Miles' 1st Birthday Cake

We celebrated my nephew's 1st Birthday a little over two weeks ago.  Can't believe he is over a year old already!  My sister did a fantastic job with a "Little Man Moustache Party".  I spent some time with a moustache on myself.  Not really my best look.

Unfortunately, we forgot to take our camera.  My cousin let Nick borrow their camera to take some pictures, so I have some of her pictures of the cake! :)

The cake is double layer chocolate and yellow cake.  I used an 11 x 15 pan (twice - once for each layer), cut it, and formed it into the 1.  It took me SO long, mostly making huge recipes of cake, baking the chocolate layer a lot longer than I thought it would need to, and then letting them cool completely before doing anything with them.  The simplicity of the design made icing the easy part for this one!   Needless to say, this was way too much cake for the amount of people there.  I was afraid that if I didn't layer it, it wouldn't be enough for everybody because the pieces would be larger.  Oh well!

Here's the little birthday man!  He did a great job with his smash cake!

Nick's first (non home-improvement) project in the workshop was these blocks he gave Miles!  

Happy Birthday Miles!

Hershey's "Perfectly Chocolate" Cake

I made this cake for both my sister's and my mom's birthdays this year.  It's very moist and very chocolatey.  When my Mom said chocolate cake, I used this recipe again because I remembered how awesome it is.  And these pictures just make me want more!

Here is a link to the recipe on Hershey's website.  Hershey's "Perfectly Chocolate" Chocolate Cake

The frosting on this cake is the Hershey's recipe; the other one is a different recipe.

Strawberries go so well with this cake... especially with the icing! 

This is the same Hershey's cake with a different icing recipe.

Looking forward to making my nephew's birthday cake next week!

Steeler cake

Go Steelers!

I was craving chocolate cake with mocha icing (see recipe for icing here) so I made this for the game today!  Haven't done too much with icing recently, so I had fun.  I used this template, flipped it to be backwards, printed it, traced it and put it on my cake so that I would have nice looking diamonds and circles.  

A birthday cake

I made this cake last weekend for my aunt's birthday.  I was pretty proud of myself, considering my pastry bags and decorator tips have been put away since the memorial day cupcakes.

The cake is a classic white cake that I made during my cake class.  If you've never made not-from-a-box cake before, it's a great starting point.  It's not difficult, is moist and perfect.  

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth!

Happy Memorial Day!

Thank you to those who have given their 

time, energy, and lives so that we as Americans 

could enjoy freedom!  You are amazing!

Chocolate cake - round 2

Okay, this chocolate cake was really good.  I'm having trouble comparing it with the other chocolate cake I made for my mom's birthday though.  They're SO similar and both SO good.  I do know that Nick and I liked the mocha icing with it better than with plain white icing that we had this time.  Anyway, the cake is pretty similar to the last one I made.  Also from foodnetwork.com.  The only differences are the amounts of baking soda and baking powder, and using 1 cup of coffee instead of 1 cup boiling water.  Oh, and this one wants buttermilk instead of milk.  As usual, I add a tad of vinegar instead of buying buttermilk.

What I learned about vanilla icing:  When you're adding flavor, add half vanilla and half almond extract.  The almond extract tastes so good!!!

Side note: the recipe on the food network website says to use "good" cocoa powder.  I think this is really funny.  I remember my Grandma telling my Mom to buy her "good buns" from the store.  What kind of buns are "good buns"?  In this case, at least my mom probably knew what she liked.  What is "good cocoa powder"?  Is mine not good enough?  Oh well!  I took this out of my version of the recipe.  I'm sure whatever cocoa powder you have is good enough.

Chocolate cake recipe:
• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups sugar
• 3/4 cup cocoa powder
• 2 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup buttermilk, shaken
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1 cup freshly brewed hot coffee

Preheat the oven to 350°.  Grease and flour two 8-inch round cake pans.*  Makes 6 cups of batter.
Sift the flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into the bowl of an electric mixer.  Mix on low speed until combined.  In another bowl combine the buttermilk, oil, eggs, and vanilla.  Slowly add the wet ingredients to the dry, mixing on low speed until combined.  Add the coffee and stir just to combine.  Pour the batter into the pans and bake for 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.  Cool in the pans for 30 minutes, then turn onto a cooling rack and cool completely.  Do not ice until it is completely cool!


*As I noted in my last cake post, I am now measuring how much batter each cake recipe makes.  My round cake pan collection currently includes two 9x1 1/2 inch cake pans, one 9x2 inch cake pan, and one 6x2 inch cake pan.  I like the 9x2 cakes, so I wanted to know how much batter each recipe makes so I know how much extra I'll have if I make a 9x2.  This made approx.  6 cups of batter... which I made into 2 cakes... about 4 cups went into my 9x2 and about 2 cups went into my 6x2.  Phew!  That's way too many number is one paragraph.

Here's some pictures of my and Mom's final cakes!

This is Mom's!

Check out the basket weave!

This is mine.  

More basket weave

This is the little guy I made with the rest of my batter and my leftover icing.

Source:  Food network, Ina Garten, http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/beattys-chocolate-cake-recipe/index.html

Chocolate cake with Mocha Icing

I definitely recommend BOTH of these recipes.  The mocha icing with the chocolate cake is SO GOOD. Luckily for us I still have some cupcakes that I made with the extra batter and icing...which may or may not have been my breakfast this morning.

This was the finished decorated cake. 

There's also little flowers around the outside.

These pictures were my inspiration. I knew I wanted chocolate on chocolate so I google-imaged cakes with chocolate icing and went from there.  So many cute ideas out there!  Anyway, these are my wanna-be-like-those cupcakes.

ANYWAY - the recipes! 

Chocolate cake from the foodnetwork.com

Ingredients

• 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour

• 2 cups sugar

• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa

• 1 1/2 tsp. baking soda

• 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

• 1 tsp. salt

• 2 eggs

• 1 cup milk

• 1/2 cup vegetable oil

• 1 tsp. vanilla

• 1 cup boiling water

Preheat oven to 350°.  Prepare two 9 inch cake pans* by brushing on crisco, sprinkling with flour, then tapping out extra.  In a large bowl combine flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.  In a small bowl combine eggs, milk, oil, and vanilla.  Beat well.  Slowly add boiling water and continue to mix.  Add wet ingredients to flour mixture and mix until smooth.  Pour batter into prepared pan(s).  Bake for:

9 x 1 1/2 in pans 30-35 minutes

9 x 2 in pans 40-45 minutes

*I decided after completing this recipe that every cake that I make from now on I am going to measure how much batter it makes and use this chart to help me figure stuff out.  I find it annoying that every recipe makes a different amount of batter, and I never know how much extra I'm going to have.  And prepare two 9 inch cake pans?  Do you mean two  9 x 1/2 inch?  Or two 9 x 2 inch?  Generally they mean 9 x 1/2 inch, but recently I've been into the 9 x 2 inch.  For this recipe, I used a 9 x 2 inch cake pan and made an additional 12 cupcakes.  

Wilton's Buttercream Mocha Icing

(I used the recipe we used in class but added chocolate and coffee as suggested on this site)

Ingredients:

• 1 cup solid white vegetable shortening

• 1 tsp. vanilla

• 8-9 tsp milk/coffee (split half and half, or add milk/coffee to taste)

• 1 lb. 10x sugar

• 1 Tbsp. Wilton Meringue Powder

• three 1 oz. unsweetened chocolate squares, melted (OR 3/4 cup cocoa)

Cream shortening, vanilla, and milk/coffee.  Add chocolate and continue to mix.  Add dry ingredients and mix on medium speed until thoroughly mixed.  Blend until creamy.  

One recipe of icing was enough for me to do everything you see in the pictures.  (Ice the cake, make a top and bottom border, ice some of my cupcakes, and practice my borders a little)

IMPORTANT!

This makes 2 1/2 cups STIFF icing. 

To make a border, make a design on your cupcakes, etc. with your icing you should make MEDIUM consistency icing by adding 1 tsp. of milk or coffee for each cup of STIFF icing that you are converting.

To ice your cake (or write on it) you should have THIN consistency icing.  Add 2 tsp. of water for every cup of STIFF consistency icing (that would be 5 tsp. for the full recipe)

Last week of Cake Class 1!

These are our "final cakes."  Tonight we got diplomas!  Okay, so it's just a certificate that says I completed the class... but that's basically what a diploma is, right?  Never fear, there will be more cake pictures!  We signed up for cake class 2! 

This is Mom's cake

This is my cake.

Taking this birthday cake to small group tomorrow...

even though I don't know of any birthdays!

This is a white cake with strawberry filling.... recipe to follow after we taste it. :)

Cream-Filled Chocolate Cupcakes

I would recommend these cupcakes if only because they are so easy to make.  None of this creaming butter and sugar, adding eggs, blah blah, do it in this order... you just dump everything in the bowl and mix.  Oh, and they taste good.

For cake decorating class this week we were filling cupcakes... so I made these with a cream filling.  I think I need to practice filling them, because all of the pictures on this website seem to have much more filling inside than mine do.  Here's the recipe I used, once again from allrecipes.com: Cream-Filled Chocolate Cupcakes.

We practiced making the "shaggy mum" this week...which is the hilarious looking giant yellow blobs.  Don't remember what the other blue ones are called.  Oops.  And the other yellow one was me forgetting to change my tip before I started, then just "going with it".  Oops again.

I can't take credit for all of these.  Mom did some...but I don't know which of us did which.

Cake Class 2

Our second cake class @ Michael's.

Here's Mom with her cupcake cake.

This is my fish cake.