birthday

How to Make a Letterboard Cake

August 8, 2018

I have to give the credit for this cake to one of my Instagram followers. While I am not sure it was her intention was to make her own letterboard cake, a string of messages sparked this cute idea!

This letterboard cake would be perfect for an announcement, birthday, or any other special event. Since I am sort of out of announcements, I just made it for the heck of it!

But seriously, how cute would this be for a gender reveal!? Why didn’t I think of this sooner?

Tools and Recipes

All you need for the cake is one batch of your favorite cake recipe or cake mix baked in a square baking dish. If you want to make this a two-tier cake, double up your cake and use some of your extra buttercream to fill the center.

Here are some cake recipes you may like:

My favorite vanilla cupcake recipe
An easy one bowl chocolate cupcake recipe
Red velvet cupcake recipe that doesn’t contain any unnatural food coloring
Or, if you want to go the boxed cake mix route, here are some tips to make it taste amazing!

You will also need one batch of buttercream, although I had enough buttercream left over to frost a few cupcakes.

Aside from the cake, you will also need the following:

Food coloring in brown and black (or whatever color you want your letterboard to be)
Fondant
Letter fondant cutters
Cake leveler
Piping bag
#10 round piping tip
Offset spatula

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How to Make It

I will say, this was one of the easier cakes I have made. The most time-consuming part was cutting out the individual letters, but that wasn’t very difficult.

The trick to this cake is just to pipe straight lines. Which is why you see me change directions of piping a few rows in. I noticed that the lines got thinner towards the end of the line. After a while it seemed like they sloped up. Going back and forth seemed to straighten out the lines.

Other than that little tip, there is really nothing else you need to know to make this cake!

Funfetti Sugar Cookies

September 19, 2016

Guys! It’s been so long since I have written a blog post! Anything posted in the last 3 weeks was written before we left for Germany. Honestly, the break was nice. Especially last week, when I took a legitimate break and didn’t post anything. But the timing couldn’t have been better because work was crazy and I had so many extracurricular activities. I would have had a break down if I had made myself post anything.

But now I am back and so excited to share this funfetti sugar cookie recipe with you!

This past weekend I spent pretty much every free minute in the kitchen making cookies for a friend who’s company is turning 1! Very exciting, right? Her company, SkillPop, hosts pop-up classes for adults on any number of subjects from personal finances to water coloring. I am actually teaching a cookie decorating SkillPop class this week!

But instead of just making any old sugar cookie, I decided to make funfetti sugar cookies. Because to me, a it isn’t a birthday without funfetti!

The recipe is essentially my sugar cookie recipe with sprinkles added. I also added lemon zest to the dough and lemon juice to the icing to really make the flavor pop.

While I did end up covering these cookies with icing, they little bits of sprinkles still made an appearance. They are like a little fun surprise when you bite into the cookie.

PIN NOW, MAKE LATER

[amd-yrecipe-recipe:77]

Miniature Funfetti Cake

March 21, 2016

Funfetti-Cake-6title

So, today is my birthday. No need to make a big fuss about it, I sure haven’t. Something about turning another year older that isn’t as appealing as it was at 25. All anyone needs to know is that I am 29. They don’t need to know how many times I have turned 29.

To mark the occasion, I thought I would make a little something for myself. In college, whenever one of our roommates had a birthday we would make them a funfetti cake. Even though it’s been a while since college, I thought I would attempt to make a funfetti cake from scratch. I definitely don’t have anything against the boxed cake mix (see Friday’s post)- we went through plenty of those in college – but I wanted to try something a little different this time around. Mainly so I could control exactly how much “fun” was going in the funfetti.

Funfetti Cake-1

I started with a simple white cake batter, then folded in a ton (about a cup) of rainbow sprinkles. I wanted this cake to be loaded with sprinkles. It’s not every day you turn 29 (for the third time).

Since I was making this cake for myself (which my husband thought was a bit pathetic until he remembered that I love to bake, so baking a cake for myself it the ultimate treat), and I certainly don’t need a WHOLE cake I decided to make a little mini cake, instead. To do this, I baked the cake batter in a rectangular pan, then cut out 4″ circles with my biggest round cookie cutter.

Funfetti Cake-2

After leveling the little round pieces of cake so that they were all 1″ high, I stacked them just like any other layer cake, with a generous layer of buttercream in between. I gave the little cake a good crumb coat, let it chill, then slathered on another layer of buttercream. Fortunately, this buttercream did not need to be perfect because my plan was to cover then entire thing with even more rainbow sprinkles.

Funfetti Cake-4

I very carefully and expertly placed each rainbow sprinkle on the buttercream so that it was evenly coated. Psych! I basically dumped my entire container of sprinkles over the cake and hoped that some would stick. Whatever didn’t stick, I just pressed into the cake, haphazardly, with my hand.

And now I have my very own personal funfetti cake! Just the right amount of cake for me. This could feed 2 to 4 people, but of course I ate the whole thing myself (over the course of a couple days – for breakfast, lunch, and dinner). Hell, it’s my birthday! If I want to eat a whole cake, I will! At least it’s just a miniature cake, right?

Funfetti Cake-8

[amd-yrecipe-recipe:9]

Golf Cake

September 18, 2015

This is a follow-up to the Cookies n’ Cream Cake post from a couple days ago. The mini cake was to photograph in all it’s cookie n’ cream glory. But this is really the cake I made for my husband’s birthday. He is an avid golfer, so I thought this would be a lot of fun for him!

Plus, I can honestly say that it was much easier than I originally thought!

I made another half recipe of the cream cheese icing for this decorating. I split the icing batch into thirds and split it among 3 bowls. One bowl I tinted with brown gel food coloring. One bowl I tinted to a light shade of green. The last was tinted a darker shade of green and stiffened with a 1/4 cup more powdered sugar.

I started with a cake that had already been crumb coated and chilled. I then spread the brown icing around the sides of the cake with an off-set spatula. Then I spread the light green icing across the top. I wasn’t too concerned with it looking perfect. Most of the top will get covered in darker green icing.

The darker green icing was spooned into a piping bag fitted with a #223 piping tip to create the blades of grass. I did find that when the icing got warm, it didn’t create the sharp threads that I was after, so I stuck the piping bag in the freezer for a few minutes to stiffen up.

I then just piped little strands of green icing all around the edges of the cake, leaving a opening in the middle in the shape of a putting green (which can be whatever shape you like). With the extra brown icing, I tinted it black and then piped a small circle on one side of the green. I made a little flag using a wooden stick (normally used for kabobs) and stuck it in the center of the ‘hole’.

Fortunately we have golf balls all around our house, so I found the cleanest one. Cleaned it some more. And stuck it on the cake as well.

My husband was so impressed with his cake. He immediately put it on the ground and tried to tee off from it.

It doesn’t matter how old they turn, boys will be boys….

Check out the recipe for the cake and icing here!

Cookies n’ Cream Cake

September 16, 2015

What do you make the man that doesn’t really like sweets or desserts of any kind? That is the problem I face every year for my husband’s birthday. I would LOVE to bake him something, but he could really care less about baked goods of any kind His one (or two) exceptions are Oreos and Cookies n’ Cream ice cream.

A couple years ago I made him Cookies n’ Cream ice cream cupcakes to bring his love of cookies n’ cream ice cream to a cake (with a lot less hassle). And since I didn’t want to have to fuss with trying to make a whole ice cream cake, I decided to work the cookies n’ cream flavor into the icing.

This icing is freaking amazing. It is a cross between a cream cheese and a butter cream. So it is a little bit more rich and tangy than a normal buttercream, but didn’t have an overwhelming cream cheese flavor. It was the perfect vehicle for the cookie crumbs. And the creaminess of the icing pairs perfectly with the chocolate cake.

{FYI – the pictures are of the little mini cake I made for the blog. His full cake was decorated like a putting green, which will be on a later post. The recipe posted below is for a full cake.)

I topped each cake layer with a generous amount of the cookies n’ cream icing. Once the top layer was placed on top, I lightly iced the whole cake in plain icing, then popped it back in the fridge to chill. After 30 minutes or so, I covered the rest of the cake in the cookies n’ cream icing.

For a little added crunch and texture, I patted even more crushed cookies around the base of the cake.

And a few more to the top.

This was a wonderfully decadent cake that was equally rich and creamy. The cookies n’ cream icing substituted perfectly for the ice cream so much that my husband didn’t even miss his ice cream cake.

Chocolate cake recipe is adapted from How to Cake It, which is an amazing blog and YouTube channel you have to check out if you like cake decorating!

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Cookie Dough Cake

September 12, 2014

My husband turned the big 3-0 this past week. And we couldn’t let the occasion pass without a little celebration and a cake! Since my husband isn’t a huge fan of cake, but does love a good bowl of ice cream, I decided to merge once of his favorite ice cream flavors with a cake, resulting in cookie dough cake!

Now, I do not make cake often, so I relied heavily on some experts for the cake and icing recipe. The cake is a vanilla pound cake, a recipe that I got when I took a cake decorating class last year at Johnson Wales. The icing recipe was adapted from a Martha Stewart butter cream recipe. I pared down the recipe by about a third, then replaced some of the granulated sugar with brown sugar so that it had more of a cookie dough flavor.

But the real icing on the cake, so to speak was the bits of cookie dough. I took my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, left out the egg, and added a touch of milk instead. I then piped little dollops of cookie dough between each layer, pressing down the top layer to flatten them out a bit.

Once all the layers were stacked, I lightly frosted the top and sides of the cake to make a crumb coat, sealing in all the crumbs.

Clearly my frosting skills need some work. Fortunately, there was an easy solution to the problem: covering the cake in chocolate chips! I started by sprinkling them on the top then pressed them into the sides.

Because I had some of that cookie dough left over, I just pipped a bit more dots of dough around the edge. I might have also just eaten it straight from the bowl.

My husband and I both shared a slice right away, eager to dig in. While definitely on the super sweet side, the little bites of cookie dough were a delightful surprise!

It was a great way to usher my husband into the next generation. Unfortunately for him, he will be there alone. What he doesn’t quite understand is that once I turned 29, I just stopped aging. Sure, I may celebrate the anniversary of my birthday, but I will be 29 at least until I have a child that turns 29. I’m pretty sure that’s a law of physics…or something….

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Cookies and Cream Ice Cream Cupcakes

September 9, 2013

Friday was B’s birthday, which I missed since I was in San Diego. I felt obligated to try and make it up to him. I had big plans to take him to all his favorite places in Charlotte on Saturday when I got back. That didn’t happen either. I was exhausted from my overnight flight back that I pretty much slept all day. Which meant that Sunday I had to do something extra special. While, B doesn’t normally like sweets, he does love cookies and cream ice cream and ice cream cake. We do not need an entire ice cream cake sitting in our freezer, so I scaled it down and made little ice cream cupcakes!

I used Trader Joes vanilla cake mix that my cousin raved about this past week. And she was not kidding! It is the best cake mix I have ever tried. For this recipe, I added some crushed up Oreos, so that the batter was also “cookies and cream”.

Since I wanted to leave plenty of room for ice cream, I only filled the muffin tin about half way up. I only made half of the cake mix, and ended up with 12 cupcakes. If I had made the entire box, I probably would have had 24.

Once the cupcakes were baked and cooled, I froze them and then let the ice cream sit out to soften. It is a lot easier to top the cupcakes with soft ice cream than hard. But it also means I had to work quickly so that the ice cream didn’t melt everywhere. I put the cupcakes back in the freezer for about an hour so that the ice cream could harden back up.

While a little messy if left out too long, these were the perfect portion of ice cream cake and would be a great dessert to make for a kids birthday party or any old get together. Plus, you could mix up the ice cream and cake flavors and really get crazy with it!

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