Red Velvet Cake with Hazelnut Buttercream

I really tried to dissuade my mom from choosing the red velvet cake with buttercream frosting for her birthday cake this year. I even tried to tempt her with the offer of a piecaken (see below), but surprisingly she even passed that up! What can I say? The red velvet and buttercream are family favorites.

But I couldn't just have an exact repeat of so many birthday cakes from years passed, so I spiced it up a bit by adding about 2 teaspoons of hazelnut oil. The hazelnut flavor was pretty strong when you ate the frosting by itself (and interestingly enough tasted like wafer cookies (which conveniently are one of her favorite types of cookies)), but once combined with the cake, the hazelnut was only a very slight accent. In the future, I will probably add about 4 teaspoons of the hazelnut oil so that it holds its own more when paired with the chocolate in the cake.

And now, the piecaken: 

I'm still trying to figure out how she could say no to this.

image via here, which I found via my fiance's gchat status...the magic of the internet