Cakes - Phase four

One hundred fifty-six cupcakes to frost, Onehundred fifty-six cakes, take some cream and smear it around, One hundred fifty-five cupcakes to frost.

Thanks to the help of three wonderful women - all cupcakes were frosted by 9pm. (Starting at 7 with a break for dinner) Everyone had fun and now the biggest question is how to get them to church in the morning. Not quite all 156 cupcakes will make it - a few have already left his world and several others got put on a plate in the freezer for a friend. But the tally is still over 120.

Whew. Overall it has been fun and a great learning experience - but I think I won't do something like this until Saphira graduates or some big achievement like that. All things in moderation - and this was a bit beyond that border stone.

Cakes - Phase three

Next step - lots and lots of cupcakes. Three people have come to help. The cake was made using the Hershey Sourcream cake and the Hershey heritage cake - the Sour Cream cake was the overall favorite. Not only was the taste and texture great - the color was amazing. Little bugs were for the babies and made from cottage cheese.

Saphira decided to dig into the big people cake.

Now she found her own lady bug.

Sweet Dreams

There were just too many good captions to go with this scene that we saw on our walk the other day:

Cakes - phase two

If you're following along - I'm baking an insane number of cakes and cupcakes for our one-tomorrow daughter. Did I mention I've never done cake decorating before? Frosting yes, decorating no.

Cake status

total batches of cakes baked: 7

Recipes used: 4 (used another Hershey - but it is untested as it is a cake base, not a cupcake)

1 large round cake in freezer

2 rectangle cakes in freezer

22 unfrosted large cupcakes in freezer

8 partially frosted large cupcakes in freezer

over 100 unfrosted mini cupcakes in freezer

Today I did the final baking and did a frosting test run with the Ukrainian dyes.

I also decorated Saphira's Sugar-free sirnik that I colored/sweetened with pureed cherries.

Then I decorated 4 cupcakes and 2 other sirnik "cakes" that I'm going to drop by a friend's tomorrow - her son was also born on the 13th!

All the sirnik bug were made using a silicone "bug" form.

The frosting of the cupcakes is taking as much if not more time than I feared - I think I'll put a call out for Saturday help.

Phase three will be Thursday night when I make the "big" flat cake for the country team meeting - as well as make up 30 hard boiled eggs for deviled eggs. Eek.

Incredible edible eggs

I normally buy my eggs from the egg wagon on the way home from the supermarket. Okay - so its the back of a truck - but wagon sounds better. My last egg lady (they seem to move around alot - she was my 4th) always made sure to give me the freshest eggs and would even refuse to sell them to me if they weren't fresh enough - all because I had a baby in tow.

This new egg lady has been pushing me to buy Quail eggs. Well, They're cute enough - but I really didn't see the point. A year or so ago when we were in Ivano-frankivska, the woman we stayed with gave her young daughter raw quail eggs in a yogurt type drink every morning - for health and to fight against radiation and several other health benefits that i took with an interested nod and a generous dose of skeptic's salt.

Well, when the egg lady keeps trying to get you to buy something, the least you can do is find out about it. While I couldn't find any totally authoritative source on the internet, I found enough pseudo sources saying similar things that you just have to believe that they are healthier for you than chicken eggs. Actually the item that most caught my attention was that Quail eggs have twice the iron content of a chicken egg packed into their small shell.

Iron is incredibly important for growing babies and as we don't have all the iron enriched (or no-sugar) cereals that there are in other places Saphira's diet is probably a bit low on natural iron - at least according to the iron calculator. And since I can get 10 eggs for 3 uah (I think) - they're a bargain compared to western prices - so i think I'll give them a try. We'll see if it helps us run faster, jump higher, and conquer illness with a single egg.

The Great Cake B ake - or a probable recipe for insanity

I have these two parts of me - the very direct, keep it organized and simple part and a creative part. The creative part succumbs to odd activities and projects - sometimes ones that never get completed. The organized part often stays too busy too allow the other part to succumb. And sometimes the two parts battle it out. Win-win, win-lose, or lose-lose: I've suffered them all.

Enter Saphira's Birthday. Plan A was to just have a quite song at home with gifts from her family - after all, what does a one-year old who we don't give sugar to need a party for? And then things kept happening - like meeting a mother with a child who has the same birthday, like the country team meeting falling on that weekend, like the newest doorkeeper giving Saphira a treat every time she is on duty and saying she is going to act like a granny since her granny is far away, like the fact that the whole church has been stand-in family for Saphira, like making a photo album and not having the traditional picture of 1st b-day cake smeared all over the place.

Creative side put her foot down and said something had to be done - She decided we needed a big cake and 100 cupcakes to bring to church. She decided on a ladybug theme.

Organizer queen still can't figure out what the big cake is for, and hasn't quite figured out the decorating of all the cupcakes - but she did manage to win out on mini cupcakes instead of big ones (less baking, less frosting, less cost) and after Creative Girl tried making about 30 cupcake liners herself out of parchment paper, she took over that project as well and found a woman to meet her on a street corner and sell her some mini cupcake liners. Now those were a great find.

So far they've both won on the choice of cake - Creative Girl obviously likes variety and Organizer Queen doesn't see the point in baking a lot of cakes unless you discover the best one - so while all the cakes will be chocolate (what other color can you have for a ladybug??) the following recipes (in order of niceness) have been used.

http://www.joyofbaking.com/ChocolateCupcakes.html - method really is everything, they say - while most involved, this recipe gave the best chocolate flavor overall - texture was also different than the others. The top of this cake was matte rather than glossy which was also probably due to method.

http://www.hersheys.com/recipes/4602/Chocolate-Sour-Cream-Cake.aspx (really almost 1st) - very very rich, easier than the 1st recipe, but a bit more pricey with ingredients

and http://www.hersheys.com/recipes/4754/Black-Magic-Cake.aspx - wins on cost and color - but flavor almost tastes boxed :-(

Was going to do a 4th variation - but Organizer Queen missed the fact that she would have to give the mini cupcake tins back when she did and so she didn't have the buttermilk she needed for the other recipe - we settled on a second batch of the sour cream for ease of baking and because there was lots of sour cream.

Would expound on this theme more - but Organizer Queen says that time is ticking and I still have another cake to bake. (If you're wondering - OQ won out on the doing it in advance and putting the cakes in the freezer, will just have to figure out the frosting bit as we come closer to to celebration day/week)

Experiments - or making Yogurt in a Crockpot

While visiting a Ukrainian mother and talking about food - I mentioned that Saphira adores yogurt. You want her to eat something, you douse it with yogurt. (We joke that she is all set for India). Well, the mother wanted to know if I was making my own.

"No," I said.

"Why," she asked, "or are you lazy?"

I explained I could find sugar-free plain yogurt that was tasty and saw no reason to buy yet another machine to make it. Honestly, I've been quite skeptical of the growing popularity of yogurt makers here in Kiev. Some of my friends have them and when it comes to babies - this is always a question that comes up. Still, this was the first time that I'd been called lazy for it.

"Why do you make yogurt instead of buying it?" I asked.

She explained that it is for the pro-biotic effects - that you get the most good bacteria and that the stuff in the store might not even have anything living in it anyway.

Still not convinced, I nodded.

Fast forward a week when we met up again. Our visit fell over lunch and so she shared some yogurt with us and I shared some of Saphira's cutlets and sirnik with them. Saphira gobbled up the yogurt. I mean, she loves yogurt - but this was obviously something extraordinary. Skeptical as I was, I couldn't deny her response - so the research began.

1) Economic cost of yogurt making: Despite the readily available cheap and yummy yogurt - making it yourself ends up saving you HALF the cost. Even if you factor in the average cost of a machine, you break even around 32 liters - or in about 27 weeks for my household.

2) A little searching and I discovered that I could make yogurt without a machine - in fact I could make it in my crockpot. Now there are recipes out there for making yogurt in a crockpot that really are pretty high maintenance - you have to do all this preheating and wrap a towel around it overnight - blah. I wanted something that was an EQUAL substitute for a yogurt maker - so I read some other ways to make yogurt and here is what I came up with:

Easy Yogurt in a Crockpot

Materials: 1 Crockpot, preferably with a keep warm setting; 1 serving of natural yogurt with live bacteria or a yogurt culture starter, glass jars that fit in your crock pot, At least 1 liter of milk - if you use more you may need to increase the yogurt and starter you use and add more jars, a cooking thermometer that registers temperatures from 80 to 200F

Prep work: You should test your keep warm function the day before to ensure that it won't heat your yogurt too high. I did this by pouring hot water into the crockpot and leaving it on keep warm for a few hours and checking it periodically. I did find that on my crockpot, if left for a long time (3+ hours) the temperature will rise - so I took this into account when making my yogurt.

Instructions:

1) Pour hot water into your crockpot - about half way full - check the temp to ensure it is not higher than 100F - Turn your crockpot on to its lowest setting.

2) Heat your milk on high in the microwave a few minutes - you don't want it to boil but you do want it to reach a temp of around 180 to kill things - check the temp periodically with the thermometer and stir the milk. This process took about 10 minutes. Alternatively you can do this on the stove.

3) Allow milk to cool to 110 - 100F. (I Covered it and put it in the fridge)

4) Mix in your yogurt or yogurt culture

5) Fill your clean jars with milk mixture

6) Place the jars in the crockpot - make sure the water in the crockpot does not get into the yogurt - remove water if necessary

7) insert your thermometer, close the lid and go do your thing - the yogurt should be ready in about 3 hours.

I checked mine periodically to ensure the temperature was fine and turned it off after one hour while we went on a walk. It stayed off the remainder of the time and at 3.5 hours the yogurt was a lovely soft set and mild. Other sites say that a more tart yogurt can be achieved by leaving the yogurt for more time. During the remaining two hours - the temp had dropped 10 degrees - not bad at all since the lid doesn't close fully due to the height of the thermometer!

I'm very pleased with myself - not only can I now say I'm not lazy, but I start saving 50% on yogurt immediately - without buying another machine to clutter up the kitchen!