The rest of August

I really can’t believe that August is over. Remember when you didn’t have to WORK in the summer and you had all this free time and you could go hiking, and make tye dye things, and stay up late, and have sleepovers, and go swimming, and sleep in til noon, and pick flowers, and make sun tea, and have bbqs, and just RELAX??!?!?!

Sorry–sometimes I have a hard time realizing that I am in fact an adult.

I made a couple of more things to finish out the month:

An engagement cake for my father-in-law and his girlfriend:

I don’t like to toot my own horn or anything, but this cake was AMAZING. It was probably one of the best tasting things I’ve ever made in my life. (sigh)

Basically I started with a chocolate cake, then filled it with chocolate mousse (recipe below) and chopped strawberries. Then covered the whole thing with chocolate whip cream (recipe below), then drizzled ganache (click here!) over the top, and topped it will chocolate covered strawberries, regular strawberries, and chocolate decorations.

Oh. Mey. Gehd.

 

ooh la la!!!

Here are the recipes:

Chocolate Mousse
This stuff is amazing. You can use it in cakes, cupcakes, pies, dip fruit in it, or if you’re like me–just go at it with a spoon. : )

ingredients:

• 1 (14oz) can sweetened condensed milk
• 2 (1 oz) squares unsweetened chocolate, melted
• 1/2 c water
• 1 (3.9 oz) package instant chocolate pudding
• 1 c heavy cream

1. In a large bowl, mix together sweetened condensed milk and melted chocolate. Gradually stir in the water, then instant pudding mix until smooth. Chill for at least 30 minutes.
2. Whip the heavy cream with a hand mixer until stiff peaks form.
3. Remove chocolate mixture from the fridge and stir to loosen. Fold in the whipped cream and return to the fridge for at least another hour.

*If you’re making chocolate whip cream–save about 1/2-1 cup of the mousse to fold into the whipped cream.

To make chocolate whip cream: mix heavy cream with 2 T granulated sugar, 1 t vanilla, and the leftover mousse from above. Start out with just the cream, sugar, and vanilla until it looks like it’s just starting to form peaks. Then for the last few seconds mix the chocolate mousse in there too.

To make the chocolate decorations: melt chocolate discs in piping bags in the microwave, and then pipe your design onto wax paper and let it set in the fridge until hardened. Then carefully peel them off and place on cake or cupcakes or whatever you want to chocolatize!

Oh yea baby!!!

Next up, a golf cake for my grampa’s golf tournament:

vanilla cake with raspberry/raspberry cream filling. it was a hit!

AND I made something for my friend’s baby shower:

how cute is that!?!?! I saw the idea on Pinterest and it actually came out pretty good!!!

UP NEXT: chocolate chip butterscotch pretzel cookies. aaaand boom goes the dynamite! lol

Theo’s Superhero Birthday Party!

My good friend is notorious for throwing themed birthday parties for her 3 young children-and this year, it was superhero!!! Everyone came in costume (you’ll see the pics don’t worry) and she decorated so cutely for the party. She even asked me to make a Superman cake, but change the S to a T because her son’s name is Theo. Here’s how everything turned out!

 

bday boy !

this might be my favorite shot

Ok so here’s some pictures from the party: can you guess who everyone is???

boris and natasha from rocky and bullwinkle

(these are my parents : ) )

that’s me! I’m a powerpuff girl.

(don’t look too long at the picture because the eyes are freaky!)

She-Ra!

this is my husband as Dr. Who with Powerpuff headband.

hard to look at I know! lol!

happy birthday Theo!

So there you have it folks! It turned out to be such a cute party!

UP NEXT: chocolate strawberry engagement cake= a sugar coma; a golf cake; and a fruit baby!

wine weekend cookies *clink*

(that was supposed to be 2 wine glasses “clinking” each other in a toast) : )

A couple weekends ago I went on a wine weekend with some girlfriends to the Finger Lakes in Geneva, NY. I wanted to bring a treat and I figured that cookies would be great because we were going in a limo and they would be portable. So I just had to buy a new wine glass cookie cutter and try them out!

they started like this

and ended like this. Pretty much right after I sat down in the limo with them. But we still ate all of them : )

It was awesome. I kinda love sugar cookie cutouts as of yet. fyi.

UP NEXT: umm probably a baked good of some kind.

Wedding Cake Pops!

If you read my last post, you’ll see the cake pops I mentioned here!

These were for my cousin’s wedding shower. They were red velvet, white almond, and cheesecake. Check out the pics!

I love them. I’m utterly in love with them. So proud! : )

So cute! Congrats Meredith and Jason!!!

UP NEXT: wine weekend shenanigans. i love cookies.

my biggest order yet……

At the end of June (yes I’m aware that it is now August hehe) I was asked to make pies and cake for a backyard wedding reception. I knew going in that it would be a very large order but I faced it head on!

The total count ended up being:

1  2-tiered wedding cake

40 mini fruit pies

10 mini fruit tarts

14 large pies.

Yea. It was crazy, but it was SUPER AWESOME! I’ve never baked like that in my life and although I lost a lot of sleep and was a crazy person, I loved every minute of it. Not to mention I made 72 wedding cake pops during this time for my cousin’s wedding (check them out in my next post!).

Instead of going bit by bit, I figured this experience would best be shared in a photographic slideshow of sorts. I’ll try to explain what’s happening in each picture

Here goes!

 

Let’s start with the cake. They asked for a checkerboard square cake. Great! Except that I had a limited number of pans and had to sorta “wing it” : )

 

The cake was strawberry/vanilla. So I made 2 batters and piped each of them into the pans. I did this layer by layer! The cake was 4-5 layers!

Here are some layers baked. It looked like a Dr. Seuss cake!

Here it is! I apologize for the lame-not particularly fancy photography—it was about 2 am at this point : ) More pictures to come!

Fridge shot! (yes this really happened)

PIES!!!

some of the minis. I made strawberry, apple, blueberry, and peach.

creepy doll shot! haha. long story short: we inherited TOO many dolls and we don’t know what to do with them. Hence, they are everywhere.

chocolate cream!

I also made pecan, key lime, lemon meringue, banana cream, chocolate peanut butter, and coconut custard.

lemon meringue! what a beauty if i do say so myself.

that’s banana cream, choco PB, key lime

in the fridge

nighttime shot. again i apologize. that’s coconut custard on the left corner!

FRUIT TARTS

yummmmm

aww yeaaaa

I can’t believe we fit them all in the fridge. Well just the custard pies, really. But still!

Hmm now that I go through all of these pictures they do look a little iffy. I’m sorry! There will be more professional looking ones coming soon!

HOW did I do all of this you may ask? There are a number of things that helped me: I was off of work that week. I currently live where there is a big kitchen and a large dining room. I stayed SUPER organized and made as much ahead of time as I could. But the BIGGEST help I got was from my husband, Adam. He was a trooper. He made dough, fillings, went out in the middle of the night to get more ingredients for me. He never complained–just pumped me up when I was getting overwhelmed! Plus he’s super fun to be around and his sense of humor kept me laughing when I wanted to cry. I don’t know what I would’ve done without him! Love you babe!!

OH! If you would like any of these recipes you can email me and I will certainly send them to you!!

UP NEXT: wedding cake pops.. then wine weekend cookie shenanigans!

a safari birthday party

I love kid parties. I love the themes. I wish I could have a safari themed birthday party with animal cupcakes. (sigh)

Anyways! I made some super cute animal cupcakes for a little girl’s 2nd birthday party and I was verrrrrry happy with them : )

so cute!!!!

oh and these are my new business cards:

love em!!!

UP NEXT: bride and groom cake pops!

product review: artificial or legit?

So you may have seen the new frosting creations advertised where you can buy a base frosting, and then mix in a flavor packet to create a variety of flavors.

I chose Cinnamon Roll……….. because I love cinnamon buns and my recent diet does not allow me to eat cinnamon buns so I thought this was the closest thing!

Ok so I made my usual vanilla scrumptiously delicious cupcakes and then followed the directions on the packet to mix in the frosting.

They were actually not that bad. They definitely tasted artificial to me though—it wasn’t the natural cinnamon and sugar taste… it did have a weird aftertaste I thought. But they were edible. I brought them into work and they were gone!! I DID make sure that I told everyone that they weren’t homemade– just in case they were nasty : )

Here’s some more pictures:

So my final rating= so-so. I would give other flavors a try like cotton candy (yum!) but for cinnamon, I’d skip this and just sprinkle cinnamon and sugar into the frosting.

Have you tried these flavor creations yet?? Please post your comments on the flavors!!!

UP NEXT: safari animal cupcakes

Bella’s Birthday Party!

Wow so clearly June came and went. I apologize for the slackage here. I was SUUUPPPPEEERRR busy baking and now I’m going to catch you up with all these upcoming posts!

First: a splatter paint cake for my friend’s daughter’s birthday!

 

 

Messy ain’t it?? It looks like a child made it! Ha! But that was kinda the theme of the party so I went with it.

 

Basically I started with a basic white, buttercream iced cake, and then literally splattered frosting all over it!!! It was fun. Very therapeutic.

 

The inside was red velvet:

(I may have run out of red food dye slightly) haha

 

Anyways–it came out great! And the birthday girl loved it!!!

 

Here it is in my fridge:

 

That’s actually not the best picture I’m not sure why I put that there. But I only had a few pictures!!!

And in the car…..

 

Voila! A splatter paint cake!

So that’s it folks— stay tuned for more updates!

 

UP NEXT: a product review!

finally a GLUTEN FREE cake!

Well, people, I know I’ve been saying for awhile that I’m going to make something gluten free–and I finally did! It was my friend, Kim’s birthday and her husband asked me to make a cake for her and I said of course!

 

But–I did not make it from scratch scratch–I used a mix. I guess I kinda cheated then…. but it still counts because you have to add ingredients to the mix and it was a mix I’ve never used before. That counts right??? Right??!? : )

 

 

 

 

It came out  DELICIOUS! Kim was my roommate in college so I was around gluten free stuff and I’ve had gluten free cake before and honestly, it’s not always very good : (. I’ve made the Betty Crocker GF mixes before and those were okay, but very dry. Gluten free is usually dry and crumbly, from my experience.

This time I used the chocolate cake mix from Hodgson Mill. It came out very very moist. Plus, I made some killer chocolate frosting and that just made it super rich and chocolatey and moist. The frosting was the recipe on the back of the Hershey’s Cocoa Powder box. It’s amazing–you should try it.

 

So there you have it, GF-ers. Happy Birthday Kim!

 

 

 

AND it was my brother’s birthday, too. (Kim and Phil have the same birthday–wink wink).

I asked my brother what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday and he jokingly said “sponge candy.” And then “and ice cream.”

HA! Little did he know what I could come up with…..

 

MY SUPER RICH SPONGE CANDY ICE CREAM DELICIOUSNESS CAKE MADNESS: (and Phil):

 

 

Oh…. Mey….. Gad. It was AMAZING! Totally not healthy and I really broke my diet for this but really people–ugh it was just specatacular! Ice cream cake coma commence!

 

Start with a cookie crust:

 

 

Alright now remember that sometimes I try stuff and then it doesn’t work but that’s part of the fun! I would NOT recommend using the whole cookie like this because it doesn’t stick together. I did put some chocolate frosting on top of them which sort of created a crust but still it didn’t work nicely so just crush up your cookies and then mix them with butter and press them into the bottom. Really–no whole cookie.

K then take a big chunk of chocolate ice cream

 

 

and press it into the cookie crust:

 

 

Then pour the magical caramel sauce over the ice cream

 

 

Then bring on the sponge candy!! If you’ve never had sponge candy or you don’t know what it is– you need to get on that! It’s hard to describe, but as my husband Adam says: “it’s a light toffee caramel that looks like it was infused with carbonation to create air sacs and hollows in the candy to make it very light and melt in your mouth fluffy.” Thanks babe!

Here we go!

 

I chopped it up:

 

See how the insides are sorta like crystals? FLAVOR CRYSTALS.

 

Then I sprinkled them over the caramel sauce:

 

 

Then press the vanilla ice cream on top of that….

 

 

 

And put chocolate sauce over the top and sprinkle with more sponge candy bits! And sprinkles!

 

 

VOILA!  Here it is when we cut it–very messy! But YUM!

 

Oh  yea baby. SOOOOOOOOOOO good.

 

Well, folks. That’s it for now. Hope you enjoy and you make this and you love it!

 

UP NEXT: PIES. and something for my 1st blog post anniversary!!

lemme just catch you up…..

hello hello. i know it’s been awhile but since the move it’s been a little bit crazy around here and you know me i usually forget to take pictures but i have been baking and i have been taking pictures!

Here’s the latest of what I’ve made:

Some cookies that I helped a friend decorate for a bridal shower:

 

 

 

 

A lemon meringue pie for my mama on Mother’s Day

 

 

 

 

Some DELICIOUS chocolate cookies for Mother’s Day

 

 

 

AND some super cute cupcakes for the Elephant Run!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

LOVE THEM!!!

 

 

UP NEXT: A GLUTEN FREE CAKE!