Apple Cider Caramels

Life has been busy and I haven't gotten to do as much baking as I've wanted these past few months! I've made a few older tried-but-true recipes (like Strawberry Cream Cake and Celebration Oreos) but I haven't had time to tinker with anything new. Slowly, I'm working baking and blogging back into my routine. Here's a recipe that I was going to post last October, but didn't get the chance to... but it's relevant again since fall is here :).

Last fall, I went apple picking for the first time, and it was awesome! I've always wanted to go apple picking, but this is the first time in my life I've lived less than an hour's drive away from an apple orchard. At the orchard, along with my fresh-off-the-tree apples, a dozen homemade apple cider donuts, and some garlic cheese curds, I picked up a bottle of apple cider specifically so I could try out this recipe. I'm very glad I did.

These caramels are amazing! They have a strong apple flavor with touch of cinnamon, like apple pie. I was very impressed by the apple flavor. There's the yummy butteriness and the occasional bite of sea salt that mellows out the sweetness. Straight out of the refrigerator, the texture is firm and chewy, but at room temperature, the texture is soft and sticky, adaptable to different people's preferences (I like them straight out of the fridge). And now I'm thinking about what other fruit flavored caramels I will make next :)… I definitely recommend you give this recipe a try!

Yoda Matcha Truffles

Happy Star Wars Day Everyone! May the 4th be with you. I made Chewie Wookiee Cookies (from exactly 2 years ago) yesterday… and had them for breakfast this morning. Seriously, cookies for breakfast = win!

Anyway, aside from the Chewie Wookiee Cookies, I wanted to make another Star Wars-themed recipe for this year's Star Wars Day. I've been craving something with matcha for a while, so I thought Yoda Matcha Truffles would be perfect. Aside from both being green, I associate both matcha and Yoda with zen and wisdom, so a perfect match!

The recipe is fairly straightforward. What was challenging was melting chocolate in humid weather, definitely not one of my favorite things to do. I also thought about just mixing white chocolate with matcha powder for the outside coating, but it turned out pretty grainy and icky looking, so I went back to relying on candy coloring to get the green tint for the coating. Other than that, they turned out pretty well, perfect for Star Wars Day.

P.S. In case you were wondering why these truffles only have eyes… I tried adding a mouth to some of the truffles (an example above ^), and for some reason they looked really strange to me. As I was decorating the other truffles, it hit me. The one with mouths really reminded me of the Adventure Time goblins rather than Yoda. I decided to hold back on noses as well since that would have made them look even more goblin like ><! When you make them, it's up to you whether to put a mouth on or not :P.

Bailey's Bear Truffles

I'm sure you've noticed the lack of posts these past 2 months, all due to computer woes and the lack of a decent kitchen. But no worries, I was recently home for spring break, and I finally had the time to create some desserts!

Actually, I've made these Bailey's Truffles a few times already, with rave reviews. The great thing about truffles is that they don't require a lot of ingredients and are rather easy to make, yet everyone always thinks they took more work than they did ;). Being without a kitchen has made it hard to get any baking done this year, but with a microwave and a mini fridge, these truffles were definitely doable.

Usually truffles are just rolled into balls and either dusted with cocoa powder or dipped in chocolate, but I wanted to play around with the shape of my truffles just to see if it could be done (without any molds or any fancy equipment)... and somehow I ended up with truffle bears. But then I figured, everyone likes bears, what with teddy bears being so popular, so why not?

To give them a pop of color and to spiffy them up, I gave my bear truffles bow ties (plus I just really like bow ties). The ties also allow for a bit of customization. The first time I made these bears, I gave them green bow ties for St. Patrick's Day, while for this blog entry, I gave them classic red ones. But of course, these truffles don't have to be shaped into bears. Rolled into balls, dipped into chocolate, and topped with whatever you want: sprinkles, a white chocolate design, or even left plain, they're still equally delicious!

Multilingual Conversation Hearts

Happy (belated) Valentine's Day!!! Thanks to all of you who replied to my facebook post. Your replies were quite helpful for today's post.

Every year, Conversation Hearts always feature some new messages to keep up with the times. But why stop with just English? I love learning languages, so I decided to combine that fascination for foreign languages with my Valentine's project for this year. I'm fluent in French and Chinese and I've learned basic Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Hungarian, so a combination of my own knowledge, the awesome input from some of you, and Google helped me come up with the messages for these Multilingual Conversation Hearts.

I first came up with the idea when I noticed the leftover letters from my parents' Do-It-Yourself Stamp Kit sitting in a cabinet, waiting to be used. I saw that in addition to the normal letters and numbers, there were some special character stamps, like Ä, Þ, and Ɖ, and thought it'd be cool to incorporate the stamps into something on this blog. I guess I also had Valentine's Day candy on my mind as well because not long after that, I ended up with this idea.

These aren't an exact match to the actual candy, but they're pretty close (they're softer in texture). I can't really judge the taste because I used flavors different from the actual candy flavors (I basically found all the extracts I have and used one for each color). But these candies are totally fun because they're customizable in color, flavoring, shape, and message. Plus, the recipe isn't too difficult. This would definitely make a great project for next Valentine's Day :).

"I Love You" from top L->R:
Russian, Malay, Norse, Japanese, Greenlandic, Portuguese, French, Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian, Chinese, Greek, Irish, ASL, Tagalog, Italian, German, Finnish, Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish

Mint Chocolate Chip Truffles

This Christmas, I wanted to make some truffles for my holiday cookie boxes. I've always thought that chocolate truffles make great gifts. They're easy to put together, yet they have an air of decadence and luxury. Plus, they taste delicious.

I wanted to make a truffle that couldn't easily be found in stores. So, I did an internet search and found a recipe for mint chocolate chip truffles. I'm a big fan of mint chocolate chip; it's been one of my favorite ice cream flavors ever since I was a little girl. I'm glad I tried out this recipe because these truffles turned out great: delightfully minty with bites of chocolate in each truffle, and visually appealing, with the pale green contrasting with the brown of the chocolate.

Carbón Dulce (Sweet Coal)

I always thought that getting coal for Christmas wasn't THAT bad of a punishment for naughty kids. Sure it's not as fun as toys, but at least it has some use, plus it's better than nothing. If it were up to me, I'd give bad kids things like dried up markers, creepy Jack-in-the-boxes, crumbly rocks... Well, good thing I'm not Santa, haha.

To embrace my stance on coal not being a bad present, this year all my friends and family got coal for Christmas... candy coal that is :). Last year I bookmarked a post for it because I thought it looked so cool. Carbón dulce (sweet coal) is a Spanish candy that's often made during the holiday season. It tastes sort of like rock candy, sweet and crunchy, with a pleasant almond flavor from some added almond extract. And it does indeed look very much like coal. Pretty awesome!

Stained Sunglasses Cookies

Hi everyone, I'm finally back! Thanks to all of you who left comments on my last post; I really appreciated the suggestions :). I'll write about Paris (desserts!) in a future post, but right now I already seem to be behind after my two month break, so let me start off by sharing a cookie I baked back in June, at the beginning of the summer.

Stained Sunglasses Cookies, with cookie frames and candy lenses. They're a twist on the stained glass cookies that are made during the holiday season, adapted for summer. Colorful, crushed candy pieces melt to become lenses as the sunglasses frame cookies bake. After cooling, the eyepieces are "glued" onto the frames with semisweet or white chocolate to finish off these playful, edible sunglasses.

The fun part about these is how customizable they are. I used images of interesting sunglasses: red heart lenses, Lady Gaga's Mickey shades, funky star glasses, the popular oversized black lenses, trendy round shades, and even the old school 3D glasses for the patterns. The dough can be dyed with food coloring to change the frame coloring, while an assortment of hard candy can vary the lens tinting. By the way, the larger actual sunglasses-sized cookies are actually easier to make than the smaller ones, but in the end, they're all worth it.