The wedding cake is finished!!

 Firstly let me say there is NO WAY I could have finished these cakes without Jon's help. Kneading the fondant alone was a huge task (we had to remake 3 batches of it too). Sometime during covering the final layer of the Brides cake my knee made a popping sound & then the pain came. I had no choice but to keep walking on it & today I had to borrow Mom Whipples crutches to get around. Then we were rescued by Mom & Dad Whipple when our van engine spontaneously combusted just after the cakes had been loaded. Luckily, the cakes were fine. However several important things in our engine melted before things got under control so I am without a car for an undetermined amount of time. Yay. All that aside, the cakes turned out well & the bride & groom loved them so all's well that ends well. For more pictures...

Cakes & Icing

We're back from San Antonio & the cakes are made. Christopher and Ethan were there as my quality control agents to check things out in between batches. There were 12 cakes in all and a total of 30 recipes used .(Not counting the one I had to make twice because the first time I forgot to put the sugar in. Yeah, it had been a long day. Ethan, in his role as quality control agent actually caught it while licking the bowl, not me.) So today you get the recipes for Red velvet cake (my own recipe), Devils food cake (Susan G. Purdy), Chocolate Italian buttercream icing, Vanilla Italian buttercream icing, Cream cheese icing, Raspberry filling, Marshmallow fondant and a few tips to bake perfectly even cakes and a great tip for spot cleaning carpets (don’t ask). Here you go…

Broccoli Cheese Chowder

I thought while I was waiting for my oatmeal this morning I'd post one of Jon's favorite soups (it's true, he actually LOVES some soups). It's really easy to make & only takes 15 min or so, but it can get a little pricey as it has 1/2lb of swiss in it, but if you get it on sale it's not too bad. It's an easy meal that's good enough for company-especially if you serve it with rolls & a nice salad. I, personally, love the smooth buttery texture & flavor of baby swiss, but I don't recommend using it in this recipe unless you want the cheese to melt all into the broth & become invisible. A good alpine swiss or something similar does great. For the recipe....

Gumpaste blossoms

Kay, so here’s my first blog about the gumpaste flowers. (See, I told you it was coming.) You can thank my friends Carolyn & Jewelle for this getting done. They came over today & made peony centers & helped with rose buds saving me huge amounts of time I'm using to catch up on things I've been putting off like this post. The pictures aren't all great and some of them wouldn't rotate even though they were rotated in Picasa so I don't know, but at least I found my camera. I’ll give directions for a generic fruit blossom this time & follow up with a rose and then an orchid. I’m also giving a link to a really good video on doing orchids because sometimes it’s just easier to “get it” if you can see someone else doing it & this is a pretty good video. There are various things you’ll need for each one, but some of the tools/equipment you’ll need for all of them. I’ll list the shared tools at the beginning with how much they cost me and then list any additional tools needed under each specific flowers’ instructions. So….are you ready?

Bake Therapy

Okay, so you know those people who-when they're really having a cruddy day and nothing is going right-turn straight to chocolate or ice cream or both. I'm not one of those people. Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely an emotional eater. Happy, sad, angry. I have an emotion & I find a food. But if I want to relieve stress, I bake. Cooking is for everyday, but baking is therapy to me. Not bread or biscuits kind of baking either. I'm talking cakes, pastries, holiday foods, not-the-kind-of-food-you-eat-every-day-unless-you-want-to-weigh-400lbs kind of baking. Today I made cake. I needed to test a yellow cake recipe for the wedding coming up, so I decided to whip up a 1/2 batch of smitten kitchen's recipe. (Which, by the by, isn't bad. It's not fantasmically stupendous, but it is-after all-just yellow cake & that's not really my thing.) I filled my mini muffin tin & popped it in the oven to bake & looked at the remaining batter about .2 seconds before I decided to play around with it a little. I divided it up & made a batch of pumpkin pie cupcakes w/ fluffy cream cheese icing & pineapple right-side-up cakes with whipped caramel pecan icing. The variations are both pretty good. I like the pineapple upside-down bites better I think, but maybe that's because I'm in the mood for coconut. I think the pumpkin one might be a little bland, but I did eat it right after the pineapple variation which is really sweet, so I'll try it again later. The chocolate icing recipe of smitten kitchen's is pretty good & super easy too. It works with milk/white chocolate too if you want to try that. The boys are down for a nap so I thought, what the heck, why not blog it. So if you want the recipes here they are...

Beef Stew

So, this Friday at the Gathering Place we're having beef stew & rolls for lunch & Emily asked me how to make beef stew & I'm 100% sure I left out important ingredients when telling her because that's how I am since I rarely ever measure & always just kind of cook on the fly. To fix that little mistake I made beef stew tonight & actually paid attention to what I did. Yay me! So here's my beef stew recipe, hearty, simple & delicious (I'm so humble).

Easy, Creamy Chicken Bake

In an effort to use up the last of the rough pastry I made up a chicken thing tonight. It was creamy, cheesy & quite good. We all really liked it & at the end of the meal Jon pronounced that I should blog it so here I am. If you don't have rough pastry on hand you could use store bought croissant rolls and I'm sure that'd be good too but you might need to adjust the cooking time & temp. Short blog tonight because I have a headache again. Love this pregnant thing I gotta tell ya. Real quick though: Ryan got his first two teeth a couple of days ago. Yep, they came it at the same time and it's about time since he's 10 months old. Although he proved to us that one doesn't really need teeth if one is determined enough since he was eating pork ribs (or porkcicles as someone called them) at a chili cook-off we went to at Jon's work a couple of weeks ago. (I'll see if I can get the picture his friend took.) Also, Christopher scored a goal in his soccer game today. He's really gotten so much better since the first game. He's more focused & is starting to get the idea behind soccer. Anyway, for the recipe...

Mille Feuilles

Mille Feuilles (mil foi) is a lovely creation of the French also sometimes called a Napoleon. They may be screwy on a lot of things, but those Frenchies know how to make some delicious food. Since I mentioned it in last nights post, and since you really only need pastry cream, berries & some powdered sugar to make a lovely mille feuilles I thought I'd oblige you this morning. You can make a savory mille feuilles with cheese & spinach or pesto, but I've got pastry cream on the brain, so that's what you're getting. For the recipe....

Chicken Pot Pie w/ Saffron, Fennel & Rough Pastry-mmmmmm

We had the missionaries over tonight so I needed something that could just cook while I cleaned my house so that I could pretend that it always looks neat & tidy. (You're laughing, but if you have kids you do it too my friend.) So I made a rough pastry this morning to use as a crust (I've also just put biscuit topping on it before & that's good too) & did the rest in the afternoon.

Our new Elders nice. I don't really know them yet, but they seem like they'll be hard workers. (They'd better be, because I'm none too inhibited to say something to them if they're slackers.) One of them-Elder Scow (?sp?)-is from Hurricane, near Panguitch. It made me think of the drives I took with Gram & Gramp Stellmon while they were staying with us down there because Gramp like to make up little songs about Hurikin & Laverkin (that's how they pronounce it out there-Hurikin). One drive we took I nearly killed us all not 500 feet from Papa & Grandma's house. It winter there, so we're all bundled up-even Molly (my Grandpas fat little dachshund). I'm driving along & I see that Mollys' front legs have come out of her little sweater so I-brilliantly-let go of the wheel & turn to my right to fix it for her. Just as I get it done Gram shouts "Stop!" from the back seat. I hit the brakes without even looking up which is good because the car stopped about 1 inch from a telephone pole. On one side was a stop-sign and on the other was a guy-wire from the pole. There was about 2-3 inches of clearance on either side of the car. Yep, I'm just that good. I like to blame it on the fact that I was 7 or 8 months pregnant with my first kiddo & not a lot of blood was going to my brain at the time. Who knows. =P But I backed up & off we went to Zion's National Park as though nothing had happened. Gram was either very brave or very desperate to get out that day, I'm not sure which. Anyway, here are the recipes...

Peach Chicken & 15 min Polish dinner Plus...artichokes

We had the Markhams over for dinner the other night & Jon requested that I make peach chicken because I hadn't made it in a while. This is one of those rare made-up dishes that I actually remembered to write the ingredients down at the time I made it. Yay me!

The 15 min Polish dinner came about because I've been busy all day making gum paste flowers (10 roses & 6 blossoms go me) & didn't want to put much effort into dinner.Which is also why there are no pictures tonight. Sorry.  Don't worry though, I am taking pictures of the process and sometime when I have a few spare minutes (ha ha ha) & Jon's not home (because he hates when I'm on the computer for more than 15 minutes without him) then I'll put up the pictures & instructions for the flowers.Anyway, it turns out that this cheap (less than 75 cents per person) & super easy dinner rates MUCH higher on the deliciousness scale than the rather fussy butternut squash ravioli of last week so say the men in my house. That tends to be the way of it doesn't it.

Hey, if anyone has the 'perfect' pumpkin roll recipe post it. I'm searching for my favorite version and have yet to find the right one. I like to taste the spices in the cake part, & I like the cream cheese type fillings, but not too sweet. Thanks for the help.

On another note, my dear sweet little heathens, reminded me that my belly is getting bigger. E-"Mommy, I'm going to eat all my lunch so my tummy can grow big like yours" C-"No Ethan, your tummy can never get THAT big, Silly." Thanks boys for keeping me grounded I need that. =P

Anyway, for the recipes