the macarons made with love

I had been trying to make macarons all year and at the end of it, I was headed to the Philippines for a vacation and of course, to see my family. Well, let’s just say that I received numerous requests to bring some home for them to try. I had a few different families to bring boxes to and each box that I found at Daiso held 16 pieces. That’s 64 macarons…IF I didn’t mess any of them up!

I decided to make my most requested flavors: pistachio, pink velvet and calamansi. Either luck was on my side or the extra love that went into making these three batches for my family resulted in almost perfect shells each time. Which was great, because I didn’t need to re-do any of the batches! Thank you, Lord!

the pink & green macarons

Let’s combine the last two color themes into one great box of japsierons.

Green: pistachio – this is probably my most ordered flavor. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of pistachio but a wide range of people like it and I am quite happy to make it.

Pink: pink velvet – this is my velvet-y chocolate flavor. I initially made the color of it pink because I thought it was much cuter, but I recently found some brown color at one of my favorite stores, Sur La Table, so I am going to slowly transition chocolate into brown colored macarons. But first, I must think of a new flavor for the pink ones.

Any suggestions totally welcome!

the 50th birthday cake

I’ve been posting a lot of pink lately (probably more often that I even realize) so I thought I’d mix it up a little and this time, go green! This year was my Ninang (Godmother) Candy’s 50th birthday. Of course, my mom and I wanted to make the her cake for the party. She wanted everything to be green. Green!

Although my mom and I made most of the decorations at home, we flew to Detroit from SF on a Wednesday night (the red eye) and I spent all of Thursday and Friday baking up a storm. Here’s how her cake turned out. Green per her request and gold to represent her 50th birthday.

Of course, with over 150 guests at the party, we could not stop there. I also baked an additional 75 (yep, 75!) cupcakes. I used the salted caramel cupcake recipe from here and went with a Andes chocolate mint cupcake for the second flavor, which I found here. Serious success.

The party was excellent and I was happy to spend time with the family. In the end, my Ninang’s cake spread turned out like this.

 

the monster cake

It was Tito Bambi’s birthday again and we couldn’t let it pass without doing something typically birthday-ish. I remember seeing cookie monster type cakes and always wanted to try making one, so we thought that his birthday would be the perfect excuse.

Tito Bambi gets the coolest cakes. First the coke can cake and now this. Haha, why? Because he doesn’t really request a theme. We usually just try to make something we’ve been wanting to for ages on a whim. 🙂

We made a layered chocolate and strawberry cake with strawberry frosting in between. The eyeballs are neopolitan flavored, covered with a green and chocolate marble. We used circles to cut fondant for the cornea and pupil and sprinkled some sugar candy to give the iris some color. For the hair, we used the following icing tip – 234. It can also be used to ice grass and other stringy designs.

After all that, here’s how the monster cake turned out:

I definitely want to make another one some day. Maybe an orange one? Or with alternating blue and purple hair! Does anyone have any other ideas? Please comment below – I would love to hear them!

yellow and green pops

At the beginning of the summer, some friends came over for the day to make cake pops. One of them brought over a lemon cake and we decided to make some with a yellow and green theme. We gathered all the yellow and green candy I had in the drawer of random edible stuff and came up with these. It was all the rave with her family when she brought them home.

Sometimes, I think that just choosing a couple of colors and seeing where that takes you is a great thing to do when practicing making cake pops. You can see which combinations work well together and also test out different designs.

My favorite ones were the margarita cake pops (upper right corner). Instead of making them in a ball, we flattened the top to make it look like a cocktail glass. Cut some colored melts in half and drew small triangles with white chocolate to make them look like lemons and limes. Lastly, coat the top rim with the sugar candy and voila! Don’t they look cute?

Our little 1UP mushrooms (bottom right corner) were also quite successful. Although, next time, instead of using white chocolate chips for the dots, I think I would prefer a flatter white chocolate circle, some white chocolate fondant or even just piping on white chocolate circles directly. These white chocolate chips kinda make it look more like Bowser’s shell. Either way, I think it’s still cute and now I have an idea to make it look even better the next time around.

Bottom line: experimenting is a win-win. Not only can you try a whole bunch of designs, but there’s always cake pops to enjoy at the end of the day.