When we bought the big water slide for Baby Girl’s birthday party, we knew it meant using it at least one more time for it to be worth the purchase price. We decided to use 4th of July as an excuse for a big water slide party again and in the end, we had 13 kids running around our yard squealing and sliding and flinging water balloons. I made hot dogs, fried burgers, and made three different types of Independence Day food!

First up, Independence Day spam musubis, which is something I made a couple years ago when we went to see fireworks at Ala Moana. I made them again this year, but this time used Neon Blue food coloring and added a lot more so I got a great bright blue.

Next up, I had some Patriotic Strawberries, which I’d seen on Food Gawker the other week. It was sooo cute and so simple. All I did was wash the strawberries a few hours ahead of time so that they had enough time to dry, then melted white wafers, dipped them, and sprinkled them with blue crystals.

I had these cupcakes in the freezer unfrosted and when two parents dropped off their kids with store bought cupcakes, I figured that was enough. Apparently I totally underestimated how many cupcakes children can eat when adults are too busy setting up food, watching a water slide, and trying to eat at the same time. I suspect the kids went crazy and just kept going back for more.

Eventually, there was only one left and one of the neighborhood kids looks at me with this look of panic like, “Are there no more cupcakes??” I told him I’d go in the house and bake some more, went inside, frosted them, sprayed them, and added the sparkler picks I’d bought on clearance at Macy’s. I took them outside 10 minutes later and the kid was like, “YOU’RE THE BEST CUPCAKE BAKER EVER!!!” LOL!

I would have put more cream cheese frosting, but I only had half a batch and had to stretch it to frost all of them.

Other food that people brought included corn on the cob, watermelon, chili, Zippy’s chicken, macaroni salad, sherbert punch, grapes, cream puffs, mango bread, and chips. I was pretty fried by the end of the day, so I passed out with Baby Girl at 8 PM for 10 hours. Hope you all had a great 4th!

By now anyone who is a friend of mine on Facebook is probably aware that I’m one of those slightly crazy people that have an abnormal attraction to all things Domokun. I have lots of Domo Qees. I own several Domo shirts. I bought Domo shirts for both my kids. I even have some on my keychain. I play Planet Domo on Facebook and have gotten Buddy totally addicted to it too.

So with that in mind, I have wanted to do Domokun Cake Pops for a really, really long time. The only thing holding me back was my fear of melting chocolate. Seriously, it scares the crap out of me due to a long history of chocolate melting nightmares, a couple of which are from making… cake pops.

I only ended up with three decent ones, but I blame this on my chocolate skills again. I’ve learned a lot and I thought I should post this anyway for people who want to take what I did and try to improve on it.

Supplies to buy:

• 1 box cake mix (I’ve realized, when those things are only sale for $1 each, buy a ton!)
• 1 bag milk chocolate chips (the wafers pictured sucked)
• lollipop sticks
• Yan Yan
• white fondant
• red fondant
• Edible Sugar Pearls Black 4mm
• styrofoam block
• bubble tea straw

Bakerella says to mix the baked cake with a jar of ready made cream cheese frosting, but that stuff tastes disgustingly sweet and imo ruins the taste of the cake pop. Make your own cream cheese frosting and try some after you make it. Trust me, you’ll want to sit there and just spoon it into your mouth until it’s all gone.

Measure out exactly 2 tablespoons of cake pop mixture for each Domo. Shape them into little rounded rectangles.

I used the thick end of a pair of disposable bamboo chopsticks to make the indentation and broke off pieces of Yan Yan sticks for the arms and legs. CHILL THEM in the fridge while you do the next part!

Roll out the red and white, then cut out little rectangles of red. Make sure you wash your hands after handling the red because if you knead your white afterwards, you’ll end up with pink Domo teeth.

Cut a piece of bubble tea straw off, then cut it in half lengthwise. Fold it down the middle, then bend it backwards. Use the pointed tip to cut teeth out of the red and white, then use a toothpick to guide the white tooth into the red indentation. Domo needs four teeth on top and bottom.

These two guys were done with melted wafers. Mr. Pikko was in a bad mood after fighting with Max (our dog) for almost an hour, but when he saw these drying he just started laughing. He hadn’t known this is what we were making.

I didn’t have my technique down yet and there were also lumps of shortening I couldn’t get out. As you can see though, the sugar pearls worked fantastically and the mouths came out great, though I was too slow and didn’t press it in fast enough. I found the arms sticking straight out was a lot easier than the arms going up. I got extremely messy doing this because my chocolate wasn’t very runny.

I don’t understand why I can’t get nice, smooth, runny chocolate. There should be a book called Melting Chocolate for Dummies. All I ever get is smooth, almost-runny chocolate.

Next, I tried chocolate chips with shortening and I gave up on the sticks. I also started just using my hands like crazy. I tried gobbing chocolate on and then smoothing it all off with my pointer finger and shockingly enough, this worked quite well. After that, I had to hastily wipe my fingers and grab the mouth, push it gently on, then add the two pearl eyes before it could all dry.

It’s a shame I didn’t stick this one, as he turned out pretty awesome.

He is, however, a farce. In my eagerness to achieve runny chocolate, I put too much shortening and as a result, he’s not drying. I currently have him in the freezer and will offer him to Buddy later, since he fell asleep in the middle of making these.

We had some pretty ugly trials. My first pop was wide and had spikes of chocolate all over his back. Baby Girl’s reaction?

“Um, Mommy. I have to let you know something. That Domo is a little fat. And hairy!”

It’s true that the chocolate adds a lot, so you should make your Domos a little skinnier than you think they should be.

And now I will show you what happens when you don’t chill your Domos long enough.

It’s Father Brennan! If you don’t get the reference, it’s from The Omen.

Although I don’t have a lot of cute Domo pops to show for my work, I’m happy that I was at least able to achieve what I’d been imagining. When I master runny chocolate, I will be back! Big thanks to Jenn for the wafers and styrofoam!

Last year, my dad sent us a few lilikoi (passion fruit) plants that he bought for us in Hilo. Two were purple and two were yellow and only two of them survived, one of each color. Sadly, the purple one just has been sickly the whole time and hasn’t grown very well. On the other hand, the yellow one has found some steroids in our yard and shot across both sides of the fence and now is about 30 feet wide or more.

I was pretty discouraged when nothing happened, but then I looked online and saw that it’s seasonal. Around April, it started to show flowers. Tons of them. But no fruit…

Then one day, out of nowhere I found three, then two more! I don’t know how they snuck up and grew so big out of nowhere, but there they were! They’ve been taking their sweet ass time ripening too. Today while I was out in the yard, I saw that one had fallen. Normally they’re ready to pick when they get wrinkly, but I think something made it fall as the stem was snapped.

I haven’t had a fresh lilikoi in a long time, so I was excited.

All I do is cut them open, sprinkle sugar, scoop, and eat. SO good. It was so good that I forgot all about wanting to plant more plants and I only remembered when Baby Girl brought me all her seeds, picked completely clean, in a ziploc bag. She didn’t want to eat them, so she sucked all the lilikoi flesh off and saved them, without even knowing what a tremendous genius she was! lol!

This is Part 1 of my review series on Rosalind Creasy’s Recipes from the Garden, which covers a basic read-through of the cookbook, difficulty level and the quantity of recipes, familiarity of ingredients, and overall production quality.

I will start cooking from the book in Part 2. If I don’t do a Part 2, that means I don’t really use the book, which should give you an idea on its functionality.

Eventually, I’ll post the verdict, letting you know my overall opinion of things. First, on to the details!

Details

Type: Paperback
Length: 208 pages
Size: 9.9″ x 7.3″
Release Date: February 2010
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Full Retail Price: $24.95
Amazon Price: $16.47 (as of May 2011)

Author

Rosalind Creasy has been writing books about edible gardening since the early 80s, when she first published her very popular book The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping in 1982. Since then, she’s written tons of books about growing your own food in your back yard, the most interesting of which (to me, anyway) is Landscaping With Fruit. Being a fruit freak, this sounds like my kinda book.

First Glance

The book starts out with Rosalind’s history of how she came into this specialty of hers and it was actually quite fascinating. By my count, this book features a total of 188 recipes, which is a ton for the price.

The book is separated into seven different sections:

• Herb Blends, Salad Dressings, and more (40 recipes)
• Sensational Salads (27 recipes)
• Irresistible Soups and Starters (27 recipes)
• Hearty Vegetable Dishes (23 recipes)
• Delicious Meat, Poultry and Seafood Dishes (21 recipes)
• Flavorful Sides (34 recipes)
• Drinks & Desserts (16 recipes)

Quantity-wise, the Herb Blends and Sides sections come with the most recipes. The photography is beautiful, with the book featuring eye-dazzlingly colorful dishes taken outside in the garden for nearly every recipe. In the sections with lots of recipes, there will be 2 recipes on a page with a full color photo of one of those dishes on the opposite side.

Ingredients

One of the most lacking parts of the book is that very little is said about the ingredients, even though there is ample space on the pages to give little tidbits of growing information. It seems that if you want to know more about some of the more exotic ingredients, you need to have one of her other books to go along with this one. It’s definitely a handy cookbook if you frequent farmer’s markets a lot.

I did have some concern over some of her ingredients, which sound quite rare, such as the rouge vif d’Etampes pumpkin, pea shoots, and cherry peppers. I haven’t the faintest idea where to even buy these things, so substitutions are definitely in order.

Overall Quality

While not completely informative in regards to seasons or gardening tips, the book of course focuses on dishes that are easily supplemented with your own produce. The cover is bright and inviting and the photos throughout the book do not disappoint. Although I can’t say I’ll be making salads out of a bunch of flower petals anytime soon, many parts of the book do sound tasty and inviting.

The book is chock full of recipes, making this a good value for the price. Recipes I intend to try out include Crab & Asparagus Salad with Fancy Greens and Sorrel Dressing, Strawberry French Toast, Vietnamese Salad Rolls, Japanese Greens with Sesame Dressing, and Carrots with Chervil Butter. Some of them aren’t technically recipes though, such as a recipe for “Steamed Rice”. I doubt any of you are going to go about growing your own rice.

The book is nicely organized and introduces novice gardeners and cooks such as myself to new concepts in food, such as flower butters and fresh herb salad dressings.

Conclusion

Although teeming with fresh vegetable heavy recipes, Ms. Creasy doesn’t ignore meat-eaters and includes dishes with delicious meats such as duck, king crab, pork, beef, and swordfish. The font is a bit small and the titles can be a little hard to read for certain letters (the ‘T’ looks like a ‘J’) but I like the fact that every other page is dedicated to a color photo. To me a cookbook without photos just isn’t all that interesting and these all serve to complement the recipes very well.

In my opinion, little snippets of information on some of the fresh ingredients such as a brief history or growing season would have been pretty useful. For instance, I had no idea what sorrel was until I went to look it up on Wikipedia. A little captioned picture would have helped me out greatly.

Overall, it makes me wish I was a retired woman with all the time in the world to devote to a garden. Maybe then I’d be able to plant more things to eat!

Disclosure: I received this book from Tuttle Publishing to review. I am not being compensated for writing this review series.

This is Part 3 of my review series on The Japanese Grill: From Classic Yakitori to Steak, Seafood, and Vegetables, which continues my cooking trials with the recipes in the book. Unfortunately, this will be my last attempt at cooking from this book.

In Part 1, I reviewed the general details of the book. For Part 2, tried out two more recipes and invited some guests over for dinner. I chose to try the Salmon with Shiso Pesto and the Foil-Baked Green Beans with Soy Sauce and Garlic.

The salmon dish sounded amazing and since the text in the book says that its a crowd pleaser at Tadashi Ono’s restaurant in New  York City, I figured it had to be a winner. My shiso plant is insanely big now, so I was able to get the 20 leaves needed with no problem. The other ingredients are simple enough, with salt, olive oil, and soy sauce being all it took to get that going.

I sliced up the shiso, then blended it together with the other ingredients. I marinated the salmon in the shiso pesto and then got to the cooking.

I managed to get all of the salmon onto one small grill and even fit the foil packet of beans on the side. The beans finished after the fish because it was on the side.

We gathered around the table and began eating and I’m sorry to say that everyone started reaching for the shoyu bottle to pour on top of the salmon. It had very little taste and if you’re going to be putting shoyu on your salmon (which I love to do), then I don’t really see much difference than if you had just salt and peppered the fish and grilled it. I couldn’t taste the pesto very prominently and even then, it didn’t do anything for the fish. I know it wasn’t the fish’s fault because I made sure to buy wild salmon for this.

The beans were just as meh. I didn’t want to overcook them like in the book’s photo so they were still crunchy, but even when dipped in the sauce, it didn’t really have much taste. I had to add salt to mine to finish what I took.

Final Verdict

I’m overall quite unsatisfied with the book and will probably either give it away or donate it to the library. It just didn’t deliver in the recipes I tried and I don’t really feel motivated to waste any more expensive meat on stuff that just struggles to make your taste buds pop.

I could have made some fantastic ribeye steaks just by using a pre-mixed rub found at any store or simply grilled my salmon with salt and pepper without needing to do additional prep and wash my blender. The yakitori chicken would have tasted just as good or better if I’d just soaked the chicken in Mr. Yoshida’s sauce before grilling. Let’s not forget the ridiculous quest around the island to find Red Yuzu Kosho with no success. Some lady on Amazon says she’s never even seen it in Japan unless you live in Kyushu! How’s that for hard to find?

Save yourself some money and skip this one. I looked up some other Asian grilling books and will see if I can try out The Asian Barbecue Book: From Teriyaki to Tandoori. It at least has good reviews, while the other reviews on Amazon for this book for the most part back me up, with a couple of them saying they had the same problems as me in finding ingredients and claiming they returned it.

Disclosure: This book was sent to be for review by Ten Speed Press. I was not paid to write this review.

It feels like lately all I’ve been doing is “Making” posts, but ultimately, I think you guys enjoy them and opportunities keep coming up for me to do a huge project and then post about it so I just have to go with the flow of my projects. I have quite a few reviews pending and more recipe posts, but once I finish a massive cake project, I have motivation to get the photos out there so that I can share my latest work.

This cake was done for my dear hubby’s birthday. It’s not the first cake I’ve made for him, but it’s definitely the first elaborate cake I’ve made and I took 5 days to make it this time. When we’d first met in college, he loaned me his beloved graphic novels called The Sandman. I loved it and that was one of the starts of our relationship.

Years ago, I came across an incredibly adorable piece of artwork by Jill Thompson called ‘The Little Endless’. She has written two children’s books about the Little Endless so far and most recently, she published Delirium’s Party: A Little Endless Storybook. I bought this for Mr. Pikko to go along with the cake.

Anyway, here’s my cake journey for my hubby’s Little Endless cake.

I started off making Dream, as he looked the most difficult with his wild black hair. I rolled thin spiky rolls of black fondant and cut off tips with a toothpick. I rounded out a head for him and rubbed some black around his head for hair background, then began to attach each individual ‘hair’ to the black part. As you can imagine, this took a really long time. His eyes, nose, and mouth were very simple to roll and add.

Here you can see the hairs I rolled out in bunches before attaching. I probably had to make over a hundred hairs for him. Some I let dry a bit so that they would spike upwards.

Here’s a view of the back of his head. I started middle way up his hairline and worked my way up to the center of his head until I’d filled up all the space. It looked pretty good, though the frosting began to droop and his hair wasn’t as spiky and wild as I wanted it to be. I used black buttercream fondant (Fondarific) mixed with some gum paste to harden it up because buttercream fondant is way too gooey and soft.

The hands were pretty tricky. I had to make an arm, then gently flatten the tip to make way for fingers. I then used a toothpick and squished four grooves down to make the fingers. After that, I pressed the toothpick between the fingers to get rid of that flat piece of fondant. Then I took my fingers and gently formed them into little fingers, pressing the four fingers together and bringing the thumb out.

Here are two finished hands! These are Dream’s.

The piece of fondant I had Dream’s head stuck to was just a prop while I did his hair. I made a separate body with his clothes and used extra pieces to cover his arms. I underestimated how much I should have used for his body and arms and he turned out looking kinda fat. =\

Oh well, haha! I tried making him taller, but it didn’t help much. All of the figures have toothpicks inside to help them stand up.

Next, i started on Death. Her eyes were pretty hard to cut out and layer, but I did it eventually. I did her hair the same way as Dream’s.

Here she is propped up while I work on her. Dream is drying in the background.

Here’s she is all done, complete with t-shirt, black mini skirt, and black shoes. I made her ankh out of greyish fondant so that it would stand out against her shirt.

Come Tuesday, I was pretty zonked out and so I forgot to take pictures of making Delirium. Bascially, her hair was done the same way, except for the part on her head. Her hair was colored with orange and red. For that party I simply made grooves with a toothpick to make it look like hair. I had no idea how to make her netting clothing, so I just left her this way, with a little black cloth covering her.

Here is Despair’s body with saggy boobs and big tummy. I poked holes with toothpicks and inserted little balls of black fondant for her belly button and nipples.

Next, the hair went on and this was blissfully easy. I added the nose, which I now notice is kinda pink. I think I had some red food coloring stuck on my fingers when I formed it. I used a toothpick to make the lines for the eyes, dimples, and mouth.

I painted the eyes on, then dabbed in food coloring in the mouth, dimple, and forehead lines. After that, to make the lines thin, I had to take a toothpick and pinch the fondant groove together to make it a thin black line.

Here’s Destiny’s body before I added his cloak. I had to add his head on before, since his whole body is cloaked. On the right is his book.

Here he is holding his book and cloaked. I stuck the book on with piping gel. Next, I added on his mouth and nose.

As a final touch, I painted red paint onto his book, which is what Destruction is doing in the photo.

These were the five I finished by Wednesday night. I made the ice cream and lined my jelly roll pan with plastic wrap, then spread the ice cream out flat and froze the whole tray.

Here’s Desire’s pants and body as well as Destruction’s pants. I let them dry overnight since the black was still sagging a bit.

I added Desire’s suit and arms, then left the whole thing to dry overnight.

On Thursday, I baked a white cake and let it cool. Afterward, I cut the top off and then cut it in half lengthwise for a long rectangle. I took the tray of frozen ice cream out and put a layer of cake on top and cut it out with a knife.

After this, I lifted the plastic and removed the outside parts of ice cream and then layered the cake on top of a cutting board.

After this, I transferred it to a cut cake board I’d prepared and then froze the whole thing. I then made frosting and tried to make it blue, but once I added the blue mixture to the butter, it turned out a disgusting pale blue color. I had to find time to go buy Blue Color Mist the next day to cover up my disgusting frosting.

This turned out to be a horrifying experience. I’d had the morning off to attend Buddy’s preschool graduation, but then decided to stay home and help watch all four kids running around the house. I took Baby Girl with me to Ben Franklin and they had every single color of mist EXCEPT blue. Why does crap like this always have to happen to me, seriously?

We went to Foodland, no mist. Safeway, no mist. I knew Compleat Kitchen at Kahala Mall had mist, so we went out there and finally found it. It only took FOUR FREAKING STORES.

Friday afternoon, I completed Desire’s head and attached it on. It was pretty easy, though he/she was fatter than I’d wanted too.

Here’s Destruction. By now you can tell I was really sick of taking pictures. His easel was fun to make and so was his paintbrush. I put a black strip around his hair to make his ponytail. I had a really difficult time with his face and it really didn’t come out how I’d hoped. Still, I thought he looked happy and that was the main thing to get across.

The family had gone to the park, so I took this chance to place the figures on top of my newly sprayed cake and add the gold stars I’d been working on that afternoon. They were cut out and painted with edible gold glaze leftover from my Mockingjay cake.

I snapped a few pictures just as they were all coming home and dashed downstairs to place it in the downstairs freezer.

Here is the cake just before singing! Needless to say, he loved the cake and our Sandman loving friends were all impressed. The kids immediately asked to eat the figures and were devastated when Daddy said that it probably wasn’t a good idea to be eating the Endless.

He did eventually give in though, and Baby Girl chose to eat Death. She ate her whole body and half her head before coming to me with a zombie look on her face saying, “Mooooommmmyy, I’m sugared out…………” She then almost fell asleep in the bathtub and passed out in minutes. That’s what you get for eating Death!

A couple months back while browsing on Amazon, I came across the Wilton Romantic Castle Cake Set and knew I had to give it a try for Baby Girl’s birthday party. We had the party yesterday and it was a crazy affair, with a total of 14 kids and a Double Cannon Blast Slide (though we bought a different, better model of the same thing from Sam’s Club). Anyway, here’s my account of the ordeal I went through to make this cake.

First of all though, I should mention that making this cake is freaking expensive. To explain, to make the exact cake I made you will need:

• Wilton Romantic Castle Cake Set ($16.68, price has gone up since I bought it)
• 16″ cake boards ($10.19 at Ben Franklin)
• 6″ cake boards (5.99 at Ben Franklin)
• 6 x 2 Inch Round Aluminum Cake Pan ($11.14)
• White Candy Melts ($5.59 at Ben Franklin)
• Wilton White Cake Sparkles x2 ($4.79 at Ben Franklin)
• Wilton Artificial Clear Vanilla Extract ($2.99 at Ben Franklin)
• 10″ Round Cake Pan ($14.49 at Ben Franklin)
• Wilton Floral Collection 32-Piece Flower-Making Set ($21.99)
• #3 tip ($3.49 as a set)
• Wilton Plastic Dowel Rods ($3.99 at Ben Franklin; awful, awful product)
• Wilton Pure White Rolled Fondant x2 ($8.99 at Ben Franklin)
• 1 lb bag confectioner’s sugar x3 ($2.50 each)
• Wilton Icing Colors ($9.80)
• 3 box cake mixes ($3.00 each on sale)
• 9 eggs (about $3.00)
• 3 sticks butter (about $4.00)
• vegetable shortening sticks (about $4.00)

All that comes out to about $159.40. Add in the 14 hours labor I put in and I’d have to charge like $250 to make this for someone else that wasn’t family.

Thankfully, the really expensive stuff is for the most part reusable. I can use the kit, the pans, the boards, the cutter set, the tips, icing colors, and rods again. Plus, I stretched the sparkles enough where I only used one bottle. Doing another castle would only require the cakes and frosting, though the next castle I have planned will require gold dust, red fondant, and square cake pans. Ugh.

I started off on Thursday night. The instructions said, “Cut 285 forget-me-nots.”

*slits wrists*

Anyway, I dyed a hunk of fondant pink.

I rolled it out to 1/16 inch and began cutting. The funny part about buying the Wilton flower cutter set is the only one you need is the little flower. You’re also supposed to use the pink foam and the plastic rod to indent the flower, but I think I saw the rod in the kitchen a couple weeks ago and threw it away. Oops. Then I couldn’t find the bag with the foam, even though I’d found it after going insane looking for it with my Mockingjay cake.

I improvised and got a plastic chopstick and used my palm to press the flower middle in.

It did the job. I put them all on a paper plate to dry.

Yeah this only took me about 2 hours. I learned how to use the cutter the right way about halfway through. I had been cutting one flower, then used a toothpick to poke the flower out. But apparently the upper part of the cutter that you hold while pressing is slightly bigger than the actual cutter part, so you can cut several flowers, then push your finger through the bottom where the fondant is and the flowers all pop right out the “top”. This sped things along greatly.

The instructions say to make royal icing, but I didn’t have meringue powder and neither did the store. Instead, I used little fondant balls. I rolled out white fondant, then cut little circles out with a coffee straw. This was a bad idea, because I had rolled it too thin and so I had to cut two circles for each ball. Just this very second, I realized I should have just switched to a regular straw. ARRGH!

I attached the balls with piping gel, which Baby Girl cutely calls “pipping gel”. I cut out 310 just for good measure. I have to say, making these with fondant middles requires some serious mental stability. I made about 100 before I began to get exhausted and nauseated. Seriously, making these made me sick.

The next day, I started on them again. This time Baby Girl wanted to help, so I let her do the cutting of the white and rolling them into balls. After about 30, she started to sigh loudly and told me how much making the balls sucked and could I please roll them for her instead of vice versa? lol

Eventually, I let her roll and attach and that was better for her. But really, making this many makes you crazy.

Friday morning, I made a batch of buttercream frosting using Wilton’s recipe in the instructions. Each batch requires 4 cups of sifted confectioner’s sugar. Wow.

When I got home on Friday, I began baking the cakes. I figured I could make one 6″ and one 10″ cake with one box mix. Since I had only one of each pan, this made the most sense anyway, since I had to cool the cakes before I could use the pan again. When I had all four layers cooled and ready, I began layering. I started with the 6″ cake, putting it onto a 6″ cake board.

My bottom layer was really fat. I didn’t measure really well for the first cake. I cut the top off using a Wilton Cake Leveler. I colored the icing pink with more icing color and began to put it on the cake. I put the next layer on top, then smeared more into the spaces between the layers to have an even side.

A word of advice if you make this cake during the warm season or live in Hawaii, you cannot use straight up buttercream to ice cakes. The butter will melt and your cake will start slipping and sliding. Use half shortening and half buttercream. This will enable the frosting to keep a sturdier consistency.

Here are all the pieces of the cake set with my iced cake on the left.

For the roofs, you had to ice the plastic roofs from the kit. This was really annoying. The kit comes with patterns for cutting out fondant for the roofs and I am definitely going to do that next time. Just make a copy of the pattern before you use it so you can use it again for another castle.

After I frosted it, I sprinkled the cake sparkles on. I still had to layer the next cake, but I wanted to try this to see what it was like. It was hard to handle after it was frosted.

To attach the roof to the turret, you had to put melted chocolate on and then put the roof on and let it dry.

Here’s a completed turret. I kept the castle box to use it to hold them while they dried.

Anyway, back to the cakes.

Here’s the 10 inch cake. You can see that it’s on top of a pink board. It’s actually three 16″ cake boards wrapped in aluminum foil and then wrapped in pink wrapping paper. I didn’t really like the way cakes look on silver, so I went with the wrapping paper. I’m really glad I did! The great part about wrapping the board is that you can use the board again. You have to use three so that it actually supports the weight of the cake. It’s ridiculously heavy.

Looks great so far, right?!

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo….

Yes, the door was too tall. Or rather, my cake was too short. I had to go and bake another cake. Thank goodness I’d thought to buy three boxes.

This was my first three layer cake. I was quite proud of myself.

I rolled out a whole package of fondant and covered the cake. I’m still getting the hang of doing this to round cakes and it came out pretty horrible, with folds all over the place.

This is where disaster struck. I had to layer the cake, which meant I had to insert the dowels to support the upper layer. The instructions on the dowel package says to use a serrated knife or kitchen shears. I went with the knife. The problem is, the dowels are made out of very slippery thick plastic.

I cut one piece, then was doing the next when my knife slipped and I sliced my left thumb tip open. It was so bad that I had blood flowing openly down my hand as I ran to the bathroom. Those steak knives aunty gave me for my wedding were still damned sharp…

It was hurting like crazy, so I said the hell with pouring hydrogen peroxide on it and just washed it out, put neosporin, and wrapped it up SUPER tight with bandaids to help stop the bleeding. I’d been holding it tight with Kleenex and after about 5 mins it just wasn’t stopping, so I just had to seal it up and keep going. 36 hours later and it’s still sensitive, but has already closed up and I can keep it bandage free. It looks horrible though. That makes my third bad knife slice on fingers this year.

Here’s the layered cake. Fricking dowels. After all that crap they were too tall. I was pissed, so I just kept going, figuring I could just frost around the base. Sadly, you could see the pink frosting and cake underneath the fondant, so next time I think I’ll just go with buttercream all around.

It took me two batches of pink frosting and one of green to have enough for the cake, though the green one you can just do a half batch. I was lazy, so I used my refrigerated frosting from Easter. It seemed like such a waste not to use it and it was fine.

This is the part that was incredibly frustrating. The instructions said to cut a dowel rod 1″ shorter than the cake, then attach the dowel rod to the turret with melted white chocolate. The problem here is I tried holding the pieces in place while it dried and it just wasn’t working for me, so I just shoved the dowels in and pushed the turret in after. They weren’t very sturdy and a cake with buttercream probably would have held the turrets to the side a lot better.

I think it might have worked better if the dowels weren’t hollow. They just weren’t sticking to the bottom of the turret. Maybe covering the top with wax paper and then rubber banding it down would make the chocolate adhere better because the bottom of the turrets are flat.

Before I inserted them, I piped on the pink window outline and then the green “leaves”. I bought a leaf tip, but I couldn’t figure out how the frick to use it, so I just oozed green in a fat line and put the flowers on. No one noticed.

After this point I got sick of taking pictures.

Final cake! Complete with sagging roof! My darned cake was tilted on this side. The next day, I slipped a white wafer underneath and that made it nice and straight.

Here’s a close up of the front of the cake. The windows and door are all frosted and then pushed into the cake.

Here’s the side. As you can see, some of the flowers fell off this windowsill. I really should have made new buttercream as the Easter one was regular buttercream, not the half shortening one.

Here’s the back of the cake.

And here’s the cake the next day, just before singing time. By this time, four turrets had fallen off multiple times and eventually I just stuck my fingers in and removed the dowels, then pushed the turrets in far enough where they could hold themselves up. This worked infinitely better than having dowel supports.

In the end though, none of the kids noticed the flaws I saw and the only complaints I got were that they couldn’t eat the roofs.

The castle set itself is very cool as it includes instructions for three different cakes, including a medieval stone castle cake. The windows are very easy to use. My only complaint is the instructions. They’re all in one big paragraph and very difficult to read. The dowels sucked and I won’t be using them again. 1″ is definitely not enough to keep the turrets up.

This week has been a hectic one, since Baby Girl turned 7 this week. We had her party yesterday, but I sent her to school with cupcake cones from Bakerella’s cookbook Cake Pops. I went to both Walmart and Ben Franklin and neither of them had pink, so I had to just buy white. I had to make 18 cones.

If you’ve made these before, you probably know something I know and that is that styrofoam blocks are expensive. And they’re even worse when your pops tip over, making the holes useless for another use. Since I didn’t want to buy styrofoam, I used upside down recycled meat trays instead. Worked out perfectly!!

I simply took a knife and cut crisscrossing lines and then used a cone to punch through.

Sugar cones are too big for these treats, so you have to cut the cones shorter to use less cake. I used a serrated steak knife to slowly saw the cones down, then snapped off the jagged parts. I broke a lot and ended up with exactly 18 cones to use.

Next, I measured each cake ball to make sure it fit with the cone. My cake balls and cones were of varying sizes, so I had to do this for each one and adjust as needed. I’d made the cake balls the night before, which helped a LOT.

Next, I dropped the ball into the melted white melts and used a spoon to coat it and take it out. I scooped it onto the cone and put sprinkles, then let it dry. After they were dry, I put chocolate on top and topped it with a red M&M.

They didn’t look perfect, as my chocolate on top never did melt as good as the white melts did and so I just had to goop it on as best I could. Still, they were very pretty. I waited until they dried, then put them in plastic baggies and tied them with ribbon. We took them to school in a little basket from Easter and they were a hit with the kids, though Baby Girl said that the cone was a little stale, which I’d warned her might happen.

All in all, much less painful than my last pop experience.

When I was growing up, we’d go over to my Grandma Mu’s house a lot and sometimes either her or my mom would have corn chowder for us to eat, which was really great because Hilo is a very rainy town. It’s cold and the air is very wet, leaving you feeling kinda blue, so the corn chowder I ate was always very comforting and delicious.

One time when I was old enough to remember, my mom told me their secret ingredient: a packet of Lipton Noodle Soup. My daughter has been downright obsessed with secret ingredients lately. I don’t think she’s quite gotten the hang of the concept though, as she’ll just randomly declare something in a recipe as The Secret Ingredient. According to her, the secret ingredient for this corn chowder is…… corn.

Hahaha! Oh, children. They’re so amusing sometimes.

I never did find out what else they put in, but over the years after trying out different chowder recipes online and making changes as I saw fit, I arrived at something I liked very much.

First of all, 2 tbsp butter, half a diced onion, and a half cup of celery. Cook until translucent and then add 3 sliced of thick cut chopped bacon. Cook for a few minutes.

Next up, add 2 cups water, 2 tsp chicken bouillon (or 2 cups chicken broth), 1 Lipton Noodle Soup packet, 1 can of evaporated milk, 1 can of cream corn, and 1 can of whole kernel corn. No need to drain the whole kernel corn, just pour it all in.

Add 3-4 medium cubed potatoes. Cut them small so they cook fast and are easy to eat. Slice 20 baby carrots or two whole carrots and add to pot. Bring to a boil, then lower heat, cover and simmer until potatoes and carrots are cooked and the chowder has thickened. You can add a thickening mixture of flour and water, but I don’t find this necessary. The ingredients tend to cause it to thicken up on its own.

Top with fresh minced parsley before eating.

This isn’t the greatest photo, as I’m still learning how to take tabletop photo images and am not doing very well with laziness. Hopefully it still looks delicious to you though!

Comfort Corn Chowder Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1/2 onion, diced
• 1/2 cup diced celery (2-3 stalks)
• 2 tbsp butter
• 3 thick slices bacon, diced
• 2 cups water (or chicken broth, eliminate bouillon)
• 2 tsp chicken bouillon
• 1 packet Lipton Noodle Soup
• 1 can evaporated milk
• 1 can cream style corn
• 1 can whole kernel corn
• 3-4 medium potatoes, cubed (small cut)
• 20 baby carrots or 2 large carrots, sliced
• pepper
• fresh parsley

Instructions:

1. Melt the butter in a pot, then add the onion and celery. Cook until translucent.
2. Add bacon and cook for a few minutes.
3. Add water, bouillon, Noodle Soup, milk, cream corn, and kernel corn. Stir until combined well.
4. Add potatoes and carrots. Season with pepper. Heat to boiling, then lower heat and cover.
5. Simmer until potatoes and carrots are cooked, about 30-45 minutes.
6. Sprinkle fresh minced parsley just before serving.

In case you hadn’t realized from all the things I casually mention, our family is slowly making our home into what I’ve now learned is called an “urban homestead”. Everything we’ve started growing here is edible. Everything that isn’t, we’re trying to either get rid of or it serves some other purpose.

For example, I insisted that Mr. Pikko not cut down the ti-leaf plants because it was useful for ropemaking. Sure, it would be a primitive rope and I ain’t gonna go making some right now, but it’s still a useful plant. And so it stays. He’s raising tilapia and rabbits and we have two mango and two avocado trees that are extremely generous.

On Sunday, we were able to pick the largest amount of produce so far. It’s still pretty meager, but it was more than the couple of beans I’d pick a day and had a bigger variety than the buttloads of grape tomatoes I had on my hands a few months ago.

We picked about a pound of green beans (which would probably cost me about 9 bucks at Foodland), grape tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuce, and five eggplants.

Later on in the day we picked more tomatoes and moved them to an Easter basket, which makes a great container for picking! I also picked a big bunch of kale leaves which I then sauteed in olive oil and garlic.

Mr. Pikko caught two tilapia, trying hard to catch the ones with spots because he wants the prettier fish to breed.

I should have made a salad, but was too lazy. We ended up eating a dinner of tilapia and sauteed kale. I hope to do this maybe once a month or so, eventually with more variety. Hooray for our first Self Sustainable Sunday!

20% Off Your $40 Seed Order – Use Code PARKSAVE20