It’s Time For Some Funfetti!

Wow – it has been WAY too long since I’ve written an update (and yes, I know my last post starts the same way).

Anyway!

To kick start myself back into the baking (tis the season), I decided to formulate my recipe for funfetti cake – mainly because I had a groom’s cake with that cake type 🙂

For those of you who don’t know, funfetti is a great cake – basically a plain vanilla cake, but with some rainbow sprinkled mixed in to give all these little points of color within the cake when you cut it.  I swear it tastes better than regular vanilla cake… but I’m part of the funfetti generation, so I’m a wee bit biased!

The groom for this cake is a vanilla lover, so he requested vanilla with a simple vanilla buttercream.  Enter Kat – Funfetti cake with some Vanilla Italian Meringue Buttercream.  I’m excited for this cake – this was going to be my first fondant-less cake for an event. Continue reading

Advertisement

Double Salted Caramel Cake

Just writing out the headline to this starts to make me drool a little bit.  I feel like every post I write “so this is one of my favorite flavors!”, but honestly… salted caramel?  It’s just amazing.  Put it into cake form?  Even better!

I have to thank the SprinkleBakes website for this – she made a Triple Salted Caramel Cupcake (that, by the way, looks absolutely gorgeous!), and I just converted/adjusted that recipe to make a cake, and oh. my. goodness.  It was delicious.  I was actually told this was the best cake I’ve made so far.  It was gooey and caramely and crumbly and just plain yummy.  I would make this again in a heartbeat if I had more people to eat it!

Continue reading

Advanced Cake Decorating so far…

Well I just finished my midterm cake for my cake decorating class last night.  It was interesting – both myself and one of my classmates had one of our layers collapse in the middle, leaving a huge divot to fill.  This, of course, just caused air bubbles galore underneath the fondant no matter what we did – so eventually I just gave up and let it be, because all I was doing was poking holes to pop one air bubble and then finding 10 more.  Regardless, my color scheme worked out well, I loved the roses and my butterfly ended up looking very nice!

Here is my first attempt at a square cake – definitely had some issues, mainly because the kitchen was so hot that the buttercream started melting before I could even put the fondant on, which made for a very messy process.  I did my best to cover up my mistakes with a thick border, as my corners weren’t looking too hot.  I really did like the color scheme, and I loved using the little pink buttons on the border (I used them on all sides).

The last cake is our first cake we made in class, where we were learning about draping.  I had fun cutting out all the circles and attaching them, even though the fondant was way too thick (should’ve been around 1/8″ thick) – but even though the drape/flowers don’t really match with the circles, I still like both aspects (just not together!)

Chocolate Cake with Hazelnut Buttercream

This week I decided to finally take on a classic and make a chocolate cake (although since it is FINALLY sunny in Chicago, I was originally leaning more towards something coconut-limey… but soon, soon).  Personally, chocolate and hazelnut go together like PB&J for me – the flavor combination is absolutely delicious, and all I can think of is Ferrero Rocher (yum).

I had never made a hazelnut buttercream before, so I wasn’t entirely sure on how this was going to go.  I found a basic recipe to get to a hazelnut paste, and then pulled my Italian Buttercream recipe out of my back pocket (from school) and just figured I could combine it all into one frosting.  Continue reading

Champagne & Strawberry Cupcakes

I have to admit, I’m in love with Cupcake Wars.  I am fascinated watching shows like that and Chopped on Food Network, because I think it’s so neat watching people come up with recipes on the fly, with all these interesting flavor combinations!  This past week I was watching with my parents while home for Easter, and the episode had several people using red wine in cupcakes.  This, of course, intrigued me, and I immediately starting looking up wine cake recipes.  Unfortunately, it seems that the chocolate-red wine combinations has the chance to make a dry, very dense cake, and all the white wine cake recipes I found started with boxed mix (um, no – to me, that’s not really a recipe!).

 

After searching around for a bit, I randomly found a champagne cake recipe, and decided to give it a whirl.  For these cupcakes, I made a champagne cupcake batter, a very light strawberry and champagne cream filling, and a champagne buttercream. Continue reading

Cakes From the Past

Gallery

This gallery contains 45 photos.

Even though these aren’t cakes that I’ve baked recently, I thought it would be fun to include them here – these are all the cakes I’ve made in the past couple quarters at school. Strawberry Bavarian Cream Dobos Torte Tiramisu – … Continue reading