Sugar and Spice

Hi bloggies!

Sorry for the late post... the holiday Monday threw me off. Not to mention... I was in a bit of a sugar coma...

Justin and I had a low key V-Day. We opted out of purchasing gifts for each other (yay to no money due to home ownership!) and just got chocolate/candy instead.

Mine didn't last long enough for a picture. Justin did however, get me a beautiful bouqet of flowers... chocolate flowers that is (the best kind in my opinion)

We went for a lovely dinner here in town - saganaki, peppercorn steak and carmel pecan cheesecake - YUM! (the lighting was wayyy to dark to take pictures... and I may have forgotten).

In other Valendtine's Day celebrations I made my annual V-Day cake for Ava's school (this is the second year I've done it)

Last year I was very adventerous and decided to do a 3 tiered heart shaped cake with different coloured fondant.

Excuse the messy kitchen table... this picture was taken
at like 12:00 am on a week night...

I was lazy and down to the wire this year so originally, I had thought to do an ombre cake in pink colours... kind of like this

On a side note... pictures that look this nice can't be that
hard right??

Once the cake was done and stacked I realized my cake was not nearly as tall as the one in the picture so I didn't have as much space to work with. Therefore, I decided to do swirls in one colour all over. Until I ran out of the colour I was using and had to make more icing.... finally - becuase I couldn't get the colours to match perfectly I went back (kind of) to my original idea and make the top a lighter shade. Basically a series of unfortunate events that got me here...

Wasn't sure how it was going going to turn out in the beginning but when it was finished it actually ended up looking pretty good (if I do say so myself).

The cake recipe I used was a White Chocolate one from my Kitchen Aid cookbook - it is a no fail, always mosit white cake that I love to use as a cake go-to - thought I'd share the recipe with you!

Kitchen Aid White Chocolate Cake

Ingredients
2 cups all purpose flour
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
4 squares white chocolate, broken into pieces
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease two cake pans.

Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in medium bowl. Combine milk, butter and white chocolate in medium saucepan; cook and stir over medium-low heat until melted and smooth.

Beat sugar and eggs in large bowl with electric mixer at medium speed 3 minutes or until pale and thick. Add vanilla; beat until blended. Slowly add flour mixture, beating until well blended. Slowly beat in milk mixture. Pour batter into prepared pans.

Bake 24-28 minutes or until toothpick inserted into centres comes out clean. Cool in pans for 15 minutes. Remove to wire racks; cool completely.

I used a simple buttercream icing recipe (3 cups powdered sugar, 1/3 cup softened butter, 1 1/2 tsp. vanilla and approx 2 tbsp. of milk) to ice the cake; add food colouring to achieve desired colour.

In other exciting (to me) news - I ran out of a small jar of coconut oil last week; one of the blogs I read recently reviewed a Coconut Oil from Costco - got good reviews and not to mention the price was right (as it always is at Costco). A perk... the jar is MASSIVE!!!!

I'll post a recipe that calls for coconut oil soon (its ooey goey, chocolately, and is ready to eat in under 5 minutes... I know - sounds irresitable)

Until next time...