Simple Yet Gourmet

I recently celebrated my Birthday and made this scrumptious cake to celebrate! Yes, I made my own cake- not because I had to but because I wanted to! I've had my eye on this recipe for awhile now (it's my favorite kind at the Cheesecake Factory), but it's so involved and requires enough ingredients to designate it to the "special occasion" category.  Well, I figured my Birthday was a special occasion so I went for it.  It was SO worth it! Every bite was pure bliss.  A chocolate lover's dream.   To make this, a moist chocolate cake is topped with decadent chocolate frosting, creamy Oreo Cheesecake, Oreo Mousse ( or not-more on that later ), more chocolate frosting, stabilized whipped cream, crushed Oreo's, and mini chocolate chips! Talk about sinfully delicious!  Since this cake has several layers it helps to make the individual layers ahead of time to break the work up.  All I did on the day of my Birthday was to assemble and decorate the cake. ...

A few months ago we celebrated my husband's birthday.  Last year all he wanted for his birthday were his beloved chocolate chip cookies, but this year he said I could surprise him.  I had a lot of fun looking up different cakes and trying to find the perfect one for him.  Aaron loves chocolate but doesn't like it to be too rich so this Oreo cake seemed like the perfect solution.  The cake itself is fudgy and studded with chocolate chips, but the frosting is light and not as sweet as most.  It's still plenty sweet, especially with the Oreo chunks in it, just not sickeningly sweet.  I had my doubts about this frosting seeing as it starts out with a flour base (what?) but I was really pleased with the outcome.  Overall, this cake was really fun to make and we all loved it!

Today we celebrated Brynlee's 4th Birthday!!  I wanted to make her something extra special for her cake, so I made a batch of these butterfly cupcakes.  You can use any type of cupcakes and frosting that you like, as long as the frosting is thick (in order to hold the wings in place).  Brynlee requested strawberry cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, so that's what we had.  I made the   Sprinkles Strawberry Cupcake s from a few weeks ago and the Cream Cheese Frosting  from   the Lindt Chocolate Truffle Cupcakes.    For the Butterfiles, I followed the instructions found in the book Hello Cupcake  for Monarchs.  Brynlee loved these and thought they were so beautiful!  Perfect for a spring birthday.

For my sister Becky's wedding she chose to have a cupcake tower instead of the usual wedding cake.  The inspiration for this tower came from the book Hello Cupcake .  This is a really fun book with all sorts of ideas for decorating cupcakes.  Most of them are silly, but this cupcake tower turned out really pretty.  The tower in the book was a 4 tier tower and so she just did cupcakes for the whole thing with one giant cupcake on top.  However, I could only find a  three tier so we made a 6 inch cake to go on the top instead.  I'm not going to go into all the details that went into the external decorations ( unless somebody is really interested ), but rather I thought I'd share the cupcake and frosting recipe I used.