Two Sisters' Creations

Fruit Tarts

2010-04-28T13:15:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite restaurants is La Madeleine. I have many favorite dishes there but I always love to get a mini fruit tart for dessert. The below is my attempt at recreating this delicious treat. I used my mini cupcake pan to make the shells and then filled them with lemon curd and topped them with fresh fruit. I think the crust was a bit to crunchy, something a little more flakey would be better. But overall they were pretty yummy...so much so that I'm thinking of having one right now for a snack!

(sorry for the bad pic and chipped plate, I was chasing the kiddo and trying to finish dinner while making these!)

Carrot Cake

2010-04-16T10:56:00.004-05:00

One of our church's Sunday school classes is having a crawfish boil tomorrow and I made a carrot cake to donate for the cake auction. I used a cream cheese frosting and covered the sides in pecans. This is a great way to raise money for the class putting this event on. Hopefully whoever buys it will enjoy it!

Princess Crown Cookies

2010-04-06T07:11:00.008-05:00

I just finished up some really adorable princess crown cookies for a 5th birthday party. This little girl is SUCH a cutie and definitely deserves something special on her big day. The purple ones are my personal favorite, and I think the sparkly "jewels" were a nice touch!

Easter Bunnies!!

2010-03-30T19:47:00.004-05:00

The Easter bunny will be here soon, so I thought I would make something fun for our Sunday School Potluck dinner tonight. This is another adorable idea from the Hello, Cupcake! book. I added the bunny face, I thought it would be cute have one of the bunnies pop up to say "hello".

Daisy Bouquet

2010-03-29T14:20:00.006-05:00

One of my sweetest friends has been in the hospital for a while and is on bed rest until her darling daughter arrives. I made this daisy bouquet to cheer her up. Hopefully it does the trick...at least until the cookies are gone!

Sunflower Cupcakes

2010-03-21T19:01:00.005-05:00

I was SO excited today to try out a cupcake design from the book Elizabeth gave me! My kiddo slept for 3 1/2 hours after church and I got the cupcakes baked and decorated during that time. The plan was to take them with us to our pastor's house for dinner...but it turns out the reason the boy slept so long was that he is sick! Just got the poor little guy into bed and the hubby is off to dinner and drop off the cupcakes. Hopefully everyone likes them. The petals didn't turn out like I wanted them to, I think a buttercream icing would hold up better and they wouldn't look so "wilted". But the lady bugs are a nice touch!

Natalie-New Baby Order

2010-03-20T15:00:00.007-05:00

Thanks again for your order Natalie! I just finished these and couldn't wait for you to see them. I think that the elephants are my favorite. I'll get them shipped off first thing Monday morning.

Thanks!

2010-03-18T08:55:00.003-05:00

A big thanks to my friends Elissa and Natalie for their recent cookie orders! I can't wait to get started on them and will post some pics when they're finished. To do Natalie's order I get to go to Su La Table! It's my new favorite store and I could spend a fortune there but will try to control myself.

Thanks again for your orders ladies, I really appreciate it!

Butterflies

2010-03-11T10:07:00.006-06:00

My friend's birthday is today and we are headed to their house for a birthday dinner. I offered to make a cake, she wanted a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. That's always a classic, great tasting cake but it looks so sad if it just has the brown chocolate frosting with no color. My wonderful friend Elizabeth recently sent me the Hello, Cupcake book and I was inspired to use their beautiful candy butterflies. After a couple of attempts I got a good method down for making them and used some of them to decorate Katie's birthday cake! I hope she likes it (and that the butterflies survive the ride over).

Cookies o' the Irish

2010-03-08T14:24:00.006-06:00

I know...that was corny...

I whipped up a batch of St. Patrick's Day cookies to ship off to a friend. Green is such a fun color to work with, it reminds me of spring and of trees and flowers in bloom. I recently got a new Wilton tip (no.1 round) and thought it would be great to do some of the decorating with but it was WAY too small and kept getting clogged. So, some of the cookies have icing globs that I'm a bit disappointed with. Next time I'll know to thin the icing before using that tip. Live and learn.

Just because...

2010-03-07T13:08:00.008-06:00

Just for the fun of it, here are some more cookies I made recently. I think something like this would be nice for a wedding shower or for little treats for guests to take home from a wedding. The colors could be done to match the bride's bouquet.

I added stems and leaves to these tulips, I did more petal details later.
(Sorry about the cell phone pic, I know I promised not do that anymore...)

Baby Shower

2010-03-07T12:25:00.011-06:00

I went to a baby shower for a dear friend this weekend, it was a lot of fun and made me think about the shower I co-hosted for another friend last year. If we could, TSC (Two Sisters' Creations) would love to be "party planners" of sorts, doing baby and wedding showers would be SO much fun! Really, what we need right now is to just do one or two of them to generate advertising/interest by word of mouth. If anyone out there knows of someone who would be willing to let us take over a party we would probably be able to do it at cost if they would let us do some advertising!

I posted a pic of diaper cake Kim and I made in an earlier blog but the pic was really dark, so here's another one. Also, there's a picture of a duck cake that we made. It was a long drive in the August heat to downtown Houston and he started sagging on one side by the time we arrived. But, he still tasted good! The funniest part was trying to cut him up, we basically had to decapitate the poor thing (see last pic).

Diaper cakes are fun because you can put all kinds of goodies on them. This one had pacifiers, teething rings and socks made into little rosettes in addition to the rubber duck topper.

The cake was a marble pound cake with butter cream frosting.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

2010-02-25T14:54:00.006-06:00

We are having some friends over for dinner tonight and that, of course, means that I get to bake something! This time I decided to try red velvet cupcakes. They always look so pretty, the red cake contrasts so nicely with the white frosting. Unfortunately, mine didn't turn out as red and I wanted them too, I didn't have liquid food coloring, only the gel. It didn't dissolve in the cream very well. Oh well, it still tasted great, the color doesn't change that. The cream cheese frosting is pretty yummy too (I had to taste test, didn't I?!). I added some red sugar crystals to the top and I think that finished it off nicely.

They aren't quite as pretty as I hoped they would be, but it is my first attempt. Next time I'll know not to fill the cups quite as full (the batter rose a bit more than I thought it would) and hunt down some liquid food coloring!

Cookies for Grandma

2010-02-20T15:02:00.005-06:00

My Grandmother is celebrating a birthday this coming week and I thought that I would try sending her some cookies. I also decided to send some to my other Grandmother as a nice little surprise.

I had fun doing these flowers and personally think that the tulips came out the best. The other flowers looked like more fun initially but didn't come out a pretty as I thought they would. Next time I will work with fewer colors (I was a bit overwhelmed) and it won't look quite so psychedelic! In a bouquet I would stick to two or three colors and one or two patterns.

(I've got to stop taking these pics with my phone! They always come out so dark!)

Belated Birthday

2010-02-17T10:27:00.004-06:00

I thought I'd post a picture of the cake I made for my son's first birthday. It was about a month ago, but I have birthday's after yesterday's party. I even made a little tiny dinosaur just for him.

Birthdays!

2010-02-17T08:30:00.003-06:00

Last night we celebrated my niece and nephew's 4th and 2nd birthdays, respectively. Yep, they were both born on Feb 16th! My sister (who is super-woman) made this adorable fish cake for them just 5 days after having her 3rd baby!!

Everyone loved the cake and the kids got a kick out of the eye made from a marshmallow.

Things are taking off!

2010-02-16T09:45:00.006-06:00

I'm very excited because I've been asked to do a cake for a baby shower. She was a guest at a shower that I co-hosted for one of my best friends and remembered the cake! I've decided to basically do it at cost and use this as a way to advertise. I'll be making a duck cake, and some cookies to give out to the guests. I can also do diaper cakes and we'll see if I can convince her to let me do one of those as well (see the pic below for one I made for the aforementioned shower).

And, I've been asked to make something for a charity event benefiting the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society!

I'm very excited to start making things for people and hopefully spread the word. Once my sister has recovered from the birth of her third beautiful child she'll be joining in the fun. As per the title of the blog, we're thinking of "Two Sister's Creations" for our name.

A "Royally" Happy Valentine's Day

2010-02-15T14:26:00.003-06:00

So, you know all those lovely cookies that you see for sale on Valentine's Day (or any other holiday) that look perfectly decorated with smooth, pretty icing? Well, I thought I should have a go at making those myself!

The icing used is called Royal Icing. It was easy enough to make, powdered sugar, meringue powder, water and coloring. As I was researching this particular technique a lot of websites I found talked about how fast it dries, and went on and on about how quickly you have to work. That scared me a bit, I mean, how fast is fast?! I was preparing my self for instant solidification upon contact with air. Nothing of the sort happened. Yes, it dried to a nice hard finish, but it does take a little time! I found after flooding the cookie with the red icing it was best to put them in the fridge for a while before adding the while decorations, other wise the white sort of bled into the red and didn't look very good.

Anyway, it was a fun technique to learn and the cookies turned out to be delicious. This is what they use to do those cookie bouquets that are sold for a pretty penny. I'm thinking of starting to make those, we could definitely do a better job than those expensive places online!

Here we go!

2010-02-10T09:54:00.001-06:00

I recently quit my job as a postdoc in the field of genetics to devote myself to raising my sweet little boy. As such, I have been finding new things to fill my days and use up some creative energy that used to either be squashed by exhaustion or thinking up new experiments. What I've discovered is that I love to bake and decorate cakes, cookies, cupcakes etc.

My sister is also a mom of 3 beautiful kids and has a real talent for decorating. She's always had an eye for color and is going to join me on this adventure!

So, I'll be using this blog to post some of our cooking adventures. Failures, successes and everything in between. Let us know what you like or what ideas you have for improvement!

Happy Baking!