Whimisical Bakehouse Cookbook by Kaye Hansen & Liv Hansen

January 24, I received 2 cake books in the mail. One, Whimisical Bakehouse Cakebook, I have been lusting after since before our wedding in August. The book is written by a mother & daughter team by the names of Kaye Hansen & Liv Hansen. They don’t do fondant or gumpaste as they want everything on their cakes to taste delicious. That’s a wonderful philosophy!

On cakecentral.com, I had heard many glowing reports on their book and even more on their recipes which is why I have been so anxious to get the book. It’s a late Christmas present from Sarah, my youngest daughter. Between bouts of sickness & not finding the book locally, I’m just now getting it. Whimisical Bakehouse Cookbook was well worth the wait. I literally spend a couple of days drooling over the pages & incapable of deciding where to start. If you don’t already own this book, find it, buy it. It’s that simple.

Small heart cake pans measuring 4-inches across.

The decision was finally made to start with the Chocolate Butter Cake on page 65. The cake baked up beautifully. I made 2 6-inch layers and a handful of small heart-shaped cakes. Can hardly wait to try it. If I had been able to decide earlier in the day, I could have iced it & tasted it. But that will have to wait for another day. In fact, to be honest, I was so excited that I forgot to take any pictures of the process or the finished cake. That’s excited. I do have some pictures of the book  though for you to view.

Recipe page showing how I mark them.

If you’ll notice the shot of the recipe, I have an inked star by the name. That’s a little tip you might want to remember for your own  cooking adventures. Recipes in a cookbook that meet with my approval, I mark with a star & I also mark them in the index to make it easier to find recipes I’m trying to find & know I have in one of my cookbooks. If I don’t like it at all or think it could use huge improvements, I take the pen & X it out in ink so I don’t make that mistake twice.

Not sure how well you can see the stiffness, but it is a stiffer icing than usual.

Cream cheese icing is usually a delicious, but very soft icing. Worried about how it will travel the distance, so I’m going to try a recipe, Crusting Cream Cheese Icing, I found on cakecentral.com. The recipe has a few variations from the usual recipe, but I’m finding it hard to believe they will make that much difference. I’ll see.

Doesn't take much icing to "glue" the cake layer to the board.

Have mixed it up & I have to admit that it does seem a bit stiffer than the usual cream cheese icing. Smear a bit of icing on the fondant covered cake board & I’m ready to start. Unwrap a layer of cake & proceed to tort it so I’ll have a 4-layer cake. Lay the bottom tort on the cake board gently pressing it against the icing. Spread the icing & it spreads nicely. Torte the other layer & finish doing the crumb coat. Although at our house, I have to admit we call it priming the cake. What can I say, Jim has paint in his blood from working at Porter Paint so many years.

After icing the cake, I have to admit that I’m impressed with this recipe. Check out the cake: cream cheese icing & it’s almost completely smooth. I was even able to make roses! Not tight roses, but you can definitely tell they are roses. This is definitely a recipe I will be using again. Add the roses & other decorative features & it’s good to go except for the chocolate butterfly. That will be added on the other side of the mountain at the party site. Carefully place the cake in the cake box & all we’ll need to do in the morning is grab it & run. Ok, more accurately, we’ll carefully carry it to the van.

As you can tell, this icing allowed me to almost completely smooth the sides.

Roses that are actually made out of cream cheese icing!

A Miniature Reese

Prepare the brownie mix according to package directions for cake-like brownies. Fill the cups half full with brownie batter. Place about 1 tablespoon peanut butter chips in the center of the batter, or press 1 peanut butter cup into the batter in each muffin cup until the batter meets the top edge of the peanut butter cup. Bake for 18 to 20 minutes, until the cupcakes are set. When they can be handled safely, remove them from the muffin tins and let cool completely on wire racks. Store in an airtight container. Chocolate Ganache 1 by cheftaz 8 oz (240ml) cream 1 tbls butter (optional but makes it stay really shiny even after refrigerating) 1 oz sugar 12 oz (340 g) semi-sweet chocolate Break chocolate into 1/2 oz pieces and place in stainless steel bowl. Heat cream, butter and sugar to boiling. Pour over chocolate and let stand 5 minutes. Stir from center out until smooth. After refrigerating 1 hour then fill your piping bag. Or use to ice your cake by pouring or spreading (allow to cool to room temp first)

The cupcakes now have their ganache topping & decorative pieces of Peanut Butter cups.

I’m also going to add crumbled peanut butter cups on top of the ganache for a little decoration! As you can see, this is a very simple recipe. Do not be fooled by the simplicity of it. These cupcakes are fabulous. They would make a wonderful holiday treat or the perfect end to a simple meal. Actually, they make a great snack also. Had some overripe bananas on the kitchen counter so I decided to also make banana cupcakes. While the banana cupcakes baked, I decided I wanted to try playing with filled cupcakes. I felt a good choice of filling for this flavor of cupcake would be vanilla so I pulled a package of vanilla pudding out & mixed it up. Then the fun started.

I won!! Filling is now in the banana cupcakes.

I had never made filled cupcakes before so I did some research on the internet. The directions I found were step by step & looked simple enough so I thought I was set. Wrong! The directions I found called for snipping a hole in the corner of a baggie, sliding a round tip in it, &  filling the baggie with the filling mix. Simple enough, right? Actually this part worked quite well. Maybe I’m just not co-ordinated enough, but I could not get the tip to just ease into the top of the cupcake. All the tip did was bounce off. Determined not to be defeated, I used my other hand to force the tip into the cupcake & proceeded to gently squeeze the baggie as the directions said. Oops! Pudding exploded out of a hole that I had NOT cut into another corner of the baggie. Then when I tried to carefully withdraw the tip from the top of the cupcake, the tip retreated into the pudding instead of staying snugly in the cut corner. Ok, it was obvious a plan B was needed. Not sure why the directions hadn’t sensibly directed me to use a nice decorating bag. Pulled a 10 inch bag out of my cake supplies & fitted a #7 tip on it. Filled the bag with vanilla pudding & tried again. Much better. Took a bit of trial & effort to get the hang of how much filling to insert, but it didn’t take long. This method was much more satisfactory. Filled the cupcakes in a very short time. Frosted them with the buttercream icing I had made using some of the vanilla pudding to flavor it with & they were done.

Here's a closeup of the Peanut Butter Brownie Cupcakes.

Frosted & filled banana cupcakes.

Made up for it this evening by spending most of the evening on cakecentral.com. Have a ton of new recipes to try now. Going to be busy for awhile trying all sorts of new cupcake recipes. At least when I’m not canning or trying pear recipes. I foresee a VERY busy week ahead for me.