Chocolate, Chocolate, Chocolate Cake

Chocolate sour cream cake, filled with a chocolate mousse, topped with a chocolate ganache frosting.

This cake is divine for chocolate lovers!  The mousse filling is light and offsets the sweet intensity of the ganache.

Strawberry Shortcake

These turned out pretty good.  I think next time I would add more sugar to the shortcake itself because it was a bit too sour (?) for me as it was.  But the sweetness in the strawberries and cream offset it mostly.

I've put half of the batch in the freezer so we'll have to see how well they reheat!

Please excuse the picture.  Point-and-shoot camera's don't give the best of images at night time in the kitchen. Thanks to my hubby's steady hands (in comparison to mine) we were able to get this shot.

My first attempt at bread!

I "accidentally" had to make this loaf of bread when my pizza crust experiment went wrong.  I had used a whole packet of yeast rather than what the pizza recipe called for and so I was left wondering what to do with my yeast.

Bread to the rescue!

I hope you taste as yummy as you look and smell!

Chocolate Chip, Passionfruit, Mocha Cake

For my friend Janea's bridal shower, I made a replica of one of her favorite cakes.  Not having any recipe to follow, I pieced it together based on the description.  My creation is a 3 tiered vanilla chocolate chip cake with layers of passionfruit curd, coffee buttercream, and chocolate cookie crumbles.


The passionfruit curd didn't set up hard enough unfortunately, and as I was layering the cake, it all squished out the sides!  So next time, I will try to find a way to make it firmer if using as a cake filling.

I personally don't like coffee.  I may be one of the only people my age left in the US that doesn't down a cup or two a day.  But even I must say, if you are going to do coffee, mixing it up with a bunch of butter and sugar helps it go down smoothly :)

Amaretto Almond Deliciousness

Because I wanted to.  No other reason.

Almond flavored cake with almond flavored liquor laced between the 3 layers and in the sweet frosting.  Next time I will try adding almonds in to the cake itself for a more texture.  Absolutely divine!

Adi's birthday

My husband's 30th birthday was this past weekend.  I baked a cake - of course!  This is the first time I've ever tried using fondant.  In fact, I made my own marshmallow fondant because I refused to pay the price of the pre-made stuff at stores.  I've actually never tasted any fondant before, so I have nothing to compare it to, though I've heard people generally don't like it.

My first attempt at making it failed miserably.  I had tried using my stand mixer, the whole 2 lb bag of powdered sugar, and although I followed the recipe and directions to a T my fondant was hard and dry and crumbly like feta cheese.  My second attempt I decided to kneed by hand and slowly work in the powdered sugar until I felt that if I added any more it would be too dry.  I only used about 3/4 of the bag and it turned out great!  After adding in some almond extract for taste, my marshmallow fondant tasted great too!

I had originally planned on covering the whole cake in the fondant, but I was short on time and didn't need to add an extra worry to how the cake would turn out.  So I just stuck with the decorations in fondant.

The cake itself is a 4 layer chocolate cake with alternating layers of amaretto ganache and simple cream filling.  Though I was a bit short on ganache to cover the cake it tasted divine.  Nom nom!

Birthday cake

After moving to St. Louis over 6 months ago, I finally had my first chance to make a birthday cake for a friend.  In Colorado this was always my "job", but my friends here are all into baking, so the task only rarely comes my way.

I didn't have much time to complete the cake, so I opted to try a modified version of a boxed cake.  Thanks to the Cake Doctor, I now have some wonderfully easy recipes to choose from!  This one was a white cake with millions of mini chocolate chips throughout.  I think this would make a great cake for a kid's birthday party.

Yes, the candles are massive.