Pomegranate Ginger Roll Out Cookies

Sometimes I just can't let a good thing be. Cookies, for instance. I never seem happy to just make simple, good cookies. Nope, I've gotta go crazy and do something I can't even find a recipe for. So, see below, my very strange and still in progress recipe for cookies.

The Finished Product -- So Far

Adapted, with reverence, from The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle. Original Recipe

So! You're ready to make utterly delicious and easy roll out cookies to decorate to your little heart's content. Step One: Reduce dem juices! Hey, if you wanna make apple carrot spinach juice cookies, no judgement. I used pomegranate, because I like pretending I'm healthy, not actually adding nutritional value. I plan on making a couple batches of these over the coming weeks, so I dumped the whole bottle in there, but you could easily use as little as a half cup, if you have a pot small enough to not burn it.

Whatever amount of juice you put in, you're gonna wanna get it boiling pretty rapidly. If your pan isn't big enough to leave it on the stove on high, get a bigger pot. 

Ahh! Pomegranate scented face sauna.

I always have problems with the "reduce by half" direction, so I came up with a trick!

My phone's camera is terrible.

What you do is stick a toothpick in the juice. With a juice as colorful as pomegranate, it'll stain all the way up to where it hits, but I marked it just to make it a little easier to see. Then I marked halfway down.

You'll have to take your pot off the heat to get an accurate read.

When a new toothpick put in a non-boiling pot matches that second line, viola! You've just reduced by half.

Now, of course I didn't do anything as logical as notice how long that took me. I'd guess fifteen or twenty minutes at a full boil. I didn't stir it, I didn't look at it, I left it alone. Instead, I used my time to make a mise en place. 

Ooh! Ahh! Fancy!

Mise en place is a fancy French term meaning "to have one's shit together in the kitchen," or, a more popular translation in my house, "to discover that you have to go out to the store for another dozen eggs before you've melted down all your butter."

Yeah, I never do this. It's a good habit I don't have. But reducing the juice gives you a good excuse to do it too! Go, go! Be responsible! 

Gaze upon the crazy!

This recipe was a little different for me. I've never creamed powdered sugar with my butter. But, hey, it looks a lot like creaming butter with anything else. Can't go wrong there. Mmm, butter.

Turn that sucker to ten! (Okay, more like three, but it feels like ten, amiright?)

I am a very, very, very lazy baker. Where this recipe says to crack the egg into another bowl and add the extract, that just sounded like an extra dish to me. So if you're worried about eggshells, or just wanna be extra careful, go for it, but I dumped my egg straight into the stand mixer.

Evidence of my terrible laziness.

Coffee Grinder Super Fancy Spice Grinder

Then I ground up about this much candied ginger and added it and about a teaspoon and a half of normal ground ginger to the stand mixer. (I know, so precise!) If you don't have any candied ginger, or the only stuff available is that super expensive McCormick kind, you can easily just use the ground ginger. I just think the candied adds a little extra zing. I had to grind this up twice to get the pieces small enough.

Run the mixer for a couple rotations to incorporate it. Now comes the fun part!

I should have measured this, but I didn't think I'd wind up using all of it.

Put about this much of your pomegranate juice into the mixer. I know, I know. All I know for sure is it was more than the three teaspoons called for in the recipe. I'm gonna guess something around two tablespoons, but you should add it until the dough looks like this.

It will have a slight pinkish tinge.

As you can see, now is a good time to scrape down your sides.

Laziness Alert!

Like I said, I am a lazy baker. So salt and baking powder go in next, and mixed through so I don't have to sift them into the flour. It hasn't backfired on me yet. Next, we sift in the flour. Yes, this time I am less lazy.

I learned this trick from Alton Brown. 

Wanna sift the flour straight in? Use one of those flexible cutting boards as a sifting funnel. This will, however, require that you call an assistant over to take pictures. (I always wear black when I'm baking. It shows off the flour so much better.) You'll need more flour than in the original recipe. I used three cups. 

When you're done, it will look like this.

It should be soft, but not sticky, to the touch. And it will still have just a slight pink tinge to it. If you were going for white cookies, or don't really want pink ones, you can stop here. However, since it was for Valentine's, I decided to color half the dough pink.

You'll actually need a pinch more flour for this one, even with the Wilton gel paste.

So, the best news you'll hear all day? You don't have to refrigerate this dough. It's a beautiful thing. It does, however, need to just sit a few minutes, which makes this a great time to preheat your oven. Since you forgot to do that when you started baking. Because you're good at this.

Now roll your dough out to 1/4" thick and cut some cookies!

I rolled out too small a piece. Oh, well.

Lay them out on a parchment lined cookie sheet.

Bake at 400 degrees for eight minutes. The original recipe says seven, but we added some extra liquid, you know.

I took the scraps and made some marble cookies!

These bake up so prettily.

These have a really nice buttery flavor, with the pomegranate and ginger almost playing supporting roles at first taste, but that pomegranate zing is unlike any cookie I've ever had before. It makes a really small batch, so go ahead and give it a shot, and play with it a little until it's exactly what you want it to be.

So, in conclusion, here's a semi-accurate recipe: (Adapted from The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle)

Pomegranate Ginger Roll Out Cookies

• 1 c. {two sticks} of REAL unsalted BUTTER, softened
• 1 1/2 c. confectioner’s sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp reduced pomegranate juice
• 3 tsp ginger
• 3 c. all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. salt

 Cream together butter and sugar

Add in egg, pomegranate juice, and ginger. Blend well.

Add baking powder and salt to butter mixture, mix well.

Sift in three cups flour. Allow dough to rest for five minutes.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Roll out dough to 1/4" thick, place on parchment paper lined baking sheet and bake for about eight minutes. Allow to cool on baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring to cooling racks. Sugarbelle recommends waiting at least a day before decorating these with royal icing to prevent butter bleed.

I'll show you how to decorate these (at least one way) next time!

Thanks for reading, y'all! 

Rainbow Cake Pops

I haven't updated in a while, and I've been really tired running around preparing to move to Missouri. So, in interest of getting something cool up here, I'll be focusing on the pictures of this project, since I actually took more than two.

Inspiration!:

Alas, I did not come up with this idea on my own. It's so simple, though, that it's completely brilliant. I started with yellow cake.

 For some reason I chose to dye each individual cupcake separately.

 All puffy and beautiful, aren't they?

 If you're wondering about the almost white ones, I was trying to see how yellow my yellow cake was.

 Rainbows!

 Love this two sided bowl. There just really wasn't enough of each color to give them all their own.

 One of many reasons mixing the color into the cupcakes after pouring the batter was a bad idea.

 I also came out with two shades of blue. But they're both pretty. And they mixed together well.

 Artsy shot to distract you from messy freezer shot previous.

 Magically: Rainbows! (Cutting all the individual balls into SIX pieces and stacking them in a rainbow. Almost magic)

 I repeat now and forever my avowed hatred for Wilton's candy coating. It tastes like chalk and is NOT easy to apply. I used a double boiler and everything, but as they make it, it's just too thick.

 About a week or so later, I finished making up the balls and decided on a nice little Halloween cake ball to try my skills again.

Aren't these too cute? Still the rainbow inside, but it's more of a surprise, much prettier, and actually tastes like chocolate. Chocolate and vegetable shortening mixed in a double boiler until it was basically liquid. Very easy to apply and nice and smooth, but it didn't harden up as nicely. I would definitely play with the ratios next time and see if I could hit the trifecta.

Tune in soon for more orders and disasters!

- Southern Velvet

Frankenstein Cake Planner

A Frankenstein Cake is an idea I had to allow people to sample several different cakes in one familiar package. Although the idea makes sense in my head, It's apparently less clear to others, so allow me to explain as best I can.

Step One: Choose four different flavors of cake. The order I'm delivering Wednesday has selected a traditional Yellow cake, a chocolate, a pumpkin, and an apple spice.

Step Two: Choose fillings. (Optional. If no fillings chosen, icing will be used.) This order chose to have only one filling, a caramel on the apple spice layer.

Step Three: The second layer of cake.

Step Four: Choose your frostings. This order chose a simplified approach of two different frostings. Chocolate on the yellow and chocolate cake and cream cheese on the pumpkin and apple spice.

Step Five: "Stitch" together the sections.

Hopefully that explained the idea a little more clearly.

Tune in soon to see the making of this order!

Caramel Apple Cupcakes

About a week ago (yes, I'm kind of bad at this) I made some caramel apple cupcakes and sent them to my mother's office for what I like to call a "Bakery Fairy."

The concept of the Bakery Fairy was born one afternoon of an overindulgence of caffeine and baked goods, upon which I remarked "I want to go around the neighborhood and leave cupcakes for strangers!"
It was later decided that this would be a poor decision. Nonetheless, the idea remained.

These were fairly basic cupcakes. A spice cake recipe with some Honeycrisp apples added, whipped cream with cinnamon and leftover salted caramel from a prior project. They came out a little small and a little like muffins, but people seemed to enjoy them just the same. Only one came back in the carrier.

The really fun part about these was playing with the new toys from my kitchen supply store. I had a disher(!) to use on the cupcake batter. I was so excited that for the tester cupcake I forgot to add the apples.

It was tasty, though. As for the frosting, I got to play with the large star tip I had just purchased.

The caramel was a little hard to get control of, though. If I had been smart, I would have piped it. Or something.

All in all, a fairly successful attempt at cooking and also remembering to take pictures. Now let's work on posting before all the cupcakes get eaten... Or within 24 hours. Whatever comes first.