Baking My Heart Out

I love to bake for any reason, at any occasion.  However, baking for a holiday is my favorite.  Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, whatever.  Well, I think I like Valentine's Day the best, because I love pink, red, hearts, and roses.  :)

I made two things this year, super yummy m-n-m cookies & cake push-ups.  Cake push-ups are super cute, but I'm still working on perfecting them.  They require a lot of frosting to be cute, and then aren't super yummy.  Unless you love frosting.  :)

Valentine's Day Cake Push-Ups.

Valentine's Day M-n-M Cookies.

I found this recipe for M-n-M cookies (just like chocolate chip but with candies instead of chips) and it looked just different enough from anything I've tried before, that I simply HAD to try it.  And who doesn't love pink, hot pink, red & white M-n-Ms?  I just don't want to know.

They were such cute little dough balls, and I think they really baked up very well!  They were super delicious and I'm ashamed to say the only other person I shared these with was my hubby.  (He's a lucky Valentine, isn't he?)

While the cookie dough chilled in the fridge (a very important steps if you want fat, fluffy, soft cookies rather than thin, crispy cookies) I baked a few cakes.

The cakes (devil's food and vanilla with red food coloring) went into the freezer (under several layers of plastic wrap and inside freezer storage zipper bags) for my future cake push-up extravaganza!

 I used a circle cutter to cut circles out of the cakes, and then I sliced them in half because I wanted the cake circles even thinner in order to fit as many pretty layers into the cake push-ups.

 I have so many pink, red and valentine sprinkles, candy corn, confetti, sugar, etc. that I knew this was the perfect opportunity to make cake push ups.

I made red, white & pink frosting.  (Red is hard to make when you use real butter b/c it's always going to be a shade of orange, but I don't mind. . . )

I simply layered the cake circles with frosting, sprinkles, more cake, m-n-ms, etc.  You get the idea...

I think the hot pink frosting with the dark chocolate cake was my favorite - so pretty!


And just what do you do with all of that leftover cake and frosting?  Cake balls for future cake pops, of course!!!

For more cake push-up photos, click here.