Cakes I've Made!

I've explored a little bit into cake decorating and never gotten around to posting these cakes I made for my niece's 1st birthday and my sister's 30th birthday! 

The Elmo cake was a 1-2-3-4 cake: Swan's Cake Flour basic cake mix - warning: this makes about 3 9" cakes! It's such a dense cake because of the butter, but has such a good flavor. It honestly tastes like a sugar cookie. The frosting was a simple cream cheese buttercream frosting which you can find a recipe for all over the internet. I blended fresh strawberries with the frosting for the middle layer.

Swan’s Down 1-2-3-4 Cake

1 cup butter, softened

2 cups sugar

3 cups Swans Down Cake Flour, sifted

4 eggs

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

• Sift flour with baking powder and salt.
• Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
• Beat on medium speed, adding eggs one at a time.
• Add flour mixture alternately with milk and extracts, creaming until smooth after each addition.
• Spread into a greased and floured 10-inch bundt pan or (3) 9 inch round pans or (2) 8 inc round pans and reserve the remaining batter for cupcakes.
• Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour and 25 minutes (one hour for round cake pans).
• Cool in pan 10 minutes. Remove from pan and cool on rack.

My sister's chocolate cake was made with 2 triple chocolate fudge box cake mix (Duncan Hines I think) so that it would make 3 layers. The cake is covered in a basic chocolate buttercream, and the shiny topping and sides are dark chocolate ganache, with mini chocolate chips all over! I finished it off with piping the lettering and edges of the cake with the chocolate buttercream. Lots of work... but HUGE reward. Chocolate heavennn.