Blog: Red Velvet Cupcakes, Gnome Cake, and Fun Fair Sugar Cookies

This past week has been quite busy for me.

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I made some red velvet cupcakes for my aunt-in-law's belated birthday for Saturday. This is my standard recipe for orders with a cream cheese icing (not Swiss meringue buttercream) because it just fits. You can't tell in the photo, but the cake is SUPER red with a hint of chocolate flavour.

Happy Birthday, Auntie Heather!

Red velvet cupcakes with fondant ribbon rose toppers

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Next up, my father-in-law is turning 70 later this month, but since we were in town, we decided to deliver his cake the same day as the red velvet cupcakes (unfortunately, baby Owen was sick, so we only stayed for 5 minutes and then we drove back home).

The request was for a garden gnome cake. I made all the decorations out of marshmallow fondant, Italian meringue buttercream and a few dabs of royal icing. The tree stump cake itself is a 6-inch gluten-free banana chocolate chip 3-layer cake with Italian meringue buttercream filling, covered with chocolate ganache to resemble bark. I loved how this cake came to life when it was assembled. My only hiccups: the tall mushroom fell over because the grass icing was at room temperature for a while; during transit, the snail fell over because the base wasn't sticking to the curve of the mushroom top; and, also during transit, the gnome fell over because I used spaghettini to stick him into the cake (not strong enough - I will be using maybe linguine for supports in the future).

Happy Birthday, Grandpa!

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I decided to donate a gift certificate of a dozen sugar cookies to an upcoming fun fair at the closest elementary school to me. I wanted to create a basket of goodies to show what I can do. Here are a few: