Best.Chocolate.Cake.EVER!

For the birthday of one of my co-workers, I had promised her a chocolate cake. I had heard of this chocolate cake on one of the food message boards that I frequent and it had always gotten rave reviews, so I figured I would try it. The recipe is actually off of the back of the Hershey's Cocoa box and it's called Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate Cake. It was so unbelievably easy considering the cake and icing are made completely from scratch. In no time I had a perfectly moist and yummy chocolate cake!

I've Moved!

My blog is moving...

Check out the new blog at:

http://ashley884.wordpress.com

Sweet 16!

A customer of Treasured Cakes asked me to create a cake for her niece that was turning 16. She wanted this to be a very special cake, but very trendy. After showing her a few ideas we came up with the color scheme of black and hot pink. After that we decided on 2 tiers, stacked, with satin ribbon as a border on the bottom of the tiers. The bottom tier is chocolate cake and the top tier is red velvet cake. This would all be covered and decorated with my new Marshmallow Fondant recipe adapted into a chocolate version died black and pink. The fondant is easy to make, but not terribly easy to work with. With my wonderful mother's help, it came off as a success! What do you think?

Marshmallow Fondant

Since I discovered in my Wilton Cake Decorating class that fondant generally tastes bad, I decided to search on the world wide web for a better tasting fondant. I ended up finding a recipe for Marshmallow Fondant. With a total of 3 ingredients I figured it couldn't be too hard...right? Well, it didn't turn it out too bad. After the first batch I finally got the hang of it and even figured out the best way to color it. Best of all, it tastes great!

The ingredients...
Mini Marshmallows
Water
Powdered Sugar



What can go wrong?
Here is what the first batch turned out...



Overall consensus...I will be making this again and using it on my cakes :-)

Cheesecake!!!

The other day I was thinking that I hadn't made anything for fun in while. So I decided I wanted to try something I had never done before. My first thought was cheesecake. After checking out my cookbooks, I realized there's 10 different kinds of cheesecakes! My favorite though, is New York Style Cheesecake. Mmmmm...(drool...) Anyways, I thought I would give it a try and it turned out PERFECT!! No cracks and super creamy :-) New York Style Cheesecake is called this because of the way it's cooked. It's cooked at 500 degrees for 15 minutes and then at 200 degrees for an hour. That's the reason for the dark golden brown color on the top of the cheesecake. I even made my own crust! It's a shortbread crust that turned out pretty good too, but next time I will do a graham cracker crust.







P.S. these wonderful pictures were taken with my AWESOME new Canon S5 digital camera that was a Christmas gift from Blake and my dad :-)