Beer Mug Cake

The 21st birthday cake I made for my brother!! It was super easy! Just baked a 9x13 cake and rounded the top edges a little!

Miami Heat Cake

This cake was made for my nephew's 13th birthday party. He requested a Lebron James jersey from the Miami Heat. I created the cake using a cookie sheet as my baking pan. I made 2 cakes using the cookie sheet and filled the chocolate cakes with an oreo filling. I cut out the neckline of the cake and then covered it in white frondant. I have to give my husband credit for creating a template of the letters and number for me which I then cut out of red fondant. I traced the edges of the letters using a black edible marker. My husband also created the NBA logo found in the upper left hand corner of the jersey. He took a white piece of fondant and drew it freehand using the edible markers. I think the birthday boy was quite pleased.
Bake on!
Michele

Aargh, Matey!

This pirate cake was created for my nephew's 5th birthday party. I used 2 eight inch cakes layered with filling to create the pirate's face. I covered the whole thing in a flesh tone fondant and then added the accessory pieces. What a success!

Bake on!

Michele

Underwater Cupcakes

Made these for a cute little boy's first birthday party!!

Sorry for the crappy picture. Almost forgot to take one altogether. Snapped it last second as I was running out the door to deliver them. But they are little crabs, turtles, fish, starfish, and shark fins. The crabs were definitely my favorite. If only you could see the little pinchers in the picture. Overall though, I thought they turned out pretty cute!!

Happy 30th Birthday Brian

This cake was made for my friend Katie's fiance, Brian. Brian turned 30 this year so he needed a cool cake. My first instinct was to make him a round cake with the Wild logo on it- Minnesota's professional hockey team. Katie had arranged a surprise party for Brian. Let me start over, the party itself wasn't a surprise, but taking a limo to the Wild game with 11 of his closest friends instead of having a party at their home was. After a long debate, I decided that I didn't want to risk him putting 2 and 2 together and figure out that we were going to the Wild game. So, my next thought was to make him a Coors Light cake as this is his beer of choice and he loves his beer. I was fully dedicated to making him this cake until the night before I was going to start baking, when I decided that it was too big of a project to tackle without Jess here to help. So, my husband and I came up with a third option, a duck hunting cake. Duck hunting is one of Brian's favorite things to do. Perfect! I had an idea. Now to execute. Katie and Brian told me that they had recently had a red velvet cake with white chocolate filling and cream cheese frosting. So, this was my mission. I turned to Yes, Divas Can Cook for a recipe for a red velvet cake. I will admit that it took me all of my 28 years before I tasted red velvet cake. I know. I know. You can gasp here. What makes it challenging then is to know whether you have a good recipe on your hands. I made this recipe into cupcakes and had Jess taste test them for me prior to making this cake. She said that they were moist but that it didn't seem as chocolaty has her Mom's recipe. So, I took this recipe and added one more tablespoon of cocoa powder. It turned out beautifully though the extra tablespoon of cocoa did dull the bright red color a bit.


2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp white distilled vinegar
2 tsp vanilla
2-3oz red food coloring
1/2 cup prepared hot plain coffee



1. In a large bowl mix together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cocoa powder. Whisk until combined. Set aside.

2. In a separate large bowl, mix the sugar and oil together.

3. Add in eggs, buttermilk, vanilla and red food coloring. Stir until combined.

4. Next add coffee and vinegar. Stir until combined.
5. Pour the flour mixture into the sugar mixture a little at a time, beating until well combined.

6. Pour the batter into two greased and floured 9-inch round cake pans. Bake 30-40 minutes at 325 degrees or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

7. Allow the cakes to cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes. Then remove them from the pan and allow them to finish cooling on a wire rack.

I should let you know that I did end up using 3oz of red food coloring. I'm sorry to say that I don't have a picture of the inside of the cake. While it wasn't bright, bright red, it ended up having a solid red color. I was pleased. Now to tackle the filling.

I have never used white chocolate as a filling so I again had to search for a recipe. I ended up finding this recipe for white chocolate frosting. This filling/frosting had such a good rich vanilla chocolaty flavor. It tasted sooooo good. Somewhere along the way, my execution failed however. I'm convinced that the error occurred when the eggs were beating. I'm not sure if a bit of yolk was mixed or what the deal was, but those babies would not whip up. I should have stopped right then and there. I know better than that. For some insane reason I went ahead with the recipe and then ended up with a runny filling. I will likely try to one again, making sure that the egg whites are fluffy before I continue. :)



1 cup sweetened condensed milk
8 Tbsp unsalted butter
8oz white chocolate chips
3 large egg yolks
1 cup confectioners sugar

Hahaha. Okay well at least I can laugh about it now. I was supposed to use egg yolks NOT the whites. Oooops. No wonder it didn't work.


Continuing on...

To make the frosting, heat the sweetened condensed milk, butter and chocolate chips in a saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the chocolate chips melt. Remove from heat and let cool.

In a mixing bowl, beat together the egg yolks and confectioners' sugar with an electric mixer until fluffy.

Add the chocolate mixture and mix until thick.

I spread this between the two 9X13 sheets of red velvet. Then I covered the whole cake with cream cheese frosting. Yum. There were some hiccups along the way, but all in all I think my first red velvet cake turn out pretty well.

Now for the fondant...
So, this the part where my husband became quite involved and boy was I thankful. Not only did he make 2-3 runs to the local grocery store when I ran out of ingredients during the project (do to the frosting failure) but he took the time to create the silhouette scene with me. Him and Brian often go duck hunting together, along with our dog, Jack. This scene perfectly depicts that. Justin was so proud. Together we looked up ducking hunting decals online. He helped me (more like insisted that I) place the ducks in the right position for landing which is when a hunter would shoot at them as shown in the scene. Likely the average person wouldn't have notice this and maybe not even a hunter, but it was so cute seeing him get all involved in one of my projects. So we printed out a bunch of decal images. Justin cut them all out for me and then we taped them together to create the scene. Not to shabby, huh? I laid the paper cut-out on my fondant and went about the tedious task of cut out the silhouette. It all turned out perfectly except my paper stuck a bit to the fondant in a few spots and pulled a bit up when I removed it. It upset a perfectionist like me, but I took a few deep breaths and moved on. For the background, I had covered the cake in white fondant. Then I took a bottle of orange and yellow Wilton Color Mist and created the sunrise scene. I dipped my fingers into a few drips of red food coloring to add a few touches of a deeper color here and there. The few ducks up the top right corner of the cake were drawn by yours truly using a black edible marker.

Brian was utterly surprised when I showed him the cake. Everyone at the party was amazed. I think some even Twittered about it. Ahhh, feels so good. Another sweet success.

Bake on!
-M

M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E

This Mickey Mouse cake was made for my nephew Luke's 2nd birthday. Luke is a big fan of Mickey. He is also a big fan of Buzz Lightyear so I'm just glad my sister went with the Mickey theme for his birthday. I can't imagine putting together a Buzz cake. Don't' get me wrong. I would've accepted that challenge.

My husband and I just got home from his birthday party. Oh it was so much fun. I just have to say that I went in full spirit with my Minnie Mouse shirt on. Luke saw his cake got the cutest little smile on his face and kept saying over and over, "Mickey cake!" while gave Mickey a little pat on the cheek. Thank goodness fondant can maintain the integrity of the cake. I wish I had a picture of him and his cake. I'm sure my sister does. Too darn cute. I asked his older brother Rhett what he wanted for his birthday thinking that he might have changed his mind, but he hasn't. He still wants a repeat of his last birthday cake... a Nemo cake which can be seen in an earlier blog post. Of course at the end of the night I turned to my sister and brother-in-law and asked what the theme is for their next son, Owen's birthday who will turn 1 in June. I just love those three little boys.

I'm so sad to say that I didn't have Jess helping me on this project. I really missed not baking and assembling with her. I really could have used her help. In the end the project turned out quite well. Someone even told my sister at the party that I should start selling them. At that time my sister informed her that I (we) do!

To make the Mickey cake I made one 10 inch cake and two 6 inch cakes. I cheated just a little and made the ears from 2 boxes of vanilla cake mixes and store bought frosting. The 10 inch cake was homemade. I used the chocolate cake recipe from the chocolate cake with PB frosting that Jess blogged about in an earlier post. This chocolate cake is so moist and delicious. The only problem is that it is so moist and delicate that it can be challenging for a novice to assemble a layer cake using this recipe. For the filling on all of the cakes I made whipped ganache and to it I added finely crushed mint oreos. I covered the chocolate cake with a really delicious chocolate frosting. I will blog about the frosting in an upcoming post. It sure was a find!

Everyone loved the taste! I got many compliments on the great moistness of the chocolate cake. While people could tell that the filling was mint they couldn't quite put their finger on what it was. The combination of the mint oreos and the whipped ganache made a really yummy filling. It certainly helped jazz up the plain boring boxed vanilla cakes.

Another Sweet Escape success.

Bake on!

-M

Race Car Birthday Cake

This is the cake we made for a co-workers son's sixth birthday! He enjoys playing with his hot wheels cars and told his mom he wanted a car themed cake! His main criteria was "no girly colors!" I think we were successful on meeting that criteria!

It is a ten inch yellow cake with our super yummy oreo filling!! For the cake we used the Bakerella recipe for Moist Yellow Cake but made just a few minor changes. The previous times that we baked this cake it was a little dry and didn't have the buttery flavor we were imagining it would. So this time we cut out a half cup of flour and doubled the amount of butter flavoring extract. Definitely glad we made both of these changes!! The end result was so much better!!

Underneath the fondant decorations is a layer of the oh-so-good cream cheese frosting. Thought it would be a good compliment to the oreo filling being that is also cream cheese based.

I absolutely love the checkered border around the bottom of the cake!! It definitely takes the race car theme to a whole new level! We wanted to do a couple checkered flags but figured that would be way to tedious with the itty bitty little squares. So we did it on a bigger scale!! And I think I like it better this way anyways!! The black and white really makes the green, orange, and blue colors pop!

And now for the decorations!! Here is a close up picture of just the fun accessories!

Once again, all of the decorations are made out of marshmallow fondant! Love, love the steering wheel happy birthday sign! A fun little way to tie in the race care theme once again! The race cars were based off of a tutorial we found on Cake Journal. They ended up being super easy to make! And the stripes, lightening bolts, and sixes made them even cuter! Funny how minor little additions can add so much!

Now just to wait and hear what little Brayden's reaction was to the cake!!

Another Sweet Escape!
-Jess

Pirate Cake! Argh

This cake may just be our proudest Sweet Escape finished project to date! When we were done we both pretty much just stood there and smiled at it. Hard to believe that we created it! And especially since we have never even taken any sort of baking or cake class! A little trial and error has been our preferred method of learning so far!

The cake was a layered eight inch yellow cake with oreo cream cheese filling. Both recipes that we have previously used. Kind of nice finally having recipes that we know will produce good results! This way we don't have to stress so much about the actual cake and can spend more time having fun with the decorations!

Okay, so on to the fun part! The amazing decorations! Before starting the project we googled images of "pirate cakes" to get the creative juices flowing. We got inspiration from one of the cakes that had a treasure map around the sides of the cake. We covered with cake with a marbelized light brown marshmallow fondant. We weren't too concerned about getting the fondant completely smooth because we figured the imperfections would add to the character of an old, worn map.

Michele was the fondant girl for this project. She found a skeleton with cross bones image on the internet and used it as a stencil for the cake topper. She took it to the next step and cut out individual teeth for the little guy. Very good touch! To finish it off she made it look rustic by rubbing on a little black and yellow color around the edges. Here he is...


She then made a few other little trinkets for the cake. A compass and red "X"



Seeing Katrina's face when she picked up the cake made all of the hard work well worth it! This is probably my favorite part of the whole process!

The big test is whether or not the cake makes it to its destination in one piece. It has to travel in a jeep for over two hours. Sure hope we pass the test!

Truly A Sweet Escape,
-Jess

Princess Cupcakes

One of our coworkers was having a birthday party for her daughter and asked us to make some princess cupcakes. We also topped half of them with swords and shields for the little boys at the party. Figured they probably wouldn't get too excited about pink crowns and purple wands. All of the decorations were made out of marshmallow fondant. Embellishing the toppers with luster dust, sprinkles, and edible pearls made them so much cuter! It is amazing how something so simple can make such a difference!

Baseball Cupcakes

This past weekend my brother-in-law turned the big 3-0! Man is he getting old! :) When my sister told me she was hosting a party I hopped on the opportunity and offered to bake some cupcakes for the event! Perfect opportunity and excuse to try some new recipes and play around with fondant!

During the summer months softball pretty much consumes my brother-in-law's nights and weekends! This past summer he was forced to cut back, but previous summers he would play three or four nights a week and have tournaments every weekend. Only seemed fitting to make him baseball themed cupcakes! And by coincidence the Twins had a playoff game that night as well. (we won't discuss the outcome of that game though)

Another one of his absolute favorite things is Reese's peanut butter cups! Whenever these are around him consider them gone within moments. So to no surprise, when I asked my sister what flavors to make, her first response was "he loves chocolate cake." This immediately pulled the light bulb string for chocolate cake with peanut butter filling and dipped in ganache! Makes my mouth water just thinking of that combination!! I went on the hunt for "the best" chocolate cake recipe. I searched many blogs and was looking for the words "this is my go-to chocolate cake recipe." One of blogs swore by the Hershey's "Perfectly Chocolate" Chocolate Cake. Seemed logical for this to be a good choice being that it was from Hershey's. Well, didn't quit do the trick. First red flag was when the recipe told me to add one cup of boiling water and the batter was already like soup. Not knowing whether I should add it or not, I decided on going in the middle and adding half of the water. Definitely glad I didn't add all of it. The cupcakes were light and airy, but didn't rise to that nice classic cupcake dome. It ended up working out alright since I was cutting out the middle for the filling anyways, but it only means I have to continue the quest for a go-to chocolate cake! Dang, more chocolate batter and cupcakes to eat!

I also tried a new recipe for a yellow cake that I found on Bakerella's blog! Definitely one of my favorite blogs! I think the trick for this recipe was the creaming of the butter and sugar for seven minutes. I couldn't believe it when I read this. I think I usually cream mine for about a minute tops. By the time this seven minutes was up the butter was almost white and had more than doubled in size due to all of the air that was incorporated. I also loved that there were very few ingredients! Less chance to mess up the recipe! These cupcakes baked up very nicely and for now this will be the chosen yellow cake recipe!

As for the decorations I used marshmallow fondant! Starting to get the hang of working with this stuff! I wasn't able to find a home plate or baseball field cookie cutter so I ended up finding images online and making stencils. Worked well but was definitely a little more time consuming having to cut all of them out. In the beginning I wasn't very hopeful about how it would all turn out, but with a few genius ideas from Zach and many, many hours of time, I must say that I am dang proud of these!!

Butterfly Cupcakes!

A co-worker's daughter turned one this past weekend and she asked us to make some cupcakes for the pink and purple butterfly themed party. They turned out very cute and "girly."

She wanted common cupcake flavors being that there would be little kids at the party so we stuck with the traditional vanilla and chocolate cupcakes. For the frosting we wanted the sugary frosting that kids tend to like. We found a recipe online for the usual powdered sugar, butter, and milk frosting. And holy cow was this frosting good. Every time I walked past the bowl I couldn't help but to make a finger sweep. When Becky asked us to make the cupcakes I went on a quest to find pastry tips to create the large, fluffy swirl of frosting. I ended up ordering some online and absolutely love them! Personally I think it makes them look more professional :)

The butterflies and flowers were made out of marshmallow fondant. We are becoming pros at making this without creating a sticky disaster! For the flowers we got to use a new tool that I had just bought on e-bay! It is a set of flower plungers that come in four different sizes. These are pretty slick and easy to use! For the butterflies we used a cookie cutter that we found at Michael's. We dried the butterflies over the edge of an egg carton to create a slight fold and piped a thin line of frosting down the center to create the body.

When we saw Becky at work on Monday she said everyone loved them and they tasted delicious!! So glad they were a hit!!

THE NEMO CAKE!!!

Ahhhhh. The long anticipated Nemo cake!!! What a fun, yet challenging project. This is one of the first projects that Jess and I took on for an actual "customer". We made this cake for my nephew's 4th birthday party. I found my inspiration from a cake I had found online while "googling". My biggest inspiration came from my nephew and his love of the move "Finding Nemo". His birthday was this past July and I believe he started telling me about his Nemo birthday cake around January. He knew exactly what it needed to have. Some of his requests included: a diver, boat, propeller, net, Nemo, Marlin, Bloat, Dori, Squirt, the mask which has P. Sherman 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney on it.... you get the picture. He knew what he want and it was my quest not to let him down. While my original plan was to try to create the "Nemo" characters out of modelling chocolate, I soon discovered that this project was going to be big enough without trying to create the detailed characters on my own. For this part of the cake, I opted to go to Disney.com and purchase a set of figurines. My nephew loved that these figurines were his to keep once the party was over. He likes to create little imaginary fish tanks with all the characters...how cute! I was going to fondant both tiers of the cake, but honestly, fondant tastes gross and I started to run out of time. I opted to make a buttercream frosting dyed a nice sea blue. To create the coral and seaweed, Jess and I sculpted gum paste that we had purchased at our local Michaels.

The bottom tier of the cake is a white cake with a blueberry cream cheese filling. Oh, yeah...forgot to mention. My nephew also insisted that it be a blueberry cake. While I could have just told him that the blue frosting was blueberry, I chose to try to get these buggers Incorporated somehow.

Jess and I made just a basic cream cheese frosting and combined that with a blueberry puree that we had created. For the blueberry puree we combined blueberries with lemon juice, corn starch and a bit of corn syrup. It didn't have quite the consistency we were hoping for at this point so we whipped up some heaving whipping cream and added a bit of flour. Tada! We had found our filling! It was quite tasty!

Right Jess?!?!?!

For the second tier, we chose to go with a classic chocolate cake. Jess and I decided to get a little creative and come up with our own recipe. While we both LOVE chocolate!!!! we agreed that chocolate cake always seems to be lacking. We made it our mission to create a moist yet super chocolaty chocolate cake. We started with a basic vanilla cake recipe and adapted it to create a crazy good chocolate masterpiece. What we ended up doing was omitting some of the vanilla in the vanilla cake recipe and trading that for some melted Baker's semi-sweet chocolate. We ended up using 8oz or 8 squares of Bakers to the get the perfect chocolaty flavor that we were hoping for. We were sooooooooooooooo happy. It was a shining moment for us! We were so proud of our little chocolate creation. It was sooooo good! My mouth waters just thinking of it.

To fill the chocolate cakes, we made a whipped chocolate ganache with a raspberry filling. Take about heaven!! Yum-O! To make the ganache we heated semisweet chocolate on the double boiler till melted. In a separate saucepan , we heated heavy cream. Once this was ready, we whisked the two together and let it chill in the freezer for a few hours. Once we were ready for the ganache I put my kitchen aide to work and whipped the chocolate until it was stiff. In the meantime we prepared the raspberry filling. I started by boiling the raspberries with some lemon juice, water, sugar. I boiled this mixture for about 15 minutes and then strained the mixture with a fine sieve. I put the mixture back on the heat. I then dissolved about 5T of cornstarch into about 1/2 cup water. I mixed this in with the raspberries and boiled it for about 5 minutes more. Let me tell you... the kitchen was smelling pretty good by then.

Now that the cakes and fillings were all set. We had to work on the decor of the cake. We had a lot of fun doing this. We made the coral and seaweed out of gum paste. We simply dyed the gum paste and used our gum paste tool kit to shape it the way we wanted. We then let the pieces sit out to dry and harden.

Now all that was left to do was assembly. After making about 3 batches of buttercream, the cake was assembled and decorated. The figurines, coral and seaweed were put in their place. They stuck to the cake just perfectly with the buttercream frosting alone. I added some brown sugar around the bases to function as sand. It turned out better than I had hoped. I even think I met all of my nephew's criteria. The guests at the party loved it! I don't think my Mom could quite believe we put this all together. Job well done!

Guess what my nephew is requesting for his birthday next year...

a NEMO CAKE!!!

A Success and Failure

One of our co-workers has an annual house party and asked us to bake a cake for the event. Woohoo for our first order!! Her and her husband and four of their friends all turn fifty this year and she thought it would be fun and fitting to have a cake to celebrate the big milestone!

Michele and I started the process by baking the cakes on Wednesday. We decided on a two tier cake with the bottom tier being vanilla with oreo filling and the top tier being chocolate with reese's peanut butter cup buttercream filling.



Next came a thin layer of swiss meringue buttercream around both tiers. And then came the fun part. Our first attempt at covering a cake with marshmallow fondant. If that wasn't an experience. My advice, grease every bowl, spatula, and utensil used with crisco or else you will have one big sticky mess.
And finally the fun part... Decorating!! I found a set of cute halloween cookie cutters at Michael's that included a tombstone! Being that this was for a fiftieth birthday it was only fitting to put the names of the six people on tombstones! At least we thought this was pretty clever anyways.



Before stacking the cake, I put five wooden dowels into the bottom tier to support the top tier (at least I thought it would support it.) I put one dowel in the center and then formed a square with the remaining four dowels. I put a thin layer of frosting on the bottom tier and then stacked the top tier.

The top tier was decorated with black polka dots of various sizes. It kind of ended up looking like a mushroom, but I thought it was cute nonetheless.

And here is the finished product....


I was very happy with the finished product!! Especially for this being the "first" for many parts of this process. Then came the true test, traveling 45 minutes with the cake. And it turns out, I failed the test. Sure glad I got a picture of the cake before we left the house because it sure didn't look like this by the time I arrived at the party. Even though it no longer looked pretty, everyone said it tasted delicious! Guess it is time to take a cake class to learn the tricks of stacking a tiered cake. Sure hope we have better luck next time. Definitely frustrating to spend all of that time and then have it ruined in transit.