Best Birthday Cake Evah!

It's chocolate. It's peanut butter. It's cake. What's not to love?

Chocolate, chocolate chip cake, peanut butter cream cheese frosting and chocolate peanut butter ganache! OMG! So rich. So good. Requires lots and lots of cold milk!

I can't lie ... I adapted the recipe from Smitten Kitchen. It's not as pretty as hers but damn it was goooooooooooooooooooooooood!

The changes I made were small. I used my own cake recipe and only made 2 layers. I also added a bit of salt to the filling/frosting and found that I needed to thin it with a bit of milk. The chocolate peanut butter ganache was hands down the best thing I have ever tasted!

A Cookie Twofer

I don't think I have ever met anyone who doesn't like cookies. I know we all have our favorites and there are some of us who have specific dislikes but on the whole I think everyone can agree that there is nothing wrong with cookies. Cookie trays are an awesome addition to any dessert table (like the one above at the Grad BBQ*) and can even be turned into a dessert table of their own. They are easy to make, affordable and invoke happy memories of childhood and holidays past.

I chose to make three kinds of cookies for the Graduation BBQ, Pinwheels (which need their own post in the near future), Oatmeal Raisin (because one of the Grads the BBQ was for requested them) and Toll House (because almost everyone likes them.) The Toll House cookies really don't deserve their own post but I do want to talk about them a bit because any time I make them they quickly disappear and in the midst of all the "yums" and "ahhs" I do get the occasional question as to why mine turn out so different than everyone else's.

In the 1930s Ruth Wakefield accidentally invented the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie when she decided to add bits of chocolate to some Butter Cookies she was making for guests at the inn she ran with her husband. No matter what modern Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe you look at, they can all be traced back to this happy mistake. I love Toll House Cookies, especially when you cook them to the point of being "well done" and they are all brown and crispy on the outside and all melty and gooey on the inside. And in most cases I would tell you not to mess with perfection but tweaking my friends in a horse of another color altogether and it's the tweaks that takes these cookies from awesome to amazing!

Toll House Cookie Tweaks

1. Use real, good quality, unsalted butter and let it get really soft but NOT melted before you cream it with the sugars.
2. Use real, good quality vanilla extract. I like Madagascar Bourbon vanilla.
3. Make sure your dry ingredients are fresh.
4. I only use King Arthur AP flour in my cookies. Trust me, it makes a difference in flavor.
5. And this is the most important tweak... after you make the cookie dough, let it sit in the fridge overnight. To make my life easier I dump the dough onto a large (about a foot and a half long) piece of wax paper and roll the dough into a log. I wrap the log in plastic and let it chill until I am ready, then I slice and bake. It's the letting the dough rest that makes all the difference in the world with these cookies!

I guess we're now at the portion of this post where I have to make a confession. I really don't like raisins in baked goods and try to never add them. I find them dry, chewy and just plain old yucky. So when I knew I couldn't say no to the request (how could I ever say no to that face?), I set out to scour my cookbooks for the most awesome Oatmeal Raisin Cookies ever! And guess what? With a little tweaking and patience, I found hit on just the right combination of ingredients and technique!

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

This recipe is a little different than I usually give in that there are instructions before the ingredients list. These first directions make a HUGE difference in the cookie and should not be skipped.

1.) Two hours BEFORE you are going to make the cookie dough beat 2 eggs with 1 Tablespoon (yes you read that right) of good quality vanilla, add 1 cup of raisins or dried cranberries, cover and set aside. You can stir them occasionally if you would like but you don't have to.

2.) One hour BEFORE you are going to make the cookie dough set 1 cup of butter on the counter. Since I like to make my life easier and spoilage is not an issue, I took mine out when I did the raisins.

1 C unsalted butter -softened
1 C light brown sugar
3/4 C sugar
2 C flour
1 t salt
1 t baking soda
2 t cinnamon
1/4 t freshly rasped ginger
1/4 t freshly rasped nutmeg
2 1/2 C old fashioned oatmeal

Pre-heat oven to 350*, prep your cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Sift all the dry ingredients except oatmeal in a bowl. I usually just dump all of my dry ingredients into a bowl and give it a few turns with a balloon whip.

Cream the butter and sugars. Mix egg/raisin mixture followed the sifted, dry ingredients and then by the oats. I do all of this on my Kitchen Aid but you can do it by hand too.

Now cover the dough and let it chill for 3 or 4 hours. When you're ready to bake, scoop out about a tablespoon of dough, roll it into a ball and space them about an inch apart on a prepared pan. Bake for 8-10 minutes. Cool for one minute and set on rack to finish cooling.

These are without question THE BEST Oatmeal Cookies Evah!


*I did not make the "photo cake" and I don't know where it was purchased. I do know however that almost any place that sells cakes can produce a "photo cake" and in most cases they will make and sell you the edible image(s) to put on your own homemade cake/cupcakes. All of the other goodies on the table came out of my kitchen or "Kitchen North" where I was aided by my best friend and the light of my life.

Graduation Cake Pops

I first saw these on Bakerella's blog and thought "how cute are these!?!" By the time we were done making and bagging them I was thinking "what a giant PITA!!!" I'm sure I was thinking that only because of all the things that went wrong this being the first time making them and the fact that we ended up with 76 finished pops! What went wrong? We didn't have enough white chocolate coating, I didn't like the cake, it was a humid night and it took about seven hours to make these from start to finish. The process is relatively simple and Bakerella does a great job explaining the steps on her blog. Bake cake, crumble cake, mix with frosting, form, stick, chill, dip/pour and decorate. And while the process itself may be relatively simple getting these to look and taste the way you want them to is not and they are super time consuming if you are going to make more than a dozen.

Here is the exact list of what we used to make the pop and display:

1 9x13 cake -flavor of your choice
1 can of cake frosting in a complimentary flavor
your largest mixing bowl
medium peanut butter cup mold
square thin mint style candy mold
3.25 lbs of white melting chocolate

measuring spoons in 1/2 and 1 teaspoon
lollipop sticks
wax paper
2 standard cookie sheets
2 blocks of Styrofoam
2 cup liquid measuring cup -microwave safe
2 Wilton squeeze bottles
Wilton purple sugar sprinkles


Wilton Heart Drops
grape licorice rope
Airheads bars in White Mystery
pair of scissors
curling ribbon
cello bags
xacto knife
large, painted terracotta pot
shiny, opalized basket filler



Don't bother using anything other than "candy melts", "melting chocolate" or "candy coating" (these are the different names I have seen it go by) for these unless you are schooled in the ways of tempering chocolate. We ran out of "candy melts" and given the hour the only thing we could get our hands on was Lindt white chocolate. I made the mistake of not re-tempering it and not only did it lose its snap and shine but it just did not hold up as well as the "candy melts" the day of the event. Truth be told, I actually preferred the taste of the Merkens than the Lindt for this project but then again I have never been a huge Lindt fan. Also, do yourself a favor and clear out enough space in your freezer to hold the cookie sheet(s) and candy molds. Using the freezer speeds up the set up time and when you're doing this in warmer weather makes it a lot less frustrating.

Let's talk about cake because without the cake, these are just regular old white chocolate lollies. Due to budgetary and time concerns we used a Pillsbury Strawberry cake mix. BIG MISTAKE! First of all, while it may have smelled (to some people, people with stuffy noses) like strawberry it in no way tasted like it. Also, the color was not the bright pink I would associate with strawberry cake. While I did my thing to dress it up (butter instead of oil, hot pink food tint) I just didn't like it. Plus and this is a big plus, the texture was all wrong for this project. You don't want a light, fluffy cake for this you want a dense, moist, heavy cake. I would suggest baking the cake in a loaf pan (or two) ( even if you need as much cake as we did) and baking it at least a day ahead. I think traditional Pound Cake would work awesome for these.

The freezer was so our friend the night we made these! I made the call to deviate from Bakerella's directions and stick these BEFORE we placed them in the peanut butter cup mold and I'm glad we did. Having these little cuties all sticked up made it easier for the person pouring the molds to just plop them right in and move on to the next instead of having to fiddle with getting them just right. Each one used about 1/2 teaspoon of the cake/frosting mixture and even then some of them pushed through the top of the mold (which was okay since it was covered with a square of chocolate.) Here they are all lined up and ready for the freezer where they sat for about two hours in our process (since we ran out of chocolate.) For the plain round ones I would suggest using no more than 2 teaspoons of cake/frosting. The larger ones we made, about a tablespoon of cake, were just too big/heavy to hold up especially once they got warm!

I am really grateful I wasn't making these alone! Those freaking tassels (made from licorice rope and air heads cut and twisted together) would have been the death of me! The Styrofoam blocks were well used both while making the pops and then again when it came time to create the displays. We were able to stage the pops (I think) eight at a time and having a place to stick them upright was helpful for packaging them too! As long as you shoved the stick in deep enough it was stable enough to move them around in case they needed to get popped back in the fridge, which they did. In the end I think these are TOTALLY worth all the hard work that went into them and they seemed to big hit at the BBQ!