brightening up a blah day by baking...

Today is a pot luck for my book club.  A good person would have at least picked out the dessert she was going to make for today, yesterday. Did I do that? Nope. So this morning about 11am I remembered saying I was going to bake something.

Qualifications:

1. had to be fairly quick to make so it could cool in the appropriate amount of time
2. kid-friendly
3. I needed to have ingredients on hand

I would up deciding on chocolate cupcakes using my Hershey's perfectly chocolate cake recipe. I also had a spare cake mix in the cabinet that's been there since I lived in Rochester. Because I didn't know how it would turn out I decided to use it for a trifle. I also have been digging for an excuse to use my shiny new trifle bowl! 

First, the chocolate cupcakes:

I used my standard recipe, but the first batch came out too flat on the top.  

So I was reading one of my recipe books and I decided that maybe the 1 c of water the recipe calls for is a bit too much. That its creating too dense of cake to rise properly. Coupled with underfilling the cups and I wound up with flat dense cupcakes. I quickly added two heaping spoonfuls of flour to the mix and whisked it in. The 2nd batch of cupcakes turned out much better! See, a comparison:

Onward to the trifle:

I needed whippped cream, but my current was still frozen. Unwilling to buy a whole new tub, I decided to use my leftover heavy whipping cream and make my own. I did a quick search on cooks.com and found the following recipe:

1/2 pint heavy whipping cream

3T sugar-- i used ultra fine bakers sugar, but plain ol granulated will work just fine.

1T vanilla

Beat whipping cream til starting to thicken

add sugar and vanilla

beat until fluffy.

here's my whipping cream:

Another picture of it:

Now that I have the whipping cream. I need pudding. Jello makes a mean instant pudding but that would require a trip to the grocery store. So, I found a recipe for homemade pudding at cooks.com.

Just mix together 1 heaping T cocoa, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 hea ping T flour. Add 2 cups milk (I did 1 cup chocolate milk, 1 cup skim). Stir over low heat until thickened. Add 1 T butter and 1tsp vanilla. Voila, pudding!

  *I'll stick to Jello. This recipe took forever to thicken and never really got to be the consistency I expected.

So now I needed to put the whole trifle together. I alternated cake, pudding and whipped cream layers. For the top, I was low on whipped cream-- and I wanted to make it look prettier, so I used redi-whip instead. Then I drizzled caramel and chocolate syrup over the top.  

Tada: Trifle!

And instead of chocolate frosting, I went for vanilla frosting dyed pink/purple