American Baker in Germany

 A lot of candy recipes require sugar syrup to be boiled to a certain stage. And there are these strange names for them. Hard ball. Soft crack. Weird. Let's talk about it. First step: Combine sugar and water and/or some kind of sugar-based syrup pre-prepared. Second step: Heat it on on the stove. I am using a candy thermometer today to make sure I give you the right photos at the right stages, but the point of this post is to make it possible to tell the stages without a thermometer. So, now that we have the basics, let's go through the stages. Sugar combined with water can heat to a much higher temperature than water alone. And different stages of the sugar syrup will have different percentages of sugar to water because as the water boils, it will slowly evaporate, leaving more and more sugar behind. We also need to test the sugar syrup. We do this by dropping a drop of the hot syrup into a glass of cold water. The way the syrup behaves will be different depending on the sta...

 This cake is just one I wanted to make. It just makes my heart happy. I started by getting this image of Tinkerbell. I created a background in pink fondant and cut it into a circle. I placed it on a piece of wood to make it more stable. Then I rolled out some flesh-colored fondant and cut around my template. I pressed the lines of the image into it. And cut out only the pieces that were skin-colored. Then I did the same thing with yellow fondant for the hair. And placed it on the head. Then I did the same thing with green fondant for the dress and shoes. At this point, I placed the image on the pink background. Then I cut out the wings from white fondant. and placed them on the image as well as white pompoms on the shoes. And just to add a bit of whimsy to the background, I added a couple stars and small butterflies. I painted the image with food coloring mixed with alcohol. I painted the wings with pale blue, the butterflies with blue, the skin and hair with pale brown, the mouth...

 I love peanut butter. If there is any decent recipe that features peanut butter, I'm all over it. Peanut Butter Cookies: 1 cup (250g) butter 1 cup (240g) peanut butter 1 cup (200g) sugar 2 eggs 1 tsp vanilla extract or 1 tbsp vanilla sugar 1/2 tsp salt 1 1/2 tsp baking soda 2 1/2 cups (320g) flour Cream butter. Cream peanut butter with the butter. Cream sugar and eggs in with the butter mixture. Add vanilla, baking soda, salt and flour. Dough should be fairly thick. Place tablespoons of dough onto a baking sheet lined with baking paper. Dip fork into sugar and criss-cross onto the dough balls. Bake at 350°F or 180°C for 10-12 minutes. These are amazing. One of my favorite family recipes. Watch us make these cookies on our YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/OO6Dx8ccFhQ Schaut zu wie wir diese Cookies auf unserem YouTube Kanal machen hier: https://youtu.be/_0GzXpVuy_E