Wedding FUN!!!

Hi everyone! You might be able to guess from the title, but we've had a very exciting baking project recently! But before we get to that, it's officially our favorite time of the baking year. It's rhubarb season (although Halloween baking and Christmas baking and Easter baking is really good too)!!!!!!!!!!

Of course we tried some new rhubarb breakfasts. This Rhubarb Coffee Cake was really good. My big-little sister thought that the rhubarb was too much, but my mom and I loved this.

You can see the strips of rhubarb lying on top. Most rhubarb treats have the rhubarb cut up into chunks, so this is unusual. And I think it's what my big-little sister didn't like. But I liked the intensity of the rhubarb this way.

The rhubarb is not mixed into the cake batter so when you assemble the cake, you have to pour the batter into the pan and then layer the rhubarb on top and add the streusel.

An interesting recipe was Strawberry Rhubarb Drop Biscuits. This recipe has you chop the fruit and then let it macerate. You drain it and save the reserved fruit juice to mix into the batter. These are basically scones and we really liked them.

I love how the rhubarb and strawberries look so fresh.

The recipe includes a lemon glaze, but we didn't have any lemons, so we just skipped that part and it was still good.

A more unusual recipe that we tried was Strawberry and Rhubarb Topped Buttermilk-Honey Squares. This recipe comes from Dorie Greenspan's newsletter XOXO Dorie and I can send it to anyone who is interested. It's sort of like a sweet cornbread cake with fruit. That makes it sound weird, but it was very good..

The crispy edges on this cake add nice texture and were my favorite part.

One morning we had a Raspberry Rhubarb Crostata which is basically like eating pie for breakfast. But actually a recipe like this has way less sugar than a coffee cake, so I'm not sure why pie for breakfast isn't a more common thing! Maybe we should start a new trend!!

A crostata is like a free form tart with fruit piled in the middle. This is my big-little sister rolling out the dough.

I actually think that rhubarb and raspberry is a better combination than rhubarb and strawberry, which seems a lot more common. The whipped cream was the perfect touch.

The recipe that was one of the biggest surprises and biggest hits in this blog post is 5 Ingredient Beer Bread I cannot say enough good things about this. It was so good. Every single one of us was totally obsessed with it and we're planning on making it for all of our visitors this summer.

And not only is this recipe beyond fantastic, it's beyond easy!!!!

It's definitely meant to be served warm with butter.

Because of our big baking project that we've been working on recently, we ended up with a LOT of leftover egg yolks in our fridge. Usually we use them to make lemon curd, but we wanted to try some thing new and found this Twelve Yolk Pound Cake.

This recipe just looks like a basic bundt cake when you flip it out of the pan.

But all the egg yolks give it a bright yellow color that I loved when you cut it. We served this with strawberry syrup and whipped cream.

We've been doing lots of strawberry recipes since it's strawberry season and Strawberry Corn Flake Cake and is one of my favorite strawberry recipes that we have made in a long time. This is awesome!

This has a crunchy buttery corn flake top that everyone loved.

To make this you layer a cake batter and then the strawberries and then the corn flake crunch, which is basically like a corn flake streusel.

Do you remember how on our last post we shared a Bluberry Yogurt Cake and said that we wanted to try it with other fruit and mix it into the batter instead of layering it top? Well we did it and we liked it this way much more! We did a strawberry version and a raspberry version and both were great. But now of course I want to try it with rhubarb!!!!

My big-little sister liked the strawberry version best.

But the raspberry was my favorite.

My mom surprised us on the last day of school with Cookies and Cream Oreo Donuts. These were really good but they were baked, and ended up being more like little cakes than traditional donuts.

I thought that these looked super cute.

My mom left them on the table to surprise us and I loved how pretty they looked with our spring hyacinths that we get for my little-little sister!!

A much healthier breakfast that we tried was Healthy Breakfast Bars with Jam. I really liked these and so did my mom, but my brother and my big-little sister weren't fans. I'd recommend giving them a try though. They were very easy to make and are different from a typical granola-type breakfast bar.

These were really rich. I thought of them more as PB&J bars.

I like how the jelly is peeking out from underneath the top

A breakfast cake that got mixed reviews was Better Than the Bakery Chocolate Chip Espresso Yogurt Cake. This cake isn't very sweet because it uses dark chocolate and doesn't have a lot of sweetener, other than the glaze. My dad and brother and I really liked that, but my big-little sister thought that it tasted bitter. If you're worried about that though, you could try using semisweet chocolate.

The glaze came out looking a little bit messy, but it tasted good.

And some loaf cakes crumble when you try to cut them, but this sliced very nicely.

A really good savory breakfast was Irish Soda Bread with Cheddar and Chives.This had great flavor. We all really enjoyed it for breakfast, but it would also be great with tomato soup for lunch or dinner. It would also be a good addition to cheese plate.

This smells great while baking. I think it's because of the cheese.

This had a very soft interior, which my big-little sister said she liked a lot.

Of course we made a bunch of rhubarb muffins. My dad really liked these Rhubarb Streusel Muffins. Of all of our rhubarb muffins, these were definitely my favorite.

I love streusel so I loved that these muffins had a LOT of streusel.

These Rhubarb Muffins were also very good. The muffin itself was very soft and tender, but the top added nice crunch.

The top of these were very brown sugary, which I liked, but this topping doesn't hold together as well as some other streusel toppings. I think it might be because it has less butter in it. Next time I'd probably add a teensy bit more so that the sugar doesn't just fall right off.

One morning before work my mom made us these Healthy Rhubarb Muffins. These were obviously a different sort of thing than the muffins covered in sugary streusel! But they were still good warm out of the oven. We froze some extras and that didn't work as well. They were too wet when we defrosted them.

I think that the pearl sugar on top looks very delicate. We bought this pearl sugar to use in a specific recipe and now we can't remember what it even was! But hopefully we'll figure it out and I'll get back to you on that one!!

A rhubarb breakfast that we all really enjoyed was Strawberry Rhubarb Pecan Loaf. It has great texture and great flavor. Our family ate this entire loaf in two days.

The batter didn't look like it was going to be enough in the pan, but it rises beautifully.

The rhubarb flavor definitely dominates the strawberry in this recipe. But that's no problem as long as you rheally like rhubarb!

And speaking of rheally liking rhubarb, when we came across this recipe for RHUBARBECUE we were extremely excited!!!!!!! We were definitely going to make this no matter what, just so that we could walk around saying "rhubarbecue!" This recipe is for pork ribs, which we didn't want to make. My mom had a piece of chuck roast in the freezer and we're trying not to buy meat because it is so bad for the environment, but we definitely want to use up what we already own. This barbecue sauce was sweet and a tiny bit spicy and sticky and delicious. I'd like to try it on chicken or salmon.

We cooked the meat for a really really long time in the oven, so it ended up like brisket burnt ends. This made the sauce really dark and sticky, but I'd be interested to try the sauce cooked for shorter too.

My big-little sister picked out a bunch of recipes that she wanted to try from an America's Test Kitchen cookbook for young chefs for Stir-Fried Tofu with Green Beans. My mom was skeptical since the recipe came from a kids' cookbook but my big-little sister was right and this was fantastic! When we've stir-fried tofu before, we've made it super crispy and this recipe keeps the tofu at a slightly softer texture, which we all preferred. Let me know if you'd like this recipe - it's great!

The sauce was very good and I was surprised by how much I liked the stir-fried green beans. Something that I like about stir-fry is that it's completely flexible, so you can swap out any vegetables and protein that you want.

I especially liked how the green beans got charred in spots.

Another dinner recipe that I really enjoyed was Easy Creamy Seafood Curry For this recipe, you just use two pounds of whatever seafood you want. We used shrimp, scallops and clams, but I also think it would be good with fish.

We used steamer clams with this by accident because we got the wrong thing from the store, but I think I'd use littlenecks if we made it again.

A very adaptable dinner that we had was Caribbean Shrimp & Rice Bowl. It has a mango and pineapple salsa. I don't love tropical fruit and so I skipped that part, but I really liked the shrimp with jerk seasoning.

We served this with an avocado cream that was great and cooling with the spicy shrimp

One of my very favorite dinners that we've had in a long time was a super easy pasta dish that we just made up ourselves. First we sautéed zucchini with garlic and shallots in olive oil until it was really soft. Then we used a blender and pureed the sautéed mixture with a can of drained cannellini beans, a few cups of basil and salt to make a sauce. We tossed it with the hot pasta and grated parmigiana reggiano and it was amazing. It was similar to a pesto, but without the nuts. And I think this would be a fun method to try to make sauces with other vegetables too.

I love the bright color of the sauce. It looks very spring-y to me.

A delicious lunch that my mom and I made my dad one day was Cheese Toasts with Mushrooms, Miso & Honey. My dad was skeptical of this at first and asked if the mushrooms were a substitute for something, but he ended up really liking it. To make this you spread St. Stephen cheese on toast and then top it with browned mushrooms and a miso honey dressing.

You could make mini versions of this with baguette slices for an appetizer too!

I know that we're supposed to be done with Easter, but we kept baking with Easter candy after Easter. We did a bunch of baking with Cadbury Creme Eggs and even people who don't like that candy LOVED when we baked with it. Next year we're going to have to stock up so that we can bake with it year-round. These Cadbury Creme Egg Brownies were fantastic.

You layer the sliced Creme Eggs over the brownie, and it almost acts like a frosting. My mom thought that it might just taste like a brownie with a really sweet candy stuck on top, but it didn't. The eggs actually elevate the brownies. somehow.

I worried that the creme would spill out and make a mess when we cut the brownies, but actually they set really well.

Another huge creme egg winner was Cadbury Eggs Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies. To make these you just wrap chilled cookie dough around Cadbury Creme egg halves. You just have to trust me that all of this baking comes out way better than it sounds! These are spectacular.

Using Easter m&m's in the cookie dough makes these extra pretty.

Bits of Cadbury Creme seeped out in the baking and formed crispy lacy candy edges on some of the cookies.

The creme eggs meld into the cookie baking, so it isn't like there's a big surprise in the middle like with an Oreo. It more becomes part of the cookie itself.

An unbelievably easy no-bake treat is Easter Egg Popcorn Bars. All you need to do for this is melt marshmallows and butter in the microwave and stir in popcorn and mini eggs and then let it set in the fridge. We all liked these much more than we thought we would and I think they would be fun to try with other kinds of candy. These could be great to make after Halloween!

The process for making these is similar to Rice Krispie Treats.

Actual Easter Rice Krispie treats turned out to be way less successful. We tried making Peeps Rice Krispie Treats and they weren't really great. We melted different kinds of Peeps with Rice Krispies to form different colors.

One of the big problems with this recipe is that you'd really need to add food coloring to get pretty colors. But the last thing that we wanted to do was add chemicals to more chemicals!

Then the even bigger problem with these is that they didn't even taste that great. The Peeps don't give the same texture as regular marshmallows. These weren't bad, but they aren't really worth making either.

A healthy recipe that got very mixed reviews was Blender Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream. This gets made with cottage cheese, which is a great idea, and ends up having a surprisingly good texture. I liked this, but my siblings weren't fans, and my mom thought that it wasn't sweet enough. It's definitely a good concept but we'd probably need to modify it a bit to make something that everybody likes.

The texture ends up similar to soft serve.

A tea time recipe that we all loved was Almond Amaretto Pound Cake. My brother loved this especially, but it was a hit all around. The almond cream cheese frosting is amazing and was definitely my favorite part.

I also thought that this cake looked so pretty!

Another huge baking success was Oatmeal Lemon Crumble Bars. These are absolutely worth making. They come together very quickly. The same mixture is used for the crust and the topping and then the filling is just mixed together, similar to the filling for key lime pie.

We will definitely be making these a lot this summer and they'll be a great treat to bring to the beach!

Unfortunately Strawberry White Chocolate Blondies were one of the worst things we've made in a long time! That's probably overstating it. My dad actually thought that they were okay. But my mom really hated them! The problem was that they end up too wet and watery. The flavors were actually good. But the execution and texture definitely require some reworking.

The icing for these is actually excellent. It uses ground freeze dried strawberries which gives great color and flavor. I'd love to try the icing on a strawberry coffee cake.

But you can kind of see here how they are way too wet and drippy.

We tried another version of fudgy chocolate cookies called The Browniest Cookies and we liked this version a lot. We still like my Grandma Linda's recipe the best, but these are a close second.

These are so dark that they're hard to see in the photo!

A simple sounding recipe that turned out to be way more special than we expected was Chewy M&M Brownies. These were so good that we made them three times in a week to give to different people! Before we baked all the time, we used to occasionally get brownies from a brownie bakery that we loved and this recipe is the closest that we've come to replicating those!

This batch was cut super small because my dad wanted little ones for before running, and we don't like serving massive sized treats anyway, but usually we'd cut them a little bit bigger.

The opposite end of the brownie spectrum was Milk Chocolate Brownies. We thought that the idea of milk chocolate brownies was interesting, but these turned out more like not-very-good chocolate cake.

If you like cakey brownies that aren't very chocolatey, you might actually like these. But they weren't for us.

Grazzy brought us amazing Dulce de Leche from Brazil and we used it to make Dulce De Leche Brownies. These were okay but you couldn't really taste the Dulce de Leche, so really it was a waste. I think it would have been much better to drizzle the Dulce de Leche over vanilla ice cream or a sugar cookie so that we could actually taste it.

The Dulce de Leche did look pretty swirled into the brownies however.

My brother wanted to make cupcakes for his friend Davis's birthday and so he and my mom made Chocolate Oreo Cupcakes. These were really really excellent. I highly recommend giving them a try.

I thought that the mini Oreo was the perfect topper! I really like it when garnish serves as a clue for what flavors something is.

We had extra frosting from the cupcakes and so we added it to our favorite Fudgy Oreo Brownies. Rachel and her colleagues thought that this was maybe the best thing we've ever baked!!!!

We chopped up Oreos to put on top of these but the mini Oreos might have looked cuter!

My friend Kate slept over and she likes baking too so we decided that we wanted to do a baking project. We used our favorite cupcake recipe for Simply Perfect Vanilla Cupcakes but did tie-dye frosting.

First we made vanilla butter cream and divided it into four separate parts to color it. Then we spread lines of each on plastic wrap. It's important to think about what order the colors will look best in next to each other.

Then we rolled up the plastic wrap and put the entire thing into a piping bag.

And it pipes out beautifully colored swirls that look like tie-dye.

We thought that mixing two different types of sprinkles looked best. I thought that these came out looking fantastic!!!!!

It was my teacher Ms. DR's birthday and she loves chocolate so we made her Super Moist Chocolate Cupcakes with Favorite Chocolate Buttercream. We've never found a chocolate cupcake recipe before that we considered perfect, but this is it!!!!! They're everything that chocolate cupcakes should be and more! My brother made these for his science class too for an end-of-the-year celebration, and everyone loved them.

It takes more time but I've learned that placing each sprinkle individually is the only way to make cupcakes look perfect. Dumping sprinkles on is obviously faster, but it doesn't give you the same effect as selecting your colors and nicely spacing them.

I thought that these totally looked like they could have come from a professional bakery all boxed up.

We had lots of school celebrations for the end of the year and my big-little sister made these Mini Cheesecakes for a high school student helper who had been working in her class. These were a huge success and definitely another recipe that we'll use again this summer.

These look adorable and you can make them in advance which is perfect for entertaining.

We always do a big batch of treats to thank all of our teachers and coaches and babysitters at the end of the year and this year we made something called Rocky Road Mess. It's a candy recipe that you make by melting chocolate and Nutella and then mixing in chopped up chocolate chip cookies, marshmallows and peanut m&ms. We always try to find a recipe that my siblings and I can mostly do ourselves and that is fairly quick and easy because we have to make so much of it. This year we did fifteen pans!!!!

This recipe involves a lot of weighing, which was a great job for my big-little sister.

We started using silicon pans to reduce our use of disposable ones. These are great because it's easy to pop whatever you're making out of them like a disposable aluminum pan, but they're better for the environment.

This candy is very easy to make and turns out to be really delicious!, which is our favorite combination!

So you could maybe tell from the post title, but we made Rachel's wedding cake!!!! This was definitely the most exciting baking project that we've ever done because it was a big project trying something new, but also this is probably the only thing that we've ever baked that someone will remember forever!!!! Rachel and Mike wanted Funfetti flavor, and so our first step was recipe testing. We tried three recipes. Our first recipe was for Sprinkle Cake, and this recipe has gotten a lot of acclaim, but we didn't like it at all. We didn't like the texture of the cake and the frosting tasted like plain butter. Our second cake was Funfetti Cake From Scratch and this was the frosting that we ended up using. Our third cake was Confetti Birthday Cake and this was the universal cake winner. We've never ever compared recipes before and achieved universal agreement before but Rachel, Mike, all of Rachel's colleagues, our entire family, Grazzy, Paulo, Layssa, Chelsea, Abby and Marduche all liked the exact same cake and frosting best so we knew that we definitely had a winning combination!

Our kitchen looked like a professional bakery for a while!

We learned this cool trick for slicing cake. If you move the knife in this way instead of lifting up and down, it keeps your cake layers and frosting from mushing together and slices look much cleaner.

Once we selected our recipes, we had to convert it from an 8-inch layer cake to a wedding cake with 12-inch, 9-inch and 6-inch tiers. This involved a TON of math. First we figured out the cubic inches of the original recipe. Then we figured out the cubic inches we'd need for each tier and then we figured out what percentage of the original recipe we'd need for each tier. Once we did that we made the original recipe and weighed it and then used the percentages from our volume conversions to figure out how many grams of batter each pan would need.

We had to use a number called pi and all thought that it was funny to be using pi to figure out how much cake to make.

Then we did a trial run of making the entire wedding cake to test our conversions and to practice assembling the cake.

My big-little sister did the frosting between the layers.

We used boba straws to help support the structure.

We decorated it simply, which I thought looked perfect for a backyard reception!!!!!!! Transportation was very stressful but it all turned out okay!

And this was the final product! We should have pulled it out of the refrigerator a few hours before we did, because it was a little bit cold. But we were more worried about it melting or collapsing than about anything else and it still tasted spectacular!

I hope you've enjoyed reading all of this! I'm about to go on a big trip and I'm very excited because we're talking some cooking classes! So Au Revoir and Ciao for now!!!!!!