Woah!

The Kid went to a week long horse camp over spring break. AAAAAAaaaahhhhhHH!!!! Vacation for both of us.
Here is the cake that I made for her last day.

It had a black dog, a rabbit, and a pig running around the bottom of it. Those are some of the other animals she got to play with and take care of over the course of the week.

This was my first time working with marzipan, I used it to make the horse,and it worked out pretty well. One thing I did not expect was that the marzipan would be so oily. I did like the way the shapes held up, and did not sag the way I would expect my fondant to.

Like I told my friends, I was feeling kind of guilty since I did not make The Kid a cake for her birthday last year. But then I think on it, and realize that she gets no reason cakes all year long.

Trying New Things

So I've been experimenting with some new flavors, you've already seen the Guinness cupcakes. A magazine came out that has tons of flavors I've been wanting to try, including a chocolate peanut butter cup! Yummy!
I have not got that far yet, but I did try:

Orange creamsicle cupcakes.

These were for Lenae's son's birthday. I think they got the thumbs up from almost everyone, except for me and The Kid, but we're cake freaks purists, we both like plain white cake with no frosting.

And I had some leftover chocolate batter from these cupcakes.
So I tried out dark chocolate and orange cupcakes. I just added a hoop more bittersweet chocolate chunks and orange juice and zest to the batter, and used leftover orange creamsicle frosting.
Of course, since I'm an evil enabler, I took them to the gym for my workout partners to taste test.

They cursed me, but they ate them!

Also on the "To Do" list are these delicious sounding Butterbeer cupcakes from AmyBites. Cream soda and caramel...sounds like awesome!

Boys of Summer

I love baseball, I really do. I don't have a favorite team, I just like watching it played. I think it reminds me of when I was a kid, my brother played for many years, and one of my best friends was on the baseball team in high school.

I've said before that I really like making cakes for men. You can only make so many girly, frilly, children's cakes without going a little nuts. But then maybe that's just me.
**Sidenote: Had a discussion with Sgt. Awesome the other day while we were watching previews for movies. The words that actually came out of my mouth were "Maybe I'm a man because I would much rather see Hall Pass(which looks super dumb) than Sex in the City (which makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out)." So maybe I'm just predisposed to slightly less feminine themes? Who knows. Probably more than you ever wanted to know about me. Sidenote over**

Ok, so what does all this have to do with cake?
Well, I made a baseball themed cake for a man's birthday.

We had originally discussed just cupcakes with the Dodger's logo on each one, but I though that would make me crazy. I'm glad I came up with the pennant idea, it's something I've been meaning to make for Awesome's birthday for some years but he keeps getting the girly white chocolate cake.

I used my cake dying skillz to color the inside of the cake.

I also had to make a template to maximize the cuts in the cake so that I could get the longest pennant shape possible out of two 9X13 cakes. Math makes my head hurt.

Geburtstag!

None of my German friends has ever had me make them a cake before. I've taken cupcakes to my doctor once or twice, but I've discovered that the thing the Germans really love is Brownies. I don't think that they have anything like that here, so it's really a treat.

Anyway, my doctor has told me that American cakes are too sweet, I guess it's all the frosting.

Anyway, again, one of the teachers at The Kid's school wanted a birthday cake for her mother's 90th birthday. I was told...."She likes roses". That was all. Crap, my rose piping skills are pretty out of date, I don't think I've made a buttercream rose in over 3 years.

So I did the next best thing, I hid my cruddy piping skills with chocolate covered strawberries (another thing I don't think they make here!).

Ok, I guess they're not *THAT* bad.

Mustache March Madness!!

So, Mustache March is finally over, here is a link to the Wiki. The husband only lasted about two weeks with his lip weasel. It was causing too much distraction at his office, people kept giggling during meetings, not productive.

I started out with these mustache templates I found on The Inspired Bride.

I ended up having to cut them apart to account for the sticks. Here is a photo of a bunch of them piped out in chocolate.

A whole bunch of chocolate 'staches that have set up.

The finished product

The problem with the little sticks is that the 'staches kept twirling around, but overall a great success!

Happy Belated Birthday!

The Husband's big Four-Oh was on the 4th of this month. Unfortunately for him, he spent it in bed sick with Norovirus. I guess it's going around our area...Awesomesauce!
So, obviously no cake for him on his birthday.
The next week, he went on a trip, so no cake again.
I told him that the only way he was going to get a cake for his birthday was if I could bring it to him at his office. There was no way in processed grains and sugar hell I was going to have a big cake sitting on our dining room table for a week.
So I took it to the office last monday.
I swear, I don't mean to sound like I'm stereotyping, but taking a cake into an office filled with cops is like chumming the water on Shark Week! One person left the office with a slice of cake, and soon enough there was a line out the door!

Anyway, onto the cake.

This is a special cake I only make for him on his birthday. Not the most masculine cake ever to grace these pages, but it was fantastic!

Sgt. Awesome's White Chocolate Strawberry Shortcake, with white chocolate buttercream, fresh strawberries, and white chocolate dipped strawberries.
White chocolate is his favorite obviously. Luckily the strawberries have started to come in to the stores, and they are very nice for this time of the year.

Happy Birthday Mr. Awesome!

St. Patrick's Day

We started our day with some green eggs and milk! I think that she was somewhat nervous about trying these. It's just food coloring babe!
Here is Steve the Sock Monkey modeling one of the pins I gave out this year.
A fantastic pattern from another outstanding crafter and blogger, Betz White.
I only made one glittery & sparkly one, four guesses who got this one, I only have 4 friends after all....
If you answered Lenae, gold star for you! She was actually pouting because I was handing the pins out to my other 3 friends since I wouldn't be seeing them on St. Patrick's day. Yeah, I made her wait, evil laugh....MWAAAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!

Well, it didn't end there. It ended with St Patrick's Day (night)ZUMBA!!!
I actually bought a pair of green legwarmers, and then when I was cleaning my "closet" I found another pair! So, Teri got my extras.

Lenae and Me rockin' the green fishnets!

I also prepared some appropriate sweet treats for the evening.
Chocolate Guinness Cupcakes, with bittersweet chocolate ganache centers and white chocolate and Bailey's Irish Cream buttercream. I used the recipe I found on Confessions of a Tart! What kind of an awesome blog name is that?!?!?
I didn't use the whiskey in the ganache, and I had some white chocolate buttercream left over from The Husband's birthday cake, so I mixed my Bailey's right into that.
Who knew beer (stout) in cake would be so good?!?

OK, so I managed to work Crafts and Cakes into this post....

I'll round out this St. Patrick's Day post with my favorite Patrick on the CrossFit circut, Patrick Barber. Currently tied at #33 on the Crossfit Open Leaderboard.