Baking, The Art You Can Eat!

Being the busy mom I am, I don't always have time to make the pretty colored fondants and spare hours to make an awe-inspiring cake. Today was exceptionally busy between running errands, cooking and making sure my daughter is fed, bathed and loved :) So here my simple cake for Halloween tomorrow.  I started off with a butter pecan cake because that says "Autumn" to me and it makes the kitchen smell soooo delicious when baking it. If you stare hard enough, you can see the design I drew on the cake.  Did you guess the shape? Yes, a pumpkin. Simple and keeps most of the edges in tact for easy frosting :)   Nothing special here, just colored frosting to make it more obvious that it's a pumpkin. BUT the special part is the flavor of the frosting: Caramel Apple! Or was it Apple Caramel...?  Using black frosting, I made it into a jack-o-lantern and added spiders. Now it looks more Halloween-ish :D Just the finishing touch now... Candy e...

For my husband's class, he wanted to bring in a cake and volunteered me :) He suggested a cake in the shape of a dollar sign so here we go!  For the cake, he chose the birthday cake mix. So I baked it in an 9'' pan and using my edible green marker, I drew out the design and began cutting.  Close enough, right?  I frosted the entire shape with vanilla frosting and then dotted green frosting to embellish on the shape a bit. Outlined the green frosting with semi-sweet chocolate chips and used the remaining green frosting on the bottom edges. And voila! A dollar sign cake that took me about an hour - not including the wait time for the cake to bake.  A pretty yummy looking dollar sign if I say so myself :)

We celebrated my big brother's 30th birthday yesterday and, as the most amazing little sister ever, I wanted to bake something for him! And knowing that he isn't too big a fan of desserts, beside a select few, and he's a big fan of turtles, I decided on tiramisu turtles.  The plan had started out was to make a tiramisu cake into a turtle and put little turtles all over it. Then I thought that it would be cool to make 30 turtles, one for each year that Dave (my brother) has been alive! Then it would be even cooler if I numbered all the turtles so you knew there are 30 of them!  So let the adventure begin!  The above photo is my 24 mini cupcake pan filled with baked yellow cake. I took a toothpick and stabby stabbed them. Then poured on a medium roasted coffee mixed a bit with cinnabon creamer for a bit of sweetness.  Here are the larger cupcakes done the same way, and I forgot to take a picture of the rest, but I made some more normal size cupc...

Since my daughter was having a pizza party at school, I wanted to make a nice cake to go with it :)  It's not the biggest or prettiest cake, but I like it. Made from milk chocolate cake and covered in marshmallow fondant.  Merry Morning's logo is a sun, hence the sky, clouds and, of course, the sun - which is made from rice krispies treat :)  So many views! Can you handle it??  It needs something else.. something... Sugary! Candy!! :) Skittles around the outside and Starbursts shaped into stars. Funny story, my first three Starbursts I forgot about in the microwave and they went crazy big and bubbly... and then when I went to wash them out, they turned into cool crystallized Starbursts.  And there you have it. A nice happy cake for the little kidlings at my daughter's school :) Hope they fun with the sugar high!!  Until next time!

So there are birthdays today and as requested by my coworkers, I baked a cake for one of my other coworkers. She happens to share a birthday with one of the coolest peoples I know, BCD! So in dedication to them both, I made this cake. Sadly, only my coworker will be able to taste it since BCD is so far away!! :(  The cake is devil's food. Mmmmmm, chocolate... topped with vanilla frosting.  So the green frosting is to represent grass I guess.... if you're curious as to what the heck is in the middle, it's a plate with a salad on top and fruit snacks. Why? Well, it's well known at my work that this particular coworkers HATES fruits in salads. She thinks it's weird. So like the nice person I am, I put it on her cake so she's forced to eat it!! BWAHAHA!!  These are my little cupcake animals. Now, from the size of the plate, these animals are actually the size of mini cupcakes. That white blob over there is supposed to be a sheep. When I cut the ma...

These cupcakes are butter pecan ones... taking these out of the oven was like.. heaven. Such an aroma.. and then tasting them... heaven!  Aaanyways, the frosting is a simple vanilla and there are gold, pink and pearl sprinkles. The pink covered frosting parts are roses made from the frosting. Next time, they'll be pink so you can tell them apart more easily :)  The cupcakes are supposed to be in the shape of a bride's dress, can you tell? I hope so. if not, you're not looking hard enough. Squint a bit and then get a better imagination :P  A platter of cookies accompanied the cupcake dress. Pink Lemonade cookies that is with strawberry or chocolate frosting, topped with sprinkles. Very yummy as well :)  Okay, I'm sleepy, so I'm just gonna end this. Good night :) 

Expecting something different? Dirty minds...  Anyways, although I didn't post the next day, I did make these the day after my last post... Just had a hectic schedule and no time to post :(  Check out my balls! Cake balls, that is. I used the leftover pieces of the french vanilla cake and my leftover strawberry cake (since there wasn't enough french vanilla cake...) and mixed them with some dulce de leche. Rolled them into balls, rolled them in unsweetened coconut flakes and put them in the fridge to harden (side note: every time I read the word "harden", I think of.... METAPOD! :P ) The sauce that goes with my cake balls is a mango and pineapple puree. I took fresh mango and pineapple, chopped them up, then blended them. Then I put the blended mix through a strainer so I didn't end up with any chunks. Mixed the puree with some lime juice for a bit of zest and to soften up the puree, and voila! Coconut covered cake balls with mango/pineapple pu...

As a favor to a friend, I was tasked with making the cake for her mother's 50th birthday! With zebra stripes and pink polka dots as my design requests, I decided on another 3-tiered cake to feed all the guests and make a great cake for a wonderful woman :)  This is the bottom tier (all cake is french vanilla cake covered with vanilla frosting), and I cut random shaped fondant strips for the zebra stripes. Sadly, black is pretty much the hardest color to try to even get close to when mixing marshmallow fondant - so if you can tell from the center of the cake, my fondant is actually like a really dark olive green... Luckily, I discovered a way to make edible paint, which is what is painted on the zebra stripes to give that super vivid black color. Strangely enough, when I got some of the paint on the white fondant, it was greenish... but it looks pretty black on my olive green fondant :)  Top view: The middle isn't painted since the next tier was going to sit on ...

For my daughter's second birthday, I wanted to make something super special! So I decided on a three-tiered cake with lots of marshmallow fondant and fun decorations! :)  For the bottom and top layers, I used cake mix with sprinkles and covered them in chocolate frosting, while the center layer was strawberry with vanilla frosting. It didn't work out as I planned since the layers were a lot closer in size than I initially thought. But like all my cakes, I improvised as I went.  By the way, if you noticed, I'm wearing my Krejci jersey and a cupcake apron over it because I'm awesome like that and as I was making this cake, I was watching a Bruins game :)  Two layers done! Well.. the stacking and fondant... Much harder than I thought this was... Working on my third layer here. There's my adorable little girl trying to help :)  Three tiers! The top has added pick fondant for a cute striped look.  Added some wrap around ...