Quick, dirty and delicious

So for whatever reason, all possible cake-related events have smooshed themselves into a period of only a couple of weeks. My former room-mates birthday was a few days ago, my boss' birthday is today, another friend's birthday is on Monday(which is also Valentine's Day.)

I made these cupcakes over the weekend and froze them until today, and after class today I quickly frosted them so I can bring them into the costume shop tomorrow. These babies are chocolate mud-cake with strawberry buttercream, except for the middle white one which is the same vanilla buttercream from every other cupcake I've ever made.  I'm pretty pleased with the pretty-to-time ratio, but am looking forward to my anti-Valentine's bleeding heart cupcakes this weekend, which I hope to be able to invest more time and effort into.
 
Oh, and please excuse my ridiculous comforter in the background.  So I love parrots, big deal!

Touchdown!

I made these in celebration of tonight's big tv celebration. You know, the puppy bowl?

White almond sour cream cake and mud cake with buttercream frosting and dark and white chocolate accents.

Cupcake Carnage

So we thought maybe we had it figured out: an easy, inexpensive, foolproof method for mailing cupcakes. We froze them and hot-glued the papers down into the box. Clearly not.  Just in case you were wondering, they looked like this in their past life:

Serious business here

Sewing Club starts up again tomorrow, and we're making pajama pants. Well, starting to make them anyway. My assistant is really focused on getting our kids to be able to read a commercial pattern (I'd much rather they learn how things go together so that they don't need to rely on often poorly-written confusing blueprints and so they can move on to making their own patterns someday) but I guess it is a fairly useful skill, even if it's boring to teach. In light of that tomorrow they're going to start making elastic-waist pj pants from a Simplicity pattern, which shouldn't be too hard.

Anyway, my delightful babies sometimes have difficulty with follow-through, so anyone who wants to do this project is going to need to sign a contract. Thus the seriousness. Here's what I drew up:

I _____________________________ want to make my own pair of pajama pants.

  I promise that in order to make these super cool pajamas…

                1.I will participate in all lessons about pattern reading

                2.I will faithfully attend all meetings (unless I need to miss one for an approved reason) until I    

                finish this project.

I also understand that pajamas are not a quick project, and will take at least six weeks to finish.

___________________________________________                      ___________________

Signature                                                                                                       Date

...and yes, six weeks is an ABSURDLY long time and if it takes that long I will be rather surprised but I want to err on the side of caution here.

Skills... I'm [slowly] getting them

This weekend I made my first buttercream roses, with a lot of help from youtube. (You wouldn't believe the sheer quantity of people who've made videos on the subject) As usually happens with things I learn that way it was a lot harder than it looks, but I'm getting there. How those grocery store people do it so uniformly on so many cakes is beyond me though...

More Cupcakey-goodness

These cupcakes were another break-project, pretty much directly lifted from the Hello Cupcake book, but with better cake/frosting. (I love the ideas but don't love canned frosting: ick!) The butterflies were made by piping chocolate melts onto parchment paper (which was really tricky in my freezing cold house: they hardened almost immediately and didn't give me much time to work) and then I propped them up on broken hershey bar pieces onto the cupcakes.

The cake was German chocolate (from a mix, I'm ashamed to say) filled with peanut butter filling (modified from a recipe off Better Homes and Gardens: peanut butter, butter, vanilla and powdered sugar) and the frosting was home-made cream cheese, piped from a Wilton 1m tip. The butterflies weren't exactly perfect but I was still really happy: and they tasted incredible.

 

New Hobby

So for christmas I got one of these ridiculous doll cake pans from my brother, which revived in me the long held desire to be able to make pretty cakes. (As a little girl on two occasions I told my dad when I grew up I wanted to be the lady who decorates cakes at Shop&Save)  As it turns out, I haven't tackled the doll yet, but I've made a lot of cupcakes and am slowly progressing as a decorator.

Anyway, these are the cakes I made up for my mom's  Knit All Day celebration:  little sheep and balls of yarn with pocky-and-cheerio needles.  The cupcakes themselves were swiss chocolate with almond-butter filling, and the frosting was buttercream with a bit of almond-extract substituted for vanilla.  I thought they were pretty delicious, and the knitting ladies seemed to be very impressed.