Cupcake Wreath

Easy Chocolate Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with Chocolage Ganache Frosting:

Cupcake Recipe:

- Devil's Food Cake Mix

- 15 Oz Canned Pumpkin

- Semi SweetChocolate Chips

Mix, pour into cupcake pan, bake at 375/400 degrees for 20 minutes, or until done.

Ganache Icing:

- 8 Oz. Semi-sweet chocolate

- 1 Cup Heavy Cream

Melt chocolate and milk together (I use low heat setting in microwave), let cool until it can be piped out onto cupcakes. . . or you can dip the cupcakes into the runny ganache for a smoother look

To make the leaves I used a Leaf chocolate mold, and swirled several colors of chocolate together with toothpicks. Chocolate can be bought by the bag at craft stores like Michaels/AC moore. Let cool and pop our of mold.

To make the acorns: Use caramels, roll into shape, dip one end in chocolate and then roll in cookie crumbs.

Fall Housewarming Cake

The Recipe:

CHAMPAGNE CAKE RECIPE (taken from here)

2 3/4 c. sifted flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp. salt
2/3 c. shortening
1 1/2 c. sugar
1 bottle (2/5 pt.) champagne (3/4 c.)
6 egg whites

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together and set aside. Cream shortening with 1 cup sugar until fluffy. Blend flour mixture alternately with champagne and mix to a smooth batter. Beat egg whites until stiff and soft peaks form. Fold about half the meringue into the batter, mixing thoroughly with whisk. Gently fold in remaining meringue. Turn into two greased and floured 9 inch cake pans.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes or until test done. When cake has rested 10 minutes, turn out to cool. When cold, put together with coconut filling.



For the buttercream icing border, I used a Leaf Tip, and put a red stripe in the piping bag, filled it with buttercup yellow icing, and squeezed out leaves all around the cake. The red stripe gave it a more authentic fall leaf look...wouldn't you agree?

The leaves on the side were ordered through fancyflours.com and they are just sugar.

Gift Box Cake

My first experience with covering a cake with fondant:

I added some fondant flower cut-outs to make it look more like wrapping paper:

I used Wilton Fondant, which doesn't taste the best, so I'm looking forward to trying other brands and types like Satin Ice and Fondarific to find one that looks beautiful, but also tastes sweet like buttercream icing.