Sweet Anna's

Finding JOY in the kitchen, through easy, wholesome, made-from-scratch foods!

birthdays

white chocolate raspberry truffle cheesecakes

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Do have a special dessert that you make over, and over, and over again?  Year, after year, after year?

I have been making this White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle Cheesecake for my husband since before we were married.  It is his favorite fancy dessert, and I love making it for him!

individual white chocolate raspberry truffle cheesecakes | Sweet Anna's

This year I made cute little individual cheesecakes, really just because he loves to have leftovers and it’s so much easier to freeze and package these up than big slices of a traditional cheesecake.

And really, everything is cuter itty-bitty sized anyways, right?

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the home birth of Maren Ree…

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My sweet, beautiful, joy-bringing Baby Girl is one year old today!

Born at 12:39am, her birth was the most difficult and life-changing event of my life, so far.  WORTH IT.

I’ve tried to keep this as PG as possible (all pics are appropriate, FYI!) but if birth makes you squeamish…  feel free to scroll down quickly to some of those yummy recipes down below!

For those of you who are interested:  Here is Maren’s Home Birth Story.  One year ago today.

Maren Ree was born Tuesday July 24th, 2012 at 12:39am.  Weighing 6lbs 8oz and just 18.5inches long.

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a Cookie Monster birthday cake!

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We had a fun little birthday party to celebrate Bjørn’s 3rd birthday this weekend…  his birthday cake request?

Cookie Monster!

So, I took that theme as far as I could with my very limited birthday-party-planning-skills and made a dark chocolate cake with a cookie dough filling (recipe coming soon!) decorated to look like Cookie Monster.

Oh, and we had plenty of Monster Cookies to go along with it of course!

I actually surprised myself with how easy it was to decorate this cake.

I have never decorated a cake before this, and I was nervous.  Silly, maybe…  but that’s just the truth of it.

Wanna know how easy it was??

I used a classic vanilla buttercream frosting for this cake, dyed blue, for the main frosting.

(Here’s a tip:  food coloring gel works much better than liquid for getting a rich color like this…  and can easily be found at places like WalMart and craft stores in the decorating section!)

I frosted the whole cake with a thin layer like any normal cake, then I used a small star tip to pipe/pull the frosting on top into a hairy-mess!  This is the part I was most worried about and I thought would take forever.  It wasn’t bad at all!

I bought a can of black frosting pre-made to draw on the mouth and eyes, because I didn’t want to deal with black frosting.  And I made the eyes out of white chocolate candy melts piped into circles and then chilled until firm!

Oh, and what’s a Cookie Monster cake without a cookie and some crumbs!

Happy Birthday, sweet 3 year old boy!  

I’m glad you liked your Cookie Monster birthday!!

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