gently place it into a pie tin.

Yeah, don't just take a spoon to this and start eating...resistance is key.

Throw the pie filling into your dish lined with the bottom crust, and then take your butter and cut it into little slices and dot the top of the pie with it. You don't need to be as OCD as me and make sure all butter is evenly spaced, as I sincerely hope you're nowhere near as bat-shit crazy as I am.

I will cut you.

Take a small paring knife and trim the excess bottom crust around the entire pie, like so. Once the bottom edge has been trimmed flush with the pie tin, top your pie with a zebra. Just making sure you're paying attention. Top it with the remaining pie crust, and get ready to flute the edges so your pie is sealed and you can make it look next-level awesome.

To flute: Take your thumb and index finger, and press them into the edge of your pie.
This will create a nice indentation.

While keeping your index finger and thumb on the crust, place your other thumb into the indentation and push in,
pressing your thumb into the indentation. Repeat, moving your "original" thumb into the new indentation
while your index finger creates a new dent, and your other thumb presses firmly and kind of pushes in the crust again.

Pushing in creates those pretty little waves your see here alongside my horribly
unmanicured fingernails. Whomp, whomp. The space in between these fingers is where
my other thumb was pressing in. Can't take a picture of that as I do not have three arms. Yet.

Repeat around all edges of the pie until you're left with a gorgeous fluted crust!

Now, you could be a lazy bum and simply cut slits in the top crust to vent, or you could go the extra mile and decorate your pie like a decent human being. Anything goes here, really- I've done hearts, a turkey for Thanksgiving, an airplane because why not, etc. I chose to do a tree losing its leaves because it is officially fall, and I think everything baked during this fine season should have something to do with either pumpkins or trees or you're totally missing the point.

Free hand, take a paring knife and lightly outline a tree into the top pie crust.

Carefully cut out your outline, being sure not to pierce the bottom crust.
It will leave you with a strange Pagan-esque looking symbol on top of your pie-
Dean Winchester would be proud. Plus one if you love Supernatural and got that reference.

Now comes time to make the leaves. Take the scraps from your tree outline, roll them together, and then flatten them out on top of a piece of parchment paper.

Use the paring knife to draw a curved line into your dough.

Draw an oppositely curved line on the other side, and you've got a leaf!

Take it a step further, and lightly draw in veins on the leaf with your knife.

Then lightly place the leaves around your branches,
and you can make some that are "falling" into another leaf pile on the ground.

Now, I recommend placing your pie in the fridge for at least a half an hour so that your crust can settle in and decide not to completely crumble apart in the oven. Crust is a wicked, feeble mistress. Once your settling time is up, take small sheets of foil and line the edges of your crust while the oven preheats to 425.

I find this to be the most maddening part of making pie.
One side goes on, the other side falls off..grumble, grumble.

Once your oven is ready for action, bake your pie at 425 for 40 minutes. Once the 40 minutes are up, remove those pain in the ass foil shields and let your edges brown for an additional 10-15 minutes in the oven. Remove and let sit:

C'mon, I JUST want to eat you...

I won't lie to you...the hardest part about making a good pie is waiting for it to cool off so it isn't liquid hot magma and you can eat it. I try to make my pies after lunch so they are ready for eating for dinner. I mean, after dinner. You can't have pie for dinner! You can, however, have it for breakfast because it is a fruit- and pastry-based meal...turnovers-schmurnovers.

Baking pie will make most of life's horrible experiences at least somewhat tolerable because you can't be 100 percent depressed while eating a good dessert- this is simply a fact. I want to thank everyone for their unbelievable outpouring of support over the past week. I am reminded at times like these that there are decent, loving people out there in this world who understand loss and how hard it can be to lose a loved one, and I am very fortunate that these are the people I call my friends and family. You all are simply wonderful, so thank you for letting me pour my heart and pie out to you this week, and any other should I need to. Til next time, my fellow eaters!

That's all, nothing left to see here folks...just an adorable hedge tush.

Tis the Season for Pumpkin EVERYTHING.

Ahhh fall is in the air here in Clovis...and the cow poop smell is noticeably absent from it, making it even more wonderful! Autumn is my absolute favorite time of the year- yelling at the TV during football games, going insane with Halloween decorations, and of course, eating anything and everything that involves pumpkin flavoring. Except pumpkin pie. As far as pies go, pumpkin is definitely my least favorite...it lacks a certain charm provided by fruit pies, and the texture makes me feel like I'm eating old, mushy, rotting pumpkin insides. Lovely, right? So instead of baking pumpkin pie to celebrate fall's greatly appreciated arrival, I made a pumpkin bundt cake with cinnamon glaze. I did it all from scratch because I had a fervent desire to not only eat everything pumpkin this week and end up with an Autumn hangover, but also make sure my house smelled like how I imagine Heaven or an actual bakery smells, too. I also love this recipe because it is low calorie, and I can come up with any number of excuses to eat cake with each meal: "It's PUMPKIN- so healthy you CAN have it for breakfast," "It's lunch, I need a semisweet palate cleanser," or "It's dinner, why are you still so surprised I am going for thirds with this cake? How long have we been married again?"

It contains your daily recommended servings of pumpkin and deliciousness.

For being homemade, this cake did not take an entire day away from me to make, and the ingredients were all already in my pantry save for the canned pumpkin because I never want to prematurely believe it is fall only for an Indian Summer to ruin things for me. Mother Nature and I have never been on good terms- every summer she threatens to mow me down, and that one time she almost made me miss my own wedding (I'd offer her some cake to smooth things over if I could). I found the recipe at Taste of Home and made many adjustments to take it up a notch so that with each bite I can actually taste fall and subsequently fall into a delightfully induced food coma. So let me break down this simply tasty recipe for you so that you too can be the bearer of Autumn for your own family, thus earning you a solid opportunity to ask plenty of favors from your loved ones (I mean, my husband helped me clean the house today...just saying, it may have been because of the cake).

Clearly the canned pumpkin deserved to be center stage...it has been waiting a year after all.

I happen to have amassed an amazing collection of herbs and spices over the years thanks to the enjoyment I find from baking and cooking, so you may or may not need to grab some spices from your local hell pit (commonly called "Walmart"). Here's the breakdown:

• 2 cups of white sugar
• 1/2 cup of brown sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 3 cups flour
• 1 cup oil
• 3 eggs
• 1 15 oz. can pure pumpkin

See, super simple for a list with thirteen different ingredients! Don't you roll your eyes at me...you should have ground ginger in your pantry because it is the greatest thing ever. Making Asian food? Add ground ginger. Making spice cakes? Add ground ginger. Trying not to throw up? Drink a Gingerale. You get the idea. Ginger also happened to be my favorite Spice Girl, so the fascination goes back to the early 90s. If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with ground ginge!

I kinda wanted to stop at this point and just eat the bowl and call it a day.

 First things first, mix together the sugars, extract, and oil. This will form a crumbly paste that tastes like the dreams of unicorns. Try not to eat it all, and then add the eggs (one at a time) and beat well. You could still eat some of the paste at this point if you're not scared of salmonella (I too live dangerously).

However, I do not recommend eating the bowl of dry mix.

As the bowl of sugar/egg/oil awesomeness mixes, throw together the spices, baking soda, and flour in another bowl. Blend well, and open your can of pumpkin, and set aside. This will be infinitely easier if you're right-handed. I almost always require two tries or a tetanus shot after using a can opener, but the cake is totally worth being reminded of my left-handed shortcomings.

Add a cup or so of the dry mix to the sugar paste, and mix away.
Low speed at first unless making kitchen messes it totally your thing like it is mine.

Then mix in a third of the canned pumpkin. Blend well!

You'll repeat the dry mix/blend/pumpkin/blend process probably two more times until you've used all of your ingredients and have a huge bowl of cake, ready to be poured into only your finest of bundt pans. Just make sure you've greased up your pan thoroughly so the cake comes out easily later, and you don't leave a huge mess for yourself to clean up when trying to scrub your pan and all its damn intricate nooks and crannies. Let your cake bake at 350 until it smells done. The accurate, scientific timing is approximately 50 minutes for those of you not blessed with a kitchen-timer schnauz (I imagine IKEA will make these eventually).

Once a toothpick comes out clean, you're good to go. Let the cake rest for ten minutes.

After a tantalizingly long ten minutes, remove the cake from the pan to cool on a rack.

Doesn't it look scrumptious??! Yeah, you're damn right it does. It will make your whole house smell like the memory of your favorite Thanksgiving. For me, that happens just about every year when the Cowboys lose their Turkey Day game, but it still makes me giddy with delight (both the smell and the losses). At this point, you could dust the cake with powdered sugar, but I recommend going one step further and making my also very simple cinnamon glaze to drizzle on your cake.

Yeah, never a recipe without butter...you should be used to that by now.

You'll need:

• 2 TBS milk
• 1 TBS butter
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar

See, you know you have all this in your pantry, too! Don't make me go on about why you should also always have a pound of pure cut cocaine powdered sugar in your pantry like I did for dear old ground ginger. All you need to do here is melt the butter, mix in the milk, then mix in the sugars and cinnamon.

The hardest part about making this is not eating it by the spoonful.

Once your cake has cooled, take a large spoon and slowly drizzle the glaze back and forth over the top of your cake. The best part is this doesn't require a ton of effort to make it look gorgeous and delicious at the same time:

Oh my glazed greatness...

I had to take it up a notch and make this look even more like the cake embodiment of fall and added red sprinkles to the top as a nice finishing touch. Gold would have also worked like a charm, too. Just add what you like until you feel you've sufficiently allowed fall into your home and had it take over your entire life and made you its prisoner (tastiest form of Stockholm Syndrome, ever). 

You complete me.

This cake is by no means light...yet it is still somehow healthy. I attribute this to the magic of the pumpkin. It really is the great pumpkin, Charlie Brown. This cake marks the beginning of fall baking in the Fox house. Get ready to be overwhelmed by pie and other pumpkiny goodness where the blog is concerned for the next few weeks. I am going to make you so sick of fall you'll be praying for winter...when I can divulge you in the greatness that is "Christmas baking." I can keep you fed with the finest of baked goods 24/7/365, never you fear. Til next time, my fellow eaters!