THE CLIENT

This should have been a so-last-year post. My first client rigged me to make 100 cupcakes for her son’s first birthday come December 2011. I must have been very busy in the kitchen that I forgot to write about this for my food blog 🙂

Thanks to my brother’s then girlfriend now wife for being the middleman. Had it not been to her my pastry sideline wouldn’t be advertised; would have not reached pastry junkie palates  and not to mentioned would have not made my purse happy 🙂

Being too pressured albeit excited I dragged my stage boyfriend Lao at Landmark and SM Makati to get some ideas for the jungle-themed mini cakes. Some designs are just so adorable that it’s going to hurt ones pocket 🙂 Here’s what we got from Wilton.

A pack of this design composed of 12 giraffe standees, 12 jungle cupcake wraps and 12 sticks of leaf is worth P300 already. I thought I must have paid for the brand after all it’s Wilton. We just bought a pack and a stack of dainty cupcake cups to get started. Got home. Baked a dozen of moist chocolate cupcakes, iced them, wrapped them, stack them on the cupcake holder and voila they looked good.

 

 

On a second thought adapting this design may increase the cost of expenses which may mean increase in the price per cupcake which I didn’t want to do. I researched online and encountered better and more
ideas that will bring out my creative side. The procedure was tedious but it paid off seeing these lovely handcrafted tigers, monkeys, lions, giraffe and elephants on my baked goodies. They were just eye candies.

The thought of 100 cupcakes was just easy but when I began stacking baking pans after baking pans in the oven, icing one cupcake after another, designing each and packing them up was just mind-boggling. Thanks to my 48 hour underarm protection I survived that day and more thanks to my stage boyfriend for the packaging and delivery. Not to mention he also filed a day of leave like me to conclude that day! Amen! Cheers to these cuties that made my purse happy.

 

THE HEART-SHAPED LIONS

THE MONKEYS AND THE GIRAFFES

THE ELEPHANTS

AND THE ROUND-FACED TIGERS

 

our lil bakers

irene with her pastry brush 🙂

gabby with her pose 🙂

and they are happy as the ensaymadas 🙂

hello there. i know…i know, it’s been a long while since i wrote my last post on this site. i guess i had been very busy or so i thought? :). for those months that i had no article posted in here i was pre-occupied with my daily pastry addiction. not a single payday that flour is not part of my grocery list or a new baking gadget. the costly ingredients are hurting my pocket and my shape nevertheless it’s priceless to see happy people after getting a share of my baked goodies. read: masarap ang libre hehehe.

 

 

i am just so excited to share this picture of my 2 nieces giving a hand on our ensaymada project. they were just so cute that i did not care if they were messing the whole thing up, all i care was grab a cam and take a snapshot of them 🙂 picture! picture!

ready get set deliver

ready get set deliver

The printer’s cartridge is busted so I opted to make it more personalized and put my signature in it.

Try to have a taste of my treats.

Love,

Sakura Treats 🙂

cherry raisin tinapay

My emotions got the better of me when I learned that the uber overripe bananas that I kept hiding in the fridge was dumped in the trash on the day that I was to make my banana bread. I was angered at first but will walked me through making my very own cherry raisin tinapay. I rummaged through the left overs that we have inside our personal fridge and found a lone standing jar of maraschino cherries and a small pack of raisins. A mix here and there of dry and wet ingredients, a couple of twist in the banana bread recipe and came to life is my cherry raisin tinapay. I alternated the banana with maraschino syrup and cherries.
Oh boy it was good. Enjoy 🙂

hottie from the oven 🙂

my handy dandy gadget that's a big part of my curlynary episodes.

zesty lemon

On my last article, I mentioned that hopefully I’ll give justice to lemon bar and granola bar. One last saturday, I started to make lemon bar and up to this day I still am making one – for the very reason that “they” liked it. The fusion of the lemon zest, condensed milk and the eggs leaves a tangy tinge on one’s palate that makes one ask for another bar and another and another until box is emptied. This is also the reason why I have not introduced my granola bar yet…not yet hehehe.

zesty lemon bars

FOR SALE ehehe 😛

from hobby to money

the calendar says “september 28, 2011, wednesday,” just 2 more days and the month is over. my blog says 1 entry. not good. there’s hiatus in this site. maybe not good because i’m experiencing the dreaded writer’s block as i gather my thoughts to complete this article. nevertheless the hiatus was still quite good for my pocket.

okay, during the slight pause of writing articles for this site, i wasn’t thrown to deep slumber. my feet were busy threading the narrow streets of pedro gil going to robinson’s place manila so i could grab some ingredients from baker’s depot. it has been 4 weeks that i started my cookie business. it all started with my chewy oatmeal cookies and the sophisticated taste buds of my bff john, both made the kickoff of my cookie endeavor.

my bff ordered a couple of bags for their own consumption at home , brought some in his office, offered some to his associates and hollered at me to get some more orders, not from him but from his colleagues. i made oatmeal cookies, chocolate chip and chocolate cookies.

it was a very nice feeling. it wasn’t easy at first but everything came out smoothly since cooking/baking is really my hobby.

i am glad that with my pastime i get to earn a dime. 🙂

p.s. i am looking forward to this weekend since i’ll try to introduce new stuff that i learned, lemon squares and granola bar. crossing my fingers that they would look good and taste good. 🙂

chocolate overload

It all started with caramia’s tentazione cake that tempted me with all audacity to create my own chocolate cake.

My first cake was a fail due to low budget and failing to stick with the recipe. I learned 3 important tips when baking.

First. Do not compromise quality. Good result roots from quality ingredients. I used the regular cocoa in packets sold in the market instead of the dutch-processed. I could attest, the dutch-processed is one important ingredient if one is looking for that authentic chocolate flavor. It leaves a tinge of bitter-sweet aftertaste that is just chocolatey. One tip though that I got when baking chocolate cake in order to enhance the chocolate flavor is to add a teaspoon or two of espresso powder. You won’t taste the coffee flavor but rather get a richer chocolate taste. Try it :).

Second. When creating a cake layer, it’s best to bake in several cake tins of same sizes and same weight. This is the easiest way to stack cakes with pastry cream or frosting in between instead of slicing cake in halves.

Third. The rule of thumb when baking cake is NOT TO OVER MIX. Cakes have light, smooth texture that can only be obtained when not over mixing the ingredients. It prevents the batter from acquiring a lot of air which is only suitable when making breads. If one is making bread then over mix the dough and you still get the bread texture when it’s done.

For the amateur bakers like me try the tips, it does not hurt. These were the useful ones that made my chocolate cake and cupcake-making quite fulfilling upon seeing my finish products. :).

chocolate cupcakes in chocolate ganache

***Ganache – is a kind of icing which is a mixture of chocolate and heavy cream.

chocolate cake covered in chocolate ganache with whip cream topping and cherries

mini black forest 🙂

*recipe courtesy of youtube.com

chocolate chip cookies and the birth of our shop :P soon

And yes I started the weekend with my oven all warmed up for baking and ended it with my oven still oozing with confectionery scent.

I was just toying with the idea of making my own pastry nook when boyfriend became serious about it. He led me to the dining table and talked about it over a cup of coffee. Well the latter statement was just something I toyed with hehehe because when he invited me for a talk my eyes were about to shut and I was already all prepped for bed. The talk happened the following day during breakfast while munching on our chilled chocolate madness cupcake with his brewed coffee. Him having the love for brewed coffee (need i say more, i was obliged to gift him another coffee maker when with no sign our trusty coffeemaker decided to stop his loyal service to us for 2 years) and I having the flair for baking and cooking settled in no-argument, peaceful and common decision haha drum roll – came to life our shop’s name “the ___ and the ___” and the acronym B.e.e B.e.e just explains the whole story behind (for the cheesy part hehe, I cannot write the name of our shop here until it fully materialized, I already searched DTI business name and good ours is still unique).
We hope that everything will materialize soon and fall into places smoothly.

Alright, and so the name’s commenced and so was my weekend ender delight. my biggie chocolate chip cookies. I saw smile from my brother’s eyes, meaning we have breakfast for the rest of the week, meaning one just needs to get up, open the cookie canister munch on it while brewing some coffee. No hustle and bustle. A very light week ahead indeed hehehehe 🙂

Have good week everyone!

now brewing and baking 🙂

Here’s the recipe.

For added spin I put whipped cream on it and next time I’d put fresh fruit to top it off 🙂

vanilla cupcakes with strawberry frosting

Just so in the mood to bake this weekend that when I woke up, after a night of muddy chocolate cupcake madness, I popped in the oven a tray of fluffy vanilla cupcake batter divided into 12 cups (“,).

The night before, I thought I wasted money on foil cupcake cups since I didn’t know how to use them. It’s foil in the outside with thin paper liner in the inside. Thinking that the paper liner was just a separator hehehe I started to peel off the paper liner. Had Lao not come down and checked on what I was doing, I could have wasted a couple of dozens. Turned out the foil was for an aesthetic purpose and without the paper liner the cake will burn. Thanks Lao :).

Alright, then off to the oven and bake. Thanks to this website for the no-brainer procedure. Laura Vitale, the chef on the video was just as sweet and as lovely as her pastries while explaining the steps. At least for me, it made me look at baking pretty easily :)Thanks to her.

Poof, at 350 degrees Celsius for 25 minutes, the fluffy cakes were done. While they were cooling down, I made my strawberry frosting mainly composed of confectioner sugar, strawberry preserve, butter and vanilla extract, all whipped together until fluffy and thick in consistency. Mine was a bit runny since I ran out of confectioner sugar. It was a good thing that the sugar I used was a bit less from the original recipe since I really don’t have a sweet tooth which is quite ironic for someone like me who loves baking 🙂

Frosting time, I was able to break in my new piping gadget. It was real cool playing with the different design on each piping tip. For a moment, I felt like a kid making stuff out of a play-doh :)To top it off, my handy-dandy colorful sugar bits completed the frosting, a mere substitute for the absence of fresh strawberries. The foil cups were just lovely to look at. It was neat and shiny. It took somebody to explain its functionality before making its place in my grocery list this time :).

Off to the plate and overwhelmed some tummies waiting 🙂

Here’s the recipe.

A platter of my weekend sweets 🙂 Go pick one and indulge!

my pseudo-tentazione mini cakes

My craving for amici’s tentazione cake motivated me to make my own version of it. Though the ingredients costed me more than the slice of that tempting cake hehehe still everything got paid off :. Presenting my pseudo-tentazione cake in the form of cupcakes 🙂 Happy that the people in the house liked it.

uber chocolatey 🙂

Last month I made an article about my first fail chocolate cake because I only used just the so-so ingredients. With my persistence to create a moist, smooth, oozing-with-chocolate and almost tentazione-like to goodness delight, I did not mind buying the finest ingredients. Straight from the oven, my eyes popped when I saw my munchy lil goodness fluffy and chocolatey as if tempting me to consume them greedily. I really did not wait for it to cool down and popped one in my mouth that left a tinge of bittersweet aftertaste dark chocolate flavor. I craved for another piece when I began to swirl each cupcake in the ganache icing which is mainly a mixture of dark chocolate melted in a pack of an almost-boiling heavy cream then cooled down.

Swirling the cupcakes in the ganache icing was quite messy but fun. I couldn’t help but lick my finger after each swirl,as if I were really obliged to. Oh well I blame the ganache for being extremely pleasurable.

I made 24 pieces in one recipe and before I got here at my bed I checked in the fridge and only 5 were left. What a good way of sending me off to a chocolate-factory dream. Thank you for liking it.

Good night.

P.S. thanks to this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOgKIGMWLQk