This blog is a little late because I've been busy trying to get caught up on reports for work. Just when I get ahead of the game I have a week where multiple reports can't be written because I am waiting on info from someone. Last week was one of those weeks.
Anyhow, on Sunday we did our second week of MDBD Nerdy Nummies edition. Zoey's original choice was Apple Pi Pie, but I figured we should do that closer to Pi Day, so I made her pick something else. She went with the Chemistry Lab Cake.
What we were making (pg 44)
The ingredients we needed
Our baking tools
This is a recipe that has been featured on Nerdy Nummies, however, in
the video Ro used a box cake mix and in the cookbook she used a made
from scratch pound cake. I had planned on doing the from scratch
edition; however, it calls for whole milk and we are a skim milk family.
I don't know if that would actually make a difference, but I didn't
want to risk it, so box cake it was.
Zoey mixing up the batter
This cake requires you to split the batter between two small Pyrex bowels. So you either need to have two of the same size glass bowls or you need to do what I did and make one cake at a time. Since these are very dense cakes, Ro recommends a slow bake method, so you cook them on 330 (which I just had to guess on since my oven is not digital) for 28 minutes. My first cake took 35 minutes and my second one tool about 45 minutes. I discovered after the first cake was done and out of the bowl, that I was way off on estimating half of the batter, so my second cake was much bigger. It wasn't a huge deal since I had to use the cake leveler to even the tops out anyhow. However, I do think it made my cake a little shorter than it should have been.
Once your cakes have completely cooled and you have leveled them, you stick them together with a layer of frosting.
Then it is time to make the neck of the beaker out of the rice krispies. This was not nearly as easy as Ro made it look, especially the lip of the beaker. We made it work though. You attach them using a wooden skewer.
Then we went about frosting the whole thing white.
After it's frosted, you stick it in the freezer for 10 minutes. I then tried smoothing the white frosting out a little but more before finishing it off with blue frosting and attempting to make the milliliter line. The #2 decorating tip did not work out well. I had a hard time getting the icing to come out smooth.
Finished
My final grade for this MDBD is a B. The taste was good and for out first time trying to shape rice crispies and frost a cake like this, I'd say we did pretty good.
Zoey's Post MDBD Analysis (She got a little side tracked)
Zoey absolutely loves the YouTube show Nerdy Nummies and the host Ro. She could watch her videos all day. She loves her so much that I almost considered driving 8 hours to take Zoey to see Ro when she was doing her cookbook tour. However, reason got the better of me and we didn't go. Zoey did get the Nerdy Nummies cookbook for her birthday and she will spend hours reading it to herself. Anyhow, when she got the cookbook I decided that I would spend 2016 making recipes from the cookbook each week for Mommy Daughter Bake Day. It's taken a couple of weeks to get going with it, but today was our first MDBD Nerdy Nummies Edition.
When I asked Zoey what recipe she wanted to make she initially picked the Earth Cake. However, decided that was a little too ambitious for our first recipe, so I made her pick a different one. She ended up going with Moon Phase Macaroons, which I figured we could manage. I was wrong!!!!
What they are supposed to look like (pg 95of the cookbook)
Now normally when I do a MDBD blog post I go through the recipe and list everything out. I am not going to do that this time because as far as I know the recipe has never been published online and Ro has not done a video for this one. I don't want to break any copyright laws.
Ready to bake
Zoey's Introduction
Ingredients for the Macaroons
Tools We Needed (Zoey's favorite part of the cookbook is pg 16-19 where it lists all the tools and candy)
Using our new sifter for the first time
So during this phase of the process, everything seemed to be going ok. I can not pinpoint anything that I should have done differently. I'm guessing that maybe I needed to beat the mixture for longer than I did, but that is just a guess. What happened is that when I piped the batter onto the cookie sheet, the batter spread out a little bit. Nothing crazy, but enough that I noticed it. When they came out of the oven, they had not puffed up as much as they were supposed to and the foot layer spread out more than the top layer.
Filling Intro
Ingredients for the filling
The filling is probably the only part of this process that didn't have any problems. It all mixed up ok and I got the coloring right. Wish I would have taken a picture that showed the filling better.
Frosting Intro
Ingredients for Royal Icing
This part is the straw that broke the camel's back. I could deal with the kind of flat cookies, but the icing mistake made it so these looked nothing like they were supposed to. I 100% know what the problem here was. I ran out of powdered sugar and did not have enough to get the proper consistency. I tried to ice them anyhow and it was way to runny. The icing literally ran out of the piping bag. I just gave up after the first three. We also put too much gold food coloring in and I couldn't get the right yellow as a result.
Finished Product
My final grade for this MDBD was a D. They looked terrible, but they still tasted pretty good, so they weren't a total fail.
