Momma Duke's Birthday..

So my amazing mom had another birthday. She was so busy the weekend of her actual birthday that we ended up celebrating it the following weekend. Which gave me more time to decide what to make. Since I've been sitting on a box of red velvet cake for awhile and it was burning a hole in my cabinet, I figured I better get to making it.

So this is nothing fancy, Store-bought box of red velvet cake, jar of cream cheese frosting. Heart Sprinkles.

I had some small 6" or 7" round pans, so I thought I'd just make a layer cake with many layers. I had to refill these pans twice in order to make all the layers.

Then, let them cook on a rack, and iced them up. After the first one, I ended up cutting the bumps off the tops because I realized I have to cram a lot of icing into the edges to make it smooth. 

Overall it came out quite good. Although in all fairness it's pretty hard to screw up a boxed cake. Happy Birthday Mom. xo

Rainbow cupcakes...

In our family I'm pretty sure that we have every month covered when it comes to birthdays. February's birthday was that of my beautiful mother in law. Since she's usually the one to bake the cakes and cook the dinners for everyone's birthday, on her birthday we all pitched in so she didn't have to do a thing. My contribution was the "cake" or cupcakes as the case may be.

I really liked the look of these Rainbow Cake Jars I wrote about once before and thought there must be a way to make something similar in cupcake form. Sure enough, I was in luck. A quick google search and I came across these: Rainbow Cupcakes. Perfect! I mixed up the cake as specified and divided for the colors.

I lined the cupcake pans with those basic liners you can find anywhere. I chose them because they were thin enough so that once the cupcakes were baked you'd be able to see the layers through the wrapper.

I put about a tablespoon of each color in each liner. and just layered one on top of each other. At first I thought they might blend together too much, but in fact they didn't blend at all. Then I baked them according to the directions. Some of them bubbled the darker colors to the surface but I just covered that with icing later.

I set them aside to let them cool and was very happy with the results thus far.

Next up icing & sprinkles.

Even unwrapped not too shabby...

And the inside looked great...

And of course they tasted even better!

ps - Here's a picture of the celebration...that's my 1 1/2 year old nephew who thinks that every birthday is also his birthday (and of course we all play along because it's so damn cute.)

Jar Cakes...

I made these for my lovely sister-in-law last October for her birthday (as you can tell by the halloween table cloth). She saw them online here: Rainbow Cake in a Jar And sent me this link with a note that said "You HAVE TO make these" clearly knowing how much I like to try making different things. I told her I would absolutely make them for her birthday and had her pick out a few colors. As you can see from above she selected shades of purple and lime green. So I followed the directions in the link above and just changed the colors and the size of the jars (see below)

Modifications:
The original recipe calls for 1 pint-size canning jars, but barely gets 3 jars out of one box of cake mix. With a birthday dinner with at least 8 people this seemed like an excessive amount of cake per person. Don't get me wrong they look stunning in the taller pint-size jars but I couldn't serve 1/3 of a cake to each person! I went to the local craft store and found they had smaller 8oz mason jars which I figured would work out perfectly (pictured above). I also assume you could use those smaller 1/2 pint - jelly jars as well. You just can't fill them up all the way to the top because they puff up quite a bit. I had to experiment with one jar first before making all of them to determine how long they needed to cook and how high they would rise.

I wish I had more photos of these because they were really so cute. But I suppose that means I'll just have to make them again sometime. Hmmm...who's birthday is coming up next....