Cake Basics Cartridge For The Cricut

The new Cricut Cake Basics Cartridge makes it easy to get started using the Cricut Cake Machine. The Cricut Cake Machine is the new machine from ProvoCraft, designed to cut images out of gum paste or other thin edible material which can then be attached to cakes, cupcakes, or other treats. The Cake Basics cartridge is included with the cake machine, and is not available separately. While all Cricut cartridges will work with the cake machine, the Cake Basics cartridge is designed with cake decorating in mind. For those that don’t have a large library of cartridges, Cake Basics is all one needs to create beautiful cakes and other treats.

The Cricut Cake Basics cartridge comes with 50 images. These images include flowers, leaves, swirls, and basic shapes such as circles, squares, and hearts. Plus, the Cake Basics cartridge comes with a font containing both lowercase and capital letters. There are six creative features on this cartridge: font, font shadow, base shadow blackout, plain base, plain phrase, and plain shadow blackout. The images and letters can be used with the creative features to create new images. This makes the cartridge even more versatile by adding hundreds of additional images that can be cut. The images and fonts make for endless decorating options without having to buy additional cartridges.

While Cake Basics is not available separately, it can be used in the Cricut or Cricut Expression machines. Imagine the possibilities of using one cartridge to create coordinating invitations, party favors, cake, and scrapbook pages for an event.

The Cake Basics cartridge will be very useful for both experienced and beginning cake decorators. Cakes for every occasion can be made with one cartridge, without having to hand pipe designs onto cakes. The Cricut Cake Basics Cartridge helps make cake decorating easy and fun!

The Value Of Good Menu Covers

Successful restaurants know the value of quality menu covers. They know that customers are very sensitive to what they see in restaurants from the moment they step inside. Menu covers are one way these customers judge the overall services of restaurants.

When designing menu covers a restaurant owner should place himself in his customer’s shoes. He should visit several restaurants and examine the covers to see what his impressions would be. He should pay close attention to the way he feels when he looks at certain colors and designs. The restaurant owner should take a notepad and record which colors and designs made him feel happy, hungrier, moody, or irritated. He should also pay close attention to the colors on the menu covers that made him feel as if he should have chosen a different restaurant. He should use his notes when designing his own menu cover.

After the menu covers are designed, the owner should ask others to comment on it. He should not only seek comments from his friends and family members, but he should request comments from acquaintances or people he does not know. They will give him an honest opinion because they don’t have an emotional attachment to him. Once he receives all of the needed feedback, he should make changes to the menu cover before he places them in the hands of his customers.

He should also seek the advice of an expert who has been in the restaurant business for many years concerning his menu covers. This person will be able to inform the restaurant owner of what to include and not include on the menu. The restaurant owner can learn from the expert’s mistakes.

Menu covers are important to a restaurant. They must be professionally designed and convey exceptional, qualify food and service.

Baking For Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s day is a very special day for many couples around the country.  It’s a day where you do or buy something very special for your significant other to show them how much you really care.  Baking is an act that comes from the heart and fits perfectly with Valentine’s day.  You can bake for your special someone, or for your kids to take with them to school.  Either way, it’s an excellent way to celebrate and in this post I want to share some tips for making it a special as possible.

A heart shaped cake is the obvious choice when you’re baking for only one other person.  A heart shaped cake pan is the tool that you need to begin.  You can buy shaped cake pans online or in your local kitchen supply store.  There are lots of different options available for decorating the cake.  Most people will make a simple pink icing and call it finished, but you can also choose to use fondant or cut out decorations.

Cupcakes are also a popular thing to bake for Valentine’s day.  There are heart shaped cupcake tins, but they are pretty hard to come by.  Most people will bake regular cupcakes and decorate them with pink frosting and hearts.  My favorite way to add some extra love to the cupcakes is to get beet juice and use it to dye the cupcake batter pink.  Beet juice is naturally sweet, so you can add a bit more flavor to your cupcakes without adding any unnecessary chemicals, like those in regular food coloring.

This Valentine’s day, share your love with someone by baking something special for them.  It’s a great way to have a little fun on your date and use your creativity.  Baking truly brings people together, and this is one of the best examples of it.

Selecting, Storing and Cooking: Top Three Maple Syrup Tips

Maple syrup is probably among the most well-loved kitchen staples. It is best for using as is, and for cooking as well, because it adds not just its signature sweetness, but also its distinct, natural earthy tinge, to any recipe. It is thus important that you use only the freshest, authentic maple syrup for your cooking or dining needs. There are a lot of brands in the market these days that package and sell imitation maple products or maple-flavored ones. They are of course cheaper than the price of real maple products but are not as great-tasting. To make sure that you get the best products when you go to your local grocer, look for those that have no more than 35 percent water content. This means the ideal maple syrup should have no less than 65 percent pure maple syrup content. In contrast, imitation products—those that are usually packaged as pancake syrup—may contain only two to three percent syrup, or absolutely nothing but artificial maple flavoring.

It is one thing to buy authentic maple sugar, but it is another thing to store it in such a way that it keeps it flavour and freshness for the longest possible time. Store your maple syrup bottles in a cool, dry and dark place and it will keep up to two years if unopened. Once you open it, keep it refrigerated to prolong its shelf life to up to one year. Remember that pure maple syrup does not freeze up, so you can actually store it inside the freezer to prevent molds from growing. Take it out of the fridge to warm up to room temperature when you are ready to use it.

Finally, cooking with pure maple sugar also requires a few tips and tricks. We all know that maple syrup can be used to top pancakes and other pastries. But it can also be used in main dishes as major or additional flavoring. For baked products, maple syrup is always a substitute for sugar. Three-fourth cup of maple syrup can stand in for every cup of granulated sugar, but make sure to subtract three tablespoons of the dominant liquid for every cup of maple syrup that you add in. For general cooking, on the other hand, the ration should be kept at one part sugar to three-fourth part maple syrup.

How To Make Sliders At Home

Sliders have been through a huge revival as of late.  It was originally the staple food from White Castle on the East Coast, but now you can find them everywhere from TGI Friday’s to some of the most gourmet restaurants in the country.  They are the perfect appetizer and the perfect left hand companion to a right handed beer.  Whatever you want them for, I’ll show you how to make them in this post.

A good slider starts with good beef.  Quality and price of the beef isn’t nearly as important as its lean to fat ratio.  Sliders are small to begin with, so you want a grind that will hold up and not shrink too much.  Beef that’s 80/20 lean to fat usually works really well for sliders.  Get the beef and roll it into uniform balls of equal weight.  You may need a scale to get this part right, you want the patties to be between 1/8 and 1/4 pound each for best results.

After you get them rolled out you’ll ideally run them through a mini burger press.  A burger press is best because they all come out with equal thickness, which is very important considering how fast they’re going to cook.  If you don’t have a press you can use patty paper (or parchment paper cut into squares) on each side and squish it against the counter with a standard sized can.  The edges of the can will help them all be uniform dimensions.

Cooking them is the easy part.  You want to use a flat griddle, rather than the barbeque, so that they cook a bit slower and don’t fall through the grate.  It’ll only take about a minute to a minute and a half on each side with a hot griddle to get them cooked.

Dress them however you want, but the standard is mayo on each side of the bun and a super thin slice of cheddar cheese.

Sliders are the perfect party food, and once you realize how easy they are to make it’ll become the standard for every party you have!