It’s a Birthday!

13 Wednesday Oct 2010

Tags

almond, cake, cakes, caramel, cupcake, cupcakes, peanut butter

Which means…CAKE!

Today is my friend & co-worker’s b-day today. So of course I used it as an excuse for cake!

I’ve been wanting to try a peanut butter cake, so a few days ago, I made an almond cake & cupcakes and a peanut butter cake and cupcakes. I wasn’t sure how the PB would taste overall, but the batter was good. ;-) I was planning to bring Brenda the almond until I found out she didn’t like almond cake, so the PB it was.

The Icing Adventure

I didn’t really feel like making buttercream (mainly b/c I’m lazy and hate clean-up), so I decided to try a homemade whipped cream for the icing. I stopped by Wal-mart on my way home from the theatre classes I teach on Tuesdays so I could grab some whipping cream and various chocolate chips. (And there’s another story: the time a creepy man hit on me by asking me if I liked cheese.)

And then the adventure began. I made my whipped cream, which was delicious, and then added some melted milk chocolate. Also delicious. Then I thought I’d try to make some ganache for filler (white chocolate) and drizzle (milk chocolate).

Unfortunately, I did not actually even look at the measurements in the recipe, so the filling was a bit grainy and runny. It still tasted good (and is my favorite part of the PB cake), but I needed to put a solid wall of icing around the edges and it still ran over a bit.

The drizzled ganache turned out well. I didn’t like the flavor overall, but on the cake it was yummy. Added some chopped up reese’s cups, and there you go. All done.

I just brought in some of the almond cupcakes and used store-bought caramel icing to top them. (Which I heard was amazing; haven’t tried mine yet.)

And now… PICTURES:

of course I forgot to take a pic before I cut it…

Happy Birthday to the Fam!

17 Monday May 2010

Posted by Crystal in Cakes

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Tags

birthday, cake, cakes

My family celebrated my mother and my niece’s birthdays this past weekend. I made them both a cake–almond for Mom and chocolate for Halley.

I made the mistake of placing them both on the same board and trying to decorate from there. Slightly awkward.

And I technically haven’t “learned” the flowers/leaves yet. I was having trouble getting the leaves to point.

But here we go: ;-)

birthday cakes...

Baby Shower Cake

26 Monday Apr 2010

Posted by Crystal in Cakes

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Tags

baby, baby shower, cake, cakes, shower

This weekend was a baby shower for my friend Laura and baby Reagan. A couple other friends were throwing it and I volunteered to do the cake and some sweets.

I found a cake in a Wilton magazine that I wanted to do, and got the necessary materials for this cake…

[When I get the original image scanned, I’ll add it here.]

I decided to try teal instead of blue, since Reagan’s crib is an awesome teal. Then I waffled over the accent color: dark brown, navy, or white. I decided on white, since that would be less work this time around. ;-)

Up until I was actually decorating, I planned to stick pretty close to the original image, except perhaps putting flowers along the sides instead of swirls. I planned to add pink and orange flowers and got fondant shape cutters for that purpose.

Unfortunately, my week didn’t go quite as planned, with my part-time job taking more time than I expected, so I didn’t begin the actual decorating until the night before.

My friend Katie came over and helped with the color tinting and fondant rolling, which is definitely my least favorite part. (She’s awesome!) She was able to get the perfect shade of teal, while I worked on baking cookies.

We ended up with more leftover teal fondant than I expected, so instead of tinting new colors, I cut some white and she tinted a deeper teal and I went with those for the flowers and stroller.