July cupcake of the month!

Nothing beats a cool glass of lemonade on a hot summers day! Pink lemonade cupcakes! July cupcake of the month!

We scare because we care!

Monsters Inc. is one of my favourite Pixar movies and makes a great theme for a children’s birthday party!

I really enjoyed making this cake. Buttercream drawings are how I got my start in cake decorating. I love how vibrant and textured the decorations come out. Don’t get me wrong, fondant creates beautiful, smooth and detailed cakes, but there is something about buttercream that just makes it feel so authentic.

This cake was made for a little boy celebrating his first birthday! They wanted to make sure everyone at the party was happy so they requested the cake be half vanilla and half chocolate. I really like my vanilla butter cake recipe, so I made sure to use that and decided to try out a chocolate butter cake recipe for the other half. Both turned out great. Light and moist.  I used vanilla buttercream for all the decorations and was very pleased to be able to test out my new ‘americolor’ gel paste food colours to create Mike and Sully!

 

Salted Caramel Chocolate Cheesecake Cake

This cake is drool worthy. Salted. Caramel. Chocolate. Cheesecake. Cake. Seriously. This cake was sooo good. Basically is a smooth cheesecake sandwiched between two layers of rich chocolate cake, all covered with creamy salted caramel buttercream, topped with chocolate ganache, drizzled with more salted caramel, and sprinkled with sea salt.

I started off by baking moist chocolate cake in 2 round cake pans. I used my trusted double chocolate cake recipe with lots of cocoa powder and coffee to really bring out that chocolate flavour. I then baked a plain cheesecake, no crust, in my spring-form pan. After baking, I put the cheese cake into the freezer for 2 hours before assembling.

While the cheesecake was freezing, I whipped up a batch of salted caramel buttercream and made some dark chocolate ganache. I assembled the cake starting with a chocolate layer, than the cheese cake, then more chocolate cake.

I crumb coated the entire cake with the buttercream and placed it back in the freezer for about 20 minutes. I then put a final layer of buttercream on the cake and topped it with a generous portion of the dark chocolate ganache.

I poured the caramel into a piping bag and drizzled it over the top of the cake and then sprinkled it with large flake sea salt.

Everyone raved about the cake and I will definitely be making this again.

This would be the perfect cake for a special birthday or celebration, especially for those cheesecake lovers!