Each of these heart cakes is a 9″ heart – and about 5″ tall!  They got pretty big.  The pink heart is a chocolate cake with an oreo filling (yum!) and the purple cake is marble with a strawberry jam filling.  And surrounding all of them are lots of candy melt hearts.  I made them in a new Make’n Mold heart mold I picked up at Hobby Lobby.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

And here is the pic from the invite:

On the menu this month…

Carrot Cake Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing

The carrots are made with modeling chocolate.  Yum!

Chocolate Cupcakes with Cheesecake Filling

The cheesecake filling is so easy.  You can check out the recipe for it here.  The “eggs” on top are the mini robin’s eggs (whoppers).  I love these cupcakes!

Lemon Cupcakes

Lemon cake, buttercream icing piped like a flower.  Spring!

I’m thinking this would also work nicely swirled into a regular cake…I will be trying this   But in the meantime, here’s the recipe:

Cheesecake Filling

Adapted from a recipe from Kraft Food & Family

8 oz cream cheese, softened
2 T sugar
1 egg

Mix all ingredients together (I used a mixer to get them good and mixed).  That’s it!  Then fill your cupcakes.

How easy is that?

There were no design requests so I just went off one of the photos I had found online once that I liked.  I liked the simplicity of the design…simple, delicate, and pretty.

Since the meeting/party is this week I went with a St. Patty’s theme – much like I did 2 yrs ago. This time around I decided to use the fun of those rainbow cupcakes and make a rainbow cake!  I did it with a similar method that I used to make the rainbow cupcakes, but instead I spread it over 2 pans worth, and this time I actually spread out the batter vs. heaping it in the middle.  I’m pretty pleased with the results! (see inside pic below!)

So this month we have a 10″ cake (the rainbow cake) and a 3-layer tall 8″ cake for the leprechaun’s hat on top of it.  Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

And a closeup of the “pot ‘o gold”…

And the inside of the rainbow cake…yes I cut this cake in half before I decorated it   I told my husband of my intentions and he said “they don’t care – as long as they can eat cake”  ha!  But I had to get a pic of how it turned out!

Today we’re tackling how to make rainbow cupcakes.  I made these last week for my daughter’s 9th birthday.

You can start out by making your favorite cake recipe (whether it be a mix or scratch) for WHITE cake.  Be sure to use egg whites as specified on the back of the box and NOT whole eggs.  The yolk gives a yellow tint and it will be harder to get nice, true colors.  If you are baking from scratch, be sure your recipe makes enough batter for the number of cupcakes you need.  My measurements are based on making 24 cupcakes.

After you have your batter mixed up, split up the batter evenly into 6 different dishes.  I got somewhere close to 3/4 cup worth of batter into each color.  But mixes do vary some.

Then take your food coloring (I prefer Americolor) and add a few drops and mix the color in.  You can see how dark my colors are once mixed.  If you do them lighter, they will bake up lighter.  But these baked up nice and bright as is…

Now we’re going to start filling our prepared cupcake liners.  Starting with purple, put about 1 tsp of cake batter into each liner.  I then kind of spread the purple out to cover the whole bottom nicely.  You can see below, the bottom row I spread out but the other rows I hadn’t yet.

Then follow up with the next color (blue).  Add 1 tsp of blue on top of each purple layer.  Note I did NOT spread the blue out like I did the purple.  If you do too much spreading it will start to blend the colors.   I just kept putting one color on top of the other.  As I would dump each one in I would try to get it “spread” out as I dumped.  But I didn’t go back and spread it to the sides.  As they cooked, the batter spread out on its own…you can see the end result above.

And continue on with the remaining colors (remember to continue to work backward).  Here they are finished & ready for the oven. (I almost forgot to take a pic!)

Bake them in the oven as specified in the box/recipe.  And when they are done…. yay! Rainbows!

I made up 40 of these for the party. And most turned out just right. But one… one was a little “different”…

But she was so cute as well

I was impressed!  Then we took our magic smoother to it and ta-da!  Hello Kitty.  We then used the chocolate candy melts to make the bow, eyes, and mouth using the cleaned cake pan.  It’s a super easy technique that’s great for this type of thing.  Just use your cleaned metal pan.  Pour some melted chocolate candy melts into the spot you want to mold.  Tap the pan on the counter to get rid of air bubbles then pop it in the fridge for about 10 min.  It will easily pop out again.  Instant bow

Then she spent about 15 min practicing how to write to “sign” her name on the side of the board.  I think she did great.  She was beat after this and wanted me to write Happy Birthday though

But of course, we had to take it to the next level

With beautiful rainbows INSIDE and OUT of course!  Look for a tutorial on how to make these beautifully colored cupcakes coming next week. [EDIT:  Tutorial is here! ]   But for now, enjoy the OUTSIDE of them too!