Holiday Party

This weekend my BF and I headed down to Chesapeake, VA to see his cousin's Christmas light display (I kind of refer to his cousin as the Clark Griswold of Chesapeake, VA - see video I posted ;-). We also went down to attend his and his wife's holiday party. I decided to contribute some sweets since you really can never have enough during the holidays.



So for the party I made a cake and some cake pops. This was my second attempt at Bakerella's cake pop creation. Flavors: red velvet, chocolate and chocolate peppermint. As for decor, I stuck to basic sprinkles. They took forever to make but I was happy with the result overall - much better than before.
For the cake I had this really cute basic winter wonderland idea in my head. But it did not execute as nice as I wanted. I brought all my materials to their house and assembled and decorated there, but I still felt out of my element I guess. Not to mention I had a huge gaping hole in the fondant and had to patch it up. It was so frustrating. I just wanted to pay tribute to his cousin's Christmas lights and winter. This is what I ended up with.... not my fave cake, but it was presentable. Most important: the cake tasted good and was moist ;-) Flavors were: vanilla almond cake with vanilla SMBC and chocolate ganache as well as red velvet with cream cheese frosting. Hope everyone is having a happy holiday season... can't believe how fast the month is flying by!

Holidays are in full effect

Well it's December 1st, and the holidays are in full effect. Hanukkah starts today and only 25 more days until Christmas! I have yet to shop for anyone (sorry guys! lol). As my grad classes are winding down for the semester I decided to make some cupcakes for one of my classes that is ending today (any excuse to try a new recipe creation).

I decided to make cran-orange cupcakes. I made some last year, which were pretty good. But I wanted to tweak the recipe a bit. For the cake, I made a yellow cupcake batter and added fresh orange zest. Then I cooked the cranberries first with water and sugar (like you would cranberry sauce) but left them whole and drained the excess juice when cooled. The cranberries are then folded gently into the batter. For the frosting, I'm hooked on the SMBC (swiss meringue buttercream)! The cream cheese frosting I did last year was good, but can be so sweet with an already sweet cupcake. So I did a white chocolate SMBC. To top it all off they are garnished with sugared cranberries and a fondant holly leaf.

Very happy with my result this year. Hopefully my classmates will enjoy them too :) Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays

It's not Christmas without a baking. I pulled a Sandra Dee today and made semi-homemade brownie cupcakes. I don't like to use mixes too much anymore, but I grew up on them and I have a weakness for box mix brownies! I made the cake-like recipe, chopped up some Hershey's candy cane kisses, put them in liners, then made homemade white chocolate peppermint swirled frosting. I'm quite impressed :-)

HAPPY HOLIDAYS 2009

Holiday Cupcakes

My dad ordered two dozen cupcakes for his work party. He said any flavor, so I decided on red velvet w/ vanilla bean cream cheese frosting and the Irish stout cupcakes (same ones I made last week). They turned out so cute when I topped them with the homemade fondant holiday decor I made.

Ready for delivery!!