Belated Birthday Post

I have been out of town a lot over the past couple of months and haven't really been posting with any regularity. Hopefully life is getting back to normal for me! I wanted to take the next couple of days to play catch-up with some of my photos that were taken, but never made it out of my camera!

I will start here with Kip's birthday cake. I always make his cake and will try to tie it in with a theme to go with his gifts or something that delights his geeky soul. He loves the game Portal so I made a cake to go along with that game. I had a little help with this one too, Samantha wanted to help and since she has more experience working with fondant than I do, I gladly accepted her offer. And at 12, she also has a lot more cake decorating tools than I do.

The cake was a marbled vanilla and chocolate cake with chocolate butter cream icing.

Here is the happy birthday boy with his gift. Like I said, I normally try to tie in the cake with his gift but I wasn't sure I would be able to find the Batmobile or not when I was planning the cake. He was happy with both though, so that was all that mattered to me.

Carrot Cake

Even though we are trying to eat healthier, we still have dessert on occasion. I have been trying to make our desserts though so that I know what is in them and I try and keep to real food ingredients as much as possible. We celebrated my mother-in-law's birthday last weekend and she loves carrot cake. I volunteered to make the cake since my friend Judy had shared her carrot cake recipe with me. I am not a huge fan of cakes in general but this is the best carrot cake, and possibly the best cake of any kind, that I have ever eaten. It is a recipe from a Southern Living magazine from a while back and the recipe can be found here. Above, I have pictured all of my gathered cake ingredients. (The mason jar is vanilla extract I had made a while back.)

Here is the batter and the added "goodies".

Isn't this just gorgeous with all the colors? I was already getting excited at this point!

I think the secret to this cake is the buttermilk glaze that goes on the cake layers when they come out of the oven. 

At this point I was seriously wondering if anyone would notice that my three layer cake had turned into a double layer! The whole house smelled so good and it was so hard to wait, because I am sure it was incredible while it was still warm.

I did wait though, because what is carrot cake without the cream cheese frosting?

And finally here is my iced cake, all ready to go to the birthday dinner.

To say this cake was a hit with the family is an understatement. Everyone loved it and my oh so sweet mother - in - law sent the leftover cake home with me and Kip.