Piping Skills

     Someone said that WHEN the Laker's win the NBA series, I had to make a cake and I guess I took their comment a little too seriously.  It was a pretty epic tournament and it had to be celebrated… hence the Laker’s cake you see here…

     I think that it was this cake that showed me that I had a pretty good hand with the frosting bag.  I could use the few colors I had and the few tips I had to make something pretty darn cool, so why not right???  It was just another store bought cake mix with my old recipe for butter cream.  

     I have decided that I love butter cream and want to be good at it even if it means that I never really get into fondant that much.  It just tastes good and can be so pretty if you are talented, but it is simple to work with too.  So, this cake was good, but still not my best creation. 

     The best thing is that this made me start to think about doing a cake for my friend Jimmy.  I did a chocolate cake in the huge, Wilton cupcake pan.  Once again… I just did the normal cake box mixes and I did put chocolate butter cream on the bottom and then regular butter cream on the colored parts.  I also did some layers in this one, so when you cut into this, it had a few layers with chocolate butter cream in the middle.  Here is the cake and the recipe I used for the chocolate butter cream…

Chocolate Butter Cream

4 c. powdered sugar

½ c. baking coco

1 cube butter

1 tbsp milk

Mix together dry and then add butter and milk.  Mix well.  

A New Leaf

     Maybe this is why people start blogs.  To catalogue all the things they are doing or making.  I have started this new and fun hobby and I want to make sure I record by progress and all the little things I am learning along the way.  There are so many tips and new recipes that I am trying and failing at and trying again so it is fun and I just need to remember it all so here it goes. 

   I would have to say this (my semi-pro cake career that is) really started when I volunteered to make about 300 cupcakes for a Relay for Life fundraiser.  There were a lot of cupcakes and we made them with store bought cake mixes and just butter cream.  I just made it off the skin of my teeth, with about a pound of butter, 2 pounds of powdered sugar, vanilla, and some milk.  Here are the cupcakes…

SO yeah, there were a lot of them, but they were not that cute and pretty tasty, but not amazing.  It ended up raining ALL that night, so that was fun and we ended up with A LOT of left over cupcakes on our hands. 

I have dabbled in other cupcake making adventures and they usually turned out good.  But it was always the same old thing.  Sometimes I put marshmallow filling in them which was always a hit, but just not quite amazing… yet...

So from here on out the world will know all my cake triumphs and cake failures.