Crispy S'mores

Line your cooking sprayed baking dish with graham crackers, add a layer of mini marshmallows. Bake for a few minutes until marshmallows are puffed up and melty. Add mixture of rice crispies and melted chocolate. Smooth out on top of marshmallow layer and refrigerate until cold. Use a knife to cut and serve!

Chocolate Chip with an Oreo Surprise

Pinterest is my new best friend! I love some of these baking ideas! I cannot take credit for this idea as I found this in Pinterest, but this was an amazing idea.

Basically, you roll up an Oreo in between cookie dough and bake the cookies as typically required. Like with any cookie, I don't necessarily go by time but by appearance and color. Needless to say, I brought these to a family party and when my little cousins and my grandpa bit into it, they were pleasantly surprised!

Chocolate Banana Cupcake

My mother-in-law is really into fitness and so is her twin sister. So for their birthday I decided to go the "healthier" route (hehe) and fill their birthday desserts with some potassium. :)

I made a banana cupcake and debated on a peanut butter or chocolate frosting. I think these would be amazing with a peanut butter frosting but I decided to go with a classic chocolate. The bananas made this cupcake so moist and soft. I saved one banana from being smashed up in the batter and I sliced it up and made banana chips for a garnish. Banana chips are funny. They take a while so if you decide to make some be prepared to let them bake for a few hours. I however, didn't have hours so I cranked up my oven to 400 and let them bake for an hour. These weren't the best, but it still looked good :)

Note: find an actual banana chip recipe... My strategy was a hail Mary!

Mint Chip Cupcake

So my summer mission has been to create specialized cupcakes. Regular chocolate, vanilla etc... are just too typical, and if I'm ever going to get my own #foodnetwork show or at least become a contestant on #cupcakewars, then I need to develop more flavors. ;)

The first request I got was for a mint chocolate chip cupcake. I used a chocolate base cupcake with a splash of coffee. I filled each cupcake with a chocolate mint ganache and then topped it off with a mint frosting folded with chocolate shavings. I tipped each one off with a piece of chocolate; however, I would have preferred a mint leaf. The mint chip frosting tastes like ice cream cold! :)

Variation: top cupcake with mint ganache then add frosting. The min ganache was also delicious cold!

Halle J's Big Day

Halle J is one of my closest friend's baby girl. In fact I consider Halle a niece and her mom my sister. For her first birthday, her mama allowed me to design the cupcakes for miss Hal's big celebration. Heidi decided she wanted to have a cupcake themed party. What a great theme! Do you realize how many cupcake things there are for decorative purposes? Heidi had wooden cupcake centerpieces made that spelled out Halle's name; it was adorable! So for the cake...

Cupcakes are SO appropriate! However, a simple cupcake would just be too ordinary...so I decided that these cupcakes needed to be decorated with another cupcake to truly capture the theme.

The giant cupcake was made for the smash cake. I used a regular cupcake to top off that one, and for the regular cupcakes, I used mini peanut butter cups to mock the base of a mini cupcake. I used a variation of star tips to swirl the cupcakes tops and colored sprinkles to add a splash of fun!

Halle gave me the thumbs up after she dove into her birthday cake!

Happy Birthday Leslie

For my friend Leslie's birthday I wanted to design a cake that truly captured this woman. Leslie is so funny and she has a great sense of humor so I thought, what's a better way to capture Leslie, than creating a cake with Leslie actually pictured on it? I used basic food coloring and size variations of the round frosting tips to create the details. I used the 233 frosting tip to create her hair. I sketched out a photo I found on her Facebook to create this illustration.

Basic tip, I froze the cake that was frosted with a chocolate ganache before pipping.

Leslie got a kick out of this cake and it even made her profile pic on Facebook!

Zoe in Wonderland

My friend Theresa asked me to create the birthday cakes for her daughter Zoe's 1st birthday. The theme was Zoe in Wonderland, mimicked obviously after the Disney movie "Alice in Wonderland". If there is one word to describe my friend Theresa, it's creative. She had the cutest decorations splashed around the party site. From pictures of Zoe in paper red roses placed on the green hedges (to represent the Queens red rose bushes) to table arrangements full of the imaginative youth of little Alice, Theresa's precision truly captured the playful theme of this story.

Theresa sent me some pictures of ideas that she had for the cakes. Since it was a 1st birthday, a "smash cake" was requested, so what's a better cake than a giant cupcake? For the smash cake I used a giant cupcake mold (which I don't really recommend outside the use of a smash cake or a cake strictly used as decoration. Perhaps it's the oven I use, but the giant cupcakes tend to need more time for the middle to cook, therefore, the outsides get over cooked). For the giant cupcake I used a frosting tip 233 to create the image of the grassy hill in which Alice was placed upon. For the mini cupcakes I used mini vanilla wafers as a surface to pipe the small words "eat me" to mimic the little cakes Alice ate that makes her big and small, and I used a 13 tip to create a bed for the cookie. For the regular cupcakes I alternated a giant swirl of pink and purple frosting (to mimic the colors of the Cheshire cat) with a larger round tip. Theresa bought mini figurines of the major characters to decorate the table with as well as an Alice to top of the smash cake.

Zoe wasn't sure what to make of all the green frosting, but she sure looked adorable smashing it up!