Lemon goodies for my mom's retirement party!

Filled this cake from smittenkitchen (made lemon with some lemon extract and lemon zest) with lemon curd made using this recipe for lemon curd and this method from Joy of Baking. I made some as mini cupcakes filled with the lemon curd and topped with Ina Garten's cream cheese frosting from her amazing Pineapple and Carrot Cake mixed with seedless raspberry preserves.

I also made some in a 9 in spring form pan, sliced in two layers, with the lemon curd mixed with the seedless raspberry preserves in between the two layers, topped with a simple buttercream.

The layer cake version was best, but honestly for the cake part, a yellow cake mix with the lemon adaptation would beat my implementation of the smittenkitchen recipe. Don't know what I did wrong.

However, my mom's good old lemon bars topped all of this.

Brownie Stuffed Cookies

This idea is AMAZING inside the peanut butter dough from my mom's kiss cookies (with any varieties of mix ins). Actually the idea makes any cookie that pairs well with chocolate incredibly moist.

Texas Cake Batter Cookie Dough Ice Cream Cupcake

To spare the readers of The Cupcake Project and Scoopalicious who are hosting the online ice cream cupcake contest, I relegated my very long winded explanation of the development of these cupcakes into a separate post. Here, I will just post the mouth watering photos and recipes.

I say recipes, because this dessert is really several desserts in one:



1) Make an edible chocolate wrapper

2) Make Texas sheet cake and its accompanying frosting, and put an appropriately sized circle of this miracle cake into the bottom of the chocolate shell/wrapper

3) Make edible macadamia nut butterscotch cookie dough (my favorite cookie flavor combination), and flatten into an appropriately sized circle and place this on top of the cake



4) Smush the cookie dough down onto the cake a bit because you want more ice cream to fit in your chocolate wrapper!

I cannot even tell where the frosting ends and the cookie dough begins...



5) Make cake batter sprinkle ice cream. This is the easiest and arguably the best part! Place a scoop of cake batter sprinkle ice cream on top of the dough. This picture was a couple of days after I made the cupcakes, because the ice cream needed to recover from my 100 degree kitchen!



Be thankful if your house is less than 100 degrees and the ice cream is not melted by the time you can stick a spoon in it:



6) Make hot fudge sauce and sticky chocolate icing. Mix equal parts to create a chocolate sauce that is a bit less dark than the hot fudge sauce.

7) Drizzle (ahem pour!) this on top of the ice cream!



8) Enjoy! But, to spare yourself a food coma, enjoy with a friend.



Also, these are best eaten when they are first made. Then the cake is warm and gooey and so is the chocolate sauce, to perfectly offset the cool ice cream.

Recipes!!

Edible Chocolate Wrapper
I got the idea for this from Made with Pink's ice cream cupcake post.
However, lacking candy melts and silicone baking cups, I could not follow that recipe so well. I looked up recipes for homemade magic shell. These used chocolate chips and some form of butter, oil or shortening, so I ran with that idea. I used jumbo aluminum foil cupcake wrappers instead of the silicone baking cups, and these actually worked quite well.

Ingredients:
1 bag's worth of chocolate chips (I used half milk and half semi-sweet)
1 tbsp of butter
About 1 tbsp. canola oil

Combine ingredients in a double boiler and stir until melted. Use a spoon to spread the melted chocolate thickly all over the inside of the cupcake wrapper. Place in refrigerator until well chilled and hardened before unwrapping.

It works best to leave the wrapper on while you fill the edible chocolate wrapper, to prevent your fingers from melting the chocolate:



Oh no! I had wanted to unwrap these with my mouth!!!

Texas Sheet Cake and Frosting
Texas Sheet Cake


Macadamia Nut Butterscotch Safe to Eat Raw Cookie Dough



As the dough base, I used the dough from the Best Big, Fat, Chewy Chocolate Cookie, substituting for the egg and egg yolk with:
3 tbls milk, 1.5 tbsp melted butter, and 1.5 tsp baking powder
You may need to add a bit extra milk at the end.
I don't know exactly the ratio of macadiama nuts to butterscotch chips to dough that I used. You can adjust this to taste, and since the dough is safe, taste to your heart's desire!



Cake Batter Sprinkle Ice Cream




Coldstone's cake batter ice cream is my favorite ice cream. Thus, it was obvious my submission required cake batter ice cream. Unfortunately this is not very common in grocery stores, and I have no Coldstone ANYWHERE near me. I also lack an ice cream maker, so I had to improvise.

Ingredients

2 quarts vanilla ice cream (I used 1.5 Quarts of Dean's and a pint of vanilla from my local ice cream shop)
1 yellow cake mix (I used Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Yellow Cake Mix)
Rainbow Sprinkles to taste

Mix together. I used my Kitchen Aid mixer until the cake mix was distributed throughout the ice cream (no lumps). Using the full box of cake mix provides a VERY strong cake batter flavor. Just like eating yellow cake batter with a creamy ice cream texture. And since I am not afraid of salmonella (perhaps irrationally), I have plenty of experience with yellow cake batter.

However, you can add the cake mix slowly and have some tastes here and there to get the flavor YOU like most! This is actually what I did.

I also just added sprinkles until I reached a distribution that looked appealing. Enough sprinkles to notice, not enough to mess with the cake batter flavor.

Finally, because there just wasn't enough chocolate on the top half of this ice cream cupcake:

Chocolate Sauce


I set out to make Smitten Kitchen's Hot Fudge Sauce.
I have made this before and really liked it. My husband, a dark chocolate lover, loved it this time too. However, I thought it was a bit too dark to go well with the other parts of the cupcake. Because I also had some extra cupcakes from my experimenting while deciding on the final recipe, I decided to also make an amended version of Pioneer Woman's Sticky Chocolate Icing. I mixed equal parts of both for the final sauce.


This one is too cold -- right out of the fridge



Oh yea, that's better:



Smitten Kitchen's Hot Fudge Sauce
I used 1/2 tbsp. vanilla rather than the suggested tablespoon of rum.

Pioneer Woman's Sticky Chocolate Icing
This time, I used the whole can of sweetened condensed milk, some butterscotch chips (a handful), and about 10-12 oz. semi-sweet chips, as well as the original 2 tbsp. of butter.

And finally, if you choose to make these when it is 96 degrees outside with no air conditioning, be ready for a puddle:



Best puddle I've ever tasted!

Melted Ice Cream Cupcake Contest -- the extended version

In one of my many recipe-related quests through several of my favorite recipe blogs, I stumbled upon an ice cream cupcake contest, posted on The Cupcake Project and Scoopalicious.

The contest requires submitting a recipe and photo of an original ice cream cupcake. This contest had the potential to involve so many of my favorite things AND did not require going anywhere to submit it! This was enough to inspire me to both spend a full night in the kitchen experimenting to find the perfect concoction for my entry. I also decided to finally make my blog public so that I can submit a full blog post detailing the endeavor, rather than just a final photo and recipe.

As has been the case with many of my recent baking nights, I went a bit overboard. I won't beleaguer you with all of the details, but just to give you an idea, chocolate cupcakes from a mix, peanut butter safe-to-eat-raw cookie dough, chocolate cake batter ice cream, and various mix ins for the cookie dough were all "cut" from my final cupcake.

Unfortunately, all of this tasting left me and my taste tester/photographer/husband too full to finish one of the final products on the night I made them. Actually, these cupcakes are so full of all of my favorite dessert items that even on an empty stomach I would recommend sharing (it is really about 3 servings of dessert jammed into one).

Another unfortunate mishap is that work obligations meant that I only had free time for a baking frenzy on a 96 degree day! We only have one window AC in our 2 bedroom apartment at this point. It is in the dog's room (where we leave him when we go to work--talk about spoiled), not the kitchen. 96 degrees + no AC + baking at 350 degrees makes ice cream photos a near impossibility. So the final submission photo is actually from a few days later, once the ice cream had time to fully harden in the freezer, and my kitchen cooled off.

I love all things uncooked-give me a taste of any dough or batter and I am in heaven. I am not afraid of raw eggs, but for the sake of food safety nuts who might want to try this recipe, the only component of this recipe with eggs is the fully cooked Texas Sheet Cake at the bottom. Now, to spare the readers of The Cupcake Project who just want to see the cupcake photos and recipe, I posted the recipes, most of the photos, and my official entry in a separate post.

However, to get you to click onto this next post, here is a glimpse of what's in store:



On top of the Texas sheet cake and accompanying frosting is a layer of macadamia nut-butterscotch cookie dough. This is topped with cake batter rainbow sprinkle ice cream, and finished off with a home made chocolate sauce. Oh, and last but not least, this was all contained in an edible chocolate wrapper that was also quite problematic in the sauna that was my kitchen.