Fluer De Sel Vanilla Caramels Recipe

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This is what you need to make these homemade caramels. Brown Sugar, butter (cubed), sweeten condensed milk, light corn syrup, vanilla and fleur de sel (not pictured) for the topping. Super easy ingredients right?

Fluer De Sel Vanilla Caramels

WARNING!! These are extremely addictive. Don't send me your dentist bills! ;)

Yield: about 60-100 caramels (depending on how you cut them) Prep and cook time: 1 hour (not including time to cut and wrap caramels. That takes about another hour or 2)

Shipping Cupcakes Overseas

Sounds like an impossible task right?! Well its not. The impossible part is dealing with the freaking Military and their stupid mail system that takes forever. This is the only thing that makes shipping perishables difficult. Other than that its quite simple.

I bought small mason jars that had seal lids on them instead of screw tops. This made it easier to put wax paper on the frosting and seal them shut before shipping.

Frozen Lemon Mousse

Christine just had Liam and has been recovering from her C-section and has been having AC issues at home in the middle of the summer. So I told them that I would bring over dinner and dessert for them this week. I made pasta salad since it is a cool dish that you don't need to heat and frozen lemon mousse because she loves lemon things and being frozen would help cool things down. The mousse was fantastic!! I was very impressed. I mean I love mousse and I love lemons so of course I would love this dish. There is a lot of cream in it though and makes it really very rich.

Birthday Puffs

Ok I would take it upon me to make something I've never made in my life before the day I need to deliver them. I always do this it seems and I get to that last 10 minutes and freak out because something has gone wrong and I don't have time to fix it. Well naturally this happened to me today.

I went out with Kyle's parents tonight for his mom's birthday. I know she loves cream puffs so I wanted to try to make them for her. The dough turned out perfect, the Pate a Choux. But once it came to make the cream filling I was at a loss. I had about 10 recipe books out on the table looking through all of them trying to figure out what goes inside a cream puff. The downside to this is I have never actually had a cream puff. So of course I don't know what the filling on the inside is like. Is it sweet and creamy? Light and fluffy? Bland? What the heck is in there?! After reading over way too many recipes I settled with one that would have turned out really good, if it wasn't 100 degrees outside. That made for a very runny filling and I didn't have any time to let them freeze completely. So I just threw a raspberry in the middle of all of them to help keep them cool from the time it took for me to leave my house and make it to theirs and let them put them in their freezer, which isnt a long drive at all.

She loved them and I ended up tasting them later and was impressed that they weren't terrible. I surprise myself sometimes with my baking skills.

Bake more than once a month - June

To continue one of my tasks on my 25 before 25 list, "bake more than once a month" here are June's baking adventures:

- Lemon Bars, Lexie's
- Peanut Butter cookies, Clean Oven

The Smith Family famous Lemon Bars! My absolute favorites!

4th of July Cake Pops

EVERYONE loves my cake pops. So when I decided to make them for the 4th of July I had a lot of excited people wanting to come over to our party. The only problem, the morning of the 4th when I was getting ready to dip the pops, I discovered that we no longer have red or blue chocolate melts. Just white and green. Well hopefully half of my guests are colorblind or they don't care that these pops don't match the 4th of July theme because white and green it is! Honestly I know that no one cares what color they are as long as they are made.

Smith Family Lemon Bars

Lemon Bars, a Smith family recipe. They are my absolute favorite and when I went to visit Lex, I had to make them with her! Since I never go anywhere without an apron, I was prepared! This one I just recently got too so I was super anxious to wear it. I had seen this apron a long time ago at Disneyland and was tempted to buy it then but I decided against it. Then they took it out of the store and I never saw it again until just recently when I went to Disneyland for my last time with this pass. My pass expired this month and I didn't renew it because I will be moving at the end of the year and it doesn't make sense for me to do so. Well when I was there I went shopping and guess what I found! I of course had to text my best friend to have her justify me buying yet another apron, which she did so nicely!

Bake more than once a month - May

When I turned 24, I decided it was finally time to sit down and make a list of things that I want to accomplish before I turn the scary 25! One of those things was to bake more than once a month!

So in May, I baked:
- 100+ Cupcakes, Capstone Presentation
- Cake Pops, Graduation Party

Chocolate and Vanilla mini cupcakes with buttercream

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Happy Pi Day!

Of course I will find any excuse I can get to bake a pie, naturally Pi day is the best one of all! This is a Lemon Meringue pie, my absolute favorite!!

Baking sugar cookies with my Little May!

So LCAD was having a Type show this week and one of my teachers Matt Franz gave me these cookie cutters that punched out letters. Well the way the cutters worked is you cut out a square then made an indentation of the letter on the top. So Amy and I did that and we just got flat squares instead. Oh well, everyone loves cookies no matter what shape!

Anniversary Treats

Part 2 of my anniversary posts. The gifts!

Andy, being as wonderful as always, reserved us a Gondola ride in Newport Beach as well as making me a Fireman Build a Bear that says "I Love You" for our anniversary. He actually made the gift certificate for the gondola ride which was totally cute and included a framed photo of us on a boat to go along with the theme.

The day after we got back from Yosemite he had the most beautiful bouquet of roses delivered to my house so I could enjoy them for the rest of the week while we were home. Smart man! I love him.

Firework Cookies

Laura Mae's Firework Cookies

They aren't quite as pretty as Martha's but they sure were delicious and a total hit at our 4th of July Party this year. Here is the easy How To.

Bakerella Book Signing!

Christy and I went to the Bakerella Book Signing yesterday at the William's Sonoma at the South Coast Plaza. The wait was about an hour and a half which wasn't too bad. Christy and Lisa had to leave early to go back to work so I kept their books for them and got them signed. Angie Dudley (aka Bakerella), was really sweet and I was super excited that I got to meet her!

The book, Cake Pops. It is beautiful. I love the way it is all laid out, all the spreads are so simple and gorgeous! Love it!

Chocolate Espresso Kahlua Tart

Sounds delicious huh? Good ol' Martha is amazing, I got this tart recipe from her holiday sweets magazine.

Cake Pops

If you haven't heard of Bakerella's Blog you definately need to check her out! She started her blog in 2007 and has been baking and posting her amazing creations since.

So the other day she put up these amazing cute little Cake Pops that she made and I was inspired had to try them out my self. Mine didn't turn out nearly as cute as hers but they were devoured so that tells me something.
Here are my steps to making the Cake Pops. Hop on over to Bakerella's Blog to see the recipe.

Bake me a cake as fast as you can!

Pretty nice cake isn't it? Well don't get too attached to this photo, or your cake for that matter if you are following along.

Stick your cake in a food processor! What!!! Yep, you are going to have to shred your cake to pieces!Wait till it is cool first then stick chunks into a food processor until it is finely ground, pour into a bowl.

Here is what your cake should look like now. It looks like the beginning to a dirt dessert, remember those in elementary school, ground up oreos and pudding with gummy worms! Yum.

Ok so now you have it all ground up, throw some frosting on top. Literally throw it, frosting is thick so it doesn't just slide off your spoon or spatula easily. You are going to have to chuck it off. I only used about a fourth of the frosting, you don't need a lot.

Now its time to get messy, mash up your cake mixture with your hands, you can use a spoon but your hands is more fun! You want your mixture to be like one big ball in the end. Once it is like that start making little balls.

Cake Balls! So start rolling our a million little balls. I put mine on wax paper and then on a plate so I could put them in the freezer easier. So once you have finished rolling all your balls pop them in the freezer for a little, about 10-15 minutes just so they can harden. Don't freeze them or make them too cold because then they won't dip well.

Here comes the hard part. Turning your cake balls into cake pops.You will need lollipop sticks. Local craft stores have them in the Cake Decorating isles usually.

You will also need Candy Melts. I chose red but they come in tons of different colors.

So melt your candy melts as directed on the package, usually its just pop it in the microwave for 30 second intervals, stirring in between.Then dip in your lollipop sticks so there is a little bit of chocolate on the stick.

Here is a part I don't really have photos of, because it was extremely tragic. So you are supposed to stick the lollipop stick into your cake ball then dip that into the chocolate and turn it a little to make it nice and smooth. Welllllll, there is a problem with that.Sounds so easy right? Well its a lot harder than it looks and I gave up. Every single cake ball fell off its stick and into the chocolate, so I had to dig it out with my fingers (this is why I don't have pictures because I had chocolate covered fingers)So after digging the first few out i just decided to dip them with a spoon and cover the ball as much as possible. Now I'm making Messy Cake Balls! Yay!

But then I had all these sticks left over, so i figured might as well use them.

I stuck all the sticks into all the covered cake balls. I had a lot left uncovered because I ran out of chocolate. Once they were on the stick I jammed the stick into styrofoam so they would stand up to dry.

This one looks yummy huh? Not perfect but good enough to eat!

Oh know! Man down! I had a little problem with falling cake balls! Some of them were too hot still when I stuck them on the stick an slid right off.

So that was my adventure with making Bakerella's Cake Pops. Hopefully my next adventure will be a little prettier, I can't say it wasn't successful because they were gone before I knew it!