Cicco Creations

A friend of mine threw a baby shower for one of her old college roommates this weekend and I was honored to bake the cake.  From what I understand, they originally thought the baby was going to be a boy and they planned on doing a rubber ducky themed party.  But they later found out baby is a girl after all.  But they already had the idea of rubber duckies stuck in their heads and wanted to stick with that theme.  So, my friend throwing the party searched high and low and eventually found a girly rubber ducky theme.  She sent me a picture of one of the signs that came in the stationary and asked me to bake a cake that matched.

The cake was a strawberry/vanilla marble cake.  The filling was strawberry and the frosting was cream cheese.  For the decorations, I used my homemade fondant recipe.  We talked about what should go on top of the cake and my friend really liked the pennant banner I had used on the Sprinkles Cake a couple weeks ago.  The stationary she found for the party included some similar pennants that she planned to use as decoration, so the idea for the cake worked perfectly. 

I added some small pink bows to the top of the sticks to give it a bit of girly finishing.  And, voila!

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This weekend I made a rich chocolate toffee cake for my dad’s birthday.  I had already been thinking chocolate, and then my sister suggested adding in the toffee.  I do have a mocha heath cupcake recipe, but that is VERY rich and focuses more on the mocha, so I wanted to try something different.  I did some research and found a few different toffee cake recipes that looked good.  I ended up making some combination of a few different recipes.

I started with a traditional milk chocolate cake.  As I have gotten in the habit of doing, I spritzed the cake with a simple syrup when I pulled it out of the pan.  This gives my cakes some added moisture.  I LOVE this tip and have been so pleased every time I’ve done it so far. 

For the filling, I combined a number of recipes that I had reviewed.  One recipe called for crème fraiche as the base of the filling.  I loved this idea, but I didn’t want to buy it because it can be so pricey.  And, I waited too long to make it myself (it can take anywhere from 8-24 hours).  So instead I used sour cream.  I mixed the sour cream with some cool whip, some caramel sauce and some crushed up Heath bars.  This was a little soupier than I would have preferred and the crème fraiche probably would have had more weight to it, but the taste was still wonderful. 

For the outside frosting, I simply added some melted down milk chocolate to the vanilla butter cream I had left over from the Rainbow Sprinkles cake I made last week. The flavor was great; this was a very rich frosting.  But I should have made the chocolate into a gnache before adding it to the butter cream.  The problem was that the chocolate caused the butter cream to set much firmer than I would have preferred.  This made it almost too rich – and that’s hard to do, because we are a family that LOVES our chocolate!   

I topped off the cake with the remaining bits of crushed Heath bars.  And, I used the Wilton’s Color Flame candles.  This was a great way to bring in some color while keeping the cake more on the masculine side at the same time. 

My dad was quite happy with his birthday cake and the rest of the family was just as happy to help eat it!

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Last weekend I had the privilege of making a birthday cake for my friend’s mother-in-law.  I’ve never met her, but everything I hear about her tells me that she is so sweet and grateful.  My friend wanted throw her a small family party and she commissioned me to make her the cake.

The inside of the cake was vanilla with pink marble swirls and lemon filling.  The outside was a classic American vanilla butter cream… and rainbow sprinkles.  Lots and lots of rainbow sprinkles. 

I made the banner by printing out the letters onto cardstock.  I cut out the pennants and hole punched them to string them up.  I just used leftover sticks from the strawberry shortcake kabobs I made two weeks ago for our Oscar party.  (Apparently, after the cake was finished, the banner was moved to a potted plant to keep the festivities going for a little longer).  I let the cake sit in the fridge to firm up for about an hour after frosting it before I tied the bow to it. I added pink sparkler candles, too.

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