Buttercream Icing Recipe

I’ve never used a recipe for buttercream but one this has evolved over the last few years and I always get complimented on my icing.
Ingredients
1 stick of butter (softened)
1 block of cream cheese (softened)
about 1/2 cup Crisco or vegetable shortening
2lb bag of confectioners sugar
2 teaspoons flavor (optional)
about 1/4 cup water

Mix the butter, cream cheese and Crisco for about 2 minutes on medium speed until they are well mixed.  Add the flavor if you are using one.  If you want white icing, make sure your flavor is clear as a brown vanilla flavor for instance will make your icing slightly cream colored. 
Slowly add the sugar and once the icing stiffens (this is the hard part because I just do it by instinct) add more water a teaspoon at a time until all the sugar is gone and you have icing that is easily spreadable.  I make my icing much less stiff if I know that children will have to push it through a piping bag than if I have to pipe swirls on a cupcake.  If you use the whole 1/4 cup of water and the 2 teaspoons of flavor, your icing will be quite soft.  If it gets too soft you can just add more confectioners sugar and similarly if it’s too hard you can just add more water, but only a tiny bit at a time.

Baby Shower Cookies

I bought these adorable baby shower cookie cutters to try out for a friend’s shower.  I decorated them with some buttercream icing colors that I had left over from some other cookies I’d made.  Buttercream is always much harder to get professional looking results with, but it always tastes so good that I’m prepared to sacrifice looks for taste.
I loved the bear as I have the Wilton bear cake pan and I’ve used it for both my own baby showers, so it brings back happy memories. Whenever you ice anything furry it’s always easier as the icing doesn’t have to be smooth.

The baby’s pram was harder but I just did what they had done on the box.  I feel that it needs a handle to push the pram with, so I may improvise.

The onesie was easy to decorate and I could have make it fancier if I’d had more time.

I thought the rocking horse would have been harder to ice but it was quite straight forward.  With more colors and more time these will be really cute shower cookies, but the bear was definitely my favorite.

Owl Crispy Treats

I usually make crispy treats that are flat and cut out with cookie cutters but I’d been asked if I could make an owl.  I took a small handful of the crispy treat mixture when it was slightly warm and shaped it into an egg.  I covered in with yellow candy melt, as that was the color I had available, but any color would have done as I was covering it in Oreo crumbs.

I always cover my crispy treats in candy melts because otherwise they aren’t as durable, they tend to disintegrate when you try to decorate them.  By the time I came to decorate the owl the candy melt was dry, so I covered it with icing and then dipped it in Oreo crumbs.  If the candy melt had still been wet I could just have dipped it in the Oreo crumbs and not worried about the icing.

I’ve made owl cupcakes before and usually use Oreos for the eyes, but I didn’t have any, so used chocolate candy melts and eyes the Wilton makes.  I used the same chocolate candy melts for the wings, but they actually would have looked better if they had been bigger, so I would use Oreos in future.  The ‘feather horns’ that owls have were made out of a candy melt cut in half and the beak was a banana runt.  Once I’d made him I decided his beak was too big, so I cut it down, which looked much better, but when I tried to make the horns smaller they looked worse.  Overall I thought he looked cute and he was very easy to make. Definitely a project younger children could easily handle.

Girly Truck Crispy Treat

I’ve been asked to host a ‘transport’ themed workshop and I’ve been experimenting with different ideas.  I wanted to see if I could make a truck look girly as there will be girls as well as boys at the workshop.  I cut the truck out of crispy treats and coated it in white candy melts.  I dipped it and it would have been better if I’d brushed the candy melt on as it was quite uneven.

By the time I’d iced the truck and filled it with it’s ‘cargo of coal’ (oreo crumbs), it looked a bit like a dump truck and it definitely looked like a girls truck.

My daughter loved it and now we need to experiment with different girly cargos, such as flower sprinkles or pink candy.

School Bus Crispy Treats

I bought a whole lot of candy melts on sale a few weeks ago and on a whim bought some yellow ones, not really knowing what I’d do with them.  Then I was asked to host a ‘going to kindergarten’ party and suddenly thought maybe I could make a school bus out of crispy treats.

I don’t have a school bus cookie cutter so I had to modify a truck shape. I dipped the crispy treat in the candy melt and it didn’t cover very evenly.  It would definitely have been better to brush the candy on.

The end result looked enough like a school bus for my 3 year old to know what it was, but it was quite hard to make, so I don’t think it would work for a kindergartener with no icing experience.  It was fun to try though.

Super Easy Heart Shaped Brownie Desserts

I’ve tried so many from scratch brownie recipes, usually spending $5-10 on fancy chocolate, and not one recipe was ever better than the basic box of brownies.

Bake your favorite brownies and then use heart shaped cutters to cut hearts out of the brownie.

For one dessert I melted 8 oz of chopped bittersweet chocolate with a cup of heavy whipping cream to make a ganache.

When the chocolate had melted in the cream I dipped the brownies in the ganache.  They tasted quite good but I would use semi sweet chocolate next time.

I cooked my husband a special meal for Valentine’s Day and as brownies are his favorite I cut them into hearts and sandwiched them together with heavy whipping cream that I’d whipped with a couple of tablespoons of sugar, but you could use Cool Whip.  I sprinkled them with hearts and it was a quick and very yummy dessert.

Love Heart Cookies

I was asked to make 60 cookies with a Valentine’s theme and I had so much fun!

I got to make the icing in my wonderful new mixer (an early Valentine’s and Birthday present combined from my amazing husband)

The cookies looked really pretty and because they had buttercream icing, they tasted good too.  Poured icing and fondant always looks much neater and more professional but never tastes as good.

Crispy Treat Recipe

I’ve always loved rice crispy treats.  My Mom used to make little nests with us at Easter using rice crispies covered in chocolate, so one day I tried to make them with my children.  I didn’t have a recipe and they were OK, but then last Christmas we tried to make a recipe I’d found in a magazine which used Fruity Pebbles cereal instead and my kids were hooked.  Every child I’ve ever fed them to has loved them.

The Recipe – It’s super easy!
Melt a stick of butter with a 10oz bag of mini marshmallows over a low heat, stirring continuously or else they will burn on the bottom of the pan. 

Add an 11oz box of Fruity Pebbles or any other cereal your children love.

Mix well and put into a baking pan lined with waxed paper. If you try to work with the crispy treats when they are warm they just stick to your hands, and everything else. Leave them in a big heap for about 20 minutes until they are cool and less sticky.

For the hearts below I pressed the crispy treats into the pan until they were about an inch thick, but sometimes I need them thicker if I’m making a 3-D shape.  Press a cookie cutter into the crispy treat to get an outline of the shape.  Unless you are using very sharp metal cutters, they probably won’t go all the way through, so use a knife to cut along the outline.

 
Anything you can make out of cookie dough you can usually make out of a crispy treat, but less detailed designs work best.
For the hearts below, which I used for my son’s preschool party, I inserted a lollipop stick into the heart so it would be easier for the children to hold while they were decorating and eating the crispy treat.

Then I dipped the hearts in red candy melts.  You have to push the crispy treats together quite hard so that they are firm enough to be dipped.  Also make sure you get the candy melt over the stick slightly, so that it holds the heart in place.  You can also use a basting brush to brush the candy coating onto the crispy treat.

Make sure you follow the melting directions on the back of the candy melt package.  The first time I used them I didn’t and over cooked the candy.  It went hard and was unusable.  I now know that if it goes hard you can add a couple of tablespoons of Crisco and it will go liquid again.  I usually do that anyway as it makes the candy melts more liquid and easier to use, and also you use less because they are quite expensive.

Then I sprinkled pink sugar on a few…….

…..heart sprinkles on some others……..

…..and conversation hearts on the others. My son’s class loved them.

Packaging Cupcakes–Cheap and Cute!

I love giving cupcakes as a teacher gift, but by the time you’ve bought the cupcake boxes it becomes quite an expensive gift, particularly if you have 14 teachers to give gifts to like we do.
I’d seen this cute idea on Martha Stewart’s website but didn’t have time to glue all the paper on so I improvised.

I’d bought some cute Valentine’s gift bags and had some plastic glasses, so I put a cupcake in each glass and then put them in the treat bags.

Print a cute label using clip art and they make a cost effective, durable (my 5 year old swung his teacher’s cupcake over his head and it didn’t squish) and pretty way of saying thank you.