Bake Sale

For the February bake sale, I kept it easy. made four personal pies... 2 cherry and 2 apple... both with the lattice work on top.

as you can see-- the edges got a bit brown, so I either need to employ the foil around the edges or buy one of those fancy bake rings. my cheap ass will probably stick with the foil.

A personal favorite of mine is chocolate covered pretzels, so I rolled up the sleeves and got to dippin'.

I made 13 one-dozen bags of pretzels to donate; in each dozen, there were 4 pretzels that had a decorative pink (dyed white chocolate) squiggles on them. My original attempt was to have that white chocolate be CHERRY flavored, but when I added the cherry extract, the white chocolate melt got stiff. TOTALLY not able to put it in the piping bags. I think because I used imitation extract, so maybe it was a water base, and caused the chocolate to coagulate?

anyways... I scrapped that batch and just went with the plain pink (white) chocolate.

I also took the opportunity to practice piping some chocolate designs on parchment paper.

piping with chocolate is much different than the royal icing. Next time I either need to go with a smaller tip or just have more practice, period. perhaps I might try letting the chocolate cool a little more, too.