Mother's Day Cupcakes

Is it weird to write two posts in one day?

Meh.

I don't care... I'm doing it anyway.

So as you all know-Mother's Day was yesterday. I hope you all spoiled your Mother's.

I LOVE my Mom. She's my best friend. And you know, she's a pretty special lady. Just putting that out there!

I decided to take a break from HUGE cakes (see previous post) and make little mini's. Cupcakes that is. I wanted to try something new, cute and fun, as far as decorating goes.
I didn't try a new cake recipe though (sad face), but the chocolate cake I make is pretty dang good, and I've yet to screw it up (knock on wood) PLUS my Mom loves chocolate.... so, yeah I had to do it.

The frosting though, that was new. Espresso butter cream.

I just used my basic vanilla butter cream recipe and added some finely ground espresso coffee from Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn New York.

Let me just interject here-and say their coffee kicks ass, literally. It's strong, but SO damn good. Love it. If you're looking for a good early morning pick-me-up, look no further.
If you have not tried it, shame on you! Get online immediately and purchase a bag, or two.... You won't regret it. Promise.

Here I'll even give you the link.

http://gorillacoffee.com/

See I'm nice. I save you time.

My Mom loves pink. She's your typical girly-girl. Likes shoes, shopping, jewelry, manicures, pedicures, you know, stuff like that. However she's not afraid of snakes, or getting dirty and she loves to go camping. She's pretty cool if you ask me!

So because of her love of pink I decided to decorate the cupcakes with pink and brown accents.  I embossed a "swirly" design onto the fondant that I topped the cupcakes with. I also made little flowers for each cupcake. Cute huh?

Oh, I also made a few super tiny, itty bitty, mini cupcakes too. See. 

Some were also decorated with sugar pearls. Pink ones!

I packaged the cupcakes in these cute little boxes I found, and put my little note cards with them. 

My cute little Mom, opening up her cupcakes!

Cute!

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY MOM!

Toy Story

HAPPY 3rd BIRTHDAY JACKSON!!!

I made a cake for a friend of mine, Erin who's son, Jackson is 3 today. Jackson is very into Toy Story, and she was having a toy story theme party for him so we thought a cake of the same theme would be great!

I did a 4 layer vanilla cake with blue, green and purple sprinkles inside, and then vanilla butter-cream with the same color sprinkles mixed right in.

I decided to make it look like Andy's bed from the movie. I purchased an edible cake topper (since I lack the equipment to make one myself-some day I'll be cool enough) and placed that on top of a "quilt" made of home-made (slightly almond flavored) fondant. I then made a headboard out of brown fondant.

The cake was HUGE. The tallest cake I've ever made, and I swear weighed 100 pounds. Ok. Maybe not 100 pounds.... but it was quite heavy.

It's one of my favorite cakes. It's very simple, but very cool.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again, there is just something all warm and fuzzy about making a cake for a child. Just knowing where it's going, makes it that much more special to create.
No matter what it is.
I must confess, I happen to find this one quite fun though-I don't know what kid wouldn't like this!

Enjoy.

And some pictures my friend took for me. 

Jackson blowing out his candles, such a cute little kiddo!

Four layers of vanilla cake and vanilla butter cream makes for one LARGE cake!

Firsts

This cake had a lot of firsts for me.

It was the first time making fondant from scratch on my own.
First time making and using royal icing.
I created a new recipe. Peanut butter & Chocolate--THE ultimate combination.
It was also my first time using a letter stamp (used to stamp the name right into the fondant).

That's four firsts. Hmmm. This was also a 4-person cake.
The party was a combined celebration for four different people. So naturally this cake had to have four different sides, right?

I just have to say making fondant from scratch was awesome and fun! It turned out great, with one exception... I think I added a little too much powdered sugar, thus it was a little dry and cracked. Glad I learned on family though. They don't care. Next time less sugar.
It was really tasty too. Much better than the store-bought stuff.

I didn't have as much fun with the royal icing though. The consistency wasn't right, and I couldn't get it there. I don't know why. I need to do some more research and hopefully next time it will turn out better.

The Peanut Butter and Chocolate cake was incredibly good. Like melt-in-your-mouth good.
It was a chocolate cake; very moist and fluffy. Then there was the frosting. Oh dear, the frosting. It didn't just have a "hint" of peanut butter it WAS peanut butter... with a few other (secret) ingredients. But wasn't overpowering. You could taste the chocolate and peanut butter separately, but of course, they went together very well... as everyone knows it's the ultimate combination!

The letter stamp was fun. Although with the dry, cracking fondant it didn't look as nice as I pictured. But I know that with softer fondant it will look good. I know this because I borrowed the idea from Le Cupcake. It is this amazing blog/bakery in Australia. My friend and I came across it one day while surfing the Internet. I am OBSESSED with her work. Her stamping is (obviously) much cleaner than mine, her colors are vibrant, her work is very clean, the figures (especially the cows) are incredible, and all of her ideas are just gorgeous! I can't get enough!
Too bad she's in Australia (or maybe not, I've been wanting to go there since I was 10) I could just pick her brain for hours and hours!
Check out her kick-ass blog here: http://lecupcake.blogspot.com

So the four-person cake was for, who else? My family. Seems I've been doing a lot of that lately, but I don't mind (neither do they-can you say free cake?) because I get to practice on them, and try new things.

To be honest, I am not overly excited about the way this cake turned out. I did have fun making it though, and it tasted amazing. I AM proud of that.
I know it could have looked better though. Although seeing how a lot of these things I had never tried before makes me feel better about it. It's the perfectionist in me.
See for yourself.

This side was my favorite. I found the design in a magazine, it was an advertisement for jewelry. I did it with royal icing. 

Here's a picture of the ad. 

The only boy on a cake full of girls. I tried to do something more modern and artistic. 

Royal icing flowers. 

Yes, that says Moriah. And no, it's not spelled wrong. I think it's neat. The sugar pearl idea also came from Le Cupcake. 

Square cut-outs filled with silver sugar pearls, and a candle for each person.