Dark Chocolate Buttercream on Whipped Cream

I designed a cake this weekend with simple, yet elegant decorations done with dark chocolate (to look like black). I didn't know how it would hold up on the whipped cream icing, but it did just fine. It is always a trial to set up a cake iced in whipped cream, as the whipped cream tends to be very unforgiving. The icing goes on very smooth and looks wonderful, but if any repair work is needed after the cake has set for awhile, it is very hard to make it look good, and it is almost certain that some touch up work will be needed somewhere.  That's when flowers, etc. come in nicely. . . or you can also make certain the touched up part is at least not in the front of the cake. The flavor of this cake was dark chocolate mint with chocolate mint mousse filling.

Italian Cream Cake

A prospective wedding cake customer asked me if I would be able to do her cake in a family recipe for "Italian Cream Cake." I told her I would need to test it out before I would give her an answer. So she gave me the recipe, and I made it for friends at our New Year's Eve dinner. It was a huge hit...very yummy cake. I can't give you the recipe without permission, but I will definitely make it again. I will tell you it had pecans and coconut, and the entire cake was iced and filled in cream cheese frosting, with coconut on the sides, and chopped pecans on top...yummm!

Happy New Year!

I received an order for 5 dozen cupcakes for New Year's Eve day. I'm not a huge cupcake fan, but wanted to do something a little special for this order. First I went to my "Paint" program, and came up with a design that I thought would work,  then printed it out enough times to use as a pattern. 

Then I melted both dark and white chocolate and piped each of the designs. After the designs cooled and hardened, I brushed them with gold highlighter dust.

Since I wanted the frosting to be somewhat festive, I decided to stripe my decorating bag with liquid paste color, so that the icing would come out 2 tone. I iced the yellow cupcakes with blue and the chocolate with purple.

Here are the finished products...