I’ll be honest. I’ve always been a bit intimated by fondant. The results are so gorgeous that I’ve always assumed that it was difficult. When I came across a fondant cupcake decorating class at a local shop called the Cake Professor, however, I decided to try working with fondant. Guess what? It turns out simple fondant decorations that can make a cupcake look really pretty are super simple to make. In a lot of ways working with fondant is a lot like playing with play-dough.
A couple of years ago I decided to bake the Peninsula Grill Coconut Cake, after finding a recipe for the cake on the Martha Stewart website. The cake was very time intensive to make. Also, after seeing everything that went into the cake it lost just a bit of its charm. Now, I don’t expect my cakes to be healthy, after all they are cakes, but the Peninsula Grill Coconut Cake is DECADENT even for a cake!
Only three days until Christmas! This year went by so quickly, but there is still time to make a batch of cookies or two. In fact, I plan to spend some time today baking. This is one of my favorite cookie recipes. I have made these cookies for many different occasions, including a baby shower and to celebrate the arrival of spring. I made the latest batch for Jaime and my annual holiday dessert party. To help give our party a cohesive elegant look we decided to make all of the desserts red and white. Recently I have been a bit obsessed with snowflake cookie cutters and I figured that this was a perfect time to put them to use and make some snowflake cookies. Earlier this season I put them to use to make salt dough snowflake ornaments.
I was very excited to pick up this month’s Martha Stewart Living and see an article, “A Cake Takes Shape,” on using sheet cakes to make animal shaped cakes. A couple of months ago Jaime and I did something similar to make a hot air balloon cake for a baby shower.
I was tasked with making a hot-air balloon themed cake for a friend’s baby shower, a task that I delightfully accepted and then promptly roped my husband into. I didn’t want to have to buy new pans for the cake, after all I didn’t see myself making many hot-air balloon themed cakes, so I made do with two basic 9” round pans and a 9 x 13” sheet pan. We had quite a bit of extra cake that we didn’t need for the balloon, that we happily ate. You could probably make this with three 9″ rounds.
