Cindy's Birthday Party

My cousin Cindy and her friend Emily hosted a joint birthday party on Saturday night, and Cindy asked me to supply the baked goods. Cindy and I both happen to be lawyers who bake.

Cindy's requests included snickerdoodles, fudgy chocolate-raspberry bars, a Restaurant Eve cake, and red velvet cupcakes. I tried to make what I call "party size" (i.e., smaller) snickerdoodles -- since party guests usually like to nibble and graze on a variety of offerings -- but my #50 cookie scoop broke shortly into the baking process. I had to go with the #40 scoop instead, which yielded 3.5 inch diameter cookies. This batch was even better than the snickerdoodles I made last week, with a wonderfully dense, almost chewy texture.

Cindy requested that I cut the fudgy chocolate-raspberry bars into very small portions, no more than 2 or 3 bites each. Since these bars are very fudgy and extremely dense, it only take a few bites to get your fill anyway. The recipe is written for a 9-inch square pan, but I usually multiply it by 1.5 and bake a 9" x 13" pan instead. I trimmed the edges off of the finished bars to yield a 8" x 12" rectangle that I cut into 48 bars that were 1" x 2" each. I searched high and low for raspberries to garnish the bars, but turned up empty after looking in three different grocery stores, so I left them plain.

For the Restaurant Eve cake, Cindy had the peculiar request of a 2-layer 9" round cake with aqua or blue-green frosting and pink trim. I played around with the frosting color quite a bit, mixing dark blue, light blue, and leaf green to come up with something closely approximating Tiffany blue. The color scheme would not have been my pick, but it was meant to match the decor of the room where the party was held. Cindy topped the cake with two-tone pink candles and served it on bright pink plates, which really helped pull together the overall look.

Finally, while Cindy received pretty standard red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting (pictured at the top of this post), I held back a few cupcakes for Tom and our house guests: Tom's best friend from college and his wife and son, who were visiting us from California. I asked 5-year old Thomas to decorate some cupcakes for us, and I brought out all of the sprinkles and colored sugars that I had on hand. Thomas used them all to make the original creations pictured below:

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Comments

Cathy said…
I really love pastries. Wish to have some of your magic recipes. Am planing to have one, on my child's birthday. Thank you.
April 18, 2009 at 12:41 AM
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