Mmmm… Desserts. I’m a full-hearted believer in desserts. One of my biggest concerns in life is becoming a diabetic and not being able to indulge in the delights of dessert as much as I do now. Truly, embracing my 20’s has been way more about embracing desserts. Have to enjoy this metabolism and healthy blood sugar levels while I have them, right?
I don’t think I could quit eating desserts. Let’s be real, I’ll be taking the insulin and having dessert at least occasionally if I inherited my family’s issues with diabetes. That’s how much I believe in dessert *wink, wink*. I believe that dessert should be eaten first so there’s still room, and I don’t think there are many problems so big that dessert can’t help (unless the problem is a tummy ache).
In the kitchen, desserts are kind of my thing. Seriously, I never bring anything to a social function unless it has copious amounts of sugar in it. I’m basically only good at showing affection through baked goods. My specialty is cookies and banana bread, but that doesn’t mean I’m opposed to branching out. Plus, let’s be honest – having a theme and running wild with it can make baking even more fun.
Check out these science inspired desserts with varying levels of difficulty to try out!
Galaxy Themed Cupcakes
Am I the only one who is border-line in love with the galaxy print? It’s just the perfect mix of dark purples, blues, pinks, and blacks with just the right amount of sparkles – it makes my soul happy. Be mesmerized by these cupcakes frosted to look like deep-space.
Techniques applied: to get that dark affect you’re going to want, it’s best to use a chocolate cake mix for the cupcakes (the darker the better). Then, to get the frosting right, you’re going to want to use a vibrant white butter cream frosting mixed with the right colors of gel food coloring (pink, purple, dark blue, silver, and violet seem to be the colors to get the right effects).
To get that “streaked” look with the food coloring you’re going to want to play with swirling the colors in and dripping them around in a pastry bag to get the desired colors. Once you’ve got the frosting you want, you frost all the cupcakes with the bag and add either glitter sprinkles, star sprinkles, or a simple “pearl” sprinkle (or a mixture) to the frosted cupcakes.
Rock candy
These are just cool! And, I’d image, quite tasty too!
Techniques applied: the biggest challenge with rock candy is that it takes up to 2-3 days for the candy to set up. But, with the adequate recipe, time, and place for the rocks to “form”, it’s actually looks quite easy (just time-consuming). Once you pick your colors, flavors, and boil up the sugar/water concoction (how to do this can be easily found online) then you’re going to want to separate the color/flavor combinations you want into separate containers.
The easiest way to make the rock candy seems to be to get a tall thin glass for each candy piece you want and to pour the liquid in and to anchor the stick (that is already coated with sugar from getting the stick wet and dipping it in sugar) so that it hovers and the rock candy can form. Then you carefully chip it away once it sets (that dreaded 2-3 days later).
Fossil cookies
These add a bad ass touch to any theme party! Rawr!
Techniques applied: another easier recipe! With these you basically just pick your favorite cookie recipe (as long as they bake to be the desired color that you’re shooting for to get that “ground” texture) and make up the dough. I’d suggest a snicker-doodle, molasses, or peanut butter cookie dough. Then you form the dough into disc shapes (you could roll it out and use a mason jar lid to make it faster) then you wrap the discs in plastic wrap and chill them for 30 minutes. Then you unwrap the chilled dough discs and use a dinosaur figurine (or whatever figurine you’d like) to make footprints in the dough. Then bake and presto!
