Mother's Day cake

Well my mom had requested that I make her another coffee cake like I made her on Easter, so I did make her a double batch cake (in a 13x9x2 pan) and she actually freezes it and takes out a piece when she wants one - so that was the first cake I made her.

Then, since the rest of us won't eat coffee cake, I made her a butter cake with chocolate frosting. I got the recipe from an old McCall's cooking school book from 1986 and I'll post the recipe below. Here's how her cake turned out:

I decorated the cake with multi-colored flowers using my piping bag and food coloring.

Here's the recipe for the butter cake:

2 1/2 Cups Flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
2 cups granulated sugar
4 eggs
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350º. Grease and flour pan(s). Recipe calls for three 9" round pans but I used a sheet cake size.

Sift flour with baking powder and salt.

In large bowl on high speed, beat butter and 2 cups sugar until light. Add 4 eggs, one at a time; beat after each addition.

Continue beating, occasionally scraping bowl with rubber scraper, until fluffy - 2 minutes.

At low speed, beat in flour mixture (in fourths) alternately with milk (in thirds), beginning and ending with flour. Add vanilla. Beat until smooth, about 1 minute.

Pour into pan(s), bake 25-30 minues or until suface springs back when gently pressed with finger. (Or toothpick comes out clean)

I really like this cake, it's a light butter yellow cake and you can use pretty much any kind of frosting you like with it. Enjoy!

Quick Coffee Cake

So I was going through my cookbook and wanted to make something I haven't made in a while and came across this recipe my mom had given to me years and years ago. She doesn't do much baking anymore (she has me... Ha!) and I know she loves this coffee cake so I made this for her for Easter. It's a dense coffee cake with cinnamon streusal on top. Recipe is below!

Ingredients:

1 Cup Sugar

3 Tbsp Butter

1 Egg

1 Tsp Vanilla

2 1/2 Cups Flour

2 Tsp Baking Powder

1 Cup Milk

(Cinnamon Streusal recipe below)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream sugar, butter and egg together.
3. Add Vanilla.
4. Sift flour & baking powder together.
5. Add dry ingredients alternately with milk to batter mixture, beating well.
6. Pour in well greased & floured 10x10x2 pan.

Cinnamon Streusal Ingredients:

1/2 Cup Sugar

1/3 Cup Flour

1/4 Cup Butter

2 Teaspoons Cinnamon

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Mix well, and spread on top of cake batter. Bake at 350 degrees for about 45-50 minutes or until knife comes out clean. My mom loves nuts on her cake so I added about 2 cups of chopped Walnuts to the streusal before placing in oven. You could also add raisins or whatever else you like!

This is what it looks like before you place it in the oven:

This is what it looks like when it's done:


Enjoy!

Easter Sugar Cookies

These are the best sugar cookies you'll ever eat! These are requested for every holiday in my family. They are also so versatile - you can make them for any holiday. They are sugar cookies so you can use any cookie cutters for any holiday and then just add food coloring to the frosting to match the holiday. At Christmas I make them in green and red and use Christmas cutters. Today I used pastel colors for Easter.

Recipe:
1 Cup Butter (softened)
1 1/2 Cups Sugar
3 Eggs
1 Tsp Vanilla
3 1/2 Cups Flour
2 Tsp Baking Powder
1 Tsp Baking Soda
Pinch Salt

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Sift dry ingredients together in large bowl.
3. Mix wet ingredients in another bowl.
4. Slowly add dry mixture to butter mixture.
5. When completely mixed, place in fridge for about 1 hour.

6. Take dough out of fridge and place some flour on your surface. Roll out about 1/5 of the dough with a rolling pin. Roll to about 1/4 an inch thick. (Thinner if you prefer crispier, thinner cookies) 7. Cut out cookies with cutter. Today I used a round biscuit cutter.
8. Place cookies on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper. Bake for 8-10 minutes.
9. Take cookies out of oven and directly on cooling racks.

10. After the cookies have COMPLETELY cooled, you can start with the frosting. I use white (vanilla) canned frosting and put a little food coloring in each bowl for each color I am going to use. For this batch I only needed 1 can of frosting.
11. Frost the cookies and let them lay out until the frosting has dried. If you stack them with the frosting not dried yet, they will stick to each other.

Don't they look pretty? And they taste as good as they look!

Introduction

Hello and thanks for visiting my blog! I hope you will find lots of great recipes and cake decorating ideas here and share yours as well. I'm always looking for new recipes to try and new, fun ways to decorate my baked goods.

I'm by no means a professional baker but I do love spending time in the kitchen baking something yummy to share with family. And I do believe presentation is everything! I love to decorate cakes and cookies and make them look as good as they taste.

This was my very first attempt at using Fondant. I made marshamallow fondant (using a recipe I found online, I will share it later) and the cake came out pretty good for my first try!

It was a triple-layer chocolate cake with white frosting between the layers and white frosting on top.

This was a cake I made for my mom's birthday. It was my first attempt at making a tiered cake and I have to say it came out pretty nice if I do say so myself :) Everything on the outside was fondant. The bow on top, the flowers, the icing - all marshamallow fondant. It took a few days to complete because I had to let the fondant bows & flowers dry completely. The bow had paper towels stuffed inside it to help it keep its shape. This was a chocolate cake with 7-minute boiled frosting with coconut (my mom's favorite) and it was delicious!

I made this for my dad's birthday last year. He is a big golfer so I decided to make a golf-themed cake. It came out so cute!

I bought the golfing toppers on Ebay for a couple dollars and with the use of my grass tip I made the green grass, and the "sand trap" is made of brown sugar.

This was a golden yellow cake with chocolate frosting.

I also bake a lot of cookies, and I will post pictures of some cookies and cakes later. I just wanted to give you an idea of what I like to bake & decorate for now. I'll be posting lots of recipes soon to some of my favorite treats so stay tuned :)