This one takes the cake

honestly, i'm not one of those awesome chef's out in the world. my mother makes some amazing stuff and i've tried to make her proud through the years by repeating her recipes almost as good as her. well... i decided instead of using one of my mothers old recipes i would branch out and try something new. well as i was thinking and searching the internet for something yummy, two things stood out to me. Cream Cheese. & Nutella. normally these two would not go together but i decided that they should. the reason: im not a fan of lots of chocolate, but, Nutella adds just the right amount of flavor without being overpowering. so, i've created my own concoction that turned out to be absolutely delicious and beautiful if i might say so myself. here's the scoop.

Cream Cheese Pound Cake Recipe:

1 1/2 cups butter, softened at room temp
1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened at room temp
3 cups sugar
6 large eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

mix together in electric mixer slowly and one by one in that order. pour into either two round cake pans or a bundt pan (Grease and flour the pans) cook at 300 degrees for about 1:40 minutes. note: it makes your house smell amazing for the entire two hours. :)

Recipe with step by step picture tutorial also found here 

after that's done, let them cool and cut in half so that you can put this amazing mouse between the layers. some might say to just put the two entire circle cakes on top of each other but no... this cake is extremely dense and rich, you don't need two cakes on top of each other. one is enough. promise. 

Mouse Recipe:

1 cup whipping cream

1/4 cup nutella

whip together until you can form peaks with your beaters. the end.

then make this Frosting:

2 cubes of room temperature butter (1 cup)

2 cups powdered sugar

1 tbsp vanilla

milk

whip the butter and powdered sugar together (it will be lumpy) add the vanilla (this will make it a little less lumpy and might splatter all over your kitchen, so add slowly) then add milk until it's the right consistency for your taste. this way, instead of adding more and more sugar like most frosting recipes call for, you are adding more milk... it turns out less rich and potently sugary. much more edible in my taste. if you would like it super fluffy then instead of adding all the milk, just add a tub of cool whip. (don't forget to pick a super awesome color and dye it! or... white's fine too.)

add them all together and what do you get?

all i did to make the hearts, letters, and elephant was take chocolate chips (white chocolate if you plan on dying it), melt them in a small ziplock bag by placing it in a bowl filled with hot water from the faucet (the same way you would heat a bag of frozen breast milk) then add dye and smush around (if necessary) then draw your item on a piece of paper, place a large ziplock bag on top of the paper. cut a -smaller-than-you-think hole in the corner of the chocolate bag and pipe the chocolate by tracing the drawing on top of the ziplock bag. or just freehand. let cool (an hour or so depending on the thickness of your item) carefully remove from top of ziplock bag and place on cake. so simple.

hint: if your doing a large figure like the elephant, then make sure to do your piping thick enough that it wont break when taking it off the ziplock after it dries. also, i made the elephant look like it had 1 inch "stilts" underneath it's legs so that i could stick those stilts deep into the frosting. that way it would look like the elephant was just barely standing on the frosting but still have some foundation. 

you can kinda see the "stilts" in this image