April 20, 2014

3-layer angel food peeps cake

April 20, 2014/ Kelsey from {ps:heart }

We're eating this tonight and I can't wait. It seriously took A LOT of self control not to chow down on this cake while photographing it.

Jordyn baked this cake last night (I helped by sifting and showing her weird things on tumblr...), and then my mom and I finished decorating it with buttercream layers, 7-minute frosting, and peeps!

Does anyone out there actually even like peeps? I had my first one today...and I'm not a huge fan. But they are kind of cute, so I guess I can handle them once a year. Ha!

This cake was inspired by Tieghan from

halfbaked harvest

, who created a gorgeous

6-layer coconut creation

with peeps on top! If you don't follow her

blog

....hop to it! She's insanely talented and so creative.

Now this cake has a lot of icing going on, so it's definitely for those of you that have a major sweet tooth!

I love the idea of putting coloured icing inside cakes. It's such a nice, fun surprise when you finally cut it.

The recipes for homemade angel food cake and 7-minute frosting are below, but if you'd like some step-by-steps photos as well, you can click

here

for our original post including both of them!

Angel Food Cake

from: Fayrene De Koker (allrecipes.com)

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups of Egg Whites (approx. 10-12 eggs) - *it's important that your eggs are at room temperature before you start!

1 1/4 cups of Icing Sugar

1 cup of Flour

1 1/2 tsp Cream of Tartar

1 1/2 tsp Vanilla

1/2 tsp Almond Extract

1/4 tsp Salt

1 cup Sugar

optional (but not really optional):

1 TBSP

nonpareils (sprinkles) - to make your cake colourful!

Directions:

1) First, separate the egg whites from the yolks, being careful that no yolk contaminates each egg white. Make sure that you have 1 1/2 cups of egg whites, and place in a mixing bowl.

2) Next, in a separate bowl, sift your icing sugar and flour together three times, and set aside.

3) Add cream of tartar, vanilla and almond extracts, and salt to the egg whites. Beat on high speed, and gradually add in sugar. Mix until all of the sugar is dissolved, and stiff peaks have formed.

4) Very gently, fold in flour mixture, 1/4 cup at a time. Then fold in nonpareils!

5) Gently spoon into an ungreased 10-inch tube pan.

6) Bake for 40-45 minutes at 350 degrees.

7) Immediately invert pan onto a cooling rack, and let the cake cool completely before removing from the pan.

7-minute Frosting

from: Company's Coming: Cakes - Jean Pare

Ingredients:

2 egg whites

1 1/2 cups Sugar

1/3 cup Cold Water

1 1/2 tsp Light Corn Syrup

1 tsp Vanilla

Directions:

1) Set up a double boiler (ie. one pot sits on the burner with a bit of boiling water, and another pot/metal bowl sits on top of it.) and bring water to a rapid boil.

2) In your top pot/bowl mix together egg whites, sugar, water, and corn syrup until well mixed.

3) Place it over boiling water, and beat constantly on high for 7 minutes, or until the frosting will stand in peaks when the beaters are raised.

4) Remove from heat, and beat in vanilla.

5) Immediately frost your cake, as this frosting will set very quickly.

Buttercream

Ingredients

1/2 cup Butter or margarine (at room temperature

3 cups Icing Sugar

1 tsp Vanilla

2-5 TBSP Cream

Directions

1) Begin by beating your butter on medium-high until well mixed.

2) Add icing sugar, vanilla, and a couple tablespoons of cream.

3) Beat on medium until combined.

4) Here's the tricky part: use a spatula to test the consistency, and stick a spoon in to do a taste test. Adjust the taste and consistency by adding any of the above ingredients!

Once our angel food cake was completely cooled, I carefully cut it into three layers using a large serrated bread knife. Then I made a batch of butter cream, coloured half pink and half purple, and iced each layer one colour. After the cake is reassembled, we made 7-minute frosting and iced the rest of the cake, and added the sprinkles and peeps. Be sure to add your peeps on quite quickly, before your frosting sets!

And props to my mom for letting me cut this cake up before we served it at our family's Easter dinner! I put it back together and nobody could even tell. Ha!

p.s.

♥

kelsey (& jordyn & momma)

April 19, 2014

diy: glitter Easter eggs

April 19, 2014/ Kelsey from {ps:heart }

So here's a super last minute Easter diy!

I just really love decorating Easter eggs. I don't know if it's because of all the memories that it brings up, or just the general fun of turning things pretty colours that makes me love it so much.

This year I decided to do something a bit different, and to my mom's horror, chose to add glitter! Seriously, I'm sure we'll be finding glitter forever in our kitchen from now on. Sorry family!

In the photo above you can see Jordyn's genius way at doing ombre eggs without your hand cramping! She just used a shallow bowl, taped the egg in place, and added the dye to the desired height on the egg. So awesome.

The glitter eggs don't need much instruction. You just dye your eggs as usual, and let them dry completely. Then mod podge wherever you want the glitter, sprinkle glitter generously over top, and then let dry completely. You can now do an optional top layer of mod podge over the glitter if you don't want it coming off everywhere!

Happy Easter!

p.s.

♥ kelsey

April 16, 2014

Paska (Easter Bread)

April 16, 2014/ Kelsey from {ps:heart }

Sometimes you eat sweet bread for breakfast, and pretend like it's not actually dessert.

No judgement, right?

It's Paska season!!!

Now, if you're of German, Ukrainian or Russian descent....then you probably know what's up with Paska. If you're not, then you might be a bit confused. Paska is a sweet bread that is made for Easter, and is often topped with icing and sprinkles! (You can read more about it here)

All you really need to know is that it's white bread with sprinkles. That gets an A in my book any day!

My lovely momma helped me whip up this batch of paska, as she is the expert bread maker in our house! She's a pretty swell teacher, and I hope one day I can bake bread as well as her!

If you're a bit nervous about yeast baking....don't be! Homemade bread always wins.

This recipe comes from my Auntie Irene (who technically isn't my aunt, but is best buds with my mom....you know how it is). She has such a generous spirit, and is known for baking batch after batch of this stuff and gifting it away to everyone she meets. She's the best!

p a s k a

recipe from: Irene Claassen
yield: approximately 5 loaves, or 40-45 buns (this will depend on the size)

Ingredients:

2 1/2 tsp yeast

1 cup warm water

2 tsp sugar

2 cups milk

3/4 cup butter

5 eggs

1/2 cup sugar

1 tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla

1 lemon (juiced and zested)

9-10 cups flour

Directions:

1) In a small bowl, mix together yeast, warm water and sugar. Set aside for about 10 minutes to let rise. (If it doesn't get nice and puffy, try again. If your yeast is old and not rising, you'll want to buy some new stuff!)

2) Add milk and butter together in a small saucepan, and heat until butter is melted. Remove from heat and cool.

3) In a large bowl, beat eggs until frothy.

4) Slowly add the sugar to your eggs, then add salt, vanilla, lemon juice and lemon zest.

*Now this is when you'll want to pour the mixture into a Bosch bread mixer (or attach a dough hook to your beaters).

5) Add yeast mixture, as well as the butter and milk to the egg mixture.

6) Start adding flour, and stop when the dough starts to pull away from the sides of your bowl. For us, it was around 9 3/4 cups, but it'll be a bit different every time depending on the size of your eggs and lemon. This is quite a sticky dough, so don't be tempted to add any more flour than you really need to....otherwise you'll get tough paska!

7) Once your dough has pulled away from the sides, keep mixing for another 8 minutes. (Or you can always knead by hand!).

8) Transfer into a large, greased bowl, cover with a clean tea towel, and let rise in a warm place for 1 1/2 hours (or until doubled in size). Then punch down, and let rise for another half hour.

9) Form dough into loaves (or buns) and place on greased pans to rise for another 1-2 hours.

10) For loaves: bake at 325 degrees for 10 minutes, and then at 275 degrees for 15-20 minutes more until nicely browned. If you're nervous about them not being done, you can always cut a loaf open to make sure the inside isn't gummy!

For buns: bake at 325 degrees for 13 minutes.

Optional: You can choose to serve these with icing and sprinkles, or toasted with butter.

Butter Cream Icing

Directions:

In a medium bowl, mix together butter, icing sugar, and two tablespoons of cream. Add more cream until desired consistency is reached.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter (room temperature)

3 cups icing sugar

2-4 tablespoons cream (or milk)

1 tsp vanilla

Paska is best fresh, so we pop most of ours into the freezer (sometimes we slice our loaves before that),
and then take them out whenever we desire!

Some people like icing the top of their bread, others like to slice it and then ice the face of the bread. My family loves toasting it and topping it with butter! Sweet and salty. So good.

There really isn't a wrong way to do it. So whatever floats your boat is just fine!

All of the sprinkles that were used in the making of this post made me insanely happy.

What didn't make me happy was walking on sprinkles, and sweeping up sprinkles forever and ever.

They're kind of like glitter....you can never really get rid of them all!

♥ kelsey

March 29, 2013

diy: marbleized Easter eggs

March 29, 2013/ Kelsey from {ps:heart }

Are you ready to impress your friends and family by having the coolest eggs in town? I thought so! These babies look so intricate, but are ridiculously easy.

I really love decorating Easter eggs. I don't know why, but there's just something about turning eggs pretty colours, and experimenting with new dipping techniques and colour combos that is just so fun to me!

This year, we decided to try something a little different. My mom found

this diy

thanks to good old Martha Stewart. We were a bit skeptical at first, and kept out expectations quite low. Martha has great ideas, but sometimes (okay...a lot of the time) our end result looks a lot different than hers! Low and behold, these turned out great!

When we did our first egg (with much trepidation) and realized how cool it looked, we looked at each other with wide eyes and laughed with glee! We did it! And you can too.

Directions:

1) First choose a few colours to be base colours, and a few colours that will be the second coat that will be marbleized overtop. I suggest using paler colours as your base coat, so that the second colour will still show. When you do your second coat the egg won't be in the dye for as long, so colours such as pink or blue tend to deposit the colour better than something like yellow!

2) Prepare bowls of warm water for your base colours (make sure the water is deep enough to cover the egg), and use shallow dishes, (we used 9 inch pie plates) with water half an inch deep, for your marbleizing colours. In each bowl/dish add about 2 tbsp of vinegar. This will help the colour stick your eggs!

3) Now, add in your food colour to each of your containers and stir like crazy! For the marbleizing colours, you want your colours to be very concentrated, otherwise they might not show up very well!

4) Then, add 1 tbsp of olive oil to each of the shallow dishes (this is what will provide the marbleizing effect!).

5) Colour all of your hardboiled eggs and let them dry completely.

6) Then, use a fork to stir up the water and oil mixture in a shallow dish. Roll your egg around in this mixture, and you'll see oil streaks appear on your egg! Remove the egg and carefully wipe down with a paper towel. Let the egg continue drying, and repeat with the rest of the eggs!

*We found that swirling the oil in different ways gave different patterns of bubbles and swirls on the eggs. So experiment, and have fun!