Mud Turtle Cupcakes

The Mud Turtle Cupcakes from Rose's Heavenly Cakes have a lot of bits and pieces to make them up but they are tasty and impressive looking.  These were definite winners when I made them.

The ingredient list for these is somewhat intimidating.  This may be the most individual ingredients I've ever put together for one recipe.
 

I love caramel, but this made a LOT of caramel.  Far more than I'm used to making. Although I may have doubled the recipe...

Yeah, I definitely doubled the recipe.  This is way too much batter for one batch of cupcakes.
 

Without the decorations, the cupcakes are pretty good basic chocolate cakes.  Not too chocolatey or too sweet.

But after the decoration they're even better.  A little bit of caramel, some pecans, and some mini chocolate chips make these mud turtles amazing!

Lemon Meringue Cake

I love lemon!  I love meringue!  I love this lemon meringue cake!

The batter for this one required a TON of lemon juice.  Luckily, I buy my lemon juice in bulk.  Because I have a mental problem.

The batter for this cake is more of a biscuit than a normal cake.  It's very light and not terribly sweet.  The lemony filling more than makes up for the savory nature of the cake itself.
 

This was obviously before I learned how to properly cut the parchment to line my cake pans with.  So dumb.

Uhhhhh...  So I clearly did not realize how much meringue this recipe would make when I selected this bowl.  There were egg whites all over my kitchen, but luckily the majority of the meringue did not overrun the tiny, tiny bowl I selected.
 

Before sending the meringue-d up cake through the oven for a few minutes it's pearly white.  Very light and pretty looking.

And after going through the oven, it's pretty nice looking too!  This was one of my favorite cakes, but it was a bitch to transport.  The lemon juice in the cake itself seeped out all over my refrigerator and the inside of the cake carrier.  The meringue also didn't look so hot after a long walk in my cake carrier with the edges sliding around and hitting the carrier lid.  But looks and leaks aside, it was very very tasty.

Pecan Torte with Coffee Cream

I'm really bad at writing these posts.  REALLY bad at it.  So although I haven't updated in over six months, I have been making cakes regularly.  So I'm gonna do a bunch of short posts in order to try to clear my backlog.

In any case, the cake of the week almost a year ago in February 2011 was the Pecan Torte with Coffee Cream from Rose's Heavenly Cakes.

There are a lot of pecans involved in this little baby.  I don't mind that at all though since pecans are some of my favorite nuts.

The batter is mostly egg yolks and sugar which the pecans are then folded in to.

Apparently this was somewhere in the middle of a long run of bad luck that I had with unmolding cakes.  Luckily this one was only slightly ruined and the mistake was easily disguised by the whipped cream.
 

An evening in the refrigerator and being topped with the coffee whipped cream caused this cake to dip quite a bit in the middle.  That was fine though as the dip just became a perfect receptacle for more tasty cream!