Chocolate layer cake

 

One of my brother’s friends is having a birthday party tonight. Every guest is supposed to make  something sweet; of course my brother took the easy route by asking me to bake something. He said I could make whatever I wanted. It can get a bit overwhelming, when you get complete free range like that, can’t it? There are so many things I want to bake, and sometimes it’s hard to decide. Especially when you’re not the one who will be doing the eating. What if my brother’s friends – and the birthday boy! – don’t like what I chose? In the end I decided to go with chocolate. Because, honestly, who doesn’t like chocolate? I’m very pleased with the end result and, to be honest, slightly bitter that I have to give this whole cake away without being able to have a taste!

I took this Devil’s Food cake recipe from this post; I decided to go with a vanilla butter cream instead of the meringue frosting they used. I got some inspiration for the decoration from this lovely post but ended up using (store bought) meringue to top off the cake instead of piping even more butter cream on top of the ganache. I was afraid it’d be a bit of a butter cream overkill!

Apple cupcakes and cinnamon buttercream frosting

 

 

 

I hope everyone had a good Valentine’s Day weekend – or, if you don’t really celebrate it, just a regular good weekend, then. Good weekends are all about sleeping in, taking time for yourself to relax and maybe get one or two things done. Weekends also about cupcakes. Or they should be, at least. Cupcakes were without a doubt my first real baking love, and I’ve never quite gotten over them, or over how much fun it is to frost and decorate them.

These particular cupcakes were made using a regular pound-cake recipe. The mini!cupcake pan is new so I was excited to test it out (anything miniature sized is bound to be amazing). I added slices of apple to the regular sized cupcakes, and then added cinnamon to my buttercream. Apple and cinnamon are the best of friends, and the frosting was extremely yummy.

 

Vanilla cupcakes with a butter cream icing and mini-chocolate chip cookies

I saw this blog post down at Raspberri Cupcakes about chocolate-chip cupcakes with mini chocolate-chip cookies on top and I immediately fell in love. I love the idea of chocolate-chip cupcakes filled with chocolate-chip cookie dough (and if you do too then you should definitely check out that post, and it’s absolutely gorgeous pictures!) I decided to just go with my fool-proof vanilla cupcake recipes (that you can find here) and bake little chocolate chip cookies for on top. (A recipe post for those will follow!)