OHMYGODIWANTTOMAKEPETITFOURSFOREVER

My new roommate is a fashion designer. What's more exciting about this is that it's given me and my other roommate a shot of creative energy, and we've all been feeding our own excitement into crafting/sewing/drawing lots of awesome shit.
Our latest inspiration came through the idea of our new Etsy store, in which we'll be selling lots of awesome stuff, and which I'll surely keep you posted on because clearly you're all on the edges of your seats about that. We had this idea to do an Alice-themed photoshoot to photograph our stuff in, and make awesome little hats and beaded headbands and, the best part for me personally, bake awesome little cakes (eeeeee!) for the shoot. So I looked up petit fours, which I remembered from Samantha's Birthday Tea Party set in the American Girl catalog. I remember them being pastel and adorable, and I am so down for that.
So I googled 'petit fours', and, I mean...

THESE THINGS ARE TOTES ADORABLE! I want like eight billion of them. And I mean, seriously, what is not to love about these things? A mini piece of cake dipped in fondant and decorated adorably? How have I not been making these my entire life?
I've been doing a little bit of research on these babies and I guess you can just dip a cube of cake in fondant but traditionally the cakes are also layered with jam and soaked in liquor syrup. Ohmygodthatsoundssogood.
I need to find a good dense vegan cake recipe and a vegan fondant recipe STAT. This is essential to my well-being that I get to make these things as soon as humanly possible.

It's-a meeeee!

I found this chick on flickr, hello naomi, and I think I'm pretty much in love with her shit. Specifically, her cupcake collections, which totally own. I mean:

Yeah, I don't think anyone's topping that. Want.
I really need to start experimenting more with marzipan and stuff. I wonder if you can make it vegan. It does have eggs in it, right?

Strawberry-Mango Pie

Do you see that there? The above picture? What does that look like to you? Delicious, perfect, awesome pie, right? Now scroll down a few entries and take a look at that failurepie. This, my friends, is why you don't try to help your sexy awesome ex-girlfriend (who has great hair, by the way, just throwing that out there) do a basketweave pie crust and claim to know what you're doing. Because you don't, because LOOK AT THAT UP THERE. Just LOOK at how AMAZING that basketweave looks. That is how it is done, my friends. That pie is a thing of beauty and grace that could have only been crafted by the hands of an angel such as myself. I mean --

Does that basketweave not bring a tear to your eye? Does it not want to make you weep like a little schoolgirl with pigtails and a pink backpack? I'm thinking it does, so don't lie.

Kalamata Olive Bread

Oh man, people. I try not to brag about myself, but I am pretty much on my way to becoming the champion of bread baking. All I need now is several training montages. They shall consist of me kneading, waiting for the dough to rise, and eating the shit out of the finished product.
But seriously, folks, I've baked some awful bread in my day, and I it could very well be something in the air ducts, but bread baking feels pretty much like magic for me now. The yeast comes to life just for me; it says, "Dorie, for you, we will make your bread dough ginormous". If only bread baking weren't such a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, I'd be making it every day.
"But Dorie," you, the hypothetical reader asks, "why don't you just get a bread machine? You can make the dough and leave it for six hours, and then, boom, fresh bread."
Well, hypothetical reader, that is a good question. The answer is twofold: one, I am too poor to afford your fancy-pants kitchen equipment when I have two hands and a table and way more free time than I deserve. Two, how dare you. Can a bread machine knead with the kind of love that I knead my dough with? It can't? Well, then, sir, I rest my case. Enjoy your soulless machine bread, you communist.

Vegan Caramel-Apple Pie with Gingerbread Crust

There is something about my pies that I need to work the kinks out of, so to speak. My pie crusts have often not held up like a proper pie. A proper slice holds its own, not collapsing in on itself when you're trying to take a particularly attractive picture of it, right? I need to work on that. My pies taste good, but they don't look good, and if I want people to eventually buy this stuff, I need to tweak the recipes so that these pies look as good as they taste.
My pie just doesn't hold its own. I tried to pretend it was cobbler (shhh! don't tell it's really just attractiveness-impaired pie). I also had someone assisting with this pie who wanted to show me that he could make a basketweave pie crust top. Whether or not he succeeded is up to you to decide.
Also, I need to replace some light bulbs in the kitchen. It is not doing these pictures of my pie slash cobbler any favors.
But anyway...on to the actual pie.

Cake Succeed

A cake that I totally want to make now...

Via succeedblog

Recipe/results for apple caramel pie will be up tomorrow.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

To be honest with you, I have never tasted a red velvet cupcake. I know in some states that would be grounds for divorce. Ha. But if I have had a red velvet cupcake in the past, I've forgotten about it, so obviously the experience was not memorable enough. Like Kenny Powers says, I've had a lot of memories in my life, and sometimes the smaller ones get dumped to make room for the bigger ones.
I guess I would say, consider me full of regret for missing out on years of stuffing my piehole with these babies. I keep changing my mind about what flavor of cupcakes are my favorite, and this one is quite the contender. It has a flavor that is hard to explain. They're like half chocolate, half vanilla, and all deliciousness.

 

(The cupcake undressing so you could see the red cake underneath. Pervert.)

I was going to get around to making these later anyway, but I decided to make them for a friend who recently went vegan. When I asked what was the hardest thing for her to give up, she said that sometimes her workplace would bring in a steaming batch of red velvet cupcakes, and while most of the time non-vegan treats didn't do much for her, those cupcakes had her seriously considering a relapse. Well, no more, dear friend. We whipped these up and after our first ones apiece we had a conversation that went like this: