I’ve been doing a lot of baking recently, and in this series of blogposts I’m documenting all of the bakes that I don’t make recipe blogposts about, so you can see what I bake besides those!
Some of these bakes actually had some interesting stories as to what I made them for, and only a few of them are just random afternoon bakes, unlike part one of this series.
I’ll be sharing photos, what I made these for, what it was like baking them, how they ended up, and how they tasted! Also, a lot of these recipes are from cookbooks, but if you want to know the recipe then just write it in a comment and I’ll get it to you.
Here is a list of the order of all of these bakes, so you can go look at any of them that seem particularly interesting!!
- Happy Birthday Sir James Cake
- Danishes
- Gingerbread cupcakes
- Chocolate chip cookie
- Cinnamon rolls
Let’s get started, first with this Happy Birthday Sir James Cake!!!! (Just keeeep reading I’ll explain the name)
So… Sir James!!! Ya know, making a cake for my good friend’s birthday!! I’m kidding. Sir James, in fact, is a character. This cake is inspired by a book!!!! A book that was written by my mom!!!!!!!!! I made this cake for a fanart compilation that she was making at the beginning of the month. She is an amazing writer, and this cake is inspired by her first book When We Vanished (a YA novel, my favorite!) Go check her out at alannapeterson.com!
I don’t bake very many cakes, and this one was VERY challenging. The hardest part of this for me was coming up with the idea for it, because her book has so many themes and different things that I could do, but I also had NO idea how I was supposed to make them on a cake! I did know the flavors that I wanted to do though, Chocolate orange with chocolate orange buttercream, and a raspberry buttercream for the details. (I used multiple random internet recipes, one for the cake and another for the frosting, so that wasn’t a big problem.) After asking everyone who had read the books what they thought I should do, my dad came up with an idea, and since I didn’t have any others, we went with it. He thought back through the whole book, to see if there was any cakes at all, and found one! In a video game that was played in the book, one of the main characters had to make a birthday cake, for another video game character, Sir James! So I decided to create this in real life, and above is how it turned out!!
There was SOOOO much zesting and juicing of oranges that had to be done in the making of this cake, but in the end I think that the chocolate orange combo was a little too heavy for me. This was probably because I also made chocolate orange buttercream, I feel like if the buttercream had been just chocolate, I would have enjoyed the cake as a whole more. Plus the piping was so hard, and ended up not looking the way I would have liked, but I am inspired to try some more cake decorating after doing a little research. I was making the raspberry frosting, and while I was I decided to add in some rosewater, and I’m very proud of this because my mom’s favorite flavor probably ever is rose.
Anyways, this has been a very long description, so I’ll end it here. This cake was so fun to bake, and even though the final taste and presentation wasn’t my favorite my family raved about it, which is just the best when it comes to baking!
DANISHES!!!! I made these this Wednesday, to make a reel for my Instagram. In my last blogpost, I put the recipe for the cookies that I made in a reel, but this time I just used a cookbook (Simply Bread by Wendy Sweetser!) So the danishes get to be featured here.
First of all, go check out my Instagram if you haven’t already! It already has 60 followers, so most likely you found this from there, but if you haven’t already go check it out!! Making reels is honestly SO fun, even though it’s also hard. When I posted my first reel, I was so happy because it got up to 495 views (in a week) But when I posted my second, these danishes, It got up to 1,000 views in 15 minutes. IT WAS CRAZY AND AMAZING. It’s slowed down now, but those few minutes were such a fun time.
Second of all, these danishes were probably one of the hardest things that I’ve ever baked myself. There was so much resting, rolling, folding, and resting, rolling, and folding again. But trust me, it was so worth it. These were the most fluffy buttery vegan pastries I had ever made, and the apple cinnamon filling tied it together incredibly. Make danishes people! So worth it.
So these ones were not the best things I’d ever made either….but I’m showcasing them here anyway. The reason that I made these cupcakes was that we were having an outdoor social distancing meeting with some friends, and also because I wanted to practice my buttercream piping skills for the Happy Birthday Sir James Cake. We had also just gone to a craft store and found the most adorable cupcake liners. As you can tell, the piping was not the most beautiful thing… So I just topped them with some coconut chips and called it a day. The cupcakes themselves were gingerbread flavored, a little strange for spring, but they were fun to make and did taste really good.
I got this recipe from one of the best baking recipe books that we have in our house, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. These gingerbread cupcakes were so good, and this bake was really fun.
CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES!!!!! First off, LOOK AT THIS PICTURE. Chocolate chip cookies are just so fun to make randomly, and this time, the idea came from my brother. He actually just started craving them, and then started baking them, I only helped him at the end. We used Chloe Coscarelli’s recipe (yes I love her), and got these incredible vegan chocolate chip cookies. Ugh they are SOOOOO good. I love putting pecans in chocolate chip cookies, because OBVIOUSLY! Also, no chocolate cookies are complete without gorgeous finishing salt on top. Chocolate chip cookies 4 life!!!!!!!!!!
Now for the last bake, Vegan Cinnamon rolls! OH MY GOSH cinnamon rolls. I made these for my dad’s birthday, as his big gift from me along with some fruit salad (which you can see in the picture above) for a special b-day breakfast. These are, like the danishes, pastry with an apple cinnamon filling. I was very proud when I decided to add apples to cinnamon rolls, like I was inventing something (it wasn’t part of the recipe, which can be found in Vegan Brunch by Isa Chandra Moskowitz). And also later we found out that we didn’t have powdered sugar, so we couldn’t make icing for them, so I decided to stay with the apple theme and made a cooked apple cinnamon topping for the rolls.
This went SO well with the cinnamon rolls, and I was actually surprised how easy it had been to make them, I thought it was a whole hard feat that only extremely experienced bakers could do, but it was pretty simple, and it tasted so magical.
This blogpost has been much longer than usual, but I hope you enjoyed reading me TALKING IN ALL CAPS about the things that I baked. I highly recommend all of these bakes, and if you want the recipes or more information, just say in the comments!!
Thanks for reading! <3
