Birthday Adventure

I've been wanting to make a cake with a dramatic flower... So for my birthday I decided that is what I would make. I found a flower cake (this one) that used heart shaped cookie cutters to form the flower leaves.  I thought simple enough... "I can do that" so I tried it...  Below is the result.   Happy Birthday to me :)

This is 2- 6 x 3" chocolate cakes with buttercream.  Flower is Fondant & Gum paste.

For my birthday I took a trip to the cake mecca that is New York City...  We visited NY Cakes where I bought myself the newest clay gun/ extruder- it is awesome as well as a few other toys including my first copy of cakecentral magazine.  Here is my loot:

We also visited three cupcake stores- Sugar Sweet Sunshine, Cupcake Land and Crumbs.  All three were good but the winner in my book between these three was cupcake land. A close second was sugar sweet sunshine, if not just for the name, but the cupcakes were really tasty as well.  Of course everything in my book is compared to Magnolia bakery and no one has yet to surpass them...

Here are some shots of the cupcakes...
Beautiful cupcakes at crumbs....

I had a peanut butter candy cupcake and it just didn't have enough peanut butter flavor.  The cake itself was o.k. but wasn't really that chocolaty... It was o.k. but definitely looked better then it tasted.

The counter at cupcake land in Brooklyn...  I had a peanut butter cupcake here.  It was awesome. The icing tasted like real peanut butter and the cake was light and fluffy...

Sugar Sweet Sunshine cupcakes.  They were the cheapest of them all- only $1.50 each and they tasted really good.  Much better then the almost $4 crumbs cupcakes. 

Randomly found this place called Economy Candy... I have never been in one store with this much candy in one place in my entire life.  It was great!

Another really fun store was Fishs Eddy- if you need plates- This is where you need to go.  It was a GREAT store... I'm glad I don't live closer because I could get into serious trouble..