Chocolate Cupcake Assortment

A friend of mine is co-hosting a charity event for a cancer patient Saturday, and so I made a chocolate cupcake assortment for her to sell as part of the bake-sale.  I made chocolate cupcakes with three kinds of buttercream: pink coconut, salted caramel, and peanut butter.  I can't decide which is my favorite.  They are all amazing!  I am always glad to be able to contribute to events like this, and even happier when I learn how much money people are able to raise with my products.  Cake can make a difference!

Creme Brulee!

When baking my cakes and making buttercream, I use a LOT of egg whites.  Which means I end up with a lot of leftover yolks!  This can be OK, since I use the yolks to make fruit curd fillings and custards to go inside the cakes, but sometimes I just have more yolks than I can use.  Luckily, one of my husband's (and my) favorite desserts is creme brulee, which uses a dozen egg yolks in the recipe.  (Hey, no one says this is health food!)  And so, we have wonderful vanilla bean creme brulee... smooth, cool, creamy, and sweet, with its crisp burnt sugar crust.  It is such a delicious combination of contrasting textures and flavors.  There is really nothing like it.

Recipe Testing

I came up with a great idea for a new cake and frosting combination, and my oldest daughter's school also happened to be having parent-teacher conferences.  In my pre-kid life, I was a teacher myself, and so I know the long hours put in by the hard-working teachers at parent teacher conference time.  So, I made up a batch of these cupcakes and took them to the teachers to test for me.  These are brown sugar and spice cupcakes with maple cream cheese frosting and a bit of fresh nutmeg grated on top.  They're sweet and just a bit spicy, with the tangy cream cheese and hint of maple flavor.  It was definitely a good combination!

Happy Birthday Jason!

It is my darling husband's birthday, and he is actually not a cake man.  He likes pie.  Berry pie.  So, I made him his favorite, blueberry, raspberry, blackberry pie!  I decorated it, too! I also made some homemade vanilla bean ice cream to go with it.  So delicious!

Piano Recital Cookies

I got an order from my girls' piano teacher this week, for cookies to be handed out at a recital.  I made sugar cookies and covered them in my homemade vanilla fondant, and then decorated them with black royal icing eighth notes!  They were so fun to make, and it was amazing to see how talented the kids were as they all performed their pieces! 

Chocolate Coconut Macarons

Oh how I love crispy, melt-in-your-mouth French macarons! These ones have chocolate shells with pink coconut buttercream between them!  So light, dainty, and delicious!

Baby Shower Cake

I had such a fun time this week making a baby shower cake!  This was a coconut cake with key lime filling and coconut Swiss buttercream, covered in homemade vanilla fondant and hand made sugar paste baby booties and a bow!  It was so fun to sculpt the little baby booties!

Vanilla Macarons

French Macarons are just so wonderful.  They have a delicate, crisp crust on the outside that dissolves in your mouth when you bite it, leaving way to a soft, slightly chewy inside, and then the wonderful buttercream filling in the center, so creamy and wonderful!  The macaron is an experience of amazing textures and flavors unlike any other cookie.  I love making macarons!  They are so fun, because they can be made in any flavor and color.  They are just tiny, perfect little gems!  I made chocolate, raspberry, and vanilla macarons for wedding favors for my mom's wedding back in May, and they came out so fun!  Today I just did basic vanilla macarons.  They are so wonderful!

Cheery Cherry Cupcakes

When it comes to cake flavors, I'm always looking to try new things.  One of the things I like is to take an established flavor profile from something that does the flavor artificially and make it using real ingredients.  So today I experimented with making my own version of "cherry chip" cake mix.  Cherry chip cake mix has a slightly almond flavored white cake base with little red bits of artificial cherry flavor mixed in - sort of like the "blueberries" in a lot of blueberry muffin mixes.  Ew.  I didn't want to just use maraschino cherries, because that flavor can be powerfully strong in a not-good way.  So, I turned to cherry pie filling.  I drained the cherries out of some cherry pie filling, rinsed and dried them, and then cut them into little bits.  Then I stirred these into my favorite white cake recipe and baked it up!  For the frosting, I used some of the cherry gel that I had drained off to flavor my Swiss meringue buttercream cherry.  For fun, I added one maraschino cherry to the top.  These are so pink and cheerful!  I baked some cupcakes and a single 9-inch layer, to see how both would perform.  They came out wonderfully moist and soft, with great cherry flavor, but definitely not artificial!  Test successful!