Mimosa Scones (My First Ever Original Recipe!)

So, sometimes inspiration comes from some crazy places. Like, say, a hang-over. Not mine! Seriously! A friend’s! Anyway, I spent the day yesterday with some great women from my book club, and naturally the conversation turned to mimosas (just like most meetings… discuss book for 5 minutes, discuss kids for 10 minutes, drink wine the rest of the time).  I have another good friend in book club, who also bakes, and she and I got to talking about mimosa cupcakes. We had both heard of champagne cupcakes so it seemed easy enough to add some orange to it. When we got home ,we both immediately got to work researching recipes and,  within seconds of each other, started emailing our ideas back and forth. But then I got to thinking…

Mimosa= Champagne and orange juice, traditionally served at brunch.

Cupcake=Anytime food, but not typically thought of as a “brunch” food.

Muffin= Ideal brunch food!!!!!!

So I grabbed my library copy of “The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion” (which I am totally going to buy when I need to return it to the library) and found the recipe for a basic muffin. BUT, I didn’t have a few ingredients, AND I wanted to incorporate champagne. So I made quite a few changes popped them in the oven, and what came out was not a muffin. Somehow, and I don’t know why (because the section on basic scones was torn out of my book…) my muffins had become scones. AND they were awesome scones!

Scone + Mimosa = Brunch!!!!

Preheat oven to 400 and lightly spray a muffin tin with cooking spray

you will need:

2 c all purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 stick butter (1/2 cup)

1/2 c sugar

2 eggs

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp orange blossom water (orange extract)

1/2 c champagne

1 Tbsp orange zest

(For glaze)

1 1/2c confectioner’s sugar

3 Tbsp champagne

-Mix together first 4 ingredients

-Cream butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time. Add vanilla and orange extract.

-I added the flour mixture 1/2 cup at a time, alternating with the champagne (I don’t know if this matters or if you can add the champagne to the wet ingredients before the flour mixture, I’m just used to alternating wet and dry ingredients for my cupcakes)

-Add orange zest

-Scoop by 1/4 cup scoops into a muffin tin (I got nine, but you could easily get 10)

-Bake for 20 minutes or until the tops spring back when touched lightly, meanwhile make glaze

-In a saucepan, stir together the champagne and confectioner’s sugar. Bring to boil then reduce to simmer. Simmer, stirring until mixture is smooth.

-When muffins are done, allow to cool for 2 minutes in pan, then turn out onto a cooling rack. Top with 1 Tbsp of the glaze.

-Serve with fruit and a mimosa (add an egg white if you need to feel like it’s healthy) and enjoy your brunch!

Ellie made that Poppy bouquet using coffee filters and food coloring 🙂

I originally added some orange zest to the glaze, too. It was really good, but I will leave it out the next time. It kind of over powered the taste of the champagne.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave a comment!

Random Acts Of My Children (Involving Ice Cream and Cookies)

Anyone know a band looking for a drummer?

If anyone gets hungry, I can also whip up some mean spaghetti right here in my drum!

 If I lack in rhythm, I make up for it in noise and enthusiasm. Oh, and I will work for Cheerios! (Or any food for that matter! Maybe ice cream???)

Last night, Ellie and I made our own ice cream. I never realized how easy it is! We will probably do a version of this every night this summer!

(Slightly adapted from Parent’s Magazine, June 2011 issue)

In a quart size freezer bag, pour 1 cup milk, 1/4 cup sugar, and 1/4 tsp vanilla. (Add any other flavoring here, too. Ellie wanted hers blue- like the cotton candy flavor at Cold Stone Creamery, so I added a miniscule drop of blue food coloring). Squeeze the air out of the bag and seal well.

Place bag in a gallon size freezer bag and add to that bag 2 cups ice and 3/4 cup coarse salt. Seal bag and place the whole contraption in a plastic grocery bag.

Shake bag for 10 minutes or so (also a good arm workout!). When milk mixture is thick, rinse  the salt off of the quart bag and enjoy your ice cream!

Blue Ice Cream

Ellie was a little camera shy last night, so I didn’t get a good picture of her making the ice cream.

Tonight, I think I may puree some fresh strawberries to add to the bag and serve it on top of one of these

"Killer Chocolate Chip Cookies" from Hugs and Cookies xoxo

(For the cookie recipe go to Hugs and Cookies xoxo on Facebook, or her blog. Make sure you “Like” her on Facebook. I have tried two recipes so far from her weekly bake-a-longs and I haven’t been disappointed yet!)

Bye!

Butterfly Fairy Cookies (How-To!)

I had an idea. It may have had something to do with having “Barbie, A Fairy Secret” playing on loop on the TV for the past few days. Butterfly fairy cookies. Right now Ellie is telling me she wants a Barbie Fairy Secret birthday party. I am not starting to plan yet… last week she wanted a “Meg from Hercules” party, and the week before that she wanted “Daphne from Scooby Doo.” Her 5th birthday is in August so I’m sure her little mind will change AT LEAST once more, if not a thousand times more! But I thought I could whip up a few cookies and this weekend we could have one of our theme days.

I didn’t want to run out and buy a butterfly fairy cookie cutter, (ok… I did look and Sur La Table did not have what I had in mind) but I already had a ballerina and a dragonfly.

Start by cutting out the ballerina (you will want to make sure your dough is well chilled, and dip your cutter into flour- those arms and legs are a b***h to get out with out breaking off!) Then cut the top half of the dragonfly:

Use the ballerina to cut the body out of the dragonfly:

And place the wings from the dragonfly onto your ballerina body (like a puzzle piece):

(Gently push them together… I didn’t take a picture of that part)

I thought it would be fun to make one fly, so I used the opening of a #10 tip to punch a hole in one of the wings:

After baking let cool completely and decorate however you want. I didn’t want to make these too Barbie-ish just incase Ellie was over this movie before tomorrow, so I based mine on the really cute invitation we got for our friend’s daughter’s first birthday.

My favorite part is the disco dust on the wings. I love that stuff!

(Off topic a little: I’m trying to play around with my photography, unfortunately, this has not been the week for natural light in NJ. I was so excited to find this one little corner of my front room that was perfect!)

And this flying fairy?

I’m going to leave her here and see how long it takes Ellie to notice. I’m guessing roughly 18 seconds. I swear that girl can sniff out a cookie like a blood hound. 🙂

Bye!!!

My Week In (Pink) Cookies

The title of this post really says it all. Really, I can’t even think of anything to write!

All of these cookies were made with either one, two, 0r four drops of Americolor Electric Pink. The palest pink also has one drop of Wilton’s white.

The hippo face was inspired by the hippo in this collection by SugarKim on Flickr. You really need to browse her pictures. Just don’t go right now. Wait until you can look at hers without comparing my hippo to her hippo. Please.  🙂

And that was my week in pink!

Oh… and if you were blown away by Kim’s cookies, you need to check out her blog about the parties she throws- http://thepartiologist.blogspot.com/. I’d like to think that if we lived closer we’d be friends. (Not just so I could be invited to one of her parties!)

Bye!

Mothers’ Day Cookies

I really, really wanted to try the lemon-poppyseed roll out cookies from Callye of The Sweet Adventures of SugarBelle, and since mothers’ day just happens to be tomorrow, I had a good reason! Callye decorated her cookies like beautiful lemons and limes. She even generously shared a tutorial so we can all try to make our cookies as beautiful as hers! But, since I didn’t want to be a complete copycat, I decided to highlight the OTHER ingredient.. the poppy! And once I started to roll with it, I realized how perfect it was. My grandmother’s kitchen (before they redid it several years ago) was covered in bright yellow, red, and blue, poppy-printed wallpaper!

Here is the original recipe from SugarBelle, and here is her tutorial for making the lemons and limes using the wet-on-wet technique.

And here are my mother’s day poppy-seed cookies! Inspired by my grandmother’s kitchen, SugarBelle’s recipe, and probably a little bit of Ali Bee’s Bakeshop, too. (I have been obsessed with turquoise and red lately and I think I have these cookies stuck in my head.)

The polka dot cookies are regular vanilla cookies with my version of royal icing, the big red poppies are chocolate roll outs with the same royal icing, and the brushed on poppies are the lemon poppy seed roll outs with royal icing (for those, I added a splash of lemon juice to replace some of the water).

That’s black sanding sugar. I bought it so long ago, and never opened the bottle. I guess I knew it would come in handy someday!

I have also been trying a lot of brush embroidery lately. For an excellent tutorial on brush embroidery check out Ali Bee’s Bakeshop (I guess she DID inspire a good part of these cookies!)

Two more things: 1- I also made a bunch of the lemon poppyseed cookies with just lemon rind and sugar on top (like SugarBelle’s) and they were AMAZING! My husband, my neighbor, and my inlaws all had the same reaction… “mmm-MMMM!” And they were so quick to make, so they could be a great last minute hostess gift!

2- I owe Bryan, my husband a HUGE thanks for this! He was actually home last night, so we wanted to have a (rare) date/movie night. We rented “Black Swan” on demand, and he watched from the couch while I watched from the breakfast bar, where I was busy decorating cookies. This is a transcription of the majority of our conversations during the movie:

Bryan: “Woah, did you see that?”

Stephanie: “No, give me a second to finish the details on this one cookie, then can you rewind that?”

Love you, Bry!

Happy Mother’s Day to everyone! As my card from my very thoughtful friend, Marisa, read, “I hope you get to drink at least half a cup of coffee before you have to do something for someone”!

A “Pigeon” Playdate with Ellie

Ellie and I had another “theme day” on Saturday (she’s four and a half so we have a lot of “theme days”). Lately she has been into the books by Mo Willems. I love these books. He really gets the sense of humor of a young child. If you have never heard of him, his books include, “Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus” (which earned a Caldecott medal), “Knuffle Bunny- A Cautionary Tale” , a series of books about “Elephant and Piggie“, and many more.

We started by playing Ellie’s favorite computer game, which we found on Pigeonpresents.com. The game is based on one of the Pigeon books, (“Pigeon Finds A HotDog“). You are given a hotdog and a selection of toppings, everything from mustard to dirty socks. After dressing up your hotdog, Pigeon comes out and comments on it. Ellie rolls around on the floor laughing every time she plays this game. When we got tired of dressing up virtual hotdogs, we stopped and had some hotdogs of our own for lunch.

This week, we had a very nice surprise. Ellie’s cousins stopped by for a little while. We read “Don’t Let The Pigeon Stay Up Late”  and “Knuffle Bunny Too, A Case Of Mistaken Identity” while we ate our snacks:

I’m glad I made a few extra! (One of my Easter bunny cutters got a second job as a Knuffle Bunny, and the Pigeon is a circle with a bunny ear for a neck and a mini Halloween ghost inserted a la Sugarbelle’s technique for a beak).

Unfortunately we do not have a Pigeon or a Knuffle Bunny costume (as costumes are an important part of our theme days), and thank goodness Ellie did not ask me to make one for her!

This playdate was so easy to put together. There are a ton of activities on that Pigeon Presents website, and tons of books to read out loud. There is even a “Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus” board game that we don’t own, but I just saw at Target today. There is also a DVD of a few Mo Willems books in the Scholastic books series. Ellie loves it, because she gets to interact with the Pigeon.

I hope this post gave you some ideas, maybe for a rainy day.

Thanks for reading!

I linked this post to 5 a Day Books at The Imagination Tree