A friend of mine is having a birthday party for her son, he’ll be the big 1!  He’ll be needing cowboy cookies for his cowboy pals so I came up with these Deputy Badges.  Sugar cookie stars frosted with royal icing, Kopykakes writing, gold dragees and dusted with edible gold dust.  They were a bit of hard work but definitely worth the effort, completely. I haven’t ever worked with royal icing before.  In fact, I looked up the recipe on cooks.com and watched a video on youtube on how to make and apply the stuff.  Amazingly, I got it on my first try.  Look out world, Heathers got...

Captain, Captain, there are sharks afin! This weekend my nieces visited and we worked together on a great cupcake project.  Shark Attack cupcakes.  We started off with a basic vanilla cake recipe and then added some red food coloring to make the cake look gory like blooooooooood…    Ewwwwwwwwwww.  And, scaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrry! For the frosting we added blue to some buttercream (confectioners sugar, unsalted butter and heavy whipping cream).  For the fins, we used oreo cookie sides, broken in half.  We dipped the cookie halves in melted white chocolate, tinted with black gel color (hint...

After having been sick for the last week and a half, I decided to bake something fun, for myself, as a bit of “feel better” non-medicine.  I decided on the following recipe which I altered from the original found in my 100 Best Cupcake Recipes book – Tropical Luau Cupcakes.  Although the recipe calls for a “yellow cake mix” I opted for a homemade vanilla cake mix, not from a box – they are usually icky!  As for the banana pudding mix – I used 3 (individual serving) containers of Hunt’s Banana Creme Pie pudding. Tropical Luau Cupcakes Ingredients 2 cans...

This weekends project was a 3-tiered wedding style baby shower cake that turned out to be only 2-tiered.  3 tiers was just too much cake.  Like the cupcake party, I used a basic vanilla butter recipe and swirled in an amazing chocolate recipe (using sour creme for extra moist texture and a tad of instant coffee to give the chocolate a little kick).  The frosting started off as a basic buttercream (unsalted butter with confectioners sugar) but I added some heavy whipping cream for a better texture which made it even easier to spread.  The stars are made of fondant, of course and the miniatures on...

Giant Mardi Gras cupcake baked for my nieces 1st Birthday