DIY Framed Earring Holder (For $5 or Less!)

What You'll Need:

Picture Frame
Craft Paint (Optional)
1-4 pieces of colored felt
Roll of Decorative Ribbon
Mesh Laundry Bag
Hot Glue Gun (Or crafting glue)

Follow the bold lettering for a quick read, but don't miss out on all the extra tips below! :D

How to Make a Rainbow Cake

Step 1:

Mix cake batter and separate evenly into plastic cups.  Add desired food coloring to each cup and stir well.  (I wanted a lot of small sections of color, so I divided the batter into 24 cups, using 6 different colors. So 4 cups of each color.)

Step 2:

Pour contents of each cup into pan. For best results, pay close attention to the distribution and arrangement of color. Do not stir or swirl!  To level batter, drop pan forcefully and repetitively on countertop. (Steve came into the kitchen while I was doing this because he thought I was mad and throwing things around. :P)

Belle from Beauty and the Beast Cake : Holly's Birthday (2011)

Hey guys. :)
It's been just about forever since I've posted on here, and I've still got a lot of cakes I've never posted about.  So am I going to be more consistent with this?  I guess we'll just have to wait and see. :P

So, about this time LAST year, my buddy Holly had just turned 22.  So in honor of the event, I made her this surprise Belle cake.

 I used the Wilton doll pan to get the shape of her dress.  The doll is a pick, but the entirety of her dress is made from fondant.

Looking back, I find it amusing that I did all the buttercream details with a medicine syringe.  I made this before I learned anything about piping with pastry bags, so although its kinda shoddy, at least I was innovative. :P

And here she is all lit up. :) 

As for now, I just finished making a peace sign cake, which I'm about to go drop off now... at 4am. :P

More posts soon?  I hope so. :)

Valentine's Day Heart Cookies

I've been baking more than it seems, seeing as my last entry was over a month ago.  The biggest reason for my absence is the fact that all the pictures I've been taking for this blog have been sitting in my roommates camera forever, despite the many times I've asked her to upload them for me. (Shame on you, Holly! :P)

However!  I baked the other day at my boyfriends house and used his dad's camera, thus enabling me to write this to say both "I'm not dead after all!" and "Look! I made cookies!" :)

Steve's dad has had a box of white cake mix and a container of frosting sitting in his cupboard for months now, so when I woke up on the morning of February 13th with an urge to make heart-shaped sugar cookies, I decided to use Monster Mama's "Incredibly Easy [Cake Mix] Sugar Cookies" recipe again.

 

Easy Peasy Pumpkin Squeezy

Whew, I've been neglecting this blog for awhile.  Finals week was awful, so I plan on kicking back and blogging much more often now that winter break is here.  On the downside though, I'm so poor right now that I don't know if I'll be able to buy any of the ingredients for all the super awesome Christmas cakes I had planned...*sigh*

When I last posted, I had mentioned I made several cakes for Thanksgiving.  Well, Cake Number 3 was a lovely pumpkin bundt cake.  I was planning on carving the shape of it myself, but once I come across the idea of using two bundt cakes instead, it was too easy to pass up.  (I was just all caked out at this point.)

Then came my search for the perfect recipe.  I decided on this one from allrecipes.com

Ingredients
* 1 (18.25 ounce) package yellow cake mix
* 1 (3.4 ounce) package instant butterscotch pudding mix
* 4 eggs
* 1/4 cup water
* 1/4 cup vegetable oil
* 1 cup canned pumpkin
* 2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
* Whipped cream


Directions


1. In a large mixing bowl, combine the first seven ingredients. Beat on low speed for 30 seconds; beat on medium for 4 minutes. Pour into a greased and floured 10-in. fluted tube pan. Bake at 350 degrees F for 50-55 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool in pan for 15 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. Serve with whipped cream if desired.

I only had one bundt pan, so it took double the time to bake the two pumpkin halves.  In the meantime, I started working on the frosting.  I thought a cream cheese buttercream frosting would be amazing, so I took a recipe from MarthaStewart.com.  I dyed the majority of it orange, but dyed some green and brown for the stem and leaves, too.  (You just cover an ice cream sugar cone in brown frosting for the stem, sooo simple. :D )

This frosting did taste great, but I had a few issues with it when it came to covering the cake.
When I had both cakes baked and cooled, I put the two halves together with frosting.  This left a very apparent line across the middle of my cake.  When I began to frost the entire "pumpkin" I unfortunately discovered the frosting was too thin to completely hide the cake (and the line across the middle) beneath it.  I struggled with it for a good 30 minutes before just coating the whole thing and giving up.  I was super late for a friend's birthday party at this point, so I left, planning to get home early before my family Thanksgiving to give the cake another coat and to add the vines and leaves.

Except....that never happened.  In fact, I was super late to Thanksgiving too.  (Being late is kind of a thing with me. Heh.)  And! To top it off, some of the cake was eaten before I ever got to take a picture of it. :(

All and all though, I'm okay with how everything turned out.  It was still an orange pumpkin shaped cake with a nice brown stem.  Some vine detailing would have been nice, but that one layer of orange frosting got a bit thicker over night, so I'll take that instead.  Not to mention, I happened to think it tasted preeeettty darn awesome.

So, if you have the time to fiddle with the frosting for this one, I'd recommend it.  It's super simple, just a bit time consuming.

Toodles for now!

<3 Rachel

Welcome!

Well hello there!

Somehow you have happened upon my brand new blog! As you can tell by my excess number of exclamation marks, I am pretty darn excited! :P

So, what is rachie--cakes.blogspot.com, you may ask?  Well, I'm not entirely sure yet (But I am totally peeved that my web address needed two hyphens. All the other rachie cakes on this blogspot don't even bake and stopped posting years ago! gggrrrrr)

But anyway, to somewhat answer the above question that my pretend-ideal-reader has just asked me in my mind:  It shall be a baking blog! :)  And anything beyond that, we'll just have to see...

In the last year, I've gotten very very much into baking, primarily cakes.  And now that I have a commissioned wedding cake looming in the future, I need to practice practice practice!  So I plan on baking almost every weekend.  I thought it would be fun to blog my trials and tribulations, drop a few awesome recipes here and there, and let anyone who stumbles along know any new tips and tricks I figure out.  I got a little experience behind my back, but I can't say its much. So hurray for new learning experiences! ;)

And as I am with any new idea, I'm dreaming big. :P   It would be pretty awesome to start making youtube videos, modify some recipes of my own, and make a whole bunch of new friends on here.

So thanks for checking out Rachie Cakes! Check back soon, or be one of my first followers! Com'mon, you know you wanna. ;)

<33 Rachel!