The Adventures of a Frustrated Baker

Now that school is winding to a close and I have had a few extra mornings with my family this week, I have been thinking about fun breakfast foods we could make together.  This morning we decided to make some monkey bread. If you have never had the pleasure of enjoying monkey bread, then I am sorry.  It truly is a yummy treat, though not really appropriate for breakfast.  You'll see...it is mostly sugar...yummy, yummy sugar! It is also ridiculously easy.  No prep needs to be done the night before, so even if you don't have too much time before work, school, church or whatever, this can be made pretty easily without having to rearrange your schedule or get up super early.  You basically cut up the cans of biscuits, coat them in sugar and cinnamon, melt butter with brown sugar, pour it over the top and bake for 40 minutes.  See, easy! Cut each biscuit in half Then into quarters Set aside for a moment Put the sugar and cinnamon in a gall...

As some of you may know, a few weeks ago it was teacher appreciation week.  A few of the other parents from my daughter's preschool class and I thought it would be a wonderful idea to put some special things together for our kids' preschool teacher because she is just so wonderful and amazing with the kids and we wanted her to know just how much she means to all of us.  As the resident food blogger and creative baker of the group I was nominated to "make something yummy" for her.  Since one of the other moms suggested we do flowers I thought it would be fun to bake her some flowers to compliment her real flowers!   Let me just say, cookie pops...WAY easier than cake pops.  Seriously, I would definitely do these again, though maybe I will put a bit more work and thought into decorating them.  The sprinkles I used didn't want to stay!  That and it was 10:00 at night by the time I got them decorated...better advanced planning would have made things...

A few weeks ago, it was my birthday and true control freak and avid baker that I am, I made my own cake.  Now I'm sure there is some rule out there, just as my family tried to say, that states you are not to make your own birthday cake if you have family around that can do it, but I wanted this cake...and I wanted it to be pretty...and well see above comment about me being a control freak.  Sorry, its just who I am LOL!  So I stayed up late on the day before my birthday so that I could bake this most delicious cake!  (It is super moist and not too rich and very flavorful, seriously I love this chocolate cake...beats boxed cake mix by like 10,000!)  Then when I got home from work on my birthday I quickly decorated it...so quickly in fact I plopped the top layer of cake on top of the bottom before I put in the raspberries.  I was irked, let me tell you, but no worries I worked with it and by layering them on the sides and in between roses on top it...