cooking ala mel

healthy recipes and the occasional craft

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Free Customizable Geeky Home Prints – Harry Potter, Doctor Who

After moving from Buffalo, NY to north of Baltimore, MD and mostly getting settled in (just a few finishing furniture pieces we’re waiting for, and SHELVES for my pantry.. cannot wait to get all my baking supplies out of boxes), it was high time for me to make a few new prints to hang on the walls!  As always, I had to go with a geeky theme, focusing on quotes from my favorite books and TV shows – Harry Potter and Doctor Who, of course!  I decided to go extremely simple with black and white text and images so that they can be easily customizable by using different colors and designs of scrapbook paper!

Geeky Home Prints | cookingalamel.com

 

After getting all of my frames hung up and ordering prints from Shutterfly, there were a few things missing:  a “welcome” sign for the front hallway, some sort of home print to go along with a welcome sign, and something for in our upstairs bathroom (which has a TARDIS theme).

Here’s what I came up with (click the links below to download the full-sized prints from my Flickr page): [Read more…]

Chocolate Cookies and Cream Cake

I have to say, I’ve been really enjoying having many things to celebrate – my graduation, my parents’ retirements – so I have ample opportunity to flex my cake making muscles.  For a family graduation picnic, I made this chocolate cookies and cream cake, and it’s one of my favorites I’ve made ever.  The cake was light and fluffy (with rich chocolate flavor, and the filling… I could just eat it by itself.  In fact, I probably will do that sometime pretty soon.  So good.

Chocolate Cookies and Cream Cake | cookingalamel.com

This cake did a lot of traveling (from Buffalo to Pittsburgh to Uniontown – about 5 hours total for the cake layers), so it wasn’t quite as easy to frost it as I would’ve liked, as I usually like to make sure the layers are nice and cold.  That meant simple decorating and lots of Oreo crumbs on the outside to cover up any trace cake crumbs that got into the frosting – it’s easy to cover up mistakes!  The flavor was fantastic, regardless, so who cares what it looks like, right?! [Read more…]

Chocolate Bourbon S’mores Cake

Guys, I’m back, I’m back!!  I’m back with a very special cake I made to celebrate my graduation from pharmacy school!  After 6 long years of studying, I can finally be a full-fledged pharmacist.  To celebrate, a cake needed to be made… it had to be chocolate, of course, and bourbon just had to be involved!  😉  I made it even better by making it s’mores themed.

Chocolate Bourbon S'mores Cake | cookingalamel.com

When brainstorming what I wanted for this cake, I just decided I needed chocolate bourbon cake layers, because I love bourbon, and I made a chocolate bourbon cake a while back for my dad and loved it.  Back when I made this campfire delight cake, I loved that filling, so I went with a toasted marshmallow buttercream filling.  I love my chocolate swiss meringue buttercream, so that had to be the outside.  Crushed graham crackers in both the filling and sprinkled on the outside, and we’ve got ourselves one perfect s’more style chocolate cake. [Read more…]