Finding My Go-To Baking Recipes

I love to bake. It is a fun creative process for me. I have found that I have had more opportunities to bake lately and have been working hard to find what I would call my go-to recipes. I wanted to share some that I have found and what kinds I’m still trying to figure out. Let’s start with the above cake. It is a 6 inch three layer mini chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting. I LOVE chocolate and peanut butter together. So delish! I will have to say after trying quite a few chocolate cake recipes my favorite that is always consistently good is the recipe on the back of the Hershey’s Cocoa Powder box which you can find here: ‘Hershey’s “Perfectly Chocolate” Chocolate Cake. It is so moist and does great with stacking layers. I can’t remember which recipe I used for the peanut butter frosting (which is sad since I should have saved it ’cause it was good!), but I have yet to try a recipe I have found on pinterest for it that hasn’t turned out yummy. I did cheat on this cake for the “chocolate ganache”. That is one thing I need to sit down and figure out, but I was pressed for time and due to lack of ingredients I simply used Torani Dark Chocolate Sauce. The bottle seems to last forever! I initially bought it to add on top of my whipped cream in hot chocolate but have found it works on all kinds of other desserts.

The above cake is a Coconut Bundt Cake and is really good! I had never made a coconut cake before and have made this one 2 more times since. You can find the recipe from 5 Boys Baker here. It is very moist and the coconut flavor is perfect. Even my youngest who doesn’t like coconut liked this. I have added this to my go to list, although I do have some eyes on some other coconut cake variations I want to try.

This cake was my first try at a Red Velvet Cake from scratch. Sadly, I used the wrong type of food coloring and then did not have enough to get it really red so it was more of a pink hahaha. But it still tasted good. Then I used a cream cheese icing and drizzled some more of that Dark Chocolate Sauce on it with chocolate covered strawberries. While I was the one that made the mistake, I think I will try another recipe as the one I used wasn’t the clearest. Anyone have a good red velvet recipe? I did use this tip to make the chocolate covered strawberries which worked like a charm.

This last cake was simply vanilla with vanilla frosting. It was good, but yet again, I want to try some other recipes to see if I can find something even better. I did like this recipe for the sugared fruit. My oldest was eating all the extras the next day like crazy!

The thing I have learned by making these mini cakes with 6″ pans is that I can always have leftovers to create a few cupcakes to add on the side. I was able to make about 6 cupcakes from each of the mini cakes batters. Since all of these were for a bake sale, having the extra cupcakes made for even more product to sell. And good news! All of these completely sold out! A success for sure. -jess