Coconut Cake with Lemon Curd Filling

This cake is simply a white layer cake with lemon curd in between the layers. If you don't know what lemon curd is, then you are missing out! It's so good! My aunt, who we made this cake for, claimed that lemon curd is like crack. She one time ate a whole jar by herself with a spoon in about a week. She loves it so much.

She asked us to make this cake for her birthday and then we surprised her and put the lemon curd in between the layers. It's a simple cake that has a 7 minute frosting on the outside, this frosting is kind of like marshmallow fluff (which is also amazing!), then you cover it with coconut.

If you don't want lemon curd in the middle, you could use strawberry jam, raspberry jam, or whatever you think would taste great. If you don't want a jam, then just put frosting a more coconut in the middle and it is just as delicious!

Carlo's Bakery

Anyone who loves to bake knows who Buddy Valastro is. Or maybe it's just us. We love to bake and so we watch any baking show that we can. Well, his show, Cake Boss, is one that we always watch. We have been watching it for a couple years and we really wanted to visit his bakery. His bakery is Hoboken, NJ and is about 8.5 hours from us :(

Well, this summer we finally got to visit! Yay! We were so excited, but we expected to have to wait in line for hours, like the website says is possible (which we were not excited to do!). Fortunately though, we didn't have to wait for hours, maybe only an hour and a half, which was great!

When you get into the bakery it's so crowded, but it's a cute shop. We went on our birthday, so we got an 8 in.  chocolate cake with fudge frosting. They also wrote "Happy Birthday" on it for us. Not only did we get that, but we also bought a lobster tail (the pastry kind, of course), biscotti, and a bag of assorted cookies. Everything was really good, but the cake was the favorite.

Above is a picture of us in front of Carlo's!

So, we didn't get to the bakery until about 6 p.m. and by the time we left the bakery it was around 7:30, and we didn't leave Hoboken until around 8, but we couldn't eat the cake until we got to the hotel (which was a 2.5 hr drive). Well, we got stuck in traffic because of a semi accident, so we didn't get to eat the cake until about midnight. Everyone was so tired, but we just had to eat the cake, so we ate cake and crashed!

Oatmeal Cake with Coconut Pecan Topping

This cake is superb. The topping is the best part, it doesn't even need a cake, simply a spoon would be great! But, eating it with the cake is just as great. 

Oatmeal cake might sound weird but it is actually good, especially with this topping. If you don't like it or don't want to try it (though you should, because its good) we think that the topping would be even better on some brownies!

This is just a closer up picture of the cake:

 From this view you can see that the cake is moist and some of the topping absorbed into the cake:

• 1/2 cup quick cooking oatmeal

• 3/4 cups boiling water

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 1/2 cup brown sugar

• 2/3 cups flour

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 1/2 tsp baking soda

• 1 egg

• 1/4 cup of butter

Mix the oatmeal with the boiling water, stir and cover. Mix the remaining ingredients then stir in the oatmeal mixture. Grease and flour a 8×8 inch pan. Pour batter into pan and bake at 350 for 23-25 minutes.

• 3 tbsp melted butter
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup sweetened shredded coconut
• 1/2 cup chopped nuts(we used pecans)
• 2 tbsp milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

Combine all ingredients and mix thoroughly. Carefully spread frosting over the top of the cake.

 

Buckeyes

Buckeyes are one of our favorite candies/dessert to make. They are so delicious. What's better than peanut butter and chocolate, especially when the peanut butter is mixed with powdered sugar???

Here are some pictures of the buckeyes that we make:

One thing that we love about buckeyes is that they don't need to be perfectly uniform, each one is different than the other.

Decorted Flower Cake

We decorated our grandparents anniversary cake for their 46th anniversary. My grandma loves to garden; it's how she spends her time now that she is retired and she normally makes my grandpa help. So, we decided that we would make a cake with flowers on it. We put pink and purple flowers on the top along with some small blue drop flowers in between them. Here are some pictures of the cake we decorated:  

We also put purple, pink, and blue flowers on the front side of the cake so that it wasn't plain.

We did a basket weave in brown around the cake so that it would look a basket of flowers. 

Cupcakes

We have been wanting to try different types of butter cream and finally got to try Italian butter cream. If you haven't tried it before than you should try it soon because it's really good. It's not as sweet as the American butter cream (or the icing known as just butter cream to most people). It's a little more difficult to make, but totally worth it in the end!

This is a picture of the 3 different types of cupcakes we made. ( They are all chocolate cake, but they have different types of icing)

This cupcake has the American butter cream.

This is Italian butter cream, but we flavored it peppermint. We were creating a peppermint patty cupcake, give it a try sometime!

This one is just the Italian butter cream. 

Graduation Cake

We decorated this cake for our cousin's Graduation party. Her school colors were silver and blue, so naturally that's how we decorated the cake. To get the silver icing, we bought this stuff that was like edible spray paint.

This was the front of the cake. (above). It said "Congrats, Emilia".

This was one side, It said "Success Bound". 

The other side of the cake said "2014", because she is a 2014 Graduate.

Again, we used the ombre design but with only one color. For the silver, just ice the cake with white icing and then spray on the silver. We thought that the silver looked cool when the icing wasn't smooth, so that's how we did it. You could also use this kind of coloring on cupcakes and it would look good.