Category: Cake

Renny's Recipes: Minnie Mouse Birthday Cake

1/8/2020

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I hope everyone is having a wonderful new year! I'm still suffering from a little bit of back to work depression. Christmas was wonderful, and it's a busy time for our family since our daughter's birthday is three days later.
We threw her a Minnie Mouse birthday party for her second birthday. She was so excited. She asked me for about a week afterwards what happened to her "birpay party" and keeps pretending that she is having a party.

I made her a chocolate birthday cake using my favorite chocolate cake recipe, which you can find on a box of Hershey's Cocoa Powder. Our litte one loves blueberries, so I used this blueberry filling for the middle.

I made pink buttercream frosting for the outside. For the polka dots I used these Wilton's candy eyeballs. I just turned them around backwards so they looked like plain white polka dots, and nobody knew the difference.

On today's post, I am going to share with you my secret to perfectly delicious buttercream frosting! You can use this recipe for all your frosting needs and adjust it with any color you want it to be, and add chocolate if you want. Your sweet treats will always taste delicious.

Perfect Buttercream Frosting

Soften 1 and 1/2 cups of butter to room temperature for at least 4 hours.
Beat butter until it is white, light, and fluffy.
Add 1 tsp vanilla to butter. Continue beating.
Add 2 lbs powdered sugar.
If you want to add any coloring, add it at this stage.
Once the powdered sugar is mixed in with the butter add in the milk, 1 TBSP at a time.
Continue adding milk until frosting is a smooth consistency for spreading, but still holds it's shape.

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Zucchini Orange Cake

5/28/2019

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**This post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links. But, all opinions expressed are my own.

On Memorial Day, I shared with you my recipe for a The Best Ever Chocolate Zucchini Cake and the mistake I made that turned out to be a good thing. I promised to share with you what I did with the rest of the zucchini that I had left over.
This is it! I had a lot of oranges in the house because Maddy and Lindsey had both gotten some in produce coop boxes and brought them over. I used a Cara Cara orange in this recipe. I used to think that Cara Cara oranges were just a type of blood orange. I have discovered that I was incorrect in thinking that. Blood Oranges and Cara Cara have different "parentage", if you will and the Blood Orange is not as sweet as the Cara Cara. The Blood Orange has a slight raspberry flavor to it. The Cara Cara oranges are sweet and juicy! I used that reddish juice and the zest in this Zucchini Orange Bundt Cake. Yup! Time to pull out that bundt pan again! Our weather has stayed so nice this year that I am able to bake longer than usual!
The flavor of this Bundt cake was vanilla with the slight orange hint coming through. The zucchini added moisture and texture to the cake. The cake was light and soft and the color was quite beautiful, with its golden color and green and orange flecks.

I decided a cream cheese soft frosting would set off the tenderness of the cake nicely. Here is the recipe:

Zucchini Orange Cake

If you try both the Chocolate Zucchini Cake, and this Zucchini Orange Cake, drop me a line and let me know which you liked the best! I have my favorite, but I won't tell right now! Check our Instagram in a few days to find out.

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The Best Ever Chocolate Zucchini Cake

5/27/2019

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**This post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links. But, all opinions expressed are my own.

My DIL's mom, Anita gave me a giant zucchini. Yes, we know that the smaller ones are the ones you are supposed to pick to cook up for a delicious dinner veggie. But, if you have ever grown zucchini, they somehow have a way of hiding until finally one day there is a giant one laying there taunting you to do something with it. Anita found this particular one before it had a chance to become extraordinarily huge, but it was big enough for me to make 2 recipes out of it! Today I will share with you the first thing I made with it. It is The Best Chocolate Zucchini Cake Ever!

When Anita handed me the zucchini, she said, "Here! Make some banana bread!" I had every intention of doing that and taking her a loaf. But then one afternoon a couple of days later, I looked in the fridge and realized that I needed to use that zucchini and the idea of a chocolate zucchini cake came into my head. I had heard about them before but never made one. I as so glad that I did because this cake came out so moist and delicious, much better than any zucchini bread I had ever made! This particular recipe was adapted from an old church recipe compilation. It doesn't need frosting because it has a brown sugar, chocolate chip topping that is perfect!
Now, here is my secret "oops" moment that caused this cake to be so moist, I believe. I used my food processor to grate the zucchini. I accidentally left the chopping blade down in the bottom of the food processor! What I ended up with was coarsely chopped, slightly pureed zucchini. It was almost like a very thick applesauce, only zucchini. Well, I couldn't waste it, so I went ahead and made the cake anyway! It was an amazing success. I took it to our church choir practice to share it. It was a hit!

Before baking, you sprinkle on the brown sugar and chocolate chips for the topping.

It comes out of the oven looking like this.

Look at the gooey, chocolate deliciousness!

3winksdesign's Moist Chocolate Zucchini Cake

Whipped Cream or Ice Cream can add a final touch.

Even if you don't have a giant zucchini, you can use regular sized ones for this recipe. Later, I will give you the recipe for what I did with the rest of the zucchini!
Have you ever made a silly mistake that ended up making your recipe more delicious? Let me know in the comments!

If you don't have any zucchini at all for this recipe, here is one that Lindsey made for Memorial Day last year!

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Find that pie and many others, not included in the blog, in our Pie Book, available on Etsy!

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Friday Faves #98! Carrot Cake Roll and a Mini Cookbook!

4/11/2019

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The verdict is in! This year, in order to accommodate everyone's schedules, we are doing Easter Brunch at our house! I am actually pretty excited about it! All of the kids who live in town, and those "adopted" into our family kids and various other friends and family are going to attend church with us at 8:30 AM. My husband and I will be singing in the choir. I am going to love looking down from the choir loft and seeing so many loved ones there with us listening to the Easter message. We get done with our Sunday meetings at 10:30. Since we live across the street from our chapel, it will be easy to come home and pull out all of the food that I will have prepared the day before and enjoy a lovely brunch together!
And what will the menu be, you ask? Well, that is still in the planning stages. But one of our favorite dessert/brunchy foods is a nice cake roll! We usually make and give away pumpkin rolls at Christmas time. (I can't believe we haven't shared our recipe for those yet)! For Easter, I thought a nice Carrot Cake Roll sounded like just the thing for Spring! I've made one to try it out! It is definitely going on my Easter Brunch menu!

Now that it is just my husband and I at home, I have started buying just a few carrots at a time so that they won't get rubbery before I use them. I had these in my fridge and needed to do something with them. But, actually, the recipe only needed 1 carrot!

As I began to create this recipe, I started thinking about other cake roll recipes I've made or eaten. The nice things about cake rolls is that you get a lot of bang for your buck! They are pretty simple to make, they don't have to bake very long and they look beautiful when they are all finished and decorated and sliced! Best of all, they taste deliciously decadent! All of these thoughts helped me to decide that cake rolls would be the Friday Faves subject for this week! Not only that, I came up with a nice little surprise for our subscribers! You may or may not know that our subscribers all get a secret link to a secret page on our blog where they can download printables just for them! Today, I am giving a nice little Spring/Easter Gift of a Mini Cookbook with 3 Cake Roll Recipes, along with some tips and variations for making them to our subscribers! All you have to do to download your own copy is to subscribe to our blog! Don't worry, I only send 1 email a week. I welcome new subscribers and give them the link to the secret page and tell you about what we are up to. It's painless! All you have to do is put your email in the box at the top of this page, or on the pop-up that appears.
Now, on to the Carrot Cake Roll!

Super cute with the piped on carrots, right?

This cake roll has the traditional carrot cake flavors of cinnamon and carrot with some sweetness of pineapple. The filling is a cream cheese filling with pineapple added as well. You don't have to add the pineapple, you can make it a plain cream cheese filling. But, my husband loved the pineapple in the filling. The frosting is our regular popular recipe. Those carrots aren't fondant, I just piped them on with the frosting. I am so excited to serve this at our Easter Brunch! And you can make it and serve it as well! Just follow us here on the blog and we will send you the link to the Mini Cookbook with this Carrot Cake Roll recipe plus 2 others that are faves, with ideas for delicious cake roll variations.
I printed off my own copy of the Mini Cookbook and put it right into my Bloggelicious Baking Binder under the cake section. You can order your own Bloggelicious Baking Printables here. It is a great way to organize all of the recipes that you print from online sites. I find it so much easier to print them off when I use them often, rather that searching for them again and again online.

Now, on to the rest of my menu! Deviled Eggs are a must. Some croissants with various fillings to choose from? Do you have any great ideas for me? Let me know in the comments with a link to your recipe! I am open for some wonderful ideas! Thanks! I'll let you know the final menu soon.

I can't forget a nice tablescape as well!