Fat Tuesday! And other recent baking adventures...

So in honor of Mardi Gras, John's office had a little lunch party. He signed up to bring dessert (of course :) and I had a hard time deciding what to make. I didn't really feel like doing a King Cake of a pecan pie, so we started tossing around the idea of a regular cake decorated Mardi Gras style. We discussed some design ideas and looked up some pictures online, and well, one thing led to another and here's what we ended up with:





I guess I got a little carried away...it's a monstrously large cake and there are 13 people in John's office. Heh. I had SO much making it though. It's my first tiered cake (and only my second attempt at fondant) so all things considered, I'm relatively happy with how it turned out. I could have easily spent another hour working on it, but John had to have it to work by 1:30, so unfortunately, some of the other decorations I wanted to do (such as a few bead necklaces made of fondant and some additional purple stars) didn't happen. I also seriously rushed through the top layer, which you can definitely tell. The cake itself was having issues, so the frosting and the fondant didn't adhere as well. So yeah, don't look too closely...there are some serious issues. The bottom layer (two 10" cakes) is a homemade funfetti cake (using my new favorite yellow cake recipe) and the top layer is a divine chocolate fudge cake. Yum yum yum. I'm happy to say that I've finally found a decent vanilla buttercream recipe, one that uses just butter (no icky shortening) and still manages to have the right consistency for layer cakes. And the fondant is a marshmallow fondant, so the taste is actually decent. I mean, fondant is still fondant, but it's the best I've tasted. John--who hates frosting--actually likes the fondant.

As I mentioned, I recently made my first fondant cake. I made a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting for my boys, and I was rather happy with how my first attempt turned out.

It's obviously very amateur, but I'm working on it.

And since I was sorting through my Food folder, here are some more semi-recent pictures:

V-Day truffles that John took to his co-workers.

A couple of weeks ago for FHE Andrew wanted to make "pink cake." I was craving a nice yellow cake, so we compromised by using pink sprinkles. :) Andrew loves to help bake.


Ok, so this is really late, but here are my Christmas cookies. I made plates for friends and ended up making over 180 cookies. We had sugar cookies, iced pumpkin cookies, cranberry orange cookies, raspberry thumbprint cookies, Rolo cookies, and chocolate biscotti (which were not deemed worthy to be included in my cookie plates).



And last but not least, the cute tartlettes I made for my parents last time they were here. I of course didn't eat any, but I snuck some of the Bavarian cream that was left over--yum!