Berries and Blooms...

A sugar flower class that I took from Jennifer Dontz....it was amazing, I learned so much...these are some of the gumpaste flowers we did.

An over the top candy cake for a 15th birthday girl. It's a chocolate cake with chocolate chip cookie dough filling. The top tier is actually peanut butter rice krispies covered in ganache. (you can probably tell I used a ziploc storage container to form it...haha...snort....).

The other cake is a strawberry shortcake cake. Vanilla on the bottom, lemon with strawberry on top.

Dragon Cake

This cake was made out of chocolate using The Whimsical Bakehouse's "chocolate transfer technique".

The bottom cake is a guinness cake with ganache filling and a mix of SMBC/ABC ganache buttercream.

The top cake is lemon with strawberry filling and frosted with a SMBC/ABC lemon frosting.

Practice Cupcakes..

experimenting with different flavors and recipe. The first one is a sweet tea cupcake. It's a vanilla cupcake with earl grey tea steeped into the milk, and topped with a lemonade frosting.

There's also a lemon cupcake (my standby by lemon recipe) and I frosted it with my leftover lemonade frosting and drizzled it with grenadine.

The last one is a red velvet....I wanted to see how the Nancie Mcdermott recipe would stand up in cupcake form as it makes such a terrific cake.....topped with cinnamon ermine frosting (requested by my son).

Results....The sweet tea cupcake is PHENOMENAL....If you want the recipe, let me know....I might change the lemonade frosting to a lemon Swiss meringue buttercream next time, just because the lemonade flavor overpowers the subtle flavor of the cake. The lemon cake is always awesome, no matter what frosting you put on it (although I prefer strawberry or blackberry) and the red velvet.....well....it's good, but crumbly.....I'm gonna see how these taste tomorrow.

S'more Cupcakes....

Chocolate cake, marshmallow, graham cracker crust, dipped in ganache and topped with Hershey's Milk Chocolate candy bar shavings....mmmmmmmmm.......

These were time consuming. I first had to make graham cracker crust discs (by baking, then freezing in the bottom of cupcake tins), make the cake...add half a marshmallow 2 minutes prior to end of bake time, add the disc immediately to hot marshmallow. Then I grated the chocolate, and made ganache. After the cupcakes were cool and marshmallow set, I dipped in ganache and added the hersheys chocolate.

Samoa Cupcakes...

Field of Cakes (link on the side), has posted a recipe for Samoa cupcakes....she had promised them for a while, so I bought a couple of Girl Scout Samoa cookies a while back in anticipation (problem is I ate most of one box! LOL....and that was while I was on my diet....oops), anyways she finally posted it so I made them today.

Her recipe is much more complex then what I did today (check her recipe out by hitting Fields of Cake link on the side under "blogs I like"). She had a cookie crust, a caramel filling and then the rest of the elements I have....I don't like too much stuff going on with my cupcake...It makes it hard to eat...of course that's just my opinion....so I simplified, and this is what I did:

Chocolate Cake

(by Fields of Cake)

2 cups AP flour

3/4 cup cocoa (I used Hershey's Special Dark)

2 cups sugar (I used 1 cup white and 1 cup brown sugar)

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

2 eggs (I used extra large)

1 cup hot coffee

1 cup buttermilk

1 Tbsp vanilla

1/2 cup oil

1/2 cup mini chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, line 35 cupcake liners.

Sift dry together and give it a whisk. Mix wet ingredients together in a 4 cup measuring bowl. Add wet to dry and whisk until smooth (Not long). Add chocolate chips. Bakes approx 18 minutes.

Ganache glaze:

12 oz mixed chocolate chips

4 oz cream

1/2 tbsp butter

Over double boiler melt cream and chips together, add butter. Simple!

Coconut Buttercream:

(Fields of Cake, with some changes to it by muah)

1 pound unsalted room temp butter

1 small (3.4 oz pkg) white chocolate instant pudding mix

1 1/2 cup heavy cream

1/4 cup Malibu rum

1/4 cup cream of coconut

1 cup powdered sugar

Beat butter and pudding in stand mixer with paddle on med high for approx 5 minutes (stop and scrape bowl as needed) or until light and fluffy, reduce speed to low and add cream and rum to blend, then rebeat on med high for 5 minutes (Mine became curdly looking and decided to splatter all over the place, but I decided to ignore it, put a towel over the top of the mixer and beat it to death....and it came out beautiful), reduce speed to low and add cream of coconut and sugar....incorporate then beat some more.

ADDITIONALLY YOU NEED CARAMEL SAUCE (SEE SEVERAL POSTS DOWN I HAVE MY RECIPE) AND 3 BOXES OF SAMOA COOKIES.....

To assemble:

Make cuppies, cool. Then make glaze and dip cupcakes into glaze...let glaze set a bit (or pop cuppies in freezer for a few minutes) then add buttercream, drizzle caramel over top and add cookie!

Happy Easter!

Fishing!

A replica of a cake and cupcakes I found on cakecentral by NancyBee...This is a guinness chocolate cake with a layer of Jamison ganache and baileys buttercream in between each cake layer. The cupcakes are chocolate with vanilla buttercream.

Note the trout, I loved how they turned out.

Rolled Roses Cake.

For a 60th Birthday. The original design is much simpler...I embellished too much so not too happy with this cake. It gets kinda frustrating when you put hours and hours into a cake and it doesn't turn out the way you would like.

Underneath the decorations is a turtle cake, dark chocolate cake with brown sugar swiss meringue buttercream, homemade caramel sauce and candied pecans and chopped chocolate. The topper is actually a dome shaped out of rice krispy treats.