oreo cupcakes

This past week, Bakerella posted a blog about these cookies and cream cupcakes she made and they looked fantastic!  They each had an oreo inside a chocolate cupcake and hers had buttercream frosting.  I started making these irresistable cupcakes and you put one oreo cookie in the bottom of a cupcake liner and then pour the batter over it and as it cooks, the oreo floats to the top!

For the frosting, i didn't want to use just a regular buttercream and i remembered seeing a recipe using marshmallow fluff so on Cakecentral i found a peanut butter marshmallow buttercream.  The frosting was sooo good it was hard to stop eating it, and the peanut butter was not overpowering at all, it had just the right amount of sweetness.
This recipe is a keeper!!

(Bruna, that is the towel your mom made for us under the cupcake, we use it for everything!!)

First German Chocolate cake

Tonight my mom and i had our final class of the course 1 Wilton decorating class and i chose to bake a german chocolate cake.  All of the decorating on the cake we learned in this class.  The cake came out really good in the end but i must have used 3 lbs of shortening and butter just to find a good chocolate buttercream recipe that would pipe well.  In the end i just went with the Wilton chocolate buttercream.  Then i piped about 50 of those drop flowers on parchment paper to let them air dry so i could just put them on the cake during class, but when it came time to do that i decided to toss them and re-do them.  I also learned during class that LESS IS MORE!! At first, i couldn't stop putting things on my cake because i wanted to see how it looked.  I started piping white leaves but then quickly realized that wasn't going to work.  Our instructor kept saying that sometimes you've just gotta stand back and look at the whole cake.  I also had fun with edible glitter as you can see the shiny roses!!  Glitter makes everything better! 

My mom found this key lime cake recipe that looked pretty good so she chose to make that for the class
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When we got back from our class my mom and i couldn't wait to cut our cakes to taste them.  The key lime cake was extremely moist and it tasted more like lemon but im definately keeping that recipe.  Then we tried my german chocolate cake and it was really good too!!  I feel like i need to run 5 miles now, but fortunately they will go with my dad to work tomorrow.

cake pops!

I made my first cake pops about two months ago when i started seeing them at starbucks and some of my teammates told me i needed to learn how to make them.  They are the easiest things you can make and they taste sooooo good!! i just got the Cake Pops book by Bakerella and there are so many cute things to do with these little pops. 

Yummy coconut cake!!

last night i had the itch to bake a cake.  I didn't know what kind but we had just bought some new 8 inch round cake pans and they had to be put to use immediately!!  I randomly came up with a coconut cake, and having never made a coconut cake before i wasn't sure if it would need coconut milk or condensed milk or whatever.  So we went to the store before finding a good coconut cake recipe so we picked up vanilla pudding, coconut soy milk, (i could not find coconut milk so that was the next best thing, it was actually pretty good) and coconut.  That should cover everything on whatever recipe i find.  Bingo!! i found a recipe that had all of the ingredients we had bought, it also had vanilla yogurt which we also had!  The batter tasted sooo good it was hard to put it all in the the new cake pans and not save some for me.  Well the cakes looked great out of the oven.  Then I found a good recipe for the frosting and the cakes wouldn't cool fast enough for me to put it all together...sigh...The recipe for the frosting had egg yolks that i beat up for it seemed like 10 minutes, then i poured yummy hot coconut milk, sugar mixture over the raw egg yolks and mixed that for a while too.  The frosting turned out very good considering the fact that i had never made it before.  Finally, it was time for my favorite part-- putting it all together!!! yay!
There were 2 8 in x3in cakes and i used the wilton cake leveler to cut each cake in half so i could torte them.  The cake ended up being like a foot tall, okay maybe like 5 inches but it was the tallest cake i have made and it was sooo moist and coconutyyyy.  This cake recipe is definately a keeper.