Happy Easter!

I actually made these cupcakes for my family's Palm Sunday celebration, but since we wouldn't be seeing them on Easter, I decided they should be Easter cupcakes! :) I made 5 bunny toppers for all of the children in attendance (all blue ears because we've got all boys in our family!) as well as some decorated Easter eggs, flowers. The rest of the cupcakes were sprinkled with dark chocolate shavings...yummy no matter what topper you got!

These are fondant bunny toppers and decorated Easter egg toppers - hope you like!

Whether you're celebrating Easter or Passover this week, I hope you have a wonderful holiday!

Happy St. Patty's Day!!

Happy St. Patty's Day to you all! In the spirit of the holiday, I made Irish Car Bomb mini cupcakes last night - Guinness Stout cupcakes with Bailey's Irish Cream frosting!! I was going to make Jameson Irish whiskey chocolate ganache to put in the center, but 1) I'm not a huge whiskey fan and 2) I was getting tired! :)

Two yummy cupcakes!

I was reading Bakelab's blog post about Car Bomb Cake Balls (which also sound amazing!) and decided I wanted to make them in mini-cupcake form.  I researched a few different recipes and finally found the one I wanted to try - yes, it uses a cake mix, but seeing as how I'd be making these at 9pm after the kiddies went to bed and I ran out to the store for the ingredients, I was cool with that! :) 

So the final recipe I chose was from the Chew on That blog (click on the link to see the recipe) - this recipe includes the info on how to make the Jameson's Chocolate Ganache for the cupcake filling, which really does sound heavenly!!

The only change I might make to the recipe would be to add a liiiiiitle more Guinness to the batter - I'm not quite getting that little kick I was expecting...but the cake itself is moist, delicious and definitely not as sweet as a normal chocolate cupcake.  It's delicious with the Bailey's mixed into the frosting - I'm in LOVE with this new flavor!! :)

Here are some pics - they're not very "design-y", but they're delish!!!

Cute St. Patrick's Day Shamrock wrappers purchased at Michaels last night!

Moist and delicious!!

Let me know if you try to make these - I'd love to hear and see how yours come out! Happy Baking!

Mid-week Baby Shower!

These cupcakes were made for a mid-week office baby shower for one of my co-workers whose wife is expecting their 1st child in April - so exciting!! They don't know what the baby will be, so I incorporated all colors for these mini-treats!

Inspired by A Baked Creation's blog , I crafted these little fondant duckies last night in between "How I Met Your Mother" and "24"! They look a little scary all lined up, like a gang ready for a fight!! You think you're going to eat us!?!?! Ummm, yeah we did!  There are a few leftover cupcakes in my office now, begging to be eaten!

To go along with these, I also made little fondant baby cupcake toppers all snuggled up under blankets.

There's nothing like a office shower to break up the week! So much fun!

Elmo's World!

This Elmo cake and cupcakes were made for the 1st birthday of an adorable little boy named Frankie...I was told that when he saw the cake, he sang "La, la, la, la!" from Elmo's song, which I consider the best review ever!

The cake itself was white chocolate cake with cannoli cream filling and white chocolate buttercream frosting. Elmo himself was fully edible - the body was made of cake and cannoli cream filling and his head was made of rice krispy treat.  Even his eyes and nose were edible - marshmellows!

The cupcakes were a mix of chocolate & vanilla cake and frosting, topped with fondant circle cutouts with the number "1" on them depicting the birthday boy's age. Other cupcakes had Elmo faces on them!

A Story (or two) Behind this Cake!

I was asked to make a baby shower for a Children's Literature theme baby shower...they asked that I include The Cat in the Hat, Curious George, Peter Rabbit and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  I launched a Google image search for all those characters and thumbed through my twin boys book collection and was instantly transported back to my own childhood!! I took iconic images from each story as my inspiration and used those to come up with this cake.

Each main character was hand-sculpted out of fondant and each scene that they are placed in was handpainted onto the cake behind them...I really can't decide which one is my favorite! They were all fun to make!!

The top and bottom tiers of the cake were devils food cake with white chocolate mousse filling and white chocolate buttercream frosting.  The middle tier was yellow cake with chocolate ganache filling and frosting.
YUM!!!