Spice Cake and Roses

My grandmother and her husband came into town this weekend, and my mom had us over for dinner so I offered to make a quick cake. I had lots of leftover icing from class this week and my brother's birthday cake earlier in the week. I went with a spice cake from Rose's Heavenly Cakes because I'd made it before and knew it was pretty simple. I decided I wanted to practice doing roses since I hadn't done them in a while. I managed to throw the cake together including decorations in two hours! The cake didn't cool fully, but since we were cutting into it soon anyway it wasn't a big deal. It ended up being very moist. My husband said it was one of his favorites, and my mom requested I make it with a cream cheese frosting for my step-dad's 50th birthday.

Chocolate Birthday Cake

I seem to be unable to get my blog posts done right after I finish the cake. This one I made on Sunday (after getting up early to do a short triathlon in the morning) for my brother Daniel's birthday on Monday. His requirements for the cake was no flowers and some sort of American buttercream icing. So, I made this Chocolate Buttermilk Layer Cake with chocolate buttercream and did a simple swirl pattern that I saw online.

Mother's Day Cookies

This weekend I put my cookie class to use by making a Mother's Day cookie bouquet. This is probably one of the most creative projects I've done. I got lots of ideas online, but I was really surprised at how well the whole thing came together. I had planned to make the cookies Friday evening, but all I was able to get done was making the dough and rolling it out. Then it had to cool in the fridge so I got up early Saturday morning to cut out and bake the cookies before going for a bike ride with Daniel. I used the recipe from All in One Bakeshop which was great because the cookies didn't spread at all and still looked like the cookie cutters. I had some issues with the dough breaking when I put the sticks in, but I just added a little dough to patch it. It all got covered by icing later.



My friend Adriana came over after lunch and helped make all of the royal icing and flood icing. That part takes quite a bit of time so we only had an hour or so to decorate before she had to leave, but that was enough time to get some cookies decorated. It was a lot of fun having company for the decorating. I think next time it would be nice to have several people here to decorate cookies.



I ended up staying up fairly late to finish decorating the rest of the cookies. It's almost therapeutic though because it's something completely different from what I normally do. I put the cookies in a ceramic flower pot and put fake flowers around the outside of the pot. I even put plastic wrap on it mainly to keep the cats from messing with it Saturday night, but I also thought it made it look very professional.

Carrot Cake

This week I decided that I would make dessert for Sunday night and then take the rest to work on Monday. So, I made one of Daniel's favorite types of cake - carrot cake. I made the Classic Carrot Cake from Rose's Heavenly Cakes, but I modified the frosting a little to make it sweater and thicker. The cake itself was very moist and delicious. Daniel loved it, but with my frosting it was so rich that neither of us could finish the pieces.