Cake Endeavours

We always seem to have bananas that have gone very ripe by the end of the week and an ever increasing inventory of frozen bananas growing in the freezer.  Since we didn't have any baking to do this weekend I figured it would be nice for a change to bake something for us and to make some room in the freezer. I just picked a recipe at random from Pinterest.  I was able to get 24 large muffins from it.  I filled the liners to the top so that they would overflow over the top to create muffin tops.  Yum!  I reduced the sugar by two thirds and next time I'm not going to add any as we didn't notice any difference in flavour or texture.  I'm also going to try to replace the butter with apple sauce to see how that changes the flavour and texture.  If it works out the muffins will be so much healthier for us.

I was asked to make this cake for the goalie, #30 for the Queens University hockey team.  I'm so not into sports.  I couldn't even tell you the name of my alma mater's hockey team or if we even had one.  Though York U did build a mega hockey complex so my guess is that that would be a yes to having a hockey team. The idea was to have his hockey mask as the main feature of the cake.  The helmet has amazing art work on it that I didn't even want to attempt to replicate so we went with a more basic interpretation.  I printed out a goalie mask colouring page and drew a rough design.  One side, batman symbol and the other Thor's club.  In the middle Queens crown and number 30.  The bottom has a brick pattern on it. That I could handle replicating.  Ha! This was a 10" 2 layer chocolate cake with chocolate fudge filling covered in white fondant.  To finish off the decorating I added the lightening bolt and the full batman symbol alo...

For this cake I had to go to Miss E to get schooled on what Yo-Kai was.  I had no idea it was as she put it a "knock off" of Pokeman.  At least that is her opinion. :) Domenic's favourite character is Noko, the lucky snake; see four leaf clover on his head.  I used two different sizes of heart cutters then squared off the points to join all the hearts to form the clover.  This was a 2 layer 8" chocolate cake with butter cream filling. I love the tail so I had to make sure to include it as part of the decorating.

Today we went out to Bowmanville to my home church, St. Paul's for a surprise flash mob to celebrate my mom's retirement as the junior choir director after 40+ years.  It was also the Mr. Dewell's 70th birthday party, the amazingly talented organist and family friend.  No matter how old I get I still can't call him by his first name. Anyway, I was making a chocolate cake for another order today and decided as a surprise to make a 6" cake for Mr. Dewell since I know he likes his chocolate.  The only problem was that I didn't have any baking chocolate but thanks to Miss E's suggestion we did have several really large Toblerone bars that I could use instead. Toblerone chocolate is very different to work with than baking chocolate.  It melts a lot faster.  I made some musical chocolates from a mold set and were almost impossible to get out because it doesn't get very hard.  Between each of the three layers I added some chopped up Toblerone.  The Toble...