Chocolate Mousse-Filled Cupcakes

The theme for this week's Cupcake Challenge on Hoosier Homemade is Cake Mix. I decided to turn ordinary cake mix special by using it as the foundation for Chocolate Mousse-filled Cupcakes. I baked regular yellow cake cupcakes and filled them with chocolate mousse. I then iced them with vanilla buttercream and added some mini chocolate chips. I took pictures along the way in case anyone was interested in a little tutorial of sorts.



Start with regular yellow cake mix which you then use to fill the cupcakes a little more than halfway in order to get this size cupcake.



Prepare chocolate mousse following the directions on the package.

Fill a pastry bag, fitted with a number #12 tip, with the chocolate mousse.



Push the tip about halfway into the cupcake and squeeze until you feel some resistance.

This is what the filled cupcakes look like when they are done. Not very pretty, yet!

Once you have filled all the cupcakes with mousse, frost them as usual with your icing of preferrence. I picked vanilla buttercream.



The last touch is to sprinkle the top of the cupcakes with some mini chocolate chips.

These cupcakes are very moist and everyone loves the surprise inside!

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American Girl : Rebecca's Back-to-School Dress

This is Rebecca, an American Girl doll, and she is going back to school soon. My daughter wanted her to have a special dress for the occasion, so I decided to try my hand at making her one. Anyone who knows anything about American Girl dolls will tell you that the clothes and accessories can get quite expensive. I decided to use an old dress that no longer fit my daughter in case things didn't work out.



If anyone is interested, I can do a tutorial with pictures. However, I basically just traced one of her dresses onto my daughter's old dress. My daughter wanted it to be "twirly", so I had to adjust for that when cutting. This was the first time I ever used a knit fabric which definitely added a level of difficulty.

My daughter loved the end result and put it on Rebecca before I really finished it. If you look closely you'll see some threads I didn't get to cut and even a little maker on the edges that I wasn't able to wash off. Silly girl says Rebecca needs a dress for each day of the week. I'm going to try to create a pattern in order to streamline the process. But what's important is that Rebecca is now ready to go back to American Girl school with all her other doll friends!

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Chalk Menu Board

My kids love the play kitchen Santa brought them last December. They are constantly cooking and serving up food. They recently informed us that it was in fact a restaurant called "The Princess and the Frog". My daughter started to work on a menu for the restaurant and I decided to make them a board to write up the "daily specials" that they were constantly rattling off to their customers. They have loved it so much that I decided to do a simple tutorial.



You will need a blackboard, a wood plaque, scrapbook paper and mod podge. We actually got this blackboard at a princess theme party a couple of years ago, so I simply purchased an already-painted frog at the craft store to go with the theme. However, those are not needed.



The first step is to apply scrapbook paper to the wood plaque. I did three coats of mod podge and smoothed the bubbles out with a credit card. Let it dry.



Next apply letters using mod podge. You can print out letter templates off the Internet, I used my Cricut cut them.



Lastly let the wood plaque dry and attach it to wall over the blackboard. Hand your kid some chalk and let their imagination run wild. As you can see, we ate really well on Sunday!

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