Bite Sized Brownies with 4 icing flavors: mint, chocolate, peanut butter, and coffee
Heart shaped Hershey’s perfectly chocolate cake with vanilla butter cream decorated with chocolate bark shards.
Yellow cupcake and chocolate buttercream with hand piped chocolate hearts.
Spicy Pumpkin Brownies
Bite sized brownies with a pumpkin puree center. I added normal pumpkin pie spices to the pumpkin puree and some cayenne pepper to the brownie batter for an extra kick. Each mini brownie was topped with chocolate to complete the pie look. It was hard to tell when these little guys were done baking because of the pumpkin, but normal cook time (for mini brownies) seemed fine. These are best served within a day of baking because they are so moist that the paper liners don’t stay on very long and they sort of ‘deflate’ if they sit more than a couple days.
Fat Free Almost Vegan Brownies
Almost because I used chocolate chips and cane sugar that I’m sure was processed through bone char, but the recipe is very easy to make completely vegan.
- 2 cups flour
- 2 cups white sugar (if you want an even lighter, though more expensive, version of these you can try Splenda or other sugar substitute)
- 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup water
- 1 cup applesauce (I used a natural, no-sugar added version)
- 1 tsp +/- vanilla extract (I never measure vanilla)
Mix all dry ingredients together. Add wet ingredients and mix together. Spread in a 13x9 pan and bake at 350 for about 30-35 minutes, or until they look ready to eat.
Some things worth noting: I was initially very disappointed in these. The batter tasted awful to me and even right out of the oven they were less than exciting. However, give these a day covered on the counter and they turn into fudgy deliciousness.
Princess Cake
2nd attempt at fondant. 2 tier chocolate cake with chocolate icing covered in white fondant with pink buttercream decorations. Princess cake for a 5 year old’s birthday.
First attempt with Fondant. Yellow cake, chocolate icing, homemade marshmallow fondant. I much prefer the marshmallow fondant because it is sweeter (and cheaper) than the pre-made stuff. Mixing the color caught me by surprise. I thought I used a lot of dye and still didn’t get past pastel versions of ‘No Taste’ Red and Royal Blue.
Notes for next time: be prepared to use a lot of dye to get a true color and use gloves!
Halloween Cake Balls
Zebra Cake
A 2 layer chocolate/vanilla zebra cake with chocolate and vanilla buttercream. There are a lot of zebra cake recipes online that call for equal amounts of alternating cake batter and being very precise about the process, but I found those ‘stripes’ were too perfect and didn’t really say zebra when cut. Vary the amount of batter at each addition to get more organic stripes in the cake.
Tootsie rolls were a special request for event theme.
Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Pretzels
Peanut butter candy mixture between two pretzels and dipped in chocolate. These looked the best, but dipping the entire thing in chocolate tasted better (to me anyway). Sprinkles could be used when chocolate is still wet or colored chocolate can be drizzled on top.
