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!