Merry Christmas!

This past Sunday was my drama team’s Christmas party. Since I’m a rather indecisive individual, I made two cakes.

The Red cake is red velvet & white cake in stripes on the inside. Covered in red buttercream, with snowflake sprinkles and chocolate sprinkles.

The Blue cake has a layer of strawberry (purple – I was originally going to add purple onto the design), and a cream cheese flavored layer. Buttercream icing and snow sprinkles.

Yummy chocolate cookies are by the lovely Ashley, whose home we invaded. She’s kinda fabulous.

So my goal is to take some artistic shots next time I bake something pretty. I’m pretty awful at remembering to take pictures of things I make. How sad is that?

Thanksbirthday cupcakes!

My Birthday was Thanksgiving. and I made cupcakes.

(inspired & semi-reciped from a cupcake book birthday gift!)

cheesecake lemon flavored. mmm.

 

Stupid Spirit Hands!

Tags

butterbeer, Cauldron Cakes, Harry Potter, Magic Wands

This weekend was Harry Potter weekend, although for me it was only Harry Potter Friday. I spent Thursday and Friday at a friend’s house (Michele), and Friday we had her kids and two other teens for a Harry Potter marathon.

So, being the overachiever that I am, I had some snacks prepared.

But I’ll begin with Thursday and an impromptu shoot:

The Lovely Caitlynn

Unfortunately, I left my camera, so I only had my phone.

On to HP Weekend – Wands

I brought pretzels, molds, and chocolate and we made wands…

Arin really liked hers. Livi was jealous.

Cauldron Cakes

I started these ahead of time:

I cared more about the aesthetics than making them strictly out of cake. Black vanilla chocolate cauldron filled with chocolate cake pieces and homemade whipped cream & Biltmore’s black cherry syrup.

 

Butterbeer

Michele and I decided to use the simplest Butterbeer recipe we found online: cream soda and butterscotch. We didn’t end up making it Friday night, so Michele and the girls made it Saturday. Michele didn’t like it, but the girls loved it. Two of the girls have been to World of HP in Universal and said they liked this better, since it was much less sweet (and they could actually drink it all).m Here’s the pic they sent me:

Alas, they forgot to bring me some. :-( Sad times.

Coming tomorrow: Dinner Club, The Cupcakes That Time Forgot, and quite possibly An Afternoon at the Zoo.

It’s a Birthday!

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…

Chocolate goodbyes…

Yesterday was our good-bye lunch for one of our staff, and I was asked to make the cake.

I went for a simple design. I definitely need to work on writing. I redid it over and over until I decided that it would have to work.

I did enjoy the color contrast in the black (actually still brown) and white. I kinda wish I coulda left it entirely plain after the shell borders.

Contrast-y shells.

If red wasn't so hard, I would have used that instead of blue.