Father's Day: Brownie Bottom Ice Cream Cupcakes

For Father's Day, I decided to make Brownie Bottom Ice Cream Cupcakes as seen from Joy the Baker. The tricky part about this recipe is how quickly you have to work to avoid ice cream melting or the ganache hardening prematurely. I bought standard brownie mix (out of laziness)

I used semi sweet chocolate for the ganache!

I now realize why making whipped cream by hand failed the first time I tried...I hadn't whipped it long enough! This time I stood by the mixer for over 3 minutes to make it thick and fluffy.

Whipped cream, cherry and caramel syrup to top it off! (I tried really hard to decorate it better than Joy the Baker did because my poor cupcakes looked deflated without it all!)

Happy Father's Day!

Blondies

I wasn't having a great day, so I decided to bake some comfort food. Baking has always been therapeutic to me, so it wasn't a surprise that I felt much better after having made and tasted these in-between-cookie-and-brownie bars called Blondies.

I adapted this recipe from smitten kitchen again. I don't think I'll ever get tired of her. And if you're looking for a dessert recipe that's not too sweet, she's you're best bet!

My favorite part about this recipe is how versatile it is. I chose to add chopped pecans and chocolate chips, but you can add anything from espresso powder to dried fruit to mashed bananas to customize this recipe to your liking. Deb calls her Blondies "infinitely adaptable".

Jenelle's Birthday Cupcakes

Since I didn't have much time, I decided to bake cupcakes for Jenelle's birthday from store-bought cake mix. So here we have 19 cupcakes made from yellow butter cake mix with nutella frosting!

strawberry brown butter bettys

Yesterday, I decided to bake Strawberry Brown Butter Bettys from smitten kitchen! Parth came to help me again :)

We used:

strawberries!!

melted butter & granulated sugar

white bread & brown sugar & panko!

mix it all in...

TA-DA!

in the oven...

15 with foil, 10 without, 5 minutes of cooling and done!

YAYY! :)

Steph's Birthday Cake!

Yesterday I decided to bake Steph a birthday cake for her 19th birthday. I decided to bake a 2-layer yellow cake with chocolate frosting as adopted by smitten kitchen.

My version :)

After I baked the cake, I made the chocolate sour cream frosting! Parth came to help me put the icing on :)

FINISHED CAKE!

I was a little worried about the sourness of the frosting, but in the end Steph said that she liked it! Yay!

Happy Birthday Steph! Love you!