Baking Day!

First off... I should apologize to E for torturing her:

I'm sorry I've been sending you links to yummy treats that most likely compromises our diets (even if I think it's totally worth it).
I promise to attempt to be better about it and not send SO many :)

Next, I use google reader for the majority of my online reading. It's great to have all the blogs I read in one spot. It's also dangerous that they're so easily accessible now. I have about 50 some subscriptions, and at least 25 of those are on food (the dangerous part). So over the last few months I've been sending E numerous links to tasty treats like homemade marshmallows, cute lil cookies, drink recipes, and oh so much more.

She finally cracked and we set a date to do a baking day. Last year we had a cupcake day, and were sadly unsatisfied with our "high end" cupcake purchase. This year, we were determined to make something 100% satisfying. So we picked 4 recipes:

Halfway Cookies
Toasted Coconut Covered Marshmallows
Lemon Meringue Cupcakes
(Spiked) Blueberry Lemonade

Yes, we made it all in one day, it took about 8 hours from start to finish, and it was well worth the time and effort.

First I want to talk about the cupcakes... you better like cupcakes if you want these. A labor of love (as E put it)... I prefer pain in the arse. Here's what Martha says the finish product looks like:

First we made the lemon curd, not difficult at all... the cupcakes have a specific way of adding all the ingredients when making the batter. No big deal, we know how to follow directions (most of the time). The frosting... it's called seven minute frosting. I want to know who's managed to make this in seven minutes... 20 minutes later we still had warm frosting, so I put it in the fridge to cool faster then took it out and frosted the cupcakes. I failed to remix the frosting after cooling it down causing too many air bubbles.

Pros on the cupcakes: cake and lemon curd are really tasty
Cons: frosting is TOO much. The proporitions for how much frosting was made compared to how many cupcakes were made was not right. 9/10 of the frosting was completely wasted.

Now we'll move on to the halfway cookies.

They're basically a bar cookie, you mix the cookie dough then layer the rest of the components in a pan. These are a great idea, and look delish in the picture thekitchn provides. Overall, I feel there was TOO much chocolate, compared to the rest of the components. I think next time we'll buff up the recipe to even things out a bit.

Spiked Blueberry Lemonade. This was great with or without the alcohol. I made this early the morning of so the blueberries had time to steep into the lemonade. Veggiebelly.com is a great website if you're looking for vegetarian/vegan recipes. Not that I'm either of those, but I like to have something available to my friends that are :)

And last but certainly not least, we have the marshmallows. These are the greatest marshmallows I've EVER had. They were super easy to make (the stand mixer did most of the work), and after making them once, we have plans to make them many more times with different flavors and colors!

We used this recipe, but added the toased coconut to it. I still can't get over how tasty these are. Sorry, I don't have a spiffy picture for this one.

Below is a picture of what we ended up with when everything was done.

Thanks again to E for coming over and baking with me. I had lots of fun and I can't wait to do more marshmallows :)