Applesauce Rhubarb Muffins

I needed to use up those last cups of rhubarb in my freezer so I searched online for a rhubarb muffin recipe without nuts - so my children could bring them to school. I found a recipe at www.cooks.com

for these muffins and they are great!

I will finely chop the rhubarb the next time I make them. With 1/2 inch pieces, the chunks of rhubarb are too big to let the muffins cook evenly. Oh, and I used about 1/3 cup of oil instead of 1/2 cup and they didn't miss the fat!

Enjoy that fresh rhubarb from your garden today!

Happy Birthday cake!

How would you decorate a cake for a six year old who can't decide what he likes? Here's what I did:

I made a "6" cake! I used two round pans for the bottom and a heart pan, cut in two and trimmed to make this 2-layer cake. I filled it with lemon curd (think lemon pie filling) and iced it with buttercream.
Here's what the first filled layer looked like:

I should have used a different color than purple as an accent - it might be too "girly" for him. Or I could have made the cake darker blue but it will still taste the same!

Thinking about Mother's Day

Hello friends! This morning I thought I would play with my little girl all morning, but my bread supply was so low that I had to make bread instead. It was a good, dreary day for it. While I was at that, I glimpsed the little piece of paper I had recently signed - agreeing to donate a cake to a cake walk that is happening on Saturday (the day before Mother's Day). I figured, "Why not?" and baked a cake too. I made a plain white cake, 2 layers, 9 inches round. I made up some buttercream and got to work decorating the cooled cake. In an hour, I had this to give away. I thought it should make a nice Happy Mother's Day cake!

So, Happy Mother's Day a little early!

(Now go tell your mom you love her.)

A Flower Garden Cake

This could have been a Welcome Spring cake, or an Easter cake, but at our house it was a birthday cake for a four year old girl! She loved it.

It was a chocolate cake underneath, with a buttercream filling. Pretty standard stuff. Melody helped me make the 4 bugs on the cake and we had great fun doing it! Fondant and gum paste are just as much fun as play dough.

This is just a closer look at the details. The smiles on the bugs are an exact match of my pinky fingernail!

Happy Easter!

Hello there,

 Happy Easter to you and yours. I'm serving up a simple baked cheesecake with peaches on top for our Easter dessert. I made the "Happy Easter" piping from Royal icing and let it dry and placed it on the cooled cake. My children created these Ukranian Easter Eggs (Pysanky) yesterday.
Enjoy the holiday!

Happy Easter, Love Helen

Lightning McQueen Cake

I was asked to do a car-themed cake for a boy who absolutely loves Lightning McQueen. I challenged myself to do it in 3-D. I am thrilled with the results! Took about 5 hours to decorate the whole thing. I used parchment paper cut-outs to design numbers and lightning that would fit.

The red is all fondant. The other colors are fondant/gum paste mix and the white is buttercream icing. I covered it in buttercream first. This is what it looked like then:

I had the 3 inch toy car as my model. The cake was three 9x9" cakes that were trimmed and stacked in various ways. The final cake is about 7"x14"x2"high. When I was done, I wanted the wheels to look like they were buried in sand (since they were flat on the bottom) so I sprinkled brown sugar all around the cake. I'm super impressed with how this one turned out!

Smurf cake

Today's blog is just to show how I decorated the Smurf cake I made for my daughter's birthday. I used a shaped pan and filled it with my usual chocolate cake recipe for a 9x13" pan.

Then I covered the flat area with smooth white buttercream, and the rest, with stars. I used piping gel to make the black, and red fondant for the tongue. Pretty cute!

It was really easy to decorate this "shaped" cake! But it did use more icing than I expected. Stars take up more icing than smooth finish.