A Graduation-Cap (Mold Pan) Cake Attempt

This cake did not turn out to look how I had hoped for. In fact, when I was through with it, I kind of felt bad for my son when I presented it to him on his graduation day, (he graduated from Grade 12 this year), but thankfully he didn't really care, and he loved the taste. As usual with most of the desserts I make - they may not look the greatest but (more often than not), they taste delicious!

I used a basic Yellow Cake box mix, for the cake, custard for the filling and topped it all off with your basic butter cream frosting.

I bought one of those Wilton Graduation Cap Pan on Amazon for about $10. (I had just finish washing it, hence some suds on the outside of the pan):

Pretty cool huh?

Time to try it out.

Video: Swap THIS for THAT: 4 HEALTHY Ingredient Swaps

You can swap a lot of ingredients for more healthier choices when baking - or otherwise.
Here are 4 examples...

Strange but Chewy STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE Cookies

So I made some Strawberry Shortcake Cookies the other day (a slight alteration on another recipe called Chewy Strawberry Sugar Cookies) because it was strawberry season and I had a whole lot of strawberries to use up AND I wanted strawberry shortcake - in cookie form. Would you believe there's no DECENT if any, strawberry shortcake COOKIE recipes out there?? Sure there's raspberry.... cheesecake, but no strawberry... SHORTCAKE.

Anyways, I added white chocolate chips to my version and practically quadrupled the amount of strawberry puree called for and you probably could have still added more. The original recipe called for about 3 tbsp - I used about a cup! I think if I were to use only 3 tbsp, I would barely taste any strawberry flavour, if at all. The original recipe also called for the cookie dough to be rolled in some red and white sugar before baking them - but I didn't bother with that. (Remember, it's a strawberry SUGAR cookie recipe. I'm trying to make a strawberry SHORTCAKE cookie recipe.)

In the end, the cookies tasted weird at first, and looked even weirder. Something that would look delicious to zombies. They were a flesh-looking colour and the slightly burnt white chocolate chips looked like some bad-looking teeth sticking out of them.

Now when I say weird, I meant the strawberries tasted weird inside the cookies. I'm not sure if it is because I'm not used to FRESH strawberries in a cookie dough - (I pureed them on the stove with a bit of sugar) as opposed to those dried strawberry bits you find in dry cookie or muffin mix.

Video: FALCONRY in the Fruit Fields

This interesting solution is one way (albeit an expensive way), to get rid of those pesky birds who are fattening up from your fruit fields...