Sugar Sweet Buttercream

I finally received my new Cricut Cake last week! For those unfamiliar with the Cricut Cake machine, it's an electronic cutter specifically designed for decorating cakes, cupcakes, and cookies. It doesn't officially launch at retailers until tomorrow but I thought I'd share this just to be like "I had it first." Hahaha...

Let's just say that it is a pretty complex (amazing!) piece of equipment, especially since it doesn't need to hook up to a computer. It wasn't hard to use but I don't have experience with the original Cricut for paper scrapbooking so it'll take a little time to get comfortable with it.

My friend asked me to make her a small super chocolaty cake for her roommate's birthday so I came up with this Chocolate Insanity Cake.

Chocolate devil's food cake covered with chocolate buttercream, filled with milk chocolate and decorated with white chocolate chip borders! I used the Cricut Cake to cut out the flower and letter decorations out of white frosting sheets. I had a hard time getting them to stick to the dry buttercream because it's better suited for attaching to fondant-covered cakes. Next time I'll try using the Cricut Cake with rolled fondant or gumpaste.

Since we're sort of on the subject of chocolate buttercream, I wanted to share this lil' cutie bear-shaped cake I made in my first cake decorating class with a Wilton shaped pan. He was my first attempt at piping stars all over a cake, a little tedious to say the least but I love the effect.

How could you resist an adorable face like this? I just want to eat him up!

Oh wait, that's right, I already did...

And now that we're sort of on the topic of shaped cake pans... Here's a piggie face cake I made for my good friend who loves pigs. She requested it special for her birthday.

I used the Wilton animal crackers pan and filled it with fun-fetti cake.

Shaped pans are great for a quick themed cake and are very versatile but I've already acquired so much bakeware and I'm running out of room to store everything! I should experiment with carving cakes to save on space... or start a cake pan rental business... hmmm... do they have one of those already??