When you cut the cotton candy pumpkin it has a very pale yellow colored pulp. And even the roasting the pumpkin did not change the color that much (see the pictures bellow):


However it produced a nice looking pumpkin pie, the filling had a nice texture to it:

However, as I said, the taste needed more “pumpkiness” to it. So if you ever wonder if the Cotton Candy Pumpkin is good for making pies, I would suggest other pumpkins. Unless of course you prefer the very mild taste of Cotton Candy Pumpkin.

Bellow are two cake toppers from AmericanBridal.com. Both cake toppers are crafted from bonded marble and can add elegance to your wedding cake.

Two Hearts One Love Cake Topper

$19.95

Your marriage will be the start of your two hearts being one strong love. This cake topper will ad elegance to your cake…[Click here for more info]

Happily Ever After Cake Topper

$19.95

The new couple engaged in a warm loving embrace. The perfect addition for the most elaborate pastry creations [Click here for more info]

For more bridal accessories visit AmericanBridal.com. If you know of any great online bridal shops feel free to share them with me int the comments.

Most of the restaurants out there bake or fry the chicken wings until they done and the just coat them in a hot Buffalo hot sauce before serving. The trick is to bake chicken wings until they almost done, coat it with sauce and then finish baking them.

To start off you will need about 12 – 16 chicken wings. You might want to cut them in two through the joint. I leave the tip of the wing on, but if you don’t like the look you can cut the tips off:

Arrange the chicken wings on a baking sheet and generously season them with powedered garlic, powdered onion, pepper and paprika. You can also do the seasoning in a large bawl so you can toss the wings- wings get better coating of seasoning this way. It is important not to use any salt in this step as your Buffalo hot sauce will have sufficient amount of slat in it.

Bake the wings in a preheated (400° F) oven for about 35 minutes until the skin begins to turn golden brown and the mean begins to barely separate from the bone:

Place the chicken wings and large ball and coat them in Buffalo sauce:


Rearrange the coated wings on the baking sheet while replacing the foil. I am using aluminum foil for two reasons, it leaves less mess, but it also makes it easy to discard the fat.

Bake the wings for another 10-15 minutes in a 400 °F over. You have to keep an eye on them now because you will not wont to overcook them. Generally I judge by the strong aroma from the sauce, you hardly smell the sauce when it is cold.

Hot Souce

To make the sauce for the chicken wings you will need:

• 3/4 cup – Hot Sauce (Red Hot by Frank’s seems to work the best, but you can use Tabasco or any other brand)
• 1/2 cup – Ketchup
• 1/4 cup – Blue Cheese Dressing (You can also use Ranch dressing, but the blue cheese gives it that extra something if you know what I mean)
• 1/4 cup – Soy Sauce (Reason we do not use the salt to season chicken wings before baking them)
• 3 Table spoons of butter

Combine the above ingredients in a a sauce pan place it over the medium heat burner:

While heating, stir the sauce until all ingredients fully dissolved and incorporated. The sauce should acquire a color of the cream of tomatoes soup:

This recipe should make a sauce that has a rather serious kick to it. However if you like more spicy or little milder sauce you will have to adjust the ketchup to hot sauce ratio.

All you need is to bake your favorite cupcakes. The “fur” decoration was done with a grass decorating tip 233 using butter cream icing. The little feet are made of marshmallow circus peanuts bars, one bar makes two feet when you cut it in half. For the antennas we used red liquorice and the eyes were made out of mini m&m’s.

We made 15 green monster cup cakes and 15 blue ones:


Here ere are few things you might need to make the monster cup cakes:

A friend of mine has asked me to bake a cake for her daughter’s birthday. My friend’s daughter was whose birthday coincides with St. Patrick’s Day. I decided to bake a cake that will look like a four leaf shamrock.

A lucky shamrock cake can be very easily done using a small heart cake pan. If you have a set of three heart cake pans for a tier cake- use the smallest one.

You will need to bake four heart shape cakes, then turn them round so all the bottom of each hear almost touch each other.. The stem part can be baked in a simple rectangular bread pan.

It took me about 5 hours to make the flowers and the cake topper. To bake, assemble and decorate the cake required another 4.5 hours.

Although fondant cakes look great, the assembling and decorations needs to be done the last minute as fondant can not be refrigerated.

I was pleasantly surprised how realistic the gum paste flowers look. One of the trick I have learned is to make the petals for your flowers as thin as possible- it adds that extra realistic look.

Can’t wait for the follow up class where we will learn more advanced flowers. If you leave in New Jersey, consider attending one of the classes at Chocolate Belles in Brick. You won’t regret it!

I got the idea for this cake by flipping though some old magazine. The original cake was actually three teared cake, where the top two tears where sitting on top of a spider and a third little spider was on the very top of the cake. Not only it was too complicated to make, I did not have enough people to eat even if I did make it.

It gave me an idea however for the cake pictured here. To make this cake I used 13 inch round cake pan, a 4 inch cup cake (for the body of the spider), plenty of fondant and thick pretzel sticks (to make spider’s legs).

The pumpkins around the base of the cake were made of fondant as well.

It is good idea to prepare your fondant ahead of time by dividing and coloring the fondant for the different parts of the cake. You can keep your fondant in a zip lock plastic container to prevent it from drying out.

If you have never worked with fondant before, you should remember not to store your cake in refrigerator as the moisture and fondant do not go well together. This is also why you will probably be much better off to fill your cake with butter cream icing instead of custard or whipped cream icing as both can go bad very quickly if not refrigerated. While butter cream can be stored at room temperature for 2 to 3 days.

If you need good book on fondant decorating techniques, I highly recommend The Cake Decorator’s Motif Bible: 150 Fabulous Fondant Designs with Easy-to-Follow Charts and Photographs