Bridal Shower Cupcakes

Pictured below are the cupcakes I wound up doing for a Bridal Shower earlier this year. Vanilla/Almond cupcakes with an almond buttercream icing and marshmallow fondant on top. I used a black royal icing for piping the "K"s on top of each and fondant for small flower accents on some of the cupcakes.

Chocolate-Mint Cupcakes

I've always loved the combination of chocolate and mint. Don't get me wrong, chocolate and peppermint is nice at the holidays and all... but good ol' mint is a great match for chocolate at any time of year. Maybe I got hooked on the flavor combination at my grandmother's house - she always had those Andes mint chocolates around. Anyhow, the point of my mentioning the love I feel for pairing chocolate and mint was so it might act as a segue into the cupcake I'm featuring below.

Chocolate Cupcakes with Mint Buttercream Icing






These cupcakes were popular enough at the office that I made another batch - this time with varying sizes of cupcake. (That way even those who were watching their diet could enjoy one - or two - of the smaller sized cupcakes!)

Mini-Cakes

I love the idea of single-serving cakes. I was commissioned to do cupcakes for a bridal shower and thought to myself, "Oh! This seems like suck a great opportunity to do mini-cakes!"

In all honesty, it wasn't the best opportunity - namely due to time constraints. (I found out about the bridal shower the week of and I had no time to really get to doing the cupcakes until the night before the shower.) But, I did do some "mock-up" mini-cakes!

Each mini-cake is two layers of vanilla cake, separated by buttercream icing, and finally covered in pink fondant.

Sushi Cake

For Boss' Day this year I somehow found myself making a Sushi Cake. (Thankfully no one wanted eel filling or salmon flavored cake.)

The actual cake consisted one layer of Vanilla Butter Cake and one layer of Dark Chocolate (for both tiers). I used a chocolate mousse filling with a buttercream icing beneath the marshmallow fondant.

The sushi on top of the cake is made of fondant. I hand formed them based on some of my favorites (and yes, I used white jimmies as rice!).

(Apologies for the quality of the photos - camera phone pictures have gotten better over as technology has improved but camera phone + fluorescent office lighting = not the best picture ever.)

An Introduction

After laborious online searches I've come to the conclusion that there are hardly any baking blogs out there. *pause* Wait, no, the opposite of that. There are probably far too many baking blogs in existence. But, for our purposes, let's pretend that isn't the case.

I hope this blog will help me to network, exchange ideas, share my creations, and receive feedback from the rest of the baking (online) world. I have no professional training - nor do I pretend to be perfect. Rather, I love to make people happy and at a very early age I realized that baking was a means to do that. Over the years I've learned as I've been asked to make different things by those who know me. Eventually, people started hiring me to bake for them. (Which combines two of my favorite activities - baking and not losing money.)