French Macarons

Anyone else in love with French Macaroons? For my birthday in June, my friend Erin made me some macaroons. After indulging in half the box, I brought the other half up to my parents that evening to share. My Mom, who doesn't care for sweets, tasted one and loved it. Fast forward to this past weekend, and I picked up a number of flavours at Rahier Patisserie here in Toronto for my Moms birthday. My was the pink and green, and Aubrey adored the lemon (yellow). Are they replacing the popular cupcake on the dessert scene?

I found this article helpful: The Best Macarons in Toronto

Birthday Party, The Cake

Oscar's Birthday weekend was great fun. There are so many different elements to the weekend that I thought I'd break them into a few posts as each element is unique and special. This is my last "Baking" post for a long, long time. ;)

Some birthday cakes are fancy, and beautiful. Themed and stylized. But I think there is something perfect about a simple, classic birthday cake. My Mom makes the most delicious cakes from scratch, and one day, I will try to recreate her famous cakes, but for Oscar's birthday his cake was courtesy of a Duncan Hines box. :) I took a chocolate cake, and a vanilla cake and did layers. The icing, being SUPER easy is home made. Simply Icing sugar, Butter, Vanilla flavour and some water.

The icing isn't perfectly put on, but that's what happens when your baby gets scared of the KitchenAid Stand Mixer and wants the cling to you as you ice the cake. It was a bit of a struggle but we did it in the end, together. The cake is 3 layers and topped off with sprinkles. I was going to put some circus toppers on it, but I just fell in love with the simplicity and stopped after the sprinkles. This may be common knowledge but if you want to know the trick to doing layers,  there is one simple step.

You need to slice that "hump" off the top of the cake off all of the inside layers. You want to make it as flat as possible, because if you start layering with the humps, your cake is going to wobble and potentially slide off one another when you ice.

Just do that with all of the "inside" pieces but leave the hump on the top one. :)

And there you have it. Our sweet classic cake, for our sweet little boy.

Birthday Party, Sweets

Oscar's Birthday weekend was great fun. There are so many different elements to the weekend that I thought I'd break them into a few posts as each element is unique and special.

Leading up to the weekend, our house was filled with the sweet scent of lilacs from our garden, or maybe it was all of the icing sugar floating through the air as I made desserts. Although the birthday boy got little sugary treats himself, no birthday party is complete without cake. And although I made a cake (I'll do another post on that...) with the success in my kitchen of my 5 Minute Cake Pop, I decided to venture into new territory...

Honestly, I'm addicted now to these things. This time, instead of sticking lollipop sticks into the timbits, I dunked the donut holes into the icing and placed them on wax paper. Next, I put a smartie, and then sprinkled some sprinkles onto the top. Pop them into the fridge and maybe an hour later take them out. The wax paper makes them VERY easy to peel off. (See original recipe and post here)

You can see in the VERY bottom photo there was a lot of icing that had pooled around the bottom of the ball. But the pooled icing is missing from the top. To remove the pooled icing, I took scissors and gently cutting away the excess. (I worried that by using my hand, the pressure may rip the ball)

3 tiered Cake stand, William Sonoma , Photos by Lindsay Stephenson