In Love with CAKEPOPS!

I know I have mentioned it before in a previous blog but I am in love with cake pops.  I purchased the bake pop pan from the infomerical, which now you can buy at Bed Bath & Beyond, and make sure to use your 20% coupon if you purchase.  I have tried to make the cakepops with mashed cake and frosting but the texture is slightly overputting to me.  If I want to eat a "cake"pop, i want to taste cake.

I have experimented with several flavors.  For my recent selection I decided to do a irish cream cake batter laced with chocolate chips and coated with delicious milk chocolate.  What was my inspiration, my unopened bottle of Irish Cream that I completely forgot about.  I searched the web for a delicious recipe and finally came upon a recipe by the Cupcake Rehab, I of course adjusted to my liking. 

I usually make cupcakes because I love the frosting but I am finding that cake dipped in chocolate is just as satisifying.   I do plan on making some cakepops that have fillings and also holiday cake pops to come.  These are how my delicious irish cream cake pops turned out.

Go Diego Party

My good friends, Cheri and Jonathan, were giving their son, Preston, a first birthday party and they asked me to make a cake and cupcakes.  I was of course honored.  What was the theme, Go Diego, of course.  I knew for the cake I was going to do a safari theme like I did for Benjamin's birthday.  For the cupcakes I searched the internet high and low to find the easiest and perfect Diego cupcakes.  I finally found them at Nick.com.

For the cupcakes, I made chocolate cupcakes topped with vanilla frosting.  For the Diego details I used mini M&M's (eyes), fruit roll-ups (mouth), cheerios (ears), nd for the hair I had a template and traced with melting chocolate.  For Baby Jaguar I tinted the frosting with a few drops of orange food coloring and couple drops of brown  I used red and orange dots candy (nose and ears), mini m&M's (ears), and black frosting for the whiskers and mouth.  I think these turned out very cute, I did make a joke that Diego kinda had a Don King fro, but they were still adorable.  If you would like to make these cupcakes here is the link: http://www.nickjr.com/recipes/diego-cupcakes.jhtml.

For the cake I also made a chocolate cake, adopted by Martha Stewart's Devil Food Cake Recipe.  I did a two layer cake filled with vanilla buttercream frosting and tinted green to resemble grass.  For the decorations I used piping gel tinted blue for the lake surrounded by crumbled graham crackers to resemble sand.  I used green laffy taffy ropes for the tree trunks and piped green frosting with a star tip to resemble leaves.  I made a fondant elephant and baby jaguar for figurines to complete the cake. I'm getting more and more comfortable with decorating cakes as it is much easier to decorate cupcakes which I love.  Let me know what you think about the cake.

 

I had a lot of fun making the cake and cupcakes and look forward to my next baking project.