Baby Shower Cupcakes

A good friend was putting together a double baby shower for coworkers at her school and asked me to create some cupcakes. One of the teachers is having a boy, and the other a girl so I used a variety of pastel colors. I searched through flikr and books to try and get an idea of what to put on top of the cakes. I was getting frustrated because nothing to seemed to be quite right. But... while walking through our local Ben Franklin Craft store I found these awesome Wilton chocolate molds with a baby theme. 

The cupcakes were chocolate and vanilla. I tried some new recipes from one of my favorite cupcake books "Little Cakes from the Whimsical Bakehouse". The cupcakes had a really traditional flavor, and a great texture. Some cupcake recipes that I have tried turned out either way to dense or way to dry, but these were really flavorful and light. I used the house buttercream recipe from this book. It used a different method than I had used before, but it turned out well. I topped the cupcakes with either blue or pink frosting and either the chocolates or rainbow sprinkles. Hopefully, the ladies like them because I was pretty happy with how they turned out!

Cherry-Yogurt Loaf Cake

Last week, my husband and I made the plunge and finally bought a t.v. We have upgraded through 3 hand-me-downs, but decided to move up in the electronics world. After researching our options, we found ourselves buying one at Costco. While standing in line at Costco, I took a visit to their cookbook section. I found a great cake book that I couldn't pass up called Gorgeous Cakes. It is written by a british author, and has some wonderful recipes in it. I like that it has many cakes made with dried fruit, which I love to use. 

This cake, "sour cherry yogurt cake" was easy to make and turned out wonderfully. The cake didn't use eggs, but rather contained a pine nut paste. The cake was glazed with a mixture of orange juice and powdered sugar. The recipe called for red food coloring to give the pink color, but I had some blood oranges in the fridge so I used those instead. 

We had some friends over for dinner, and this made the perfect after dinner treat.

Valentine's dessert

Can I say how much I love the cookbook Cake Love! Everything I have tried is amazing, and this cake is no different. To say I love you to my wonderful hubby, I decided to bake the LCD cake (an awesome vanilla bundt cake). I topped it with chocolate ganache and melted white chocolate to make it extra decadent. 

I am not quite sure why I thought we needed an entire bundt cake for the 2 of us (especially a cake as rich as this). However, it did make a nice treat for my coworkers! A coworker had also brought some  yummy treats to work that day, so it made for some great snacking (probably not what I should be doing while sitting in a cubicle all day).

Vegan cupcakes

A while back I purchased a great cupcake cookbook "Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World".

It has tons of great recipes in it, but I hadn't gotten around to making any of them until this weekend. So I tried out the golden vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting. The batter mixed up very easily, although it is very easy to overmix it (which I did and they came out a tiny bit tough). They rose a ton in the oven, which happens often because of our altitude. I expected them to fall, but they stayed a perfect shape for frosting! All in all I thought they were delicious, and you couldn't tell a difference in taste between these and their non-vegan counterparts!

Happy New Year

To ring in the new year, we had a progressive dinner with a group of friends. We started with appetizers at Christina's new house, went to La Fuente restaurant for dinner, came to our house for dessert, and finished the celebration at Mary's house with cocktails and dancing! For dessert, my friend Candace made flan, and I made chocolate mousse in chocolate cups. To create the cups, I first melted 12 oz. of semisweet chocolate chips in a double boiler. Then, I used a pastry brush to paint the inside of cupcake liners. I tried both regular liners as well as nut & party cups. After the first layer of chocolate, I froze the cups for 30 min. Then I remelted the chocolate and painted a second coat and froze the cups again. Once the chocolate had hardened (about 1 hour), I peeled off the paper cup. I found that the nut & party cups were MUCH easier to peel off than the regular cupcake liner.

While the chocolate was hardening, I made the mousse. I found the recipe for "Heavenly Chocolate Mousse" on the All Recipe website. The only deviation I made was that I cooked the egg yolks over a double boiler rather than directly over the heat. Once the mousse was done, I piped it into the chocolate cups using a large star tip and topped it with some whipped cream. It made a nice single serving dessert. I think next time I might try it in mini cupcake liners for a bite-size dessert! Happy New Years!

Gingerbread

I have to admit that I had never made a gingerbread house. It seems like the holidays always fly by and we never get around to it. So... I was stoked when my sister-in-law threw a gingerbread house making party. I found the gingerbread recipe on About.com, but instead of using the icing recipe I used the royal icing powder mix from Wilton. The recipe made a good dough for the house and for cookies. However, the first batch of cookies I baked WAY to long and they turned into little gingerbread rocks. The dough turned out really dark because the molasses I had on hand were blackstrap molasses. It still tasted really yummy though. The first house below I decorated and the next one my husband, Dan, decorated (notice the fully landscaped yard)!

Merry Christmas

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season! I have been really busy, but was really excited to do this Christmas cake. My mom volunteers with an organization called Young Lives, which provides support to teen moms. They had their Christmas party this week, and my mom asked if I could do a birthday cake for Jesus. The cake itself was a 1-2-3-4 cake from Paula Deen, which was ridiculously simple since it only consisted of 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups self-rising flour, 4 eggs, and 1 tsp vanilla! I filled the cake with raspberry preserves and frosted it with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream. The nativity was done with fondant. 

The cake ended up having a pretty funny story. I dropped the cake off at the party, and went home since I was exhausted. The weather was terrible with quite a bit of snow predicted, so they thought the turn out would be bad. But... there were WAY more people than they expected. Things got so hectic that they forgot to serve the cake!!! So... now the cake will double as a treat for the children at our church after they finish the Christmas pageant on Sunday!