My friend Laura likes chocolate cupcakes with vanilla frosting. I told her husband I would surprise her with a very special version of that flavor combination so I made her some homemade Hostess cupcakes. These are fun because they look like a boring chocolate cupcake with shiny glaze, but they have a surprise inside- a big yummy blob of vanilla frosting!

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My aunt Sherrie and I made these together. I think it’s kind of weird that red velvet everything is in vogue right now. It must be some irony-induced backlash to the organic/natural movement that makes us want to pump our bodies full of whole bottles of evil red food coloring. Or maybe it’s just because they are so pretty!

They weren’t quite as dark red as we wanted but they sure were velvety! They were kind of dense and pound cake-y. Yum! The recipe is adapted from a Paula Deen recipe- I mean, how can you NOT trust a woman who puts Velveeta in chocolate fudge?

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My nephew turned 5 recently and swore he wanted a circuit board cake. At the 11th hour he decided he wanted a car cake instead. Online searches for car cakes yielded a lot of lameness and ugly-ass cakes, so I winged it. Wung it? Whatever. I figured something out, and was pretty pleased when it actually, totally looked like a car.

I know the icing isn’t perfect here- that’s the beauty of making something for a person who is only 5. Perfection is not what they’re after. They are after copious amounts of frosting and candy on a cake that’s shaped like something other than a cake, which makes them pretty easy to please. I think the biggest compliment came when, after admiring the cake for several minutes, my nephew turned to my Dad and with saucer eyes and his jaw hanging open, and said- “GRAMPA- do you realize this CAR is EATABLE?!?!?”

Eatable indeed! I made this somewhat nasty hot pink strawberry cake in a 9×13 pan and then cut a third of it off, lengthwise. Then I cut the long skinny piece I had in half perpendicular. Like this:

I flipped the 2 pieces 90 degrees and set them next to each other on top of the remaining large cake and stuck them on with frosting. They were kind of slope-y which actually made it look more like a car. I wanted really sturdy, fluffy frosting for this, so I used a fluffy meringue frosting (my mom made it so I’m not sure how- something about like this) and tinted it blue to attach the cake pieces and cover the whole thing in gobs and gobs of icing. I made a little bit of white royal icing for the windows, doors, and writing. Tic-tacs for lights and blinkers, oreos for wheels, sour belts for racing stripes and windshield wipers, some weird white tootsie rolls for the bumpers, and voila! A car that any 5-year-old would love.

I had about 3 minutes to try to pretty up these birthday cupcakes (for a Heather) before running out the door to the party… and found that uppercase and lowercase H’s in a variety of fonts made for an easy fancy decoration!

Color a bit of your icing with food coloring and scoop it into a small Ziploc bag. Cut a little tiny hole in one corner and hold the bag steady with two hands to pipe. You can always do a practice run on a piece of parchment and scoop the icing back into the bag.