Christina's 18th Birthday

For Christina's 18th birthday, we made a Strawberry Shortcake with cream cheese frosting. It was very delicious!! We also had some Strawberry Shortcake cupcakes to go with it that we made with the leftover batter.

What you've missed

Sorry we haven't posted in a while, it's been a busy past couple of months. Here's what we've made since the last post!

Emilie's Super Sweet Sixteen!!!

Nina and I knew we had to make a special cake for Emilie's 16th birthday so we got creative.

While Emilie thought we were ditching her, we were secretly plotting the best cake ever and I think we succeeded.

I present to you the Nutella Swirl Cake. It consists of Nutella marble cake with both vanilla and Nutella buttercream frostings!


To make, we used a box yellow cake and reserved about a cup of batter and mixed it with Nutella (enough to make it look like chocolate batter). We then poured it over the yellow batter in two round pans and swirled it through as with any other marble cake.

The Nutella buttercream recipe came from:

http://www.food.com/recipe/nutella-buttercream-frosting-313044

We also used a basic vanilla buttercream recipe using only butter, milk, vanilla and powdered sugar. Any other vanilla frosting could substitute.

After baking and cooling of the two cakes, we put the Nutella buttercream in the center and decorated the top using a star tip to make swirls. The result was the most delicious and sweet Nutella cake ever that also looked like a flower cake!

It was very sweet and delicious and Emilie was pleasantly surprised. Hopefully she forgave us. :)

Coming soon, Nutella cupcakes!

Happy Birthday Emilie!!!!!

Love,
Irma

Yummy V-Day treats!!

Hope everyone had a wonderful Valentine's Day!

I made these delicious cookies to get into the spirit using the recipe located here...

http://annies-eats.net/2010/02/08/red-velvet-whoopie-pies/

They were really fun and surprisingly easy to make. The only issue I ran into was that the batter was a little thick and hard to get into the piping bag. I think it was because I doubled the recipe but only had one bottle of red food coloring. I used that bottle and a half teaspoon of gel coloring instead and it didn't make much of a difference.

See you for St. Patrick's Day!

Love, Irma

Happy Valentine's Day!

We haven't posted in a while, but January was just so busy!! Last weekend, Emilie and Irma made a birthday cake for their cousin Cara. We thought we'd double the recipe to serve 24, but I guess the servings were huge because the recipe for 24 made a big cake, 24 cupcakes, and 6 mini heart cakes!! We've never used fondant before, but thought we'd try it out on our heart cakes. It looked so pretty!! The cake was a yummy chocolate cake with cookies & cream frosting made by mixing crushed Famous Amos into vanilla buttercream frosting. mmm!!

Gingerbread Cupcakes!

Semi-homemade gingerbread cupcakes (Recipe from Hello, Cupcake!) and Cream cheese frosting.

Chocolate "Junkbox" bark!

When our (Emilie & Christina)'s mom makes brownies, sometimes she'll put a bunch of random things, like peanuts, m&ms, and marshmallows in them and call them "junkbox brownies." Today, Christina was making chocolate covered pretzels when Emilie suggested to just mix in a bunch of the pretzels and peanuts Christna had out and spread it into a bark. So, we did just that... and it came out really good tasting! Here's our original recipe:

12 oz of chocolate chips (use dark or semi-sweet)

Mini pretzels

Peanuts

1 tbsp milk

Melt the chocolate in a ban over a double boiler. Add the milk and mix until melted. Crumple about 2-3 handfuls of mini pretzels into the mixture. Add 1-2 handfuls of peanuts. Other nuts would probably taste good, too. If it seems like there's too much more chocolate than there it of anything else, then add more snacks to the chocolate mixture. Mix it all together and spread into a pan; refrigerate until cold and hardened. Break it up using your hands.

Add red & green sprinkles on the top to make it more festive (if you wish)!

Put it in a really pretty cellophane bag with a bow and give it as a Christmas present!!