Gizmos and Gadgets

Our favorite Auntie Shannon is one of our biggest supporters of Holy Hannah's. When we open for business she will be the one operating the counter. She is always thinking of neat ideas for us to try in our recipes. And she also has an eye for fun baking tools. These are just a few of the things she has found for us along the way.

Exhibit A: A Cupcake Corer

The Box

Auntie Shannon has an obsession with Cupcake Wars and bought this to further are experience with cupcakes. She is dreaming we will be on the show someday (wouldn't that be sweet)! I think the name pretty much explains the concept of the tool. It extracts the innards of the cupcake so you can fill it with goodness inside. We will be trying this bad boy out tonight so stayed tuned for an update.

The Corer

Exhibit B: A Cupcake Puncher

The Box

Thank you Auntie Shannon and Martha Stewart! This gadget is incredible! It makes the cutest cupcake punches around! We have been adding these in the corner of our business cards for a personal touch.

The Puncher

The following pics are a little demo of what this baby can do! Imagine the possibilities!!!

Cupcakes!

Close Up

Moral of the story - We LOVE our Auntie Shannon and cannot thank her enough for her endless support and she is obsessed with cupcakes. The End. =]

Just For Fun

We had some extra cake laying around and I had some time to kill last week, so I decided to whip up a few pumpkin cake pops. I'm generally not a fan of Halloween, I hate finding a costume and all of that, but I've always enjoyed pumpkins.

I attempted adding some vertical lines to make them look a little more realistic but it just looked dumb so I didn't continue with that.

Up next, Turkey Cake Pops for Thanksgiving and Ornaments & Trees for Christmas! Heck, we may even have to break out the triple decker cake pop for Snowmen in January :)

Amazing Cakes

Ty and I just got back from a fabulous vacation in Arizona. I love warm weather and vacations! I was so sad to see the weather temperature back here in MN when I printed my boarding pass. A high of 50 degrees! I am not ready for Winter!!

We stayed with my favorite Uncle Rick and Aunt Jane while we were in Arizona. My uncle travels the country as an auctioneer, yes he can talk REALLY fast. Currently he is working on a project in Denver. One of his coworkers was talking about his recent accomplishments in the kitchen and my Uncle mentioned our blog and what we are trying to do here at Holy Hannah's.

This is no lie, these were the gentleman's first 2 cakes ever! When I first saw the pictures I couldn't believe it. These cakes could come straight out of Ace of Cakes they are so amazing. So here is a shout-out to Mr. Baker from The Great Indoors in Denver, Colorado and his amazing cakes!

Hamburger

Check out the detail of the sesame seeds!

Chili Pepper Cake

Close up
All those peppers are cake covered in fondant

After seeing these pictures I have been inspired to get back on the baking train. I was slacking the past week or so. It must have been because my dad was hollering about all the butter I have been using. =]

Johnny

This past weekend Tyler and I made the trip to Appleton, Wisconsin to visit the Kelly family. Treats I brought with me - Special K Bars, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Homemade Cinnamon Bread. All were a hit. I didn't take any pictures because there are previous posts pertaining to each of them already.

While in Appleton we stopped to visit Tyler's Grandma. She lives on a piece of land with Johnny, one of Tyler's uncles. As we were leaving Grandma's, Johnny came over to thank me for the package I sent over last month. He then proceeded to tell me he ate his entire batch of cookies in one sitting. He was not kidding!

Can you imagine eating 12 of these babies at one time?
Sugar overload!

After talking for a while Johnny said he would be right back and ran inside the house. He came out holding some money and said "now you send me another package with this money!" He was appalled by the amount it costs to mail a package, "$6.62 you paid to mail me cookies!" I tried and tried to turn the money away and he ended the conversation by saying, "I am a customer, and you aren't about to turn a customer away!"

This money is worth 2 packages to Johnny
One is on the way - Special K Bars!

So this is it, we have hit it big time! We are going nationwide! Well we are at least expanding to the state of Wisconsin!

Homemade Cinnamon Bread

Two weekends ago Tyler was being an all star and studying for his CPA exam. I decided I would play Susie Homemaker and bake some bread. I found a homemade cinnamon bread recipe awhile back that I have been dying to try and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity. Boy, was I wrong!

I decided to try and make bread on the coldest day of Fall thus far. I wanted to make 4 loaves of bread so I could take some to Appleton with me. Early Sunday AM I got up and made my dough. I put it in the oven with the light on so it would raise while I ran off to the gym. It was in the oven close to 3 hours and didn't rise much. I decided I would shape it in my loaves and put them back in the oven to raise again. Well they were in there for about 6 hours and might have risen a 1/2 inch. No good! At 10 pm Sunday night I decided I had waited long enough and just wanted to get this bread baked!

Here is a look at the inside of the bread. As you can tell the very center of the bread didn't rise to the most desired height. Ohh well, you live and you learn. The bread still tasted delicious!

Cinnamon Bread

I decided I wanted to try and put a glaze on the top of the bread to give it a little more sweetness. Well it worked for about a minute and then in all slid down to the bottom on the loaf pan. So instead of having the glaze on the top, my bread rocked its glaze on the bottom. Again, you live and you learn.

Pure deliciousness

So this was not my most successful encounter with making bread. I might just stick to cinnamon rolls next time.

Blondies

This past Sunday our family got together to celebrate the birth of Grammy and Auntie Shannon. Last year we went all out with this little ditty for the party:


Bright, right? This was the final cake we had to make for our cake class, and it has a lot of character, to say the least. This year we decided to stay low key with a store bought Banana Cream pie (we have yet to master pies), chocolate chip cookies and blondies. Blondie's are one of Auntie Shannon's favorite treats so I HAD to make them. I ran into a little bit of trouble with the wax paper however, the recipe called for Parchment Paper but I only had wax paper on hand. I thought I would be okay, but we ended up having to peel it off every single bar. Oops! It was fine, I just blamed it on Mike ;)



The bars were quite delicious despite the fact that I received a few complaints from the peanut gallery (cough*Emilee*coughcough!) about using semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of milk chocolate. I am quite partial to the semi-sweet chips, they always remind me of eating fulls (peanut butter on a spoon covered in chocolate chips) at the Lee's house when we were younger. It took me a while to figure out why they always tasted better when I ate them with Chelsea. At first, I thought it had something to do with the Jif peanut butter instead of the Skippy we had at our house. But instead I decided it was the fact that my mom always bought milk chocolate chips and Mindy always had semi-sweet. Thank you Lee Family for converting me over to the dark side :)

Lucky Ducks

You are all a bunch of lucky ducks! I put the recipe for the Special K Bars up on our ROTM page. Please enjoy. And beware, these things are deadly!