Week #19 – Hockey Cake

May 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

My friend Jason is a big hockey player.  So much so that he uses his hockey jersey as his facebook profile picture.

So that jersey was the inspiration for his surprise birthday cake.

This ended up being a much larger cake than I intended.  Jason insisted that he could eat the entire thing on his own but I’m fairly sure he threw over half of it away.  But he ate it for breakfast several days in a row.

The hockey puck is actually a gluten free cake because his girlfriend can’t eat wheat. She appreciated the fact that she could eat some of his birthday cake too.

The cake is vanilla butter cake with coffee frosting and the cake was drenched in booze. I covered the whole thing with black and white fondant.  I’m sure it was yummy but I didn’t try any of it.  They wouldn’t let us serve it at the restaurant. But Jason sure did…

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Week #18 – 1st Birthday Cake

May 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

My coworker Luke asked if I would make a cake for his daughter, Laila’s 1st Birthday.  I asked if she had any themes or anything and he sent me a picture of this adorable toy that she loves.

I thought it would make an amazing cake so I happily said yes.

I baked the cake using my standard butter cake recipe but added in some funfetti to make it fun and playful.  I put purple vanilla buttercream on the inside for that girly touch.  However…

I dropped the first cake I baked on the floor.  Yeah that was a few hours wasted.

So the next day I rebaked the cake and carved it out in the cat shape.  The next day I covered it in orange fondant and added in all the details.

Luke told me that his daughter really loved the eyes so I focused on getting those to really pop.  I really love the way this cake came out.

I was going to add the microphone but they needed the cake a day earlier than expected so I didn’t have time.  I was going to make it out of an ice cream cone and a ball of rice krispies.  Next time…

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Week #17 – A Gluten Free Cake Wreck

May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Well I decided to try my hand at gluten free baking.  Unfortunately all I did was follow my basic butter cake recipe with the gluten free flour and…

Nothing like a cake that’s burned on the outside and completely uncooked on the inside.  So gross, kinda looks like a cake throwing itself up.  In edition, I tasted the part that did get cooked and it tasted gross. Since I didn’t have any more gluten free flour, I didn’t get a chance to remake it.  So unfortunately, this is the cake for this week.  Sorry :(

I promise next week will be better!

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Week #16 – Poppies in a Box

April 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I attended a wonderful poppy making class at Sugar Flower Cake Shop last weekend and we made these adorable poppy flowers sitting in a “wooden” box. The cake was a vanilla butter cake with salted caramel buttercream on the inside and vanilla buttercream on the outside. The “wood” is made from gumpaste mixed with a softener so it won’t get too hard. You make a woodgrain effect by mixing several shades of brown together until they swirl but don’t mix completely. Then I accented the wood with some “screws” that held the box together which is just brown edible paint.

It was a lot of fun to make this cake.  Sugar Flower Cake shop does a lot of the hard work for you and all you have to do is the fun assembly of the cake – which I like. Poppies are a relatively easy flower to make since they don’t have too many petals or complicated assembly.  Plus they’re just adorable.

Next time I think I’ll air brush the color onto the poppies so I can get nice bright colors. The center is made from gumpaste dipped in nutmeg so it smells amazing!

Since I’ve gone gluten free, I didn’t get a chance to try the cake but my teammates at the International Space Apps Challenge did and I think they enjoyed it. Also I had to shoot the pictures with my iphone since I didn’t go home before my teammates devoured the cake.

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Week #15 – Happy Birthday Dad!

April 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

My poor father has the great misfortune to have been born in early April.  That means that he has almost never had a real birthday cake. So this year, this project, I was bound and determined to make my dad a great birthday cake.

I found a great sponge cake recipe on the martha stewart website that actually tasted great.  I made 2 cakes and the first one came out light and fluffy.  The second cake came out a bit heavier because it had some time to sit and the egg whites fell.  But it still tasted good.

The real secret to this cake was…booze! I filled the middle of the cake with raspberry jam and brushed the cake with rum. The rum really helped keep the usually dry matzo cake moist.  It was delish!

I covered the cake with vanilla buttercream, dyed light blue. I have always wanted to try this squiggle pattern which was a lot of fun and pretty easy to do.  It took a while to cover the whole cake and my hand really hurt from holding the pastry bag but the end result is really lovely.

I topped the cake with these adorable happy birthday candles we found at the grocery store.  The cake was a big hit and my dad was very happy with a kosher for passover cake that actually tasted good! FTW!

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Week #14 – Not all Passover cakes taste like cardboard

April 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Passover is one of those times when baking is always tricky.  Not letting things rise often makes for heavy flavorless cakes. I had the pleasure of making 2 cakes for my family seder.  The first night I made this lovely apple cake.

The cake itself is kind of heavy.  But it’s about 3/4 apples and 1/4 matzo meal so the apples keep the cake moist and tasty.  The top of this cake burned in the oven so I sliced it off and made a crumble of brown sugar, butter and matzo meal.

I topped it off with some blackberries for “color” and visual interest.

The cake was a huge success and we all ate it right up!

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Look what I got in the mail yesterday!

April 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I had no idea how big these pans would be but I’m excited.  Anyone need a really large wedding cake? I can do that now…

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Week #13 – Chocolate Cake!

April 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Who doesn’t love chocolate?  Actually, me.  I’ve never been a big fan of chocolate flavored things.  I think it comes down to not liking coco powder. I like chocolate, but not chocolate ice cream, or chocolate cake.

But I’m determined to make and perfect a chocolate cake so I am including it in my repertoire.  Which brings me to this chocolate cake.  It’s a decadent devil’s food cake filled with raspberry jam and covered in a chocolate ganache.  It’s pure chocolate goodness.

The hardest part about this cake was getting the ganache to be super smooth.  I ended up going over it once, refrigerating it, going over it again, repeat and then finally using a hot offset spatula and a hairdryer (I kid you not) to get it to be as smooth as possible.

I topped the cake with these beautiful white chocolate shapes I made.  I think it looks rather interesting and kind of art-deco-y.

My husband brought the cake to his office where they cursed my name in between mouthfuls of chocolate cake.

Here is a pic that one of them snapped of the inside of the cake.  Looks pretty good if I do say so myself.

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Week #12 – CloudSyncr

March 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This week is one of the first weeks where I made a cake for a Kickstarter contributor.  My friend Chris was really excited by last week’s salted caramel cake so I decided to use the leftover icing and make him a cake. I wanted to personalize the design for him so I made a logo for an app he developed in cake.  The result came out quite nicely.

This was my first attempt at “sculpting” a cake.  I put it in quotes because I really only sculpted the sides. It was a lot of fun doing that.  Basically I made a template of the logo and placed it on top of the stacked cake and used a serrated knife to cut out the shape.

My only mistake was that I cut a little bit at an angle so my sides weren’t completely straight.  I only really noticed this when I covered the cake with fondant and it wasn’t sticking quite right.

After I stacked the cake I put plastic drinking straws in the cake to make sure it wouldn’t sag.

Once I covered the cake in white fondant, I cut my handy template out into the two colors and placed the white one over the cake. I used my brand spankin new air brush (yay I’ve used it twice) and with a mixture of sky blue edible airbrush paint and vodka, sprayed the rest of the cake.  It looked pretty good but I wasn’t 100% loving the splotches it left behind so I went back over it with a sponge and more blue. I actually loved the sponge painted effect because it reminded me of clouds!

Photo courtesy of Chris Burris

 

The cake itself is a butter cake soaked in rum and as I said, covered in salted caramel buttercream.  According to Chris is was absolutely delicious :)

This actually isn’t the first cake I’ve made for Chris. I had the honor of making his and his lovely wife’s wedding cake for his geek themed wedding.

 

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Week #11 Salted Caramel Cake

March 19, 2012 By 2 Comments

Sorry for the delay – I’ve been in a magical land called Austin at a conference where nerds come to get drunk and get free stuff. I went to Austin on a bus called the Startup Bus where 300 people from 11 cities get on 11 buses and create 60 startups in 72 hours.

My bus peeps had a little reunion party on Friday so I decided to make a salted caramel cake for the party.  That cake fell apart before I could photograph it but it tasted really good. So using the left over cake and frosting I created this mini cake which is more like a pasty but I’m going to allow it because it’s my blog and I said so.

The cake is a slight variation on my classic butter cake recipe.  It’s a bit less sweet which is good since the frosting is pretty sweet.  I filled each layer with salted caramel buttercream which is similar to standard Italian buttercream except I cooked the sugar a little longer so it would caramelize.  I also swapped some of the water with rum.  This way it tastes delicious and gets you hammered. I topped the cake with a homemade caramel flower (which kinda fell) and some sea salt.

I had a little bit of cake left over from the big cake so I used a 3 inch cutter to cut mini layers of cake.  I decided to leave the outside of the cake “naked” to give it a nice natural look. So now this is a cake that’s bigger than a cupcake and smaller than a real cake :)

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