baking | The Angel Forever

Category Archives baking

Family birthday party – 6 yr August edition

Posted on August 16, 2009 9:28 am by TheAngelForever

Last year at this time I was fussing over a volcano cake for NHL’s 5th birthday party. He wanted a dinosaur theme party for the entire family. The problem was there were no decent cakes out there. I opted to make one for him. The end product was using my giant cupcake pan and sculpting the following:

It was not the best, but it was decent. This year we tossed together a quick party for family (still debating a friends party later on). His birthday kind of snuck up on us. Today is the day. NHL opted to have a Disney Car’s birthday theme. When we talked about different cakes he had several options: giant cupcake, regular cake, or cupcake cones. Care to guess which one he selected?

Last night we made the ones that he selected , and they (hint, hint) will be decorated after transport to Nana and Papa’s house. Here is what last year’s party looked like. Time to get ready to head out soon. More photos to come soon.

Categories:
baking birthday Disney looking back nhl

To cheesecake or not to cheesecake

Posted on August 14, 2009 12:00 am by TheAngelForever

The month of August is filled with many birthdays. First there is JL’s, then my Dad’s (Happy belated B-day on my blog Dad), and NHL’s. For JL’s birthday, he wanted to try a recipe that we found for a tie-dyed cheesecake like the one that we loved at Disney’s Pop Century Resort. The cake was decent, but did not live up to our expectations. We came up with modifications that we thought would improve the recipe. Since my father’s birthday was coming up, and he likes cheesecake, we offered to make one for him. Below is a photo of Disney’s cake and our original:

Pop Century Resort Tie Dye Cheesecake All that is left

Tuesday evening, JL and I baked another tie-dyed cheesecake altering the recipe in order to better replicate the cake from our Disney dream. Here is a look at our finished product:

JL wrote all about what we did with a lot of photos documenting the process on TechyDad. Head on over there if you would like to take a look at all of the fun we had.

So my question to you is inspired by our cheesecake baking:

What is your favorite type of cheesecake? If you are not a cheesecake fan, what is your favorite dessert?

_____________________________________________________________________________

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #61

Categories:
Aloha Friday baking food glorious food photos yummy

Tie-Dyed Cheesecake Results and B-day summary

Posted on August 6, 2009 8:31 pm by TheAngelForever

All day Monday, JL and I kept talking about how we could not wait to try the Tie-Dyed Cheesecake experiment that we made on Sunday. We were anxious to see if it would live up to our memories of the amazing cake that we had while at Disney’s Pop Century Resort in May. Monday evening finally arrived. JL and I dropped the boys off to have dinner with Nana and Papa. From here we drove to a new Chinese/Japanese/Thai restaurant to try. On our way we saw the fire engine that was mentioned on my Worldess Wednesday.

It was so nice having dinner together and not worrying about what the kids would eat. We quickly decided on some sushi rolls to share and ordered our meal. After a little while, our sushi appetizer arrived. Not only did it look amazing, it was absolutely delicious.

Just as we were finishing these up, our meals arrived. I decided to go with something safe, but not something that I typically get (beef and broccoli) and JL tried something quite different (spicy orange tofu).

Thanks to my digital camera being with us most of the time, we were able to capture the photos of our wonderful meal. Of course, taking photos during your meal gets you looks. Our waitress came over. Of course, I had to explain that we blog and take pictures to show JL’s birthday meal. A little while later, while waiting for our packaged leftovers, the waitress and another come over. The two of them were singing happy birthday to JL while carrying ice cream with a lit candle on top.

Once we were done with dinner, we went back to my parent’s house to have the much anticipated Tie-Dyed Cheesecake. I quickly opened up the spring form pan so we were able to see more of the colors.

Then it was time to sing Happy Birthday to JL and dig into the cake.

Finally, it was time to cut inside and see if it looked anything like the much loved cake from Disney’s Pop Century Resort. Here is a reminder of what the cake there looked like.

This is what we saw when we sliced inside the cake . . .

As you can imagine, we were all disappointed. It looked nothing like the cake of our dreams from the memories in May. This cake was 2/3 red velvet and only 1/3 cheesecake. NHL actually thought the cheesecake was frosting on top of the regular cake. Basically the proportions of the cake were flipped.

Don’t get me wrong, the recipe is not a bust. It was not horrible. However, as cheesecake fans we loved the cheesecake part, which was a mere blip in the cake. In the end, we figure we would try this recipe again. Next time we would likely use 1/3 of the cake mix, or possibly only 1/4 of it. Then we would at least double the cheesecake portion. We figure this would fix the proportions. In addition to this, we would not cook the red velvet all the way during the first time in the oven. We figure mostly baked would allow it not to dry out quite as much. Of course, we may also try this recipe that my friend who made this on Monday found after we had both made these cheesecakes. Certainly not going to be any complaints from the family about eating another cheesecake!

_______________________________________________________________

Submitted as part of Grace’s Kitchen Friends on Feels Like Home.

Categories:
baking birthday Disney food glorious food jl looking back photos yummy

The Pop Century Tie-Dyed Cheesecake experiment

Posted on August 2, 2009 10:13 pm by TheAngelForever

Back in December, we did a lot of research to try to figure out which Disney World resort to stay at. Several of the Disney message boards had amazing posts with information about anything and everything you could ever want to know. Seriously, they had information about the rooms, pools, buses, and even the food. Best of all, they had photos of items that helped to lure us into staying at the Pop Century Resort.

One night, JL and I were sitting at the laptop reading about the Pop Century. At the time our reservations were at a different value resort on Disney property. We read about all of the activities that took place at Pop Century each day, especially for kids that were NHL’s age. Then we looked at photos of things from the food court. We were immediately intrigued by something called tie-dye cheesecake. The photos were amazing and we sat there almost drooling. Several days after this we changed our reservations to Pop Century Resort.

When we went to Disney in May we knew that we HAD to try the tie-dye cheesecake. Of course, we did just that one morning as part of our breakfast splurge.

We had this colorful, delicious treat twice while on our week long vacation. . . so did my parents. A short while ago JL did a search for the tie-dye cheesecake on Google. He found a recipe mentioned on Slashfood.com that compared itself to the cheesecake at the Pop Century Resort. Today we went grocery shopping and JL mentioned that he wanted to try making this. It seemed like the perfect time since his birthday is tomorrow. So we bought the red velvet cake mix, got bricks of cream cheese, and bought food coloring just in case we needed it.

When we got hom JL and NHL baked the 9" round red velvet cake in our never used springform pan from my bridal shower. It also made a dozen cupcakes with the extra batter. Then I switched out and made the cheesecake part. We opted to only do four colors this time around. So I mixed green, blue, purple and yellow for our experiment. Here is the cake just as it was heading into the oven to bake the cheesecake part on top of the red velvet cake.