Garden Day Bake Sale

Made some extra yummy carrot bread for the garden day bake sale. Then I cut in 1/2 loaves, wrapped it up in some nice freezer paper and drew some little carrots for the labels.

Garden Day was a fun day with the school selling homemade goodies such as fig jam, pickles, honey and homemade breads.

Everyone enjoyed themselves!

Here is the recipe for two loaves of Carrot Bread:

3 cups all purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

3 large eggs

1 cup corn oil

2 cups white sugar

3 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups grated carrots (you can use zucchini too)

1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Grease and flour two 8x4 inch pans. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Beat eggs, oil, vanilla and sugar together in a large bowl well. Add all of the sifted dry ingredients to the creamed mixture and mix well.

Stir in the carrots or zucchini by hand (and nuts if added).

Pour into prepared pans and bake for 40 to 60 minutes, or until tester inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan for 20 minutes and remove breads from pan to cool completely.

Fun Girls Party - Cupcake Decorating - III

These are the boxes that I prepared for each girl to place her 4 cupcakes in after decorating. Each girl decorated 2 white frosting cupcakes and 2 chocolate frosted cupcakes which I made the night before. Each box was prepared with each girls name on it.

Then I made a variety of sugared decorations. These are little purple hearts with pink flowers. We also had lots of fun sprinkles and jelly bean decorations.

Here we have some yellow flowers with little purple flowers on top.

These little pink butterflies were my favorite.

These were little purple tulips with pink flowers and yellow dots.

I wish I had the chance to have taken pictures of the girls finished cupcakes but as soon as this project started it was as if time sped by and I completely forgot about taking pictures :-(

Chocolate Souffle Cake From Petite Little Bee

Decided to make my favorite Chocolate Souffle Cake. This cake is very soft and moist - and has no flour at all -just butter, eggs, sugar, vanilla and chocolate. Mmmm scrumptious.

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Petite Little Bee's Chocolate Souffle Cake

Ingredients:

1 and 1/4 cups sugar divided; 8 large eggs at room temperature (I often cheat and take them straight out of the frig); 10 ounces melted semisweet chocolate pieces (I use toll house because I think they taste just fine); 1 1/4 sticks unsalted butter melted and cooled.

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, prepare a 9 inch spring-foam pan, butter and coat with sugar instead of flour; in a large bowl beat all of the egg yolks and 3/4 cup of sugar at high speed for 5 to 7 minutes; at low speed add your melted chocolate and butter mixture until well mixed; in a separate bowl beat all of the egg whites until soft peaks form then add 1/4 cup sugar; very gently fold the egg white mixture into the chocolate mixture; pour into prepared sugared pan and bake for approximately 30 minutes or until a cracked crust forms.

I like to serve this dessert with creme Chantilly! You can serve it warm or at room temperature.

Happy Baking!

Update: This was entered in Designs By Gollum -Foodie Friday. Go check out this amazing blog if you have not already.

This was also entered in the fabulous Tablescape Thursday at Between Naps on the Porch. Please visit this amazing site for wonderful tablescape inspirations.

This is an antique sterling silver tea set - shown above is the coffee pot, creamer and sugar.

Perfect Peach Pie

I am so happy to have finally found this excellent recipe for peach pie. The crust of this pie is amazing. When I saw how much butter was needed I knew this recipe would be a winner. I don't know about you, but lately I have noticed that the price of pies has sky-rocketed. Even though they are expensive, most of these purchased pies leave a great deal to be desired no matter how much is spent. This recipe, I found in the Food Network Magazine (Aug/Sep 2009) is the best recipe ever! * It is amazing. (They also have recipes for blueberry pie, lemon-lavender pie, cherry pie and green tomato pie). Here is the link. Recipe

*I must say that I have tried making the pie crust exactly as written in the magazine, and as stated below. (Which is the picture above. ) When I made the pie exactly as the recipe in the magazine, the crust turned out way too thick and did not really taste that good. I have therefore changed it.

The following is my version of the peach pie:

Make 2/3 of the recipe for the crust (link above). Use half for the top of pie and the other for bottom. Follow all of the directions.

To prepare your filling, take one pound of sliced peaches (At this time I used a bag of frozen peach slices, but I plan to use fresh when they are in season), then add 3/4 cup light brown sugar (maybe a little more if you like things sweeter), 2 tablespoons quick cooking tapioca, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, a sprinkle of cinnamon, a yet smaller sprinkle of nutmeg and a quarter teaspoon salt. Also add around 4 tablespoons of sliced butter and mix up well. Again follow all of the directions for assembling and baking as in magazine.

Let cool and and-voilà!- the most perfect Peach Pie.

I like to serve my pies warm and with vanilla ice cream on the side. There is just nothing more scrumptious. I am going to try this with apricots when they are in season, I think that will be amazing too.