Baking Adventures.

Like I have said before: I love crafting! And by crafting I mean any kind of creative outlet there is. This includes dancing and painting and baking! I have discovered a fabulous blog called Bakingdom, it is awesome and it makes me want to be a baker and make pretty things that are also delicious. Like this, and this, and this! Not only are they pretty but they are also Harry Potter!

Anyway, looking at those beautiful cookies and cakes made me decide that I needed to do some baking and unleash my edible creative side. So, my wonderful friend Rebecca, who also loves baking, and I decided to make a bunch of Theta themed cookies to get ready for initiation. We also decided to try our hand at making a vertical cake (which is not as easy as Bakingdom makes it look).

We ventured out at about four on Saturday afternoon and bought a whole bunch of stuff in order to make sugar cookies from scratch.

First, we baked all four of the cakes. First, two rounds that are funfetti and two round of white cake, one dyed blue and one dyed red/pink.

We baked two at a time which worked out well because Rebecca had to work for a few hours so I just hung out and switched out the cakes when the first set was done. 

Then I leveled them off and stuck them in the freezer until Rebecca returned. When Rebecca did come back we made the sugar cookie dough but it had to chill for a while so I decided to take a crack at putting together the vertical layer cake.

It wasn't that hard to do, but it still did not come out exactly like the picture looked. The cake was not as dense as the one in the instructions was and I am not sure how to fix that. I really liked the way that it came together but I didn't shave off the crusty stuff on the bottom and it was really crumbly but I think for a first try it went pretty well. 

We wrapped it in wax paper to hold it together, then poured a syrup over it to try and  glue it together. Then we stuck it into the freezer to set and started working on the cookie dough.

We rolled it out and. since we didn't have any cookie cutters, I just started to cut out shapes free hand. I did kite shapes and pansies and mushrooms, since I wanted to try and imitate these Super Mario Brother cookies that I found. I also cut some Thetas and some other letters and even a few Mickey Mouses!! It was fun to cut shapes but there was so much dough that it also got really, really tiring. We still have dough left over because I couldn't cut all of it. 

The nice thing is that these cookies only take about 10 minutes to bake so I could cut and fill a tray in the time that it took for one tray to bake. We ended up with a nice system going on.

After a while all I wanted to do was decorate, that we pretty much when I gave up on cutting out more shapes. Decorating sounded more fun, and it was more fun. The first color we made was yellow so that we could make the Theta things. 

This is me icing the first cookie. A pansy!!

I love how it turned out! 

When we were shopping, we knew that we needed black icing because of the Theta things. At first we were just going to try to mix all of the primary colors together and see if that made black but then we stumbled upon an actual black food coloring. I am so glad that we bought it because then we were guaranteed a really pretty black color. I just love the way that pansy works. But, when it dried, the black bled over so we need to figure out a way to fix that.

Here are a bunch of the finished products. We don't have the most steady hands or the most patience to make it neat. But I think that it adds character.

Here are my three favorite. I took this picture a few days later so you can see how the icing dulled and the black on that pansy bled over. 

After we got tired of decorating cookies we iced the cake. THAT was an adventure. We were really tired, by this point it was past midnight and we had been at all of this baking since 5ish. (Baking is tiring) The cake was really crumbly so I pretty much just used the icing as a glue and tried to shove it all back in there. This is how it turned out: 

For a first try, I like it.

Here is the finished product, cut open:

 

Not exactly like the original that we based it off of. It tasted ok, but my friends weren't as impressed by the inside as I had hoped they would be. 

Baking was extremely fun, we will definitely be doing this again. Actually, we already have another adventure scheduled for two weeks. Rebecca and I are going to make a whole lot of pansy cookies for our sororities inspiration week, the week leading up to initiation. The pansies were my favorite and the easiest to make so I am looking forward to making a lot of them.

Hopefully we will get better as time goes on.