Cream Cheese Mini Tarts

As well as making fodant and cake on friday, I also made tarts!

Well... I made the tart shells friday, and made the filling today. I thought it was actually pretty easy. I was naive and didn't know that tarts shrunk untill I was searching around the internet, and found on smitten kitchen an unshrinkable tart recipe. Before then I was good with trying my other recipe I had found, but I didn't want to take the chance and have my shells shrink!

The ingrediants weren't insane either, only thing I had to buy that was extra was dark chocolate. The filling was super easy, I didn't use the bailey like what was called for, but used instead milk and vanilla like what was suggested.

The filling was a cream cheese filling with dark chocolate on the bottom as well as drizzled on top.

And one more drool-worthy picture then the recipe

I used smitten kitchen recipe for the crust, only thing I forgot was to poke the tarts with a fork, but it came out great! I also cook for 12 minutes, then another five but I made the mini tarts. If you make mini's I would watch the time. Another note is if you don't have tart pans, you can use upside down cupcake tins. They didn't look the greatest, but it didn't look terrible either, I use three cupcake tins to make it sturdy.

http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/11/the-great-unshrinkable-sweet-tart-shell/ - tart

http://bakingbites.com/2007/08/fresh-fruit-and-cream-cheese-tart/ - filling

First Time Fondant

What better way to enter blog life with a post about fondant?

Sooooo after a week of buying my materials I was finally able to make my own fondant!

This was the first time I also put fondant on a cake and I wished I looked up more about putting fondant on the cake before I put it on the cake (How many times can you say cake in one sentence?) The day after I fondant-ed my cake I found all these great videos about how to cover a cake with fondant. I didn't do too many things wrong, but I wish I did know to chill my frosted cake before I put the fondant on.

You can't really see in the pictures, that the polka dots have cracks in it. It wasn't a major issue and I think I know how to fix it next time. I also redecorated the cake a bunch of times. I started out with a beaded border, but I thought it looked to childish, so I took it off. I then proceeded to do checked, but I didn't like the lilac checkers. I then did just big polka dots, and then finally ended up with this.

I'm not sure if all fondant recipe use almond extract, but the one I made did. It made the fondant delicious, I might even dare to say that I liked it better then my regular icing. I think, just to say it plainly, I fell in love with fondant. I loved everything about it, the feel, the texture, the taste. I even loved when I cut it open, I loved the smoothness of the slicing. I know that sounds odd, but try cutting a fondant cake and it just feels silky.

Ok onto the recipe I used...

I used a recipe from the cook duke http://thecookduke.com/fondant-recipe/

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post the recipe on my blog or just the link? So I'm just posting the link for now. The cake recipe I used was just our good old standard cake which recipe I'll post in a few days. I hope this post wasn't to boring considering this was my first post!