Baked Out!

 So this weekend we had Jay's Birthday Saturday night and then Alisha's and Alexis's Birthday Sunday.  So this meant a whole weekend full of baking.

Jay asked for chocolate cupcakes. But, you know me I had to make it special.  Jay is a bigger sci-fi nerd than me.  I actually think he makes me look normal.  :)  So of course we had to throw some Star Wars in the mix.

 

They are chocolate cupcakes with chocolate cream cheese icing and butter cream icing.  The cupcakes with the choclate icing are the Rebel Alliance and the ones with the white icing are the Galactic Empire. Yes I know I'm cheesy, I thought way to hard on this.  :)

For the girls birthday party I had to bake a Neapolitan cake.  Remember the pictures of the cake a posted a while ago.  Well they totally fell in love with the cake so I had to make it.  This was a harder process.  It is 3 different flavors of cake, chocolate, strawberry and vanilla.  This means 3 different batters.  Also there is not frosting in between each layer it is strawberry jam.  So I had to make homemade strawberry jam also.  I started baking for this cake on Saturday while I was baking Jay's cupcakes.  I baked the Chocolate and Vanilla layer and made the strawberry jam before we had to leave of Jay's party (we were 1 hour late for the party).

The strawberry jam was easy and turned out incredible.  The bad thing is JT and Addison want homemade strawberry jam everyday.  

 

Homemade Strawberry Jam is addictive!!

Sunday morning all we had to do is bake the strawberry layer, make the icing, and ice the cake.  This took longer than we expected.  We were 2 hours late for the party.  

 Here's the vanilla and chocolate layer getting strawberry jam.

Here's JT cutting and leveling the strawberry layer.

Here are all the layers with jam, ready for the crumb coat.

 Here it is with the crumb coat in the fridge so the crumb coat can get hard.

 And here's it is all iced and decorated.  Isn't it pretty.

 

Here's Val cutting the cake.

Here's the inside of the Neapolitan cake.

The caked turned out yummy.  It was gone in 10 minutes.  Everyone said it was the best cake they had every had.  I was very happy with the outcome, next time I might make the layers thicker so the color difference can be more dramatic.  We also made cupcakes with the left over batter.

 

I baked four times last week, so I will not be baking for the rest of this month (I say that now).  I will be working on making cards.  I have gotten some new stuff in the mail and I have yet been able to play with it. 

Well off to class.  Martha Stewart Cochran out!!!  :)