Mom's Dark Chocolate Cherry Birthday Cake

I won't tell you what year it was for her, but I made her a cake using her favorite flavors- cherry and dark chocolate. It was harder than I thought to find a good recipe or inspiration for this cake, so I was kind of on my own. Luckily it was a combo that would be hard to mess up.

I got a box mix of dark chocolate cake, maraschino cherries, dark chocolate, and buttercream frosting ingredients. Baked the cake as usual, made the buttercream with cherry extract and LOTS of juice from the maraschino cherry jar for flavoring. That gave the icing a pretty light pink tint and lots of cherry flavor, better than the extract!

Chopped maraschino cherries

THE best product on the market.

See what I mean? They weren't even 100% cool

Another product sent from the heavens

First layer of buttercream

Add chopped maraschino cherries

Add second layer and ice

Smoothed out to look like fondant but tasty

Super dark (maybe too dark) chocolate

Fancy pants

Some decoration

My freestyle icing is wicked good sometimes

Chocolate shavings on top

Mom with her cake (& in her pjs.. sorry for putting this online, Mom!) :)

Tori's Pina Colada Beach Cake

The slightly disappointing melting end result

My friend Tori's birthday is so close to Christmas that she never got one of my cakes even though we've known each other for years, so her graduation party was a perfect excuse to make her one. Unfortunate for the cake and her, it was somewhere in the 90's (degrees, not decade) when I was baking her cake. In my little kitchen, having the oven on meant it was at least 100 degrees in there, so everything was melting, including the icing and decorations I had planned for the cake.

Tori said she liked several flavors when asked, two of which were pineapple and coconut. The answer was pretty obvious to me- Pina Colada cake. And since summer was in full swing, I went with a beach theme.

Cake ingredients (two boxes of cake)

Jell-o water

The teddy grahams are all suited up!

Make-shift cake platter from foam core board and parchment paper

Icing ingredients (minus the egg whites)

All baked!

Cute, but melting

Sunbathing teddy grahams

Adam's Pistachio Poker Cake

We threw Adam a surprise Las Vegas birthday party this year. Everyone dressed up like they were in Vegas and there were themed games and decorations all around.

Last year, I made Adam a Pistachio Mudkip cake, but no one could tell the cake was pistachio because the buttercream icing was overpowering. This year, I was determined to make sure everyone knew it was pistachio flavored. I learned from Amy's Lemon-Blueberry cake that the filling is the key to getting a specific flavor across.

• Cake: I used the same recipe that I did last year. It was so simple and actually tasted very good.

• Icing: I sort of made this up. Using this recipe as inspiration, I combined a package of pistachio pudding mix with a container of vanilla Cool-Whip (it was a seasonal thing, so it was on sale) and some (maybe a half a cup? I don't usually measure.) confectioner's sugar to thicken it up.

• Filling: For the pistachio filling, I simply made a packet of instant pudding mix. Easy peasy.

Now for the fun part! How the heck do you make cards and poker chips? I used white chocolate, a little bit of icing and, of course, food coloring. Melting chips are the best for this. They melt smoothly. I used a double boiler, wax paper, cookie sheets, a rolling pin, and a sharp knife. I poured the melted chocolate on a cookie sheet lined with wax paper. I put another sheet of wax paper on top and then used a rolling pin to flatten the top. Once they were cooled, I cut rectangles for the cards and cleaned up the edges of the chips.

My helper

Making the chips

Making the cards

The cards look like American cheese!

Pudding for the filling

Layer one

Filling

Layer two

All iced! This spread surprising well for an easy icing

I made some colored chips

Decorating the cards (while sitting on the kitchen floor and watching The Office)

The cards

I added some chips underneath the cards for support. You can kind of see it under the Ace here

The birthday boy got a highly unlikely hand

Me with the cake

A collaboration :)

Birthday boy looking sharp with his cake

Justin enjoying the cards

I think Tim liked it...

Happy birthday, Adam!

Eli's Raspberry-Mango Cheesecake with a Walnut Crust

Mango cheesecake with raspberry puree and a walnut crust

For Eli's 23rd birthday, I decided to drive to Waltham to wish him a proper birthday. The week before, I had an incredibly packed schedule. Luckily, I had been planning his birthday cake for weeks, so I didn't have to quickly figure something out. The night before I left, I decided to bake the cake and then drive it to his house instead of baking it when I got there. It was my first time making a cheesecake! It was a good decision to make it the night before, though, because cheesecake needs to be refrigerated overnight anyway.  

I knew I had to incorporate mango into Eli's cake no matter what. It's his favorite fruit! I had a list of things that I knew he'd like, most of which were fruit. I finally decided on a mango cheesecake when I found recipes online with great reviews. 

I went to the Rochester Public Market and picked up some raspberries and mangoes. I knew they wouldn't last until I was ready for them almost a week later, so I threw them in the blender separately and pureed away. I then stuck them in the freezer. This worked out great, and it has encouraged me to puree and freeze the fruit I have that might be going bad soon. 

I adapted my recipe from epicurious. In the crust, I added finely chopped walnuts (done in my blender). Walnuts are one of Eli's favorite things, and I had been making maple-honey walnuts for him.  I also had a deeper pan, so I added to the baking time. To make the cake taste a little bit more like mango, I poured the extra puree over the top of the cake before baking it and swirled it in. The swirl really helped add a mango flavor to the cheesecake. After the cake had baked and cooled (and traveled 400 miles in my trunk), I poured raspberry puree over the top. It was pure raspberry, so it added just the right amount of sweetness without giving it too much! After a night of sitting on the cake, the raspberry puree soaked in a little, increasing the flavor and moisture of the cake.

Graham cracker crust with crushed walnuts

After baking the crust

Lots of cream cheese! I actually only used three of these, but they came in a club pack at Wegmans for a deal!

Mango puree

The cheesecake batter

Mango swirl added to the cheesecake

The final product

Not bad for my first, right?

Make a wish, Eli!

The birthday boy (wearing the shirt I got him)

Hopefully he was pondering his birthday wish

Attempting to make a clean cut

How's that for a slice?

Cheesecake is up there on my list now! Yum!

This cake was one of my favorites. The walnuts, raspberry, and mango swirl all made it so delicious! Pure fruit seems to bring any cake up a notch!