When you cut the cotton candy pumpkin it has a very pale yellow colored pulp. And even the roasting the pumpkin did not change the color that much (see the pictures bellow):


However it produced a nice looking pumpkin pie, the filling had a nice texture to it:

However, as I said, the taste needed more “pumpkiness” to it. So if you ever wonder if the Cotton Candy Pumpkin is good for making pies, I would suggest other pumpkins. Unless of course you prefer the very mild taste of Cotton Candy Pumpkin.

Bellow are two cake toppers from AmericanBridal.com. Both cake toppers are crafted from bonded marble and can add elegance to your wedding cake.

Two Hearts One Love Cake Topper

$19.95

Your marriage will be the start of your two hearts being one strong love. This cake topper will ad elegance to your cake…[Click here for more info]

Happily Ever After Cake Topper

$19.95

The new couple engaged in a warm loving embrace. The perfect addition for the most elaborate pastry creations [Click here for more info]

For more bridal accessories visit AmericanBridal.com. If you know of any great online bridal shops feel free to share them with me int the comments.

Most of the restaurants out there bake or fry the chicken wings until they done and the just coat them in a hot Buffalo hot sauce before serving. The trick is to bake chicken wings until they almost done, coat it with sauce and then finish baking them.

To start off you will need about 12 – 16 chicken wings. You might want to cut them in two through the joint. I leave the tip of the wing on, but if you don’t like the look you can cut the tips off:

Arrange the chicken wings on a baking sheet and generously season them with powedered garlic, powdered onion, pepper and paprika. You can also do the seasoning in a large bawl so you can toss the wings- wings get better coating of seasoning this way. It is important not to use any salt in this step as your Buffalo hot sauce will have sufficient amount of slat in it.

Bake the wings in a preheated (400° F) oven for about 35 minutes until the skin begins to turn golden brown and the mean begins to barely separate from the bone:

Place the chicken wings and large ball and coat them in Buffalo sauce:


Rearrange the coated wings on the baking sheet while replacing the foil. I am using aluminum foil for two reasons, it leaves less mess, but it also makes it easy to discard the fat.

Bake the wings for another 10-15 minutes in a 400 °F over. You have to keep an eye on them now because you will not wont to overcook them. Generally I judge by the strong aroma from the sauce, you hardly smell the sauce when it is cold.

Hot Souce

To make the sauce for the chicken wings you will need:

• 3/4 cup – Hot Sauce (Red Hot by Frank’s seems to work the best, but you can use Tabasco or any other brand)
• 1/2 cup – Ketchup
• 1/4 cup – Blue Cheese Dressing (You can also use Ranch dressing, but the blue cheese gives it that extra something if you know what I mean)
• 1/4 cup – Soy Sauce (Reason we do not use the salt to season chicken wings before baking them)
• 3 Table spoons of butter

Combine the above ingredients in a a sauce pan place it over the medium heat burner:

While heating, stir the sauce until all ingredients fully dissolved and incorporated. The sauce should acquire a color of the cream of tomatoes soup:

This recipe should make a sauce that has a rather serious kick to it. However if you like more spicy or little milder sauce you will have to adjust the ketchup to hot sauce ratio.

All you need is to bake your favorite cupcakes. The “fur” decoration was done with a grass decorating tip 233 using butter cream icing. The little feet are made of marshmallow circus peanuts bars, one bar makes two feet when you cut it in half. For the antennas we used red liquorice and the eyes were made out of mini m&m’s.

We made 15 green monster cup cakes and 15 blue ones:


Here ere are few things you might need to make the monster cup cakes:

A friend of mine has asked me to bake a cake for her daughter’s birthday. My friend’s daughter was whose birthday coincides with St. Patrick’s Day. I decided to bake a cake that will look like a four leaf shamrock.

A lucky shamrock cake can be very easily done using a small heart cake pan. If you have a set of three heart cake pans for a tier cake- use the smallest one.

You will need to bake four heart shape cakes, then turn them round so all the bottom of each hear almost touch each other.. The stem part can be baked in a simple rectangular bread pan.

It took me about 5 hours to make the flowers and the cake topper. To bake, assemble and decorate the cake required another 4.5 hours.

Although fondant cakes look great, the assembling and decorations needs to be done the last minute as fondant can not be refrigerated.

I was pleasantly surprised how realistic the gum paste flowers look. One of the trick I have learned is to make the petals for your flowers as thin as possible- it adds that extra realistic look.

Can’t wait for the follow up class where we will learn more advanced flowers. If you leave in New Jersey, consider attending one of the classes at Chocolate Belles in Brick. You won’t regret it!

I got the idea for this cake by flipping though some old magazine. The original cake was actually three teared cake, where the top two tears where sitting on top of a spider and a third little spider was on the very top of the cake. Not only it was too complicated to make, I did not have enough people to eat even if I did make it.

It gave me an idea however for the cake pictured here. To make this cake I used 13 inch round cake pan, a 4 inch cup cake (for the body of the spider), plenty of fondant and thick pretzel sticks (to make spider’s legs).

The pumpkins around the base of the cake were made of fondant as well.

It is good idea to prepare your fondant ahead of time by dividing and coloring the fondant for the different parts of the cake. You can keep your fondant in a zip lock plastic container to prevent it from drying out.

If you have never worked with fondant before, you should remember not to store your cake in refrigerator as the moisture and fondant do not go well together. This is also why you will probably be much better off to fill your cake with butter cream icing instead of custard or whipped cream icing as both can go bad very quickly if not refrigerated. While butter cream can be stored at room temperature for 2 to 3 days.

If you need good book on fondant decorating techniques, I highly recommend The Cake Decorator’s Motif Bible: 150 Fabulous Fondant Designs with Easy-to-Follow Charts and Photographs

In order for your violet to produce beautiful flowers all year around three crucial things are needed: light, water and nutrition.

Keep Your African Violets In A Well Lit Place.

African violets need plentiful but not direct sunlight. You can place your violets in the window in rooms that face north, thus they will receive sufficient amount of light but will never be in the direct sunlight. If you would like to keep your violet in the rooms with window facing south keep them several feet away from the window itself. It would be the best if there is a window curtain in such rooms to soften the sunlight your violets receive.

Water Your Violets Regularly, But Do Not Over Water.

It is very important not to water your violets from the top, as some of the water may end up on the leafs, something African Violets do not handle well. The leafs will loose color around the spots where drops of water land, and the plant may eventually die. If you have noticed these spots, you still can save your plant by starting to water it from the bottom. The watering from the bottom can be accomplish by placing a dish under the pot, or using a planter that has a dish attached to the bottom. You can also purchase self watering double planters (shown in the picture) with the porous inside piece. You can find these planters in your local Homedepot, Lowes or even your supermarket’s florist section.

It is sufficient to water the plans once a week if planted in a pot with a dish under it. If you decide to plant your violet in a double planter, once every two to three weeks will be enough.

One sign that your violet needs more water is when the leafs become limp and weak. Shortly after you water your violets, you will notice that leaves will perk up and will feel hard to the touch. The goal is to maintain this “perkiness” of the plant’s leafs to keep your violets healthy.

Keeping Your Violets Well Fed.

While African Violets are very hearty plants, if you do not replant them at least once a year, you will need to provide them with some extra nutrition as the plant exhausts nutrients from the soil it is planted in. There are variety of plant food you can find that is formulated specifically for African Violets. However one particular brand stands out: Schultz African Violet Plus Liquid Food Plant.

The reason this plant food works the best is that it comes in a liquid form. With 14 African Violets in our home, a 4 oz bottle of this solution will last us well over a year (if watering every 3 weeks). All you need to is to add 7 drops or 1/8 of a teaspoon of to one quart of water. It’s much easier to prepare the water ahead of time.

We always have on hand two gallons of water enriched with Schultz African Violet Plus Liquid Food Plant.

If you are making this feeding solution it is a good idea to mark the containers so no one confuses it with a drinking water. What is good for the plants can be dangerous to humans.

What To Do If Your Violets Are Not Blooming.

Our friends are always surprised to see most of our African Violets blooming all year around. But it can happened that you have perfectly healthy plant, well watered and receiving plenty of light, yet it has been months since you seen your plant flowering.

When you think about any plant that produces flowers, it is to produce the seed- a sort of “species preservation” mechanism. While the only plants in our house that do not flower are the new plants that have not yet fully developed and reached the stage when they can flower. Many adult plants can go into a sort of a dormant state as far as flowering is concerned. If you want your violet to flower, you need to awaken that “species preservation” mechanism. It seams that plant will flower when it “feels” some threat. We have no problem to keep our plants flowering due to the fact that we propagate violets by cutting off the leaves. Therefore most of our plants are blooming very nicely and frequently.

If you have a healthy violet plant but it does not produces flowers you can do one of the following things. Try to cut off some older leafs on your plant. The older leafs are generally the largest ones. You can use these leafs to propagate a new plant. This cutting of the leafs seems to awaken the “species preservation” mechanism of the plants and you can see the flower buds appearing withing a week or two.

If your plant is in a plastic container, you can squeeze it hard enough to loosen up the soil around the roots. This also seems to get the plants out of the dormant state and blooms will follow shortly.

One of the reasons we became so fascinated with violets was that we would pass them in our local supermarket and they did not look well and we always wanted to rescue them.

Our first two or three plants were purchased at $.99 per plant- just like the one we bought today, you see it in the photo on the left.

Next time you pass by the flower section of your supermarket, pay attention to African Violets. They are literally crying to be saved.