From The Archives

Each evening, after the wee one heads off to bed, I've been decorating butter cookies with royal icing for his Birthday cake extravaganza. By 2 AM I'm pretty bleary, but time is running short, and I can't begin working on this stuff when Danny is awake. You wouldn't think depicting the siege of Troy would be that complicated after the horse and city were in place, but then you've probably never made Hector and Achilles out of royal icing and butter cookies. At least, I kind of hope you haven't. Because I don't have the patience to mess around with a million shades of icing, I went for the orange/black look of Greek pottery. That turned out to be an excellent decision.

As I was putting the finishing touches on a fallen Trojan, Mr. ETB suggested making a second cake, as a joke to present an unsuspecting Danny with first. His idea was to make a sheet cake with crumbled cookies to look like dirt, and a cookie depiction of Heinrich Schliemann and scattered gold artifacts, like the Mask of Agamemnon also made of decorated cookies. Across the cake, we could lay my trowel with, "Almost only counts in horseshoes", written on it. Or perhaps, "No one will suspect..."

I'm really tempted to do it-we'll see if I have enough time.


I have not been cooking much, as we make our way through finals, papers, and holiday preparations. As I've been publishing this blog for seven years now, I do however have quite an archive of interesting things to share, which I'm posting links to below.


Christmas:

Panettone
Spritz Cookies
Nut-Free Stollen
Nut-free Stollen II
Steamed Cranberry Pudding
Browned Butter Pound CakePrune/Apricot Upside-Down Cake
Vin d' Orange


Birthday/Themed Cakes:

Alive
Porcupine Cake
Cars Birthday Cake
Excavator Cake
HMS Victory Cake
The Day The Earth Stood Still Cake
Farm

Decorated Biscuits/Cookies:

Monsters
Home Baking With Counterpunch (You never know when you'll need to bake cookies that look like Noam Chomsky, but if you do, I've got you covered)
Bastille Day Cookies
Valentine

Candy:

Homemade Sky Bar-nut free
Blood Orange Brittle
Homemade Twix-nut free


I'll try to link some other interesting posts as the holidays go along. Until then, feel free to browse the archives, tags, etc.