Chocolate and Movie Dreams

There were two birthdays this week. My daughter said she wanted chocolate cake with chocolate icing. That's it. So we had chocolate death cake. It was SOOOOO yummy!

Then one of the neighbors wanted a tie-die movie themed cake. I didn't know how to do tie-die, but she liked this too. She stayed and helped me decorate. We even had a "who can make the best popcorn" contest. It was a lot of fun. It made me grateful to have such great kids in my neighborhood.

The Horse Cake

*sigh* This cake was cute...until I tried to make the horse. I need lots more practice. The fondant was too heavy and it sagged and wrinkled until the horse looked more like raw chicken than a horse. Here it is anyway.

Camp Construction Cake

The first week of August was Girl's Camp. This year I spent the entire week in the kitchen cooking for 150 girls and their leaders. It was a lot of work, and surprisingly a lot of fun.

At the end of the week we celebrated all of the birthdays and anniversaries that ocurred while we were at camp. Since our theme was "We are Builders" I thought this would be appropriate.

Part of me cringes at this cake, but considering there was no air conditioning and we really didn't have time to do this slowly it isn't that bad. I had three other wonderful ladies help me wip out the fondant before the heat and humidity could turn it into a sticky mess. It looks a bit droopy in places, but it was only stacked for 10 minutes before we cut into it so...

The bottom layer was four different 10 inch cakes side by side:
Orange juice
Chocolate mint with the Andes mint marscapone mousse
Snickerdoodle
French Vanilla

The middle layer way my Cosmopolitan and the top was plain chocolate.

Kung Fu Panda Cake

Note: I don't own an air brush machine (SO WISH I did). Anyway, this is the picture the cake is based off of.

Couldn't get a good red, but it feels like a sun set, right?

Kadoosh!

Bey Blade Arena

Last weekend was kid #3's birthday. He is REALLY into the Bey Blades. Anyway, he wanted to help decorate his own cake this year. I think he did a great job.

I think he did a great job. Don't you?

Heffalump Cake

Wow! It's been a while since I've decorated a cake. Last week I got a call and I have to say it was nice to do something new.

Julie wanted an elephant cake. When I think of elephants, I think of Heffalumps.

So I made a Heffalump cake. Here is the step by step.

Baked a half sheet marble cake and cut out the shape.

Stacked cut out pieces on the shape.

Another view of the stacked pieces. I used frosting like glue.

Dirty iced the whole thing to hold it together.

Started the tedious task of covering with stars.

Every cake has an "ooops" moment. Here's this one.

Isn't he cute? Later the buyer poured jelly beans all around the board.

China Jade's Sweet Sixteen

Bottom tier--dummy

Middle tier--chocolate, vanilla, chocolate with Mascarpone Mousse

Top tier--vanilla, chocolate, vanilla with Raspberry filling

Maria and Brinton's Cake

This weekend I made this cake for some really good friends son and fiance. There were some serious ups and downs. This was my first attempt covering a square cake with fondant. I also had some major issues with trimming and trying to get everything "square". *sigh* At one point I was in tears thinking it was not going to happen, but I'm happy with the final result. I learned a lot doing this cake.

The bottom is a cake form (or whatever the fake styrofoam things are called)
Neopolitan cake
Mint Chocolate with an Andes Mint bittercream filling
Almond with Mascopone mousse filling

The Groom is a Duke fan, but the bride is a Carolina girl!

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Isn't this just the perfect graduation cake? The person on top is a bit scary, a little bright, but I'm still happy with the end result. This took 2 hours to ice and decorate (I did stop to eat before putting the person on the top). Longer than I thought it would. I free handed the circles. Can you tell? Hey, it's Dr. Seuss so wonky is good. ;)

Snickerdoodle Cake

This is one of my favorite cakes. I love the way my whole house starts to smell like cinnamon. It is simple and it always makes me think of Christmas and wintertime.

Snickerdoodle Cake

* 3 cups all-purpose flour
* 2 and 2/3 cups granulated sugar
* 1 and 1/2 cup butter, softened
* 1 cup milk
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/2 tsp salt

Mix all of these ingredients until well blended. (I use my kitchen aid)

Add:
* 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
* 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Then add 5 large eggs, one at a time.

Pour into four 9-inch greased and floured round cake pans. Bake in a pre-heated 400 degree oven for 20 minutes.

Cool for 10 minutes, remove from pan and cool completely before frosting.

Paint bucket oops!

This cake was for a neighbor. It looked so much better in my head, but it was good practice. What you don't see is the awesome hammer that I made to go with the nails and the paint brush. Where are they you may ask? My three year old climbed on the counter and ate them! Yes, that is why this is not a full time hobby as yet. I was really proud of that hammer too. I took white fondant added a little brown coloring and mixed just enough to get a really nice wood grain look for the handle. Ah, so sad. I knew I should have taken a picture!
I took this picture thinking I was finished, but the cake just bugged me. I wished that I had just made a round spill instead of trying to get all "dripping over the edge" with it. But the paint can bothered me too.So, I added more "paint" to the can and I liked it a lot better. Unfortunately the extra fondant was too heavy for the can and it looked a bit squished by the time they were ready to eat it. The poor nails do not make any sense without the hammer, and just so you know I made them bent on purpose! They were pulled out of the wall as part of the pre-painting prep work. See, now it makes sense!

Suanna's Masquerade

I am so proud of this cake! As you can see I figured out how to do the topsy turvy and make it look right.

Diamonds--Neapolitan layer about 7 inches tall.

Circles--Orange cake layer, mmmm, one of my favorites.

Stripes--plain old boring yellow cake because that is all the groom likes!

Groom's Cake--Batman in the Chicago Bear's colors (it only looks black in the picture). I etched the stitching on the flipping footballs, you just can't see it in the picture.

Baby Shower Cake

I revisited the Duckie theme with this baby shower. I'll be honest and admit that I forgot I had agreed to make this cake until Friday at about 2:30pm. The shower was Saturday morning at 10am! It came together although I kept cringing at the uneven top!

Tatyana's Birthday Cake

Here are some pictures of a birthday cake I made a week or so ago. This sweet girl asked for yellow icing with pink roses. I should have just made it her way, but I let my head get in the way. Since her mom was paying me I thought it should look like something you would pay for. Now that the whole thing is over, I've decided I'm going to surprise her some day with cupcakes that are frosted in yellow with pink roses on them. Shame on me for trying to tell her what might look "nicer."

This cake turned out nicely...except for my writing. I was paying special attention to making the writing as neat as possible, and I think I've made improvement. Then I started adding roses, then vines. I went a little crazy and before I had stopped to notice what I was doing, I had a wayward vine making my writing efforts useless. That was an a...n...a but that silly vine turned it into a g! You can almost see above that it isn't connected, but it looks like it is. Where was my brain?

Luckily,Tatyana still loved her cake!

The Chocolate Orange Cupcake

Ok, I don't know what has come over me. It isn't healthy in the slightest. I've caught the recipe bug. I've tried another from scratch cake recipe. This one turned out a lot denser and would lend itself to cake sculpting much easier than some of my other recipes. Which is a good thing. This recipe has a light orange flavor to it, but my favorite part is the orange infused chocolate icing. OH MY GOODNESS!!

I like chocolate oranges at Christmas time and that is exactly what the icing tastes like. I seriously could have stuck my head inside the bowl to lick it clean! Unfortunately, my husband doesn't like any flavors added to his chocolate. So, I had to spread these little delights around to some of my neighbors. Don't you wish you lived close to me?


Cake Ingredients:
* 3 eggs
* 2 cups sugar
* 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

* 1/2 cup fresh orange juice (either from real oranges or buy 100% juice)

* 3 cups flour (if you want a lighter fluffier cake try using just 2 cups flour)
* 1/2 cup powdered sugar
* zest of 1 orange (1/2 for the cake, 1/2 for the frosting)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and prepare two 9inch cake pans or cupcake pans.

2. Place the eggs and sugar in a mixer and beat for about a minute. Slowly add the remaining ingredients and beat until everything is well incorporated and it looks smooth. Stop the beater to scrape down the sides when needed.

3. Divide batter into the desired pans and bake until the top springs back when lightly pressed. Mine didn't really get brown on top, but the sides and bottom were lightly browned. My cupcakes took about 25 minutes and a cake would be around to 35 minutes.Orange Infused Chocolate Frosting:
* 1 1/2 cups (about 11 ounces) of bittersweet or dark chocolate--60% cacao (you could try it with milk chocolate, I just like my dark!)
* 1 pint heavy cream
* 1/2 cup butter softened, not melted
* 4 cups powdered sugar

My favorite dark chocolate, just 1 block left!

1. Place the cream and chocolate in a sauce pan and melt together. When it is melted and nice and creamy, take it off the heat and let it cool. I let it cool for about an hour.

2. Place in the mixer. Start it up and add the softened butter, mix well and then slowly add the powdered sugar. I probably should have put the chocolate in the fridge because it was still too soft to use as icing, so I put the whole mixture in the fridge to let it firm up. When it was "icing" consistency I stirred it up and started spreading. Mmmm, it was soooo good!

It turned out so nice that I am also entering this cup cake in the Gourmet Girl Magazine's Cup Cake Crawl. For rules and details go HERE.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes

Nathan and I decided to have a bake off tonight. I don't know if we were bored, desperate for some dessert, or if we just watch too much Food Network. We love to watch shows like Chopped and Dinner Impossible where chef's are challenged to make a meal out of surprise ingredients or without much notice. We felt like we were in one of the shows, or a combination of them. For some reason I have not been paying much attention to the status of our pantry and we were low or out of a lot of basic things. For instance, the last of the oil was used last night, the last of the milk this morning for breakfast, and I only had about 2 1/2 cups of powdered sugar.

So, our challenge was to see who could pull off the best dessert with ingredient substitutions. As I was trying to figure out what I wanted to make, I only knew one thing for certain. It would be in cupcake form. I was invited to participate in the Gourmet Girl Magazine's Cup Cake Crawl. For rules and details go HERE. The deadline for that is the 19th so I didn't think I was going to be able to pull it off, but Nathan's challenge got me moving. Nothing like a little spousal competition to motivate you.

I'm afraid I didn't take pictures of each step, but here is the recipe.

* 4 eggs
* 2 cups sugar
* 3/4 cup melted butter
* 3/4 cup peanut butter
* 1/2 cup vanilla yogurt
* 1/2 cup evaporated skim milk (the yogurt and evap milk were my substitutions for buttermilk and it turned out quite yummy, but feel free to do 1 cup buttermilk instead of the yogurt and evap milk)
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 cup cocoa powder
*2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder (higher elevations may not need as much--this is for my Utah friends--I'd try 1 1/2 teaspoons and see what happens)
* 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
* 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1. I preheated my oven to 350 degrees and put my baking cups in the muffin pan. I hate them, but I didn't want to clean up afterward!

2. I put the eggs in my stand up mixer and beat them until they were starting to get a little frothy (about 1 minute on medium) then I added the melted butter, peanut butter, and sugar and continued to mix. Scrape down the sides as needed. I remembered how my last from scratch cake fell, so I let it mix a good 2 minutes to get a lot of good air whipped in. Then I added my yogurt and milk and beat for another minute.

3. My batter was looking good and I could see the air bubbles in it so I slowly added the cocoa powder, salt, baking powder and soda. Once those were well incorporated I added my flour last. And guess what? I let it mix for another 2 minutes on med-high. I wasn't taking any chances (I forgot I was just doing cupcakes, so I don't even know if a 9 inch cake would have fallen or not!)

4. I filled my cupcake pans 2/3 full (The batter still looked a little thin, but not too thin, does that make sense? Sometimes my cake batters are really thick like pudding, don't know why) and baked them for 23 minutes. They came out a lovely shade of lighter chocolate. I should have cut one open for you to see. It was like dark brown sugar and the texture was almost more muffin like than cake like. They had a very light peanut butter flavor and the chocolate was light as well. I kept thinking they would be yummy for breakfast without the frosting. Maybe that is where the last dozen will end up!5. I then made a quick cocoa butter cream frosting and sprinkled some shaved chocolate on them.

Here is my NEW favorite icing recipe, from Conversations With a Cupcake

"Bittercream Frosting
1 pint heavy cream
11.5 oz. 60% Bittersweet cacao chips
½ c. butter
4-5 c. powdered sugar

In a medium saucepan, melt chocolate chips and heavy cream until a thick, smooth ganache forms, to keep the mixture from burning, stir constantly. Put in fridge until chilled. Remove from fridge and beat in butter & powdered sugar until frosting is a spreadable consistency. Frost. Chill cake. To serve, remove from fridge 10-15 minutes before serving."

Of course I didn't have heavy cream or enough powdered sugar. So my frosting was not nice and thick and creamy, but it still tasted good. I used a little more of the Belgium chocolate from Easter. I only have 2 lbs left! What will I do when I run out?

NieNie's Heavenly Chocolate Cake

Ok, so a few weeks ago, this genius of a woman created the perfect chocolate cake for Stephanie Nielsen of the NieNie Dialogues. I don't even know her name, but her website is called Conversations with a Cupcake so what is not to love?! Anyway, I was reading the recipe and my mouth was watering. I haven't tried to make a completely from scratch cake for years because mine never turn out. (I make what I call hybrid cakes--part mix, part homemade by doing my own things to the mix) Anyway, I decided to give this cake a try for a cook out that I was invited to for the 4th of July. All I can say is WOW! Mine didn't even turn out perfect but it was good enough to need a gallon of milk to wash it down. It was so rich and chocolaty that you just couldn't resist another bite.

Here is my journey with this cake. For the full recipe and story you can go HERE.

Melting some of that yummy Belgium bittersweet chocolate that was left over from the Easter Egg adventure, with oil for for the cake batter.

This is what it looked like after it was all melted.

After adding the eggs, sugars, cocoa, flour, buttermilk and other ingredients, I put them in the oven in pans dusted with cocoa instead of flour.

They smelled heavenly, but for some reason they sunk in the middle. They seemed more like a brownie than cake. I don't know what went wrong. I've contacted the recipe maker to see if she can guess.

So, I decided to mix something up to fill the holes in with. I wanted to make a no bake cheesecake mixture out of cream cheese and whipping cream, but I didn't have any cream cheese. Are you surprised? I had already been to the store twice to get items for this cake and I was not going back again. So, after learning that none of my neighbors had cream cheese either, I mixed up some vanilla yogurt, whipped cream and crushed oreos. Hey, I figured it was worth a try and somehow it all worked in the end! The only problem with this was that it didn't get firm enough to spread the Mascarpone Mousse over it, and there was enough mousse that I could have just filled it with that, but I didn't know.
Then I melted more bittersweet chocolate to mix with mascarpone cheese for a mousse to put under the Bittercream frosting still to come. I needed to put this in the fridge to cool before adding the butter and sugar. I don't think I quite left it long enough, but it was still spreadable.Finally, more melting chocolate for the frosting. Everything was so yummy that I could totally see someone dieing of chocolate overload! yeah, this cake does not fit in with the "healthy living" part of my blog, but sometimes you just have to enjoy life!

Well, this is the bottom of the cake, so maybe not the best photo, but can you smell the chocolate?