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 :-)

Merry Christmas!

Every year I make homemade goodies to give as Christmas gifts. Previously, I have made an overabundance of cookies and candies. This year I decided to scale it down a bit and leave it to two. This year it is Snickerdoodle cookies and Bailey's Irish Cream truffles. The recipes came from a cooking message board that I frequent (Thanks katie102006!). Both turned out delicious, even though the truffles aren't as pretty as I thought they would be. The boxes I found with the candy stuff at Michael's and they turned out to be the perfect size :-)

Tinkerbell

This is one of the toughest cakes I have ever made. Mom was asked to make a cake for a very good friend's daughter. We had found the picture in a book and thought it looked easy enough. Looks can be deceiving. Due to some family issues, I had to make the cake. The base color of the cake is all airbrushed on and everything else is piped. The airbrushing was pretty rough because while wet, if touched even slightly, the color will come right off and leave a completely white spot. All in all, it turned out very cute.

Pre-Thanksgiving

For our office Thanksgiving, I wanted to take another shot at the cupcakes. This time I made devils food cupcakes (half of them with marshmallow fluff filling) with white icing and orange and yellow sprinkles. Because of time constraints, I bought the tubs of icing from the grocery store. I wasn't completely satisfied with the consistency of this icing, but it worked for what I needed it for. This time the swirl turned out much better! After a long day at work, baking was just what I needed to calm down and forget my frustrations.

Mmmmm...

I love cupcakes! Treasured Cakes' first paying customer wanted a half dozen pink cupcakes for a batchelorette party. Strawberry cupcakes with hot pink icing :-)

This was my first attempt at decorating cupcakes without just slapping the frosting on so it took a few tries. For the bride to be's cupcakes, I did white icing with a little veil. They all had pretty sparkles on them too!

Check out the Treasured Cakes website and blog!

Course 3 Graduation!

For the last class of course 3, we were to make a two-tiered wedding cake with 38 fondant roses, and 40 fondant leaves. While the roses are beautiful and not too difficult to make, they are VERY tedious and took Mom and I a total of 9 hours for us to each make our designated number of roses. While icing my cakes, I noticed that there was something wrong with the consistency of the buttercream icing. It wouldn't smooth over and it never hardened any like it's supposed to. Thirty minutes before time for me to leave for class, Mom suggested covering my cake in fondant when we got to class to make it look smooth. It worked! It really did end up looking like a wonderful wedding cake.