5/25/2020 0 Comments Week 12: 5/11-5/18For the last week of the project Kimball baked a brown sugar pound cake. She gifted it to her grandmother for Mother's Day because it is her grandmothers favorite cake. She got the recipe from her mom's Moravian cook book, the same cook book she got the banana bread recipe from.
The cake was easy to bake and the decorating was easy because all you had to do was pour the icing on top. Her grandmother loved the cake and so did her family. This week was great because Kimball was able to give her grandmother a gift and it was for a project! Unfortunately Kimball didn't get a picture of the cake after it was iced, but she did get a picture of it right after she took it out of the cake pan.
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5/25/2020 0 Comments week 11: 5/4-5/10This week Mackenzie baked some bite sized churros with homemade chocolate sauce. I originally made them as a late night snack then realized that I could use them for our Genius Hour project!!
I used the Walt Disney parks recipe. It was super simple and I already had all of the ingredients at my house. The process of making them did not take long, only about 20 minutes. Unfortunately making the batter got a little messy! The chocolate sauce was super simple, I used the recipe from the turnovers. Once I finished making them, everyone was asleep so they didn't get to taste them fresh. Luckily I made a good amount of them so they could eat them the next day!! My parents loved them with the chocolate sauce and so did my brother. Overall this week was very successful! 5/25/2020 0 Comments Week 10: 4/27-5/3This week Kimball bakes a two-layered red velvet cake. This was probably one of the hardest items that was made because of all the steps and the decorating. The cake was all made from scratch and so was the icing.
Kimball says that the process of baking the cake took about two hours. She had to let the cake cool for a few hours then she had to put the crumb coat of icing on the cake, after that the cake was put in the fridge over night. The crumb coat allows all the crumbs to stay put on the cake before you do the real icing layer. You don't want the cake to pop out of the icing because it doesn't give the cake a clean finished look. After Kimball took it out of the fridge she did the actual layer of icing. This was very easy because there were hardly any crumbs in the way. After doing a normal layer of icing on the cake she piped some icing on the bottom of the cake and the top. This gives that cake a pretty look to it and adds detail. Besides the looks of the cake, the cake tasted amazing. Her family loved it, especially her mom because red velvet cake is her moms favorite. The icing was also very good. Luckily her family hd some extra icing, so they could eat it with fruit or even some pretzels. The cake was a success and it allowed Kimball or practice her decorating skills. 5/25/2020 0 Comments week 9: 4/20-4/26This week Kimball made a white wine cake. The recipe is from one of her moms friends. Her mom bakes it a lot for the family, so she had some competition with her mom.
The cake was easy to make and the recipe was easy to follow. My family already knew what it tasted like and when I made it they said it tasted just like when my mom makes it. That was a big compliment for me! I had a good time baking this cake because, like I said, it was easy and the outcome of it was amazing. It was so good to eat in the morning with some coffee. While it was in the oven I was getting nervous because it looked like it was going to flow out of the cake pan, luckily it didn't. This cake didn't require any decorating, so I had no improvement in that category. In the baking aspect of it though, I think I did pretty well and improved a little bit. Here is the picture of the cake. There isn't much to the looking of it, but the taste of the cake makes up for it. 5/25/2020 0 Comments Week 8: 4/13-4/19This week Mackenzie baked a New York style cheesecake. She used a recipe that her grandmother came up with!!
My family loves bagels so we already had plenty of cream cheese to use, I also already had most of the ingredients at my house which made the process a little easier. It was a pretty long process but in the end I was happy with how it turned out! My mom was pretty excited when I told her I was making the cheesecake because it was her mothers recipe! Surprisingly, my brother was also excited since he doesn't like many sweet foods. He even wanted to help but I told him he wasn't allowed to! Baking the cheese cake took almost the whole entire day to make, including the cooling process. I had to wait for it to cool completely before I could take it out og the pan because I did not want to mess it up after all of the time and effort it took. In the end, the cheese cake came out really good and everyone loved it. It was fairly large so it lasted for a good amount of time. Can't wait to see what Kimball is baking!! 4/12/2020 0 Comments week 7: 4/6-4/12This week Mackenzie decided to bake turnovers filled with chocolate. She got her inspiration from a movie, and she used a recipe that she found online.
She wanted to bake everything from scratch, this included the puff pastry/pie crust. She expected it to be much harder to make, but it was actually very easy. The recipe she used called for Nutella, but she wanted to make her own chocolate filling. This was a little more. complicated, but not too difficult. So she filled three turnovers with Nutella and filled the other three leftover with her homemade chocolate filling. This treat took a very long time to make overall. The puff pastry had to refrigerate for two hours, this was the longest process. Once the turnovers were done baking, it was worth the wait. Unfortunately Mackenzie only had two people to rate her sweet treat due to the outbreak of COVID-19. Luckily her brother is brutally honest and gave his full opinion. Her mother thought the treats were very good. She rated them a five and continued to another one. Her brother gave them a four and said they needed to be filled with a little more chocolate filling. Overall this week we were very successful. We can't wait to bake our next treat!! 4/5/2020 1 Comment Week 6: 3/30-4/5This week Kimball decided to bake a loaf of banana bread. She used a recipe from her moms Moravian cook book.
I decided to bake banana bread because I like banana bread and we had bananas that no one was eating. The recipe was very easy and didn't call for many ingredients. I was very happy about how it turned out. The bread made my house smell very good and my family loved it! My dad was pretty excited about me making the banana bread because he knew that he liked it. My mom on the other hand was skeptical. She told me she didn't like banana bread, but she tried it anyway, and she liked it! My brother also liked it and he is pretty picky. I also thought it was good, but my input doesn't count because I was the one who baked it. Next week you will see what Mackenzie is baking for her family. You will have to come back to see what she bakes. I am pretty excited to see how her sweet treats turn out! 4/1/2020 0 Comments Weeks 3-6We are so sorry for not updating you with our baking these past few weeks. We decided that we were going to not bake the last few weeks because of the whole Coronavirus situation, and we wanted to get used to our online classes. Now that we are are all caught up with our classes, we will start our baking again.
Unfortunately because of the coronavirus we are supposed to stay at home, so we will not be baking together each week. From now on until the end of the project we will be baking separately. We came up with a plan that has one of us baking each week. After we bake that week then the person who baked will write the blog post. This week Kimball will be baking banana bread and she will post a blog about how she did it and how it will turn out. Next week Mackenzie will come up with something to bake and she will write her own blog post about it. We have taken this time to think about how we can improve our baking and one of those is to read the directions and ingredients thoroughly. The last time we baked together we did not do that. Maybe since we are baking alone there won't be any distractions. When we bake together we make jokes and then get distracted by making Tik Toks. Yes that is our fault, but you can't stop us. We are so excited to get back into baking, but the people who try our foods will be different, and the number of people will be different too. The only people who will be trying our baked items will be family. This is because of the whole not leaving your house rule. We are also going to be trying to make items that don't involve too many crazy ingredients, so our parents don't have to go to the store. We are trying our hardest to be smart about the virus situation and we think that is the best way. We will see you in our next blog with a sweet treat warm and fresh out of the oven! Can't wait! Mocks-vegas bakehouse out:) 3/15/2020 0 Comments week two: 2/8/2020-2/14/2020The vanilla cupcakes...After coming off a very successful first week of baking we were super excited to bake for the second week. For the second week of baking we decided we were going to bake vanilla cupcakes with butter cream frosting!! The reason we made these is because we both love some good cupcakes. We believed that they were slightly harder than last weeks peanut butter cookies!
For the recipe we used was from Yellow Bliss Roads website. We were both super excited to try a recipe that neither of us have ever used. The recipe also had close to five-star ratings on the website! The website also had the butter cream frosting recipe so we instantly picked it. For this week we wanted to get together and bake at Mackenzies house! The process was fun and sometimes an absolute mess, but we were just happy to bake together for this exciting dessert! As soon as we got to Mackenzies we began. We first gathered all the ingredients, luckily all the items were just household items that we both had. The only item we had to buy for the cupcakes was unsalted butter! We then began to make the cupcake batter! Once we popped those in the oven we quickly made the butter cream. We ended up doubling the frostings recipe because it was just too yummy!!! Once the cupcakes were finished and cooled we started to ice them with the butter cream. Kimball went first and she showed off some of her pretty superior icing skills. Mackenzie on the other hand was not too good at it. So Mackenzie let Kimball do the icing step. After that we took some pretty artsy pictures and got a few people to rate them. We tried the cupcakes first and we noticed that something was a little off about them. Then we got a few other people to try them and the said something was missing. We went back and looked at the recipe and realized that we forgot to add the salt!! The ratings for this weeks sweet treat were lower than last weeks. This week we only averaged a 2.5 rating. Most people said they liked it for the first few bites but it kept getting worse as they kept eating it. Since most people did not like the cupcakes we bought some pretzels and enjoyed to left over icing to cheer us up a little! We had a set back this week but hope for a comeback next week!! 3/8/2020 0 Comments Week one: 2/29/20-3/8/20First time baking...This was our second week into our project, but our first week baking. We were very excited about finally baking. For our first week of baking we decided to make peanut butter cookies. We didn't have a reason for why we made them. They seemed fairly easy, and we wanted to start off easy and as the weeks move on our treat will be more and more difficult. For the peanut butter cookies we used a recipe, but not just any recipe. We used the recipe that was on the back of a tube of Jif® peanut butter!!! How exciting is that? We have used this recipe before, so we knew what was in-store for us. We thought peanut butter cookies were easy to make and we also thought the Jif® peanut butter cookies would also be good. For our very first ratings of the project, we took the cookies to Torque Fitness, for a little post workout snack! I mean who doesn't love some good cookies? We got a six workout buddies to try the cookies. They thought the cookies were amazing! They said that the taste and texture was great, along with the appearance of the cookie. For this being the first week of baking we felt that we have already been successful!! We had a great first week, we got to make some amazing cookies and some awesome ratings. We hope to keep up the good work and keep everyone updated on the new treats!! I mean just look at how good they look... |
Photo used under Creative Commons from shixart1985