Friday Favorites | No. 2

Friday, March 30, 2012

Yay!  It is finally Friday...I am not sure why I am so excited because I have to work tonight, but I guess ending the week is still something to be excited about.  Here are five of my favorite things from my week!

1.  Last night I made some spring vanilla cake pops to bring into work and I think they turned out pretty!

2.  On Pinterest I found this great idea for orange bunny rolls that would be perfect to have on Easter morning and would be sure to bring a smile to any ones face!


3.  I have a new found love for the site Etsy and found this cute American Girl doll skating outfit!  Makes me wish I was eight years old again.


4.  Spending time with my little man Japser always brightens my days!


5.  My last favorite thing about this week was that both of my classes were canceled...always a nice unexpected surprise!

Hope you all have a great weekend!

Shamrock Cake Pops!

Thursday, March 15, 2012


 With St. Patrick's Day  just around the corner, I thought that this would be the perfect time to try out my new cake pop pan that I recently bought.  I am not a huge fan of the cakes pops that are made by mixing cake with frosting and then rolled into balls...its just something about the texture inside that is not really my thing.  These cake pops that I made, however are baked and very yummy!

To start, pre-heat your oven to 325 degrees, then spray your cake pop pan with non-stick cooking spray.  Once that is done you can set the pan aside and start focusing on the batter. 
I used my vanilla cupcake recepie for this batch, but really any cupcake batter would work out great in this pan.  Since I was also making these for St. Patrick's Day, I thought it would be really cute to add some shamrock sprinkles and white jimmies to the batter and make sort of a fun-fettie cake.

Once the batter is all mixed, take a scoop or spoon and fill the bottom half of the pan with cake batter to the top.  Then take the top half of the cake pan, attach it to the bottom pan, and incert the two little clips to hold the two pans together. 

Place the cake pop pan in the oven on the center rack and bake for 20-25 minutes or just until a toothpick comes out clean from the center.  Remove from oven and let cool in the pan for 5 minutes.  Open the cake pop pan and remove your warm pieces of cake and let cool on a rack for about 30 minutes.

After the cake balls are cooled you will need a bag of chocolate melts in whatever color going to use.  I used green chocolate melts for these cake pops to go along with the St. Patrick's Day theme.  Place your chocolate microwave proof bowl and heat for 30 seconds and then stir.  Continue until chocolate is melted (mine took about a minute total to fully melt). 

Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and make sure you have your melted chocolate, candy sicks, and cake balls ready.  To help the cake balls stay on the sticks I dipped a little part of the stick into the melted chocolate and and then stuck the stick into the cake ball.  Once all the sticks are in, let them set for about 5-10 minutes or stick them in the refridgerator to speed up the process. 

When the sticks are firm in the cake balls, hold the stick and dip the cake ball into the melted chocolate.  Cover the whole ball and tap off any excess chocolate, place down onto the parchment sheet, and then cover the tops with sprinkles like I did or you could drizzle melted chocolate in a different color, chopped nuts, etc to the tops of them.  Now the hard part is letting them sit until chocolate has completely set, but once its hardend, remove from parchment paper and they are ready to eat!

When you bite into one they are perfeclty moist and the coating of white chocolate is just the perfect amout of "frosting" or sweetness to them...its like biting into a little piece of heaven.  These little cake pops are great and can be made for any holiday, special ocasion, or just as a mid-week treat!

Friday Favorites | No. 1

Friday, February 17, 2012

Every Friday I will be posting my "Friday Favorites" to show you what my five favorite things are from the week!

1. Sweet Baking Supply had a sale for Valentine's Day on packaging twine.  I bought 3 different colors (pink, yellow, and green) and I think they will be great to tie my cookie bags with!



2. The Tiffany's heart necklace I got from my boyfriend on Valentine's Day.


3. After a recent visit to Sur la Table, I found these little spatulas and they are PERFECT for mixing royal icing and my new favorite cool for baking!  I bought the pink ones to match my KitchenAid mixer.
4.  I found this Vintage Barbie cake on Pinterest and am absolutely in love with it.


5.  My last favorite thing about the week is that there is nothing on my schedule for the weekend.  No games to work, no coaching to be done, just time to finish my bathroom remodel!

Happy Friday everyone!

Heart Attack!

Wednesday, February 15, 2012


It's a day late, but Happy Valentine's Day everyone!  Here is a quick post to show off some of the Valentine's Day cookies that I created for a few clients this past week. 

I got my idea for the first set of cookies that I did for Valentine's Day from these adorable stencil cookies!  They were so simple and easy, but produced amazing results in the end.  I did make the mistake of baking and flooding my cookies the same day and ended up with crystallized royal icing...yuck!  So it was back to square one of baking, waiting a day, then flooding.  Once dry, pipe any type of pattern or design that you would like onto the cookie! 


Ready to be shipped!

The next set of cookies I did for Valentine's Day were for a little girl.  Her mom wanted to do cookies instead of the usual Valentine's Day cards to hand out to her classmates.  I came up with a few ideas that I thought would be adorable that also involved my heart shaped cookie cutter.  I came up with "Love Bug" ladybugs and "You're Dino-Mite!" dinosaurs.


For the "Dino-mite" cookies I was able to use my edible food printer and icing sheets to created the smaller cookie attached to the dinosaurs.  Not only did they look great, but it sure saved a lot of time since I did not have to hand pipe that on each of the 20 cookies!  Using my edible food marker in black I outlined in little dash marks to finish off the lady bugs and I think that it was the perfect touch!


Birthday Surprise!

My Aunt's Debbie's Birthday was on the 6th and I thought it would be really special to send her some cookies for a little birthday treat.  I was inspired by Sweet Sugar Belle when I saw her "Owl Always Love You" post about owl cookies.  My Aunt loves owls and I knew instantly that this is what I had to make and give to her!

I started out just baking my cookies and letting them dry over night.  Then I outlined and flooded in a light pink/peach color and let dry.  What makes these cookies so special to me is the fact they have brush embroidery around the eyes.  This was my first time doing brush embroidery and it took a little bit of practice, but I loved the results in the end and can not wait until I can use this technique again!


Once I was done with all the embroidery, I added the eyes that I had done the night before and attached them with a little bit of royal icing in the center.

WHOOOO are you looking at!
To finish them off I piped on eye brows, noses, and tuffs of feathers to each cookie.  I loved how they turned out and the best part is that the cookies made it all the way to Illinois and not a single one broke!  Now that is success in my book!

Super Bowl Sunday!

Friday, February 3, 2012

Looking for an easy dessert to have at your Super Bowl party this Sunday?  Well this is the cake or should I say cupcake is for you.  To start off you need:

15 cupcakes (your choice of cake, I used red velvet)
1 batch of frosting (I used a chocolate cream cheese frosting)
Vanilla frosting for details
1 cake board

Now on to the fun part! Start by lining up three rows of three cupcakes for the center of your football on the cake board.  Then add two cupcakes to both sides of the nine in the middle, then finish off with one on each side to be the points of the ends of the football.  Once all cupcakes are placed on the cake board, you are ready to start frosting.  I found it easier to fill a pastry bag with frosting, snip off the end and outline the football and fill in.  Then take an off-set spatula and smooth out the frosting all over the tops of the cupcakes.  After it was all smoothed out, I took a large start tip and outlined it with a shell border.

Then I filled a smaller pastry bag with vanilla frosting and added the laces to the football.  Lastly, I tinted more of the vanilla frosting green and added grass around the bottom of the cupcakes to make it look like the ball was sitting on the field.  Feel free to add sprinkles in the colors of the team you are rooting for or you use team colored cupcake liners.  This is sure to be a hit at any Super Bowl party, so why don't you give it a try!


Raspberry Ice!

Thursday, February 2, 2012

I guess I was a very good girl this past Christmas because I got two gifts that I never could have dreamed of receiving.  From my boyfriend I got this beauty:


KitchenAid mixer in limited edition Raspberry Ice.
From my mom I got this amazing printer for food color and icing sheets!

Canon Pixma Food Dye Printer

With the New Year only a few days aways from when I got these two amazing gifts, it was time to break them in and make some cookies.  I was inspired by different vintage New Year's cards that I had found online and found two that would be perfect to ring in the New Year with!  I started by downloading the image and printing it out on my icing sheets. 
Then once my cookies were cooled, I outlined and flooded with white royal icing.  As soon as they were flooded I added the cut out icing sheet to the cookies and then finished them off with a shell boarder.  Overall, for my first time using icing sheets, I think they turned out nice and I am so happy with my amazing mixer and printer!

Happy New Year!

Danish New Year's Cookies.

The verdict is...6 more weeks of winter!

It has been a busy past few months for me and with the new year I adding blogging to my weekly list of activities to do.  Since it has been over a year from my last post.  I am going recap these past winter months since good old Punxsutawney Phil said we are going to have 6 more weeks of winter (hope that means we will get one more cold front down here in Miami)!  So with that, lets start from the beginning.

The inspiration for these cookies and cupcakes all started when the ice rink decided to hold "Nutcracker On Ice" for their holiday theme show.  The cookies and cupcakes turned out adorable and tasted great as always!

Nutcrackers!

Left to right: Rat King, Nutcracker, Sugar Plum Fairy, Xmas Trees.

Sugar Plum Cupcakes
The show was a huge success and everyone skated great!  There was even a surprise visit from....
Yep you guessed it, SANTA!  

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