The Five Hour Cake

Today is my roommate's birthday. She is, if you couldn't tell, 20 years old. And since I'm a baker (and I had no other gift ideas) I decided to surprise her with a cake.

Which is a lot harder than you might think, because I didn't know her favorite flavor (my guess was red velvet or strawberry) or what colors or design to make it. So I just sorta winged it (wung it?) and came up with this idea on the spot.

It helped that Joy had plans last night so I was able to go out to the store, buy ingredients, have time to bake the cake, make a gumpaste bow and frosting, cool the cake, and ice and decorate it, all while she was out.

The bow is my first attempt ever, and Joy and Sophie thought it looked really good, but (you know what a perfectionist I am) the unevenness and powdered sugar splots really bothered me. Plus, I think using a gumpaste/fondant mix might help instead of straight up gumpaste, because when I put the little bows on the cake, some of them cracked. So I'm definitely going to practice this skill a little more.

And speaking of practicing, this is the website where I got the tutorial, so if you need some gumpaste bow practicing tips as well, here you go!

I still can't believe that I started baking at 7pm and by midnight, it was done. I know if I had more time, I could've fixed thought little tiny imperfections that bothered me, like the bow, and smoothed out the buttercream a little more. (I probably would've used a from-scratch recipe instead of a doctored box mix too.)

If you live in an apartment, or even a house, with a small number of inhabitants, say two or three, and you don't go through a gallon of milk as fast as a household of seven would, then it might because a good idea to check the expiration date of aforementioned milk, just in case it's two weeks past the date, and before you start dumping the milk into recipes. Just a thought.

And my final word of advice for anyone looking for cake decorating tips and tricks: don't burn your thumb on the lighter when lighting birthday candles. Actually, you probably shouldn't use a lighter at all when you're blood sugar is low and you're exhausted at 12am. But aside from the charred mark on my nail (what the heck?!), I survived that incident too.

Happy Birthday, Joy!

Captain Rex on Deck!

The cake I made for my little brother's 7 birthday was definitely a labor of love. I think the amount of time that I put into it more than makes up for the cake I didn't make for him last year.

He wanted a Captain Rex cake, and I've known for years it was only a matter of time before he asked for a Star Wars themed cake. This kid knows more about Star Wars in his 7 years of life than I do in my 19 years, 1 month, and 2 days of living. Thankfully, though, he didn't say anything about the realistic-ness of the gumpaste Lego figure on top. James, however, was not so kind. But hey, I think it looks a lot like this photo, soooo whatevs.

One big problem with the cake was the humidity. The fondant was so sticky and so hard to work with, and the gumpaste never dried properly (as you'll be able to see in the following photos). Plus, I ran out of powdered sugar half way through decorating, I didn't have a turn table or toothpicks (but I definitely bought some of those), and then there was that awful crater in the center of the top tier. You can't see it because I filled it up with another cupcake!

 I did the lettering out of a gumpaste/fondant mix. It took an hour to cut them all out, using a pattern I printed off the computer (I downloaded a free Star Wars font, and cut the letters out individually). A word to the wise, don't roll out the letters too thin or they will tear.

Do you see the trouble this cake gave me?! I didn't even notice that the "Birthday" was drooping down the side of the cake. You can't tell in this picture, but the H also cracked and tore a lot. It was a sad moment . :( I thought about re-doing it, but the cake was due in 20 minutes, and I figured no one was going to notice, except self-deprecating lil ol' me. (And now all of y'all because I pointed it out to you.)

And here we have another photo of the headless Rex Lego dude. The little black thing next to the cake is his blaster, which, if properly dried and hardened, would've been in Rex's hand, pointed down like a #7. You won't see the blaster in any other photo because Adam ate it.

 But we got a nice sparkly #7 candle at the ghetto Walmart, and the star candles, because they didn't have any birthday candles.


It was my mom's idea to prop Rex up against the cake. She's brilliant. However, she did think the pattern was margarita glasses, and not Rex's helmet, so.... yeah.

This is the other present I got Adam (the cake being the first). It's a Toy Story mixing bowl set with a spatula and cookie cutters. He can't wait to make cookies with me! :)

Despite the many, many problems this cake gave me over the last 24 hours, it was totally worth it to present it to Adam and to be able to see him (and my entire crazy, lovable family) on his birthday!

The Once and Future Cake

I stumbled out of bed at 11:30, bleary-eyed and pajama-clad. Only three hours to go before the party, and the cake was still in pieces in the freezer, and the chocolate buttercream was still unmade.

Gone were my dreams of creating a whimsical YouTube show, complete with costumes and props and instructions on how to carve a cake. The camera wasn't charged, the tripod was still in storage, and I hadn't taken a shower yet.

I think you know what they say about "best laid plans," but is there a saying about thrown-together-then-scrapped-at-the-last-minute plans? My friends and I are still talking about making an instructional and fun webshow about cake decorating, but that will just have to be put off until another day.

On the other hand, the cake itself is really awesome. I'm getting a lot better at carving cakes, thanks to instructions from Shelley at Bliss. I've really gained a lot of confidence in my cake decorating abilities since I started working there.

I'm still far from perfect, though. For example, the sword. It was gumpaste, and I made it the night before, so it didn't have time to dry. I did have the foresight to stick a dowel rod through it, but I didn't put the dowel rod all the way through, so the next day, the top of the sword was sorta cracking. Uh-oh. I patched it up with some cardboard and somehow, miraculously (it was Excalibur after all!) it stayed upright on the cake during the entire party. Oh, and that shiny stuff? Silver Glaze.

Maggie really loved the cake though, even if I did forget the anvil that the Magical Sword was "supposedly" attached to. The chocolate pound cake was "the best chocolate cake I have ever eaten," according to my aunt. So even though I look at my cakes with a more critical eye than someone else, I'm really proud of this cake and I'm glad everyone else liked it!

Con-GRAD-ulations! :)

(That was a purposeful spelling mistake. If you check the cake, I obviously know how to spell congratulations! ;) )

Sorry for the delay, but I finally downloaded the pictures off my sister's camera of the graduation cake. One of my sister's friend's mom's asked me last month to make a graduation cake for her son and daughter-in-law. (I made her daughter's birthday cake last year.) I was really worried about this cake because I just started working the week before it was due. Would I have time to make it? Would everyone like it? Would the gumpaste melt in this humidity?!

Good news all around! I have enough free time to make the cake which was received warmly, and the gumpaste survived this Georgia summer! 

The decorations were all gumpaste and buttercream. I used a dome-shaped measuring cup (greased up with lots of Crisco) to model the cap, and a thoroughly cleaned up Play-Doh clay gun to do the tassel (normally, I wouldn't use Play-Doh products for food, but 1.) Play-Doh is non-toxic, and 2.) no one was going to eat the gumpaste anyway). I just eye-balled the diploma to get a rectangle shape. Sometimes, you just gotta get creative when working with gumpaste! The cake was yellow, and I used the cake I made myself last year as the inspiration. I think the little graduation caps along the boarder is my favorite part.

In the end, my worries were for naught, and this festive little cake turned out beautifully. As Ms. Brown told me on my Facebook page:

The graduation cake was awesome and very good. You got a lot of compliments and people could not believe that you were a teenager. They thought I bought it at a bakery.

I'm so glad that everyone enjoyed it and that in my own little way, I could help celebrate this happy occasion!

The Dinosaur Cake

The Dinosaur Cake (not to be confused with the Dinosaur Train, for all you moms and dads and little kids out there) was my gift to my now 16 year old sister, Katie.

She designed the cake for me about a week ago, dinosaurs and a pink and green cake. It took me a while to figure out a design, but I realized that Katie could probably draw what she wanted better than I could read her mind. =)

The cake is confetti cake, I used a white cake recipe with 2 tablespoons of sprinkles (I used the star sprinkles, not the little round ones or the rectangular ones) per recipe. The cake was pretty big so I actually doubled the recipe.

I made a mocha buttercream icing, per Katie's request, and covered everything with marshmallow fondant, which Adam thinks tastes just like marshmallow. He really liked that part, but he's not a fan of mocha, so he just ate the fondant off of his piece of cake.

The fondant was a lot easier to put on the smaller cake, but for the larger cake it started sticking and tearing. You might be able to tell from the pictures, but I tried to cover up all the rips with the little gumpaste dinos.

And speaking of dinos, the ones on top of the cake are really wrinkly, which is unfortunate. I guess my animal sculpting skills aren't as good as I thought they were, but hey, real dinosaurs were wrinkly, right?

No, those aren't dinosaur eggs, they're coffee cups from Starbucks! ;)

A close up on one of the pterodactyl.

Ta-Da! My first fondant-covered cake. Maybe it's not perfect, but for my first try, I'm really proud of myself. Who knows how much more awesome the next one will be! :D

The Grill Cake

Every year I try to make something cool and fun for Father's Day, which in the past has included a couple of golf cakes and even a cake where I piled on as much chocolate as I possibly could.

This year inspiration hit me and I decided to make a cake that looks like a grill, because my dad loves to cook out.

I thought my idea was original, but after a quick Google search , I realized that I'm certainly not the first to come up with this idea, although I still like to think that the execution is still all my own.

The vegetables and meats are all made from a gumpaste/fondant mixture which I colored and then "painted" for the grill lines.

(And by paint I mean a little bit of brown and black icing paste and a drop or two of extract.)

I'm so proud of myself for this cake, because I didn't procrastinate the night before and stay up all night working on this cake.  I did stay up all night, but that was a few days later when I saw Transformers. :-)

The fondant creations were all made a few days before, the cake was baked and decorated on Saturday, and I put everything together on Sunday.

The "coals" are just big icing blobs of various colored gray icing with some powdered sugar dusted on top.  The flames and the grills bars are just basic buttercream.  So it really wasn't a complicated cake, but it turned out really well.

Happy Father's Day, Dad!

The Graduation Cake

So, I finally made my graduation cake.  It is, thus far, the biggest cake that I have ever made, and I really liked it.  Well, I wasn't entirely happy with it, though.  I definitely procrastinated and I feel that shows with the piping work and in all the little details.  Everyone said they loved it, but I was much more critical.

I suppose that if I had actually made the little gumpaste pieces 2 to 3 days in advance, as per directed, instead of 12 hours before (or less), then this cake would've been a lot better.

For example, I wouldn't have rushed around putting the bottom boarder on (I am ashamed of how sloppy it is) and the calculator would actually have calculator buttons on it, like a "+" or "=" or even "0" and the gavel would've looked like a real gavel (and I even had one to model from!).  And I probably would've made a few more little pieces to better display the 13 years I spent in public school, instead of just 4 (calculator, gavel, book, medal).

But I am a procrastinator and I think it shows in my work.  So before my parents go rushing off to send my portfolio to Duff Goldman or Colette Peters (I'm seriously nowhere near that good; my parents are crazy), I'm going to need to learn better time management.  And not wait until the last minute to plan the cake; this fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants cake design thing is just too stressful and seriously cuts into my sleeping time.

The cake was overall a success, though, even if the first red velvet cake I made fell apart (cake balls!) and I basically covered the entire kitchen in red dye.  (My hands are still pink, to be honest.)

The recipes I used:

• Colette Peter's White Cake (I did not taste this cake, but I'm told it was tasty) and
  
• Grandmother Paula's (Deen) Southern Red Velvet Cake (which was super dense; I wonder if self-rising flour would be better than cake flour? But I'm scared to change the recipe...)  This was an amazingly delicious recipe, and everyone (myself included) thought it was awesome.
  
• My buttercream recipe-- the BIG batch.  I filled up a 2-quart tupperwear pitcher of icing! :-)  I still have some left over which is currently sitting in the freezer awaiting further use, of course.

I also made cupcakes with my previous school colors. :-)

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Golf Cake: Gone to the Dogs

I am crazy.

My father says that I have the "entrepreneurial spirit" but I think I just have a touch of insanity.

Allow me to explain.

My Spanish teacher (mi maestra de la clase de espanol) asked me if I wanted to make a cake for her husband's birthday (and she got a taste of my cakes, if you don't recall, at the Spanish Honor Society induction), and I said yes.

That was about a week ago, and I put it out of my mind because some extraneous things came up that I focused my time on.  Well, Wednesday night, I realized that I had a cake that needed to be baked.

Wednesday was a long day, if you didn't know.  Wednesdays are often referred to as "hump day" because its in the middle of the week, and I generally like Wednesdays.  It's all down hill from there.  But Wednesdays are also busy because my sister and I go to church, and we eat pizza, pray, and play volleyball with our fellow Catholic teens. :) It's a lot of fun.  But I'm getting off subject, we're talking about cake here not pizza...

OK. So. Wednesday.  I get home from church around 8:30 and I start to (finally) make this cake.  I got out all of the ingredients-- the big seven pound bag of powdered sugar, the four pounds of butter, the commeical sized bottle of vanilla extract... yes, we went to Costco last week.  And I proceeded to bake a cake, mix up a batch of buttercream, and make my own gumpaste (with some gum-tex and really sticky glucose).

And then our oven dies.  So two 9" cake layers, which normally take about 20 minutes to bake at 350 degrees, took almost an hour (if I'm exaggerating, it's really only a little bit), because the oven kept shutting off.  Sometimes the -F2- or -F3- alarm would sound, and sometimes it would just quietly shut off and I wouldn't even notice.  Argh.

Needless to say, I was quite annoyed at our oven (which you may have noticed if you ever check out my Tweets), but it gets worse.  Because when the cake finally came out of the oven, I got burned.  That's right: the oven gave me a second-degree burn.  It's not the first time, and I doubt it will be the last.  What's different is that this time, it was on my finger, when normal it's my forearm that gets scorched.  I currently have at least four noticable burn scars on my right arm from baking.

Thursday was not much better, as far as being busy goes.  I had a fieldtrip that day (to see Don Quijote and eat some tacos), and I was supposed to have a golf game, but it rained.  So I made a cake instead, or rather, I decorated it.

The little doggie, a Jack Russell Terrier, is all made from gumpaste. Which, by the way, I think is a lot of fun to play with, if not a little sticky.  (And now I really want this gumpaste tool set so I can have even more fun!)  The cake really didn't take that long to decorate, but I'm slow and lazy, so it took all afternoon and evening.  (And I had to take a break to eat Chinese food, too, of course!)  I did go to bed earlier last night than I did on Wednesday.

Finally, today, I delievered the cake.  And you would think, well that's that.  But no, I still had a busy day today:  a test in anatomy, a quiz in Spanish, a make-up test in English... and tonight I went to see my best friend in the play A Midsummer's Night Dream, which was amazing.

But this week is Spring Break (YAY!) so the plan is to sleep as much as possible so I can start all over again with my hectic life in 9 days. ;-)  I told you I'm crazy.

The Cake Fit For Royalty

 

Wow :)  This cake was amazing!  I know that I'm not the best cake decorator, and that I make mistakes, but I can't believe how this cake turned out!  I mean, the icing was smooth, the color was great, the fondant didn't melt and was the right consistency, and the cake didn't fall apart!

I think the best part, though, is that it followed my vision.  I love it when cakes do that! :)

Before I launch into all the technical aspects of this cake, I would just like to show (because pictures say a 1,000 words and all that) how much work went into that purple:

That's a lotta toothpicks!  I mostly used the violet and burgundy colors, but I also used Royal blue so that it wouldn't be so pinkish.  At first, I thought that the color wasn't dark enough, but of course, buttercream color darkens as it crusts, so that worked out nicely for me.

After I iced the cake (crumb coat first) and did that wonderful Viva thing, I used my handy-dandy garland marker and marked out 8 divisions in the cake, with more toothpicks.  After that, I made myself some fondant swags.

I couldn't've done it without the wonderfully talented people over at CakeCentral.  Not only did I learn how to make the swags, but I also felt confidant that the swags would stick to buttercream icing (thankfully!).

I wasn't sure if the MMF and gumpaste mix would be tasty, but when my grandma tried some, she said that it tasted like marshmallows.  So, I think that worked out.  The swags and pearls were made out of the same GP/MMF mixture, about 50/50.

After I stuck the swags and pearls on there (using toothpicks for the swags for added support), I dug out the imitation brandy extract that we've never used and the Pearl Dust that I bought at Michael's (Yay, Michael's!) and proceeded to paint the fondant a nice pearly color.  The effect was gorgeous, in my humble and completely un-biased opinion. =P

My fondant (and in general, cake) skills have come a long way in a year, haven't they?

 

 

Happy Birthday to me :)

Hola de Puerto Rico

The Puerto Rico project is complete, and my little brother turns it in today. I hope everything goes well with the delivery!

James was such a blast to make this cake with! I am usually a "fly by the seat of my pants" kind of cake baker/decorator. Even if I have an idea about the cake, it's almost always a vague one that I end up changing in the end. Usually I just have a theme, and I set out to create a cake in this theme, adding elements as I go along and as my brain comes up with them.

James, on the other hand, is very methodical. From the order in which to put the cake ingredients before baking, to planning out the order of events for construction, he was the man with the plan. (You know you're disorganized when a third grader is a better planer than you are!)

Not that there's anything wrong with having a plan of action and being organized and everything. That's just not normally how I roll. So it was a challenge for me to not get all crazy on him because of his planning. This was his cake after all. I was just there for moral support. (and to teach and show him what to do when he didn't know.)

He pretty much did the whole thing by himself. I did the piping (the forests) and the sand and the construction of the cake (with the big slotted, er, serrated knife). He make the Rice Krispie mountains and little islands, and did the crumb coat. Oh, and he told me where to put the "trees" and everything. The palm trees, which are gumpaste, are made by Kelsie, strategically placed on the cake by James. :)

It was a lot of fun.

So I'm glad that we were able to come together, despite our complete opposite-ness, and make a cool cake. I helped, but mostly he made it.

And he did great. :-D

Gumpaste Gorgous

My work stuff.

This is a lily... or at least it's supposed to be

This is a broken lily petal. Oops.

Another view of the lily.

Daffodils. For some reason, I keep wanting to call them dandelions. They didn't turn out so well, but maybe next time?

Another view of daffodils

The classic rose. You can't tell from this angle, but it turned out a bit... oval-y.

This lady is amazing!

This lady has skill! And she has a nice Scottish accent too. =) I looked at her website, which only reaffirmed what I think about her skill level. When she makes a gum paste rose, she makes it look easy. As I watched the video, I though: I could do that! It looks much simpler than a buttercream or royal icing rose, which, although pretty, still look a bit sad when I make them.

(Ew, fuzzy picture, sorry!!)

I would love to get the gumpaste kit that Wilton makes. Michael's sells them for $20, but I have a 50% off coupon, dropping the price down to $10. If only I could get a ride out to the shopping center where Michael's is located, I'd be in business. Did I mention that my grandparents gave me gumpaste as part of my Christmas gifts? Probably not since I haven't posted since before Christmas. All I need now are the tools (and the practice!) and I can be a gumpaste flower queen! ...Or at least try to be one!