Bingo!  I'm going to go ahead and throw modesty aside for a minute and say that today's cake, well, it rocks.  Not only does it look super cute (my 5 year old son said it looked like the cake was wearing a ruffly skirt) but when we dug in we found it to taste delicious too!

As much as I love chocolate, I typically shy away from chocolate cake.  It's a bit fussy and can turn out crumbly, dry, bland, you name it.  I know that I've been all about finding great "from scratch" recipes lately but I recently found this recipe for a doctored cake mix and decided to give it a try.  I was a bit skeptical but that started melting away as soon as I pulled the cake layers out of the oven.  They baked up so nice and even.  Plus, I totally made up for using a box mix by making homemade whipped chocolate ganache for the filling and homemade buttercream.







Stacked, filled and ready for crumb coat.

The crumb coat is so important when working with decorated cakes.  It really holds everything together nicely.

And here it is finished.  Cute, huh?  I rather like the sweet little ruffles. 

Next time I'll try it with some color.  Maybe ombre style.  Yep, definitely.

Valentine's Day is only two days away.  In the spirit of the holiday, I had to bust out the pink food coloring.  I just couldn't help myself.  I whipped up a batch of vanilla cupcakes (tinted half of the batter pink) and topped them off with pink vanilla bean buttercream (say that five times, fast!) roses.

I'm not expecting real flowers on Valentine's Day.  That's ok, though.  No, really...I rather prefer the edible kind. 

Happy Valentine's Day!

A couple of weeks ago, my brother asked me to make the cake for my niece's birthday party.  I immediately panicked.  I mean, it's one thing to make a cake for myself but a whole other thing to make one for someone else.  For their birthday.  Eep.  I almost said no but this is my brother and, equally importantly, my niece we're talking about. 

His request was for a white cake (the quest for the perfect recipe continues!) with not-too-sweet white and red frosting flowers.  I ordered the best red food coloring I could find (red is such a hard color to create in frosting), bought some bakery whipped cream frosting and baked up a vanilla cake based on a much raved vanilla cupcake recipe.  I didn't get a chance to make a test cake but I will keep my fingers crossed all the way to the party that it will be delicious!

Here's the end product...

It's sort of a hot mess.  Oops.  But, hopefully that can be overlooked. 

Happy birthday, Quinn!