Chocolate Praline Cake

This is one of those simple to do cakes, but looks amazing and tastes like you spent hours slaving over it. One warning though, it gets messy while you serve it, so don't be afraid to dig right in :)
Chocolate Praline Cake
from the Cake Mix Doctor

1 stick butter, cut up
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup pecans, chopped
1 package devil's food cake mix with pudding (it works without pudding as well)
1 cup water
1/2 cup oil
3 large eggs
1 (8 oz) tub cool whip or fresh whipped sweetened cream

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. In a small saucepan over low heat, stir together butter, cream, and sugar just until the butter melts--about 3 minutes. Divide the mixture between 2 nine-inch pans. Sprinkle each mixture with the chopped pecans and set aside.

In a large bowl, mix the cake mix, water, oil, and eggs. Blend on low for 1 minute, scrape down the sides, then blend on medium for 2 minutes. Divide into the 2 pans and spread smooth. Place the pans side by side in the oven and bake for 35-37 minutes. The cakes should spring back when lightly pressed.

Let the cakes cool in their pans for 10 minutes. Then run a dinner knife around the edges and turn out onto wire racks, praline side up. To serve, place on cake praline side up on a cake plate and spread half of your whipped cream/cool whip on top. Place the next cake, praline side up, on top and then spread again with the rest of the cool whip.

You can also make this in a 9x13 pan. Just put everything in the one pan (instead of dividing between 2 nine-inch pans) and bake for 55 minutes. Cool the same way and just spread all of the cool whip on top of the cake instead of stacking it. Enjoy!

Brought to you by Techno-color :)

So, this isn't a recipe per se but it is a treat we tried recently and will explain why I missed posting on Tuesday this week. It was my son's birthday this week, and because he was so excited about it, my brain has been bantered with his incessant discussions about the upcoming festivities. :) One of his requests was a Herbie cake. He's completely enamored with all things Herbie (as in The Love Bug, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, etc.). He's even renamed our van "Herbie" and constantly begs to get a new paint job to look like Herbie.

As we discussed what this cake should look like, I was worried he wanted me to draw Herbie on a cake. It's a joke in the family that I tend to go overboard with our kids' birthday cakes to the point of driving myself (and everyone else) crazy. But even then, Herbie seemed a bit much. I can usually pull of a cartoon-y looking character, but where Herbie is an actual car, I was a bit stuck. Thankfully, Herbie, being a race car, has a simple number design that is easy to replicate. And thankfully, this route satisfied him. So we went with that, but he insisted it had to have Herbie's racing stripes on it: red, white, and blue. Wanting to try something new, we decided to go for coloring the cake instead of the icing.

To achieve that intensity of color you have to use icing colors, like the Wilton icing colors in the small plastic jars, and not food coloring. The blue here was Royal Blue, and the red was the No Taste Red (mostly for my sake since I can taste the red coloring and believe-you-me--it's nasty!)

Obviously you don't have to use red or blue, your color options are pretty much endless :) You just need a white cake mix. Mix it up according to the directions. Then divide it in half as best as you can. (divide into more parts for more colors obviously :) )

Add 1 teaspoon of your coloring to each half. Mix well and pour into your cake pans. I used two 8" round cake pans--one for the red layer, and one for the blue layer. Bake and cool according to the package directions.

Now, if we weren't going for the racing stripes here, I probably would have gone with a chocolate frosting, but since we needed some white, we went with a buttercream frosting recipe (see below). To further try something new, I added in a tub of cool whip after mixing up the buttercream frosting to make it a bit lighter and hopefully add some creamy flavor to the frosting.

So, all in all, it was a fun recipe to try, although I didn't care much for the cake (not a huge white cake fan) but everyone else (especially the birthday boy) said it turned out awesome and tasted great. So have fun experimenting :)

Buttercream Recipe
Adapted from Wilton's Buttercream Recipe

1 cup butter or margarine (butter tastes better :) )
4 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or other flavoring)
4-6 tablespoons water (depending on how thick you want it)
1 tub cool whip (optional)

Mix the butter, sugar, extract, and water until well blended. Carefully fold in the tub of cool whip. Makes enough frosting to frost one 2 layer cake.

Lemon Chocolate Cream Cheese Filled Cupcakes

How's that for a mouthful of a name? :) One of my boys came home from church with one of those chocolate hostess cupcakes and the other kids were clamoring for one as well. We decided to try and experiment making our own, but we didn't have anything to make exactly what he had so we improvised :) We ended up with a lemon cupcake and filled it with the pastry cream from the fruit tart recipe I posted last week and topped it off with a chocolate cream cheese frosting. It was actually pretty good, quite messy (what do you expect when you have 4 boys 'helping' you bake? :) ), but good. So, for better or worse, here's our take on a filled cupcake. Obviously you can adapt this to your own taste and come up with other variations. I would've loved to put a chocolate ganache (that's my favorite part of the hostess cupcakes) on top of this, but I was completely out of chocolate other than cocoa powder, so we went with the cream cheese frosting instead.

Lemon Chocolate Cream Cheese Filled Cupcakes
from Us :)

Lemon Cake mix, made into cupcakes according to package directions
1 Recipe Pastry Cream
1 Recipe of Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting

Pastry Cream
from The Modern Baker by Nick Malgieri

1 cup milk
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
1/3 cup sugar
3 Tablespoons all-purpose flour
4 large egg yolks
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Bring the milk, cream and half of the sugar to a simmer. In a bowl, whisk the remaining sugar with the flour, then whisk in the egg yolks. Whisk 1/3 of the simmering milk into the yolk mixture. Return the milk to a simmer and add the yolk mixture, whisking constantly until the cream thickens and comes to a boil. Allow to boil, whisking constantly, until slightly thickened, about 30 seconds. Remove from the heat and whisk in the vanilla. Scrape the pastry cream into a glass bowl and press plastic wrap directly against the surface. Chill until cold.

Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting
from The Cake Mix Doctor by Anne Byrn

1 package (8 oz) cream cheese
8 Tablespoons (1 stick) butter
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 cups powdered sugar

Blend cream cheese and butter in a large mixing bowl on low speed until combined, 30 seconds. Add cocoa, vanilla, and sugar and blend on low speed until moistened, 30 seconds. Increase speed to medium and beat until frosting is fluffy, 2 minutes more.

Assembling the Cupcakes
Fill a pastry/icing bag attached with a small round decorating tip with the pastry cream. Carefully push the tip into the center of the cupcake through the top. Gently, but firmly, squeeze the cream into the cupcake until it starts to swell. Be careful not to overfill (although my boys found the few exploding cupcakes quite fascinating :) ). If this method isn't working, you can slice off a section of the top of the cupcake and scoop out some of the cupcake. Fill with cream and then put the top back on. Frost with the Chocolate Cream Cheese frosting. These are tasty right away, but we found that they were easier and less messy to eat if we refrigerated them for a while to allow the cupcake and pastry cream to set up.

Sam's Carrot Cake

I've always thought carrot cake was good, but if had a choice between that and anything chocolate-y or pretty much anything else, I'd go with anything else. Carrot cake would be my last choice---that is until Dave discovered this recipe. He found it on Allrecipes(dot)com and it's the only recipe I've ever seen that recieved not one negative comment out of the 100s of reviews it recieved. None of the comments recommended you change anything either, another rarity! So we thought we'd try it. Wow!! It really is an incredible cake! It's incredibly moist and delicious!

Sam's Famous Carrot Cake

courtesy of Allrecipes(dot)com

3 eggs
3/4 cup buttermilk
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups shredded carrots
1 cup flaked coconut
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 (8 ounce) can crushed pineapple with juice
1 cup raisins

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour an 8x12 inch pan. In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Set aside. In a large bowl, combine eggs, buttermilk, oil, sugar and vanilla. Mix well. Add flour mixture and mix well.

In a medium bowl, combine shredded carrots, coconut, walnuts, pineapple and raisins. Using a large wooden spoon or a very heavy whisk, add carrot mixture to batter and fold in well.

Pour into prepared 8x12 inch pan, and bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 1 hour. Check with toothpick. Allow to cool for at least 20 minutes before serving.