Cake Pops!

I made my FIRST 'official' cake pops!

I've never caught on to the secrets of how to make 'smooooooth' cake pops until I tried a handy little trick I learned from HomemakerChic. 

Before, all my little cake balls looked sad and deformed as I would roll them in chocolate with a spoon.

Now.. I bought some handy little sticks at WalMart in the Wilton section, and made them into little cake POPS!

I followed the easy steps from HomemakerChic's blog, and found myself with some cute little yellow cake pops. They were supposed to be little bumble bees... But the chocolate was running too quickly out of my piping bag to get the black stripes look cute and 'bumbly'. So I have for you.. Yellow cake pops with black stripes! I'll go for that!

I got tired of rolling out little balls.. So I just went with a variety of sizes since it was just for fun and no particular theme.

Dip the sticks in chocolate before putting them in the cake so that the chocolate forms a sort of glue. Who woulda thought that was such a brilliant idea to keep the cake from sliding down the stick!

My first one was a little.... Yeah... I had to be fast on my feet to get the stripes to resemble something cute.

I hope I have inspired you to go make a cute batch of cake pops now!

Thanks for reading!

CheeseCake & FortuneCookies!

My cute friend, Charity, asked me if I'd help her out and make a cheesecake for her boyfriends birthday last Wednesday. Of course I said yes, and then proceeded to become even more excited about it when she said she wanted to make fortune cookies for him as well! 

I made fortune cookies a long time ago when I was asking boys out to dances with my friend in high school, but I don't remember anything about how we made them. I just know that they weren't so cute, and we ended up going to the little Chinese restaurant in town to buy pre made ones.

Charity came over to help me make them, and they were super fun! The only down side to them, was that we burned the holy mackerals out of our fingertips!

All the YouTube videos I watched had people with fancy gloves on. We didn't have them, so we just had to suck it up and tough it out.

While we were making the fortune cookies, and inbetween each 5 minute baking times for 2 cookies, Charity had the lovely idea of cutting the oreo cheesecake into hearts.
I thought it was a clever idea. :)

While I was making the cheesecake the night before.. We had a sad, sad thing happen..

Our KitchenAid decided to leave us after 20 years of hard and faithful work for my mom and I.

On the bright side, we do still have our fancy new Bosch to do the hard work for us when we're too lazy to pull our the mixing bowls and spoons... Like I had to in order to finish the cheesecake...

Still.. I know what I'm going to start saving money for.. For Mother's Day and Birthdays coming up ;)

Thank you, to Charity! For asking me to help her out and make something!
I would love to make more cool things for other people as well. Just give me a message or a call and I'm on it!

Thanks for reading, Again!
Until Next Time!

4 Tiered Fondant Cake: 18th Bday!

First of all... Happy 18th birthday to my sweet sister Kallie, and happy 13th birthday to my cute brother Brody! They had a pretty awesome day yesterday, as they do every July 6th together. Cute little birthday buddies!

So anyways, as you all know.. I've been trying new and different things with CAKE. So when I seen a cake from The Shaky Baker, I just HAD to make it in orange for my sister. She's been in choir for 7 years, and she's played the piano for even longer. I knew the music symbols and the piano design were perfect for her!

So I started out with my favorite cake recipe from scratch, and made 8 cake batters... Yes.. You read correctly.. EIGHT. I had no idea baking big cakes was going to be soooo much cake! But it was worth it!

My first bottom layer came out looking like this...

I almost cried.. But then I let my other 3 layers sit in the pan to cool for a little longer before I popped them out, and they looked just fine. But on the next set of 4 layers, I was sure to put more Cake Release in my pans.. Just in case ;)

I made 4 batches of fondant for this mega cake too. I used a new recipe.. and it was FABULOUS! I found it from Veena's Art of Cakes. My best discovery yet with fondant making. The two white ones I made were perfect. But when I made the two orange ones, and the one black, they were a bit sticky while I was forming them in a ball to sit over night in the fridge. I had a little trouble rolling them out though. I'm not sure exactly what I was doing wrong.. they might have been too dry. But I got cracks and tears in my fondant once I put it on the cake. 

I know it was my first time though, so I was a little forgiving. Practice makes perfect, right? So I'm going to keep practicing, and hopefully I'll be able to figure out where I went wrong. 

I made little goat poops for the pearls around the cake.. lol we have a baby goat.. So when I started rolling the black fondant in little balls.. OBVIOUSLY someone was going to make that connection. 

My sad attempt at free drawing a treble clef. 

Happy Birthday Kallie Bug. You're the best sister there is. Love ya!

Thanks for reading, if there's any suggestions anybody has on fondant making.. PLEASE let me know :) I love advice!

Until next time!

Princess Sugar Cookies

Saturday, my place of working was evacuated because of a gas leak in the street. What better what better way to spend my time than to go to Michael's?????

I couldn't resist the temptation!

First thing I did when I walked through the door was make my way over to the Wilton products. And these little jewels caught my eye. [Amongst many other things...]

Adorable little princess cookie cutters! Now, I'm not one to stock up on cookie cutters.. My mom has a drawer full of them that I go to when in need of sugar cookies. But I couldn't NOT buy these. They were just too cute. And they are soooo me.. high heels.. tiaras.. princess castle.. Yep, I was done for as soon as I saw them.

So I came home and planned on making some more sugar cookies to practice the Royal flood icing method.

Aren't they just so cute?

My little helper had these counted, but I don't remember how many we had.

After my cookies were cooling, I made up a batch of Royal icing. :)

~2 lbs. of Powdered Sugar

~1/3 cup + 1 TBS of Meringue Powder

~3/4 cup warm water

[I added about 1 1/2 TBS of Almond Extract for taste.]

Black, Pink, Blue, White!

They were pretty fun to decorate, and I'm excited for new decorations! 

Hopefully you'll see my next adventure this weekend... It's gonna be a big one!

Thanks for reading!