My car recently hit the 100,000 mile mark and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity (read: excuse) to throw a party! We had everything, from drinks like Sidecars and Irish Car Bombs to desserts like homemade (and quite delicious if I do say so myself) Rocky Road ice cream. I was also excited to bake another cake.
Here are some shots of the odometer before and after hitting 100,000 miles, as well as a picture of my car-themed chocolate cake:
Katie found this awesome idea for monkey cupcakes which I recreated for Darshan’s birthday party this past weekend:
They turned out pretty cool, and I was fairly pleased with my first attempt at making chocolate frosting from scratch.
Darshan lives for Taco Salad Fridays at our building’s cafeteria, so I figured this cake would be appropriate for his birthday last week:
(click for larger view)
Originally I had hoped the bowl would bake inward so I could simply build up the sides with frosting and drop “toppings” into it, but instead I had to stick them to the frosting since it mounded up. I used a Devil’s Food mix but did make my own (yummy) butter cream and chocolate frosting. Toppings include coconut cheese, Fruity Pebbles lettuce (yes, I picked out the green ones), jelly bean olives, and red hot tomatoes. Oh, and a huge pile of frosting sour cream.
David is almost up to his 200th skydive, so while he was on vacation in China we decorated his office. He returned to 200 plastic paratrooper toys hanging from his ceiling! Huge thanks goes out to Trey and Tiffany for their help in pulling this off!
Happy start of the World Cup 2010 day! Go USA!
(click for larger view)
I made a soccer cake for a little get together with our new team at work today. The cake was originally planned as something else with a from-scratch chocolate cake base, but when I tasted the crumbs after baking it last night I was disgusted. I quickly took the opportunity to make a box-mix chocolate ball cake to celebrate the World Cup, which tasted 100 times better. I didn’t have the heart to throw out the scratch cake, so it became the field. I believe I have perfected my buttercream frosting recipe, which I used to frost the entire thing.
The sport ball cake pan has instructions and guides for marking off the soccer ball pattern… much easier to execute on the top half and front side of the ball! The hexagon and pentagon guides don’t quite fit right once you reach the other side of the ball, so there were some approximations made that are hardly noticeable. Special thanks to Booze for holding this one steady and preventing disaster on the way to work!