Baking with Blondie

Last week on Facebook, I posted a little sneak photo of a cake I made last Thursday. This cake was created for a dear friend and someone who has always believed in me and my potential since day 1. In fact, she's the one who tipped KSL in the first place about my blog, and started my whole TV-cooking-segment "career" of 2-4 cooking segment a month (and eventual live cooking segments at huge conventions- news to come!) I'm so grateful for her support, and was so excited to make a cake for her Mom's 80th surprise birthday party. Doesn't mean I wasn't scared to death to make it, but I'd jump to the moon and back for this woman. The inside was layered with moist white chocolate cake (the recipe was super-awesome, using buttermilk and sour cream), and was filled with my favorite tart & fresh raspberry filling. The outside was frosted in white chocolate buttercream, the base ribbons were created from fondant (I wasn't going to use fondant origin...

We're going to interrupt this wee-little cake tutorial for a bit of a countdown to something very special happening tomorrow in the blondie household:  0   - the number of times Ryan or I have broken any bones in our lifetimes. Also, the number of times either one of us has wanted to watch any Transformer movies. 1 - the number of children we have ... a little blonde-haired-blue-eyed-potty-training-car-loving-manchild. Also, the number of times I've left the country while we were married (to South Korea and Japan).  2 - the number of cars we've had in our marriage (our first was a 1990 Chrysler New Yorker), and now we drive a Toyota Yaris (completley paid off in less than a year!)  Also, the number of times I've tried crab and lobster. Hated it both times.    3 - the number of college degrees we've earned from Brigham Young University. Me = Music Performance with an Emphasis in Woodwind Performance. Ryan = A double major in ...

Today marks part two of our little cake decorating series, and it's all about flattening out that crazy stuff people love to order and see on their cakes:  fondant. I've made and worked with more than my fair share of fondant. My favorite type to eat is the homemade marshmallow fondant - but my favorite type to work with is... well... that expensive store-bought stuff. It may not taste as good, but it saves brain cells, okay?  Before I roll out the fondant, I usually add in some shades with icing color (usually the gel stuff from Wilton), and then fold in the color until it's uniform throughout. Then, I try to roll them out using my rolling pin and cornstarch (not powdered sugar). This gets the fondant pretty flat, but I like that polished look. So if I'm going for a shape that's less than 6 inches wide, I use something my mother-in-law probably never intended for it's use...  her beautiful pasta maker from Italy.  Yes, I've used it t...

After posting a photo on Facebook of the cake I made last Thursday , I was sent a bunch of questions about the cake, and the techniques I used to make it look so clean.  First of all, thank you everyone! Your compliments and emails have been darling. This was the first time I made a cake with that style, and I thought it turned out really awesome.  I know that making cakes can be a bit intimidating sometimes, so I thought it would be fun to share a few little Blondie Cake Tips that have certainly helped me out last week while making the cake. On Friday, after we've gone through the little techniques, I'll share the cake itself! So stay tuned.  As for today, I wanted to share a new tip that I'm completely obsessed with, and it has made a huge difference in my cakes, and their final, polished look.  When I frost cakes, I get a little crazy bout of OCD, and no amount of smoothing or spreading can make the cake perfect enough. So I end up frosting a...

I've been doing it wrong since day 1.  It was always a mystery to me how even a pack of 2-year-old children could make decent ice cream with baggies and ice - when I had all the darned equipment in the world and couldn't get mine to come out without shards of ice attached to each spoonful. This always disturbed me to the core, and I was a little embarrassed to admit it; heaven forbid asking  anyone what I was doing wrong.  Then I noticed something very specific written in the directions of a bunch of ice-cream recipes I was using, and had completely skipped over each and every time:  air-tight container .  I had been covering the container with plastic wrap, aluminum foil, or even tried to tape on an ill-fitting lid once. All times the ice cream flavors were there, but the texture was something like chewing on a chunk of raw chicken, freezer burned over more years than you'd dare admit. It was a complete and total tragedy every time, and mad...

Today is Whats Cooking with Ruthie's 2nd Birthday! Nutrimill Bosch and some of your favorite bloggers have come together to make it an extra BIG party! We are celebrating in true blogger style with a huge giveaway- check out these awesome prizes...    Grand Prize: Bosch Universal Plus Mixer with Cookie Paddles, Blender, and Slicer Shredder additional attachments PLUS a $50.00 visa gift card to help start your baking off right away!       Runner ups: 3 additional winners will each get a $100.00 gift card to one store of their choice: William Sonoma, Crate and Barrel, or Target. PLUS all the winners will receive a copy of Whats Cooking with Ruthie Family Favorites Cookbook ebook that is set to release this week.     Thanks so much for celebrating Whats Cooking with Ruthie's 2nd Birthday Bash and Giveaway with us today! It's super easy to enter- just fill out the Rafflecopter Entry form below... a Rafflecopter giveawa...

So, I've been a little MIA lately. Life happens, eh? But that's not necessarily a bad thing on all accounts. Here's what the blondie household has been up to lately: A couple weeks ago I was on a couple TV shows doing cooking segment s.  After a practice batch of mini-bacon cheesecakes for the TV segments, and on my way driving to my Mom's house to share said batch, a construction barrier (West Jordan, Utah is quite the windy place) was caught in a huge microburst and blew into the side of my car - leaving glass shards all over the inside of my car (destroying every little last beauty...) I'm still unpacking our apartment. Our books seemed to have performed a happy-bunnies-gone-wild act in the boxes, and now I feel like we have more books than we could have ever packed in the first place.  My goal this past week was that I couldn't open my laptop in the morning until I went for a run. Very, very effective for laptop-addicts like me. I got in...

Originally a guest post for: Love Stitched.  "Summertime is in full swing, and it has quickly become the norm to have the temperatures jump into the low 100's in our little valley. Normally we'd hover under our air conditioner, or spend the afternoon at the splash pad or local pool. Unfortunately, we are a one-car-family and my husband needed the car, and to make matters even more crazy...  ...our air conditioner died.   It turned out to be a whopping 87 degrees inside  our house - so naturally, when I removed this beautiful sorbet from the freezer and shaped it neatly into balls, they melted almost immediately into almost a smoothie-like texture. It was incredible how fast it melted.  Thankfully, sorbet still tastes like sorbet - even if it's melted. This tasted incredible. The raspberry was super-tart, but completely softened by the zesty lime and calming undertones of the sultry pear. It was a perfect blend of gorgeous flavors, and turned...

I LOVE to recreate recipes I've tried at a restaurant.  Last month, Ryan and I drove up to Pendleton, Oregon for his cousin's wedding. After a long drive up there from Utah, we were exhausted, hungry, and happy to be out of the car. Ryan's parents were amazing, and the second we settled into Pendleton, they took us out to dinner.  I ordered a salad from their seasonal menu, and really had no idea what was about to begin... my complete and utter obsession with blackberries.  Yes, I've had them before, but never have I really craved them constantly... until I took my first bite of this salad. In my opinion, it was the perfect salad. The blackberries were absolutely succulent, and were surprisingly sweet with just the right amount of tang. The cherry tomatoes provided bursted when you bit into them. The green onions balanced out the sweet with a little zip. The bed of arugula was what I can only describe as buttery (strange eh?) below the thick layer...

  You know when you type an entire post and it disappears?  Yes, this happens to me all. the. time. And it makes me a crazy person.  anyway...  This is the third installment of my "Eclairs, Three Ways" mini series.  So far this past week, we've learned how to make eclairs (with a simple base recipe), learned from Alton Brown how to keep these beautiful pastries from falling, how to fill the pastries, how to coat the pastries in three different flavors (blackberry white chocolate, white chocolate cream cheese, and milk chocolate cream cheese), and how to fill them in two different flavors (whipped peanut butter cream and whipped blackberry cream). Now, we're onto the last flavor: Cookies & Cream. It's divine, and probably my favorite from the lot.  I hope this series has encouraged you to get in the kitchen and make a few batches of these beautiful and easy pastries! I love how versatile they are. I mean, if you don't like any ...

Next on the list of eclairs this week is the ever-so-mouth-watering Peanut Butter Cream Filled Eclairs. My mother-in-law wrote me an email about a day after we delivered these to my father-in-law for his birthday... ...she basically screamed that these were all she wanted for Christmas this year. What can I say? Peanut-butter-lovers and this eclair were made for each other. I LOVE this design on eclairs. It looks fancy. It looks special. And it looks like you know a little bit about decorating a little pastry. However,  it's the easiest darned thing you'll ever do. I guarantee it.   (said in the Mens Warehouse guy's voice from the commercial). Peanut Butter Eclairs to make the eclairs:  follow my base eclair, white chocolate & chocolate cream cheese sauce recipes  here ,  and instead of filling with blackberry cream, fill with peanut butter cream. Whipped Peanut Butter Cream Filling  makes enough, trust me.  ingredien...

In case you hadn't guessed, I made a couple eclairs this past weekend.  It was my father-in-law's birthday, and my husband suggested we make a batch of eclairs.  We , obviously means, well, me.   I didn't mind, really. I love making eclairs, and I think every birthday should have something beyond delicious and devilishly sweet to go along with it. I doubled the batch below, and then split my cream filling into three different flavors. I asked on Facebook on Saturday morning which filling y'all wanted - and with an overwhelming holler for blackberry, I give you the Blackberry Cream Eclairs below. Don't worry, though, I'll be sharing the other two mouth-watering flavors on the blog later this week.  I've come a long way since I made my first batch of eclairs a couple weeks ago . Cleverly, I hid the fact that they fell by filling them right back up with filling. But still, I felt like I had cheated the whole experience. This time, t...

Can it really be that simple?  Dinnertime in this case, is completely at ease. Ever since we discovered (about 2 years ago) how easy it is to make pizzas using pita bread as the crust, we've been hooked. It has slowly moved from white flour full-sized pitas, to the small multi-grain ones. I think Ryan still prefers the previous version, but I love how my son will devour these without any clue there's a load of whole grain in them. Plus, they're just his size!  Sometimes I feel extra-sneaky and (gross) smash some steamed carrots or other veggies under the sauce on my son's mini pizzas. Super-gag, right? But any way to sneak in some veggies on that kid's plate is a win in my book. You could also puree the veggies, and stir them right into the sauce. You little devil, you.  But without the sneaky additions, these are incredible. AND DANG EASY, folks. You just plop some pita bread on your pizza pan, swirl on some sauce, throw on the toppings, bake f...