raspberries and lemons

the other day i started to make a cake for a very special little girl. i am not done her cake yet but i will show you pic's when it is finished. she is getting baptized and i am so excited to make this cake for her as our gift to her on her special day.

so, making her cake inspired me to make a quadruple batch of batter so i unfortunately has some left over.... YA RIGHT!!! the cake is a white cake so it was easy for me to add freshly grated lemon zest, and whip up some raspberry buttercream icing. once i was finished with that i made some lemon curd from the box because i didn't have 6 lemons on hand at home and i did not want to go to the store.

my boy decided early in the morning he wanted to have a lemonade stand and i told him that i would make him some cuppies to sell along with his lemonade. he did really well and ended up making $19.50. so i had enough left over from the cake batter to also do up 2 dozen of these lemon raspberry cuppies.

after madly finishing the cupcakes, i started on the cake. it was four layers high, three layers of lemon curd and covered with raspberry icing. it was one of the of the best cakes i have ever made. so good i could have eaten it without the icing and that is usually my favorite part!!

butter and sugar

there is something amazing about butter and sugar. when you put them together, they always make wonderful things. i know they are not good in the quantity that i eat these two food groups in (yes i know they are not a food group), but they always make something warm and delicious.

i love how my house smells when i bake. i love the feeling of being able to make something that people enjoy. i love watching my kids eyes light up when they see the Gert (remember, that's my mixer's name) come out, or a beater being released from the mixer. i love watching them try and lick of every part of their sticky little fingers and i am sure if they could, their head would be in the bowl... i know mine you. right now would be a great time too because i don't have any hair to get dirty in it!

this afternoon after church i decided i needed to make a treat. so after investigating a few options i decided to make whoopie pie's. have you ever had them? they are so easy and SO good. i made some plain vanilla with vanilla icing, vanilla with raspberry buttercream, and sprinkled ones for the kids with the two different fillings. i tried quite a few to make sure they were ok to eat... they were!!

some cuppies!

i really want to be able to have more posts on this blog than my other blog, but i am sadly catching up quickly with the other.... wish i had more energy for cakes. but i am happy that i was able to crank out a few cuppies this time!! it felt so good to do something creative again. not so good to clean up the mess which is still pretty much a mess... i'll do what i can. my babe will eat the left over and probably lick the counter clean so i think i am covered.

i wanted to do something fun for my hubby's work so i made some gold themed cakes this time. i thought they turned out ok. i love how i always learn something(s) when i am doing this, like next time my flag poles will have to somehow be stronger. or the flag be lighter. all i know is when i went to bed there were 6 erect flags, and when i woke up this morning there were three, and two of them broke after i took some pic's. whatever... there are better things to worry about.

this time i tried a swiss something buttercream (freakin' chemo brain!!). it is not as sweet as the other buttercream i make, but ken thought it was really good. not my fave because it wasn't sweet enough, but it is b.e.a.u.-tiful to work with. i am excited to try it a bit more often.

so i decorated them with gold tee's, flag poles, golf balls and that little circle thing is supposed to represent an argyle print of a golf shirt... didn't really turn out how i had planned but i have a better idea for next time as to what i will do!

my birthday cake!

i had a few people offer to make my birthday cake. it was so sweet! but i honestly needed to do it. i had a few cakes that i was supposed to do before i found out we had cancer, my girlfriend's baby shower cake... it was going to be so cute, and my boys 7th! birthday cake. but i was not in the head space to do it. so, before i start chemo, i wanted to do to my cake.

i wanted it to be bright and girly. i think it turned out that way! i loved it!! it was three layers of vanilla/oreo cake filled with oreo buttercream and a vanilla custard. the best part of it was making it with my mom and dad even got his hand in there.

cake

i am making a birthday cake for me!!! i am so excited... you'll have to see what i come up with. but i just wanted to let you know that despite all that is going on, i still have the cake bug!

do you like nuts??

the request for the cake at one of the office's in town this month was a butter pecan cake. i hope it turned out ok. i thought i burned the pecans, and then i burnt one of the cake. i asked Ken to taste it and he spit it out on the floor and then laughed and said it was really good. SIGH of relief. i didn't want to be starting it all over again at 10pm! it was three layers high and had a butter pecan frosting. you most certainly do not want to encounter this cake with a nut allergy of any kind! i thought it was pretty good though... as i did sample the cake tops and some icing! you know me. :)

wanna play?

i was asked to to a toy story cake for a girlfriend of mine. he little man turned 5!!! she was a life saver as she had a plan as to what she wanted AND.... AND, this is the best part, she was supplying the figures for the cake! don't get me wrong, i love to make things and such, but such detailed characters would have been very expensive and would have taken FOREVER. so i used the figures.

i loved how it turned out! it was one of my faves to do. :)

it's been a while again.... excuses, excuses

ok. well i have been busily updating my other blog, and i wanted to update my favorite blog of the two i do. this one make me really happy. so at the end of Februaryi did a cake for one of the sweetest teenagers i know. she is actually only 3 3/4's as she was born on a leap year. seriously, i love her and her smile if infectious. she was having a "chocolate" party. so to keep with the theme of it, she wanted a chocolate cake. so i did a dense chocolate cake, with white chocolate cream filling and it was covered in a crusted chocolate icing. i, like you already know, don't LOVE chocolate cake, but i think i would have like this one. so here is it!!

my WORST nightmare

my worst nightmare is making a spelling mistake on a cake and ending up on cake wrecks. i hopefully won't get that far with this one. the entire time i was making this cake i kept double checking to make sure that i was spelling everything correctly.... i just noticed now, that i did not. might want to do that in the future if you are make a cake WITH WORDS ON IT!!! what a.... dork. here it is without further need for more of an intro:
seriously.

new beginning's cake

yesterday and ALL of today i was working on a cake. it is for a group of girls at our church called young women. their program tonight was an inspirational way to start off the new year and set goals for themselves of things to achieve both short and long term. i made a cake for these wonderful, beautiful and sweet girls. once i was one of them, but i am sure i wasn't so sweet! ;) i love them and i love their potential.

my idea for the cake was to take their values and put them onto the cake:

faith

divine nature

individual worth

knowledge

choice and accountability

good works

integrity AND

virtue

while making the cake it made me think of being a young woman again.... what i was like then and who i became. anyways, enough sappy stuff, i am not usually like this. maybe it's because i am running on 4.5 hours of sleep and i sniffed up enough "AmeriaMist" color from my air brushed that I am sure I will have black lung by the morning... literally, the inside of my nose is black and I WENT OUT LIKE THAT!! luckily i am already married because i know i am way past help. my hubby is a great man.

wow, enough blabber. so last night my goal was to get the icing onto the cake and get them smoothed, stacked and ready to go. just when i thought i was going to be done, i put the top tier on crooked and had to fix it and then it made a HUGE mess. i did swear. and then i got it together and kept going, until 2:30AM when i finally got things somewhat back to how it had looked before this -

i know i shouldn't swear, but at that time of day... i am just glad that i didn't punch it!!!

so today i worked on cutting out letters and spraying them so i could finish decorating the cake. it did not turn out at all how i had planned, but i ran out of time (like always) and barely got the cake to the church on time (lol, i'm so funny).

but really, i was there minutes before they finished, and i was still an hour late. so here is the final product, i am very glad that i kept all the million hearts that i cut out for v-day or i would have been up the proverbial creek.

overall i think it turned out just fine.

valentine's day fun

for the month of february, i think i have been baking almost every day. i still have two more cakes to finish before the end of the week and i am really tired, but still excited to finish them up. i LOVE to decorate, just incake.... um, ya, tired.... just in case you didn't know. i have them both baked and one half iced so i am almost to my favorite part!!! but before you get to see them (they aren't even done yet so you can't because i don't completely know what they are going to look like yet) i will show you what i came up with for the rest of this month.





some for birthdays...










some for school....







and some for my sweeties to decorate! they really did a good job and had a lot of fun. i just love these little stinkers!

hope your valentine's day was a hoot!

gingerbread is not just a good cookie!

i made this cake for an office for Christmas. it was a gingerbread cake with beer in it! i don't drink so i felt pretty stupid going into the store and asking where the beer even was. but i found it. it was a dark something-or-other, in with a purple label. it had a hint of chocolate behind it, so i was told. so i snapped it up and came home. i was so proud of myself because i actually kind of created the recipe for it so i was really excited. (all i really did was combine 2 recipes and make one that i thought would be good, but i am still calling it my very own! well i did modify it and make it mine.) the ginger in it was actual chunks of crystallized ginger and that was the highlight... it was delish!

cute carrots

i love carrots. i love carrot cake. for this cake i decided that i would leave the icing carrots on the back burner and do some little fondant carrots. they were really easy and fun and they turned out pretty cute!

the next series of pictures on my computer after the carrot cake was me in a bikini! LOL.... really LOL. i am 40 lbs overweight, due to eating fondant carrots instead of real carrots (and a few other cake products...) and it was really funny to see that picture. luckily i didn't post that one or you all would have barfed. i will maybe post an after picture one of these years. in the mean time i better put those "before" pictures in a vault!

nothing to do with cake

i have had a few people bug me for the fact that i like to have a clean house. i can't thrive or think very well if it is not organized or appears to be tidy. this brings me to the point that when i am caking i get very stressed out because it is a disaster - yes - disaster!!! so here is a pic to prove it. i actually had to stop and laugh because i totally ran out of counter space and my littlest one started putting stuff all over the floor. i couldn't even think of what i had to do next until i found a small space and went from there.

i am almost ready...

i know i have been away FOREVER! but we moved and we don't have internet except for what we can sponge off of the wireless of some unsuspecting soul, thus making my blogging time impossible. but i promise, i am coming back to it soon and i have some fun new stuff to put up on here. see you soon!!!