Jack-o'-Lantern Cake

I made another cake à la i am baker. It's a pumpkin cake, just in time for Halloween!

There is a special surprise in the middle, just like the fancy fourth of July cake I made in the summer. I used a cookie cutter and a knife to cut a hole in three layers of my red velvet cake. Then I baked a million (27) cupcakes so that I could use three for my cake. I used two white cupcakes for the bottom three layers, and made a yellow one to put in the top layer and act as the pumpkin's stem.


Then I "carved" the cake into the shape of a pumpkin.

After dying the frosting, which I think may be one of my least favorite things to do ever, I had some fun decorating. It was so hard to make a semi-decent green! (It turns out, you have to add some red.)


The inside was the coolest part! These cakes are so fun. I believe I jumped up and down when I saw that it had worked.

I took it to work, and everyone seemed to like it. It was gone in about an hour. (I made sure to have a huge slice myself.)

The BFFs were over while I was decorating the cake. (I believe Casey suggested the red food coloring for the green frosting. She is now my official frosting dyer.) I told them they had to decorate the left over cupcakes. They are very creative...


Time to go enter into my food coma!

Baby Shower Baking

My friend Casey's sister (follow me?) had a baby shower last Saturday. About a month ago her mom asked me to make cupcakes for the shower. My gut response was "oh no, no, no." I mean, I like baking for fun; I can mess up and no one would care. But this would be like... real baking. I eventually warmed up to the request (I usually need to sleep on an idea. I think it's an introvert thing.) and started asking about themes and colors and what they wanted. I learned that the theme was "baby" and the color scheme was "pink." Apparently they weren't picky.


So I set out on Friday to make 24 cupcakes, which was all that was asked of me. I wanted to go with a pink and brown theme since I was told those were the colors of the nursery. I made chocolate cupcakes and homemade buttercream icing. There were 5 different cupcake decorations:

1. My favorite, pink icing with white pearl sprinkles
2. A simple frosted cupcake rolled in chocolate sprinkles
3. Pink frosting with chocolate chips - didn't turn out as cute as I imagined
4. White frosting with candy melt shavings
5. White frosting with a candy melt pacifier


I had never worked with candy melts before, but I've wanted to try something with them for a while. I bought the "baby" candy mold and made pink pacifiers one at a time. It was pretty simple to do, though the candies turned out to be rather thick. If I did it again I wouldn't fill the mold all the way.


Then I was on a baking roll. While I was waiting for the cupcakes to bake I decided to whip up some cake balls. Cake balls are delicious and really easy to make. Just bake a cake, crumble it up, add a tub of frosting, roll them into balls, then dip them in melted chocolate. Viola, cake balls. I made the cake pink, but I don't think I made it pink enough. I wish they had been as pink as my "fourth of July" cake balls. Oh well. I don't think anyone cared.



I also converted a box I had in my room into a cute, pink cake ball holder.


Then I realized I had cookie dough left over from when I made my mom's birthday cake. I got that out and it made a surprisingly large number of onesies cookies. I decorated each one a little differently, and even made some baby stroller cookies with the baby-to-be's name.




I started baking the cupcakes at about 8:00 PM Friday night. I finished baking at about 7:00 AM Saturday morning. I didn't plan to stay up all night, nor did I need to. I know they would have been perfectly happy with just cupcakes. But I kept making stuff and just never went to bed. I think all the sugar kept me up. (Taste testing is important!) By the time I delivered all the goodies (around 9:00 AM) I had the shakes. Casey's family probably thought I was crazy; coming in with too many sweets, all hyped up on sugar. It all turned out well in the end, Casey emailed me later and said that everyone loved everything.

Want to know the best part of all? I slept for 8 hours straight on Saturday, woke up and read for a few hours, then got to jump back in bed for another 8 hours. Sleep is wonderful; I think I'm going to go have some. Good night!


p.s. I apologize for the quality of the pictures. I wasn't too happy with any of them. I had been up for more than 24 hours and I just didn't care.

Pink, White, & Blue?

I've been reading a bunch of baking blogs lately. I've also been feeling rather ambitious. I decided to make some cake balls tonight after seeing them at Bakerella. She dipped her red velvet cake in chocolate, but I had to do some improvising. I was trying to go for red, white, and blue since the 4th of July is right around the corner, but that didn't quite work out.



More like pink, white and baby blue. I also used vanilla instead of chocolate since we already had it. Even so, they were delicious! I had 4 in one sitting and now my stomach kind of hurts. :(







I didn't realize how quickly the vanilla dries. I need to work on my covering technique as I had big globs of vanilla at the bases, which were hard to break off. I'm sure I'll have more practice because they were pretty fun and easy to make. I packed these up and told my mom to take them to work. Hopefully she'll find some willing stomachs there!