It's coming!

Get excited, kids - the most important holiday of the year is nigh. MAH BIRTHDAY! I'm making at least three desserts (maybe four if I decide I like my coworkers enough) and I will share them with you over the next two weeks as I prepare them. Homemade ice cream cake is going to be the bomb diggity and I'm really excited for it.

Buttercream and Elegance

Last night, two wonderful men got legally wed. I'm so happy that Minnesota legalized gay marriage, for the sake of my fabulous friends Chris and Brian. I was thrilled when they asked me to make their wedding cake. 

Two weeks of hard work and lots of love went into my first tiered cake. Lemon cake with lemon curd filling and vanilla buttercream, and my goodness did it taste fantastic. Protip: when making tiered cakes, transport the layers separately and assemble onsite. That beauty would not have lasted even the shortest car ride without falling over. I got to do the Food Network move-the-cake-three-feet challenge, which was super exciting.   Four tiers get heavy!

On display at the cocktail party reception.

Congratulations again, Chris and Brian. You guys are great and I love you both.

Chocolate Salted Caramel Cupcakes

My life has been a whirlwind lately. We moved into our wonderful new house, and then a week later learned that Herman, our cat, is terminally ill.  Everyone handles stress differently, and I handled mine by baking some cupcakes.

I made my standard chocolate cake as the base for the cupcakes. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? 

I haven't found a really good caramel frosting recipe, until now: I found a promising recipe  in The Joy of Cooking, and I gave it a go. It turned out fantastically! I've shared it below for all of you, because I love you too much to keep it to myself. 

Caramel Frosting (from The Joy of Cooking, 75th anniversary edition, Rombauer/Rombauer Becker/Becker)

Yield: About 3 cups

Combine in a medium heavy saucepan and stir until sugar is dissolved:

-2 cups packed brown sugar

-1 cup heavy cream OR 1/2 cup unsalted butter plus 1/2 cup milk

Cook about 3 minutes, washing down any crystals on the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush. Cook, without stirring, to 238-240 degrees (soft-ball stage). Remove from the heat, and float on top

-3 tablespoons unsalted butter
Cool, without stirring, to 110 degrees, about 45 minutes. Add
-1 teaspoon vanilla
Beat the icing until cool, thick, and creamy. If it becomes too heavy, thin it with a little
-heavy cream or milk
until it is of a spreading consistency. Use immediately, or cover the surface with plastic wrap. This keeps for up to a week at room temperature or about three weeks refrigerated; or freed for up to  six months. Soften and stir until smooth before using.

The best ingredients: sugar and cream. 

You will definitely need a candy thermometer for this recipe. A standard kitchen/meat thermometer lacks the range and sensitivity for working with sugar. They generally come with little clips attached, and pictured below I have MacGyvered a way to keep my thermometer suspended in the center of the pot.

Floating butter islandse 

 The cool-down process took much longer than 45 minutes for me. It could be because I made a double batch and had more to cool, or the air flow in my kitchen, or the barometric pressure, who knows. I also didn't get the frosting to a "cool, thick, and creamy" state from beating alone. My hand beater was starting to overheat when I gave up and went to bed. The next day, my frosting was perfect frosting consistency! So, protip: you can let it sit overnight to achieve proper consistency after beating it a bit.

I sprinkled some sea salt on top to give them that extra special something. They turned out great, and I've even got some frosting left over to dip apples in.

Princess Cake for Princess Kylee

     My favorite tiny person turned 3 just last week, and her lovely mother Megan let me asked me to make the cake for the birthday party. Kylee is a princess, and of course must have a princess cake! I was very excited because I always wanted one of these growing up, so I get to live out my childhood fantasies through cake decorating. 

     Megan is a smart lady. She and Kylee picked out a Barbie with painted-on clothes and minimal hair to make my life a million times easier. If they had gotten a regular naked Barbie, this would have been a stripper cake instead of a princess cake. Also, I loved that it's Ballerina Cinderella, because the only thing cooler than princesses is ballerinas. 

Can you spot the 1970s couch in the background?

     The only downside to Ballerina Princess Plastic-clothes Barbie is that her legs are two miles long. I realized it was going to take a lot of cake to make a skirt that went all the way up to her waist. Four tiers it is then! For reference, each of the cake pans is 2 inches deep, and the pans are 8, 10, and 12 inches in diameter.

Can you spot the Portuguese souvenir?

     Next time you're baking a cake or brownies or what have you, do yourself a favor and line the pan with parchment paper. It's easier than greasing & flouring and the cake comes out so easily. You don't even have to line the sides of the pan!

For the myopic readers, that's 15 egg yolks and 7.5 cups of flour. 

     Making a giant four-tier cake means I got to do the only kind of math I'm good at: kitchen conversions! I even impressed myself by doing all of the math ahead of time and using a 3M Post-It right on the page to keep myself on track. 

     I made two and a half batches of cake batter, and honestly I could have bumped it up to 3 for good measure, except....                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Very clean, very mise en place...

 


 ....I didn't have a bowl big enough to mix it in! All of the dry ingredients pretty much filled my larges mixing bowl, and things got hilariously messy when i started mixing the wet ingredients in.

...hilariously messy. 

Before the magic

After the magic

  At this point, I decided the cake wasn't exciting enough yet, so I reserved part of the batter and colored it what I like to think of as "Aggressively Pink".  Making marbled cakes is super easy: drop spoon fulls of a different color or flavor of batter into your cake pans, swirl with a knife, and bake!

And then do the first round of dishes. 

Rounds two and three looked similar. 

                                   

A really sad fact of cake decorating life is what happens when you level a swirled cake. Leveling your layers is important because it gives you a) a flat cake and b) layers of equal height. Symmetry and evenness are things that please our brain, design-wise, so a lopsided cake would make you dislike me greatly. Cakes have a habit of rising more in the middle than on the edges because the edges cook faster (unless you use the Wilton strips), so you have to slice off the dome. When you make a swirled cake, the colored batter is added to the top of the cake....which rises up....and then gets cut off, effectively ruining the swirls. How to avoid this: 

make sure you are poking the knife all the way to the bottom of the pan when you are swirling, or have the forethought to put some colored batter on the bottom of the pan before you add your regular batter. 

 At this point I made some simple vanilla frosting to be glue. Seriously guys, frosting is just cake glue in this instance. Also, I'm out of vanilla.

Boring picture of layers being stacked

Exciting picture of Barbie waiting for her dress fitting

                                                                                                                                                                 

Action shot!

 The next day!

    I wanted to try making my own fondant, because store-bought fondant is expensive and tastes vaguely like plastic. Pinterest told me that marshmallow fondant is crazy easy and cheap and delcious, so I gave it the old college try. Also, any excuse to use the stand mixer, am I right? 

Action shot! Look at those horsepowers

    I failed to take a picture of Step One, which is melting some marshmallows with water in the microwave, stirring frequently to basically make Marshmallow Fluff. Step two, mix the marshmallow goo with powdered sugar using your dough hook. Step three....use the fondant you just made, cause you're done. Aside from how easy it was to make, it was so easy to knead! Fun fact, I hate kneading. The less I have to do, the better. It was already soft enough to start mixing my color in, no need (ha!) to work it out of its boxy I've-been-on-a-shelf-for-three-months shape!

I stacked the layers the night before and the the unfrosted cake chill in the refrigerator both to preserve its freshness and to make it easier to carve. After leveling the layers, my cake was a little shorter than I needed it to be so I built up the top using the leftover cake that had been cut off while leveling. Protip: don't throw out cake scraps, they come in handy later. Then, I rounded off the edges of the layers to make something that could be construed as skirt-shaped. I managed to shove Babs in at a slight angle, so she's kind of got a front bustle.

I covered the cake with frosting cake glue to give the fondant something to stick to.

 I rolled out the fondant using the extremely useful measuring guides on my rolling mat. 

 It got a little complicated when I went to apply the fondant to the cake. I've never applied fondant to a cake with a protrusion before, and the traditional fondant application method is to roll it onto your rolling pin and use the rolling pin to drape it over your cake. Having a doll sticking out of your cake would get in the way of that. After a couple of mishaps, I cut semicircles from the fondant and made sort of a pincer attack.

See that? That's intentional design elements right there. Definitely not trial and error. 

  In an effort to match the design of the bodice and to cover some unsightly fondant seams, I made ruffles down the sides of the skirt. I like ruffles. 

My new trick for filling piping bags: hang them from a straw. 

 Enter the pink frosting to add the finishing touches, and voila! Princess cake with a lady in it!

I took special care to mirror the pattern on the bodice, because I'm insane like that. 

I am so proud of how the cake turned out, and how much Kylee loved it! By chance she had picked out a sparkly blue dress (not unlike that of the original Cinderella) to wear to her party, so the cake matched her outfit. What more could a girl ask for than food that coordinates with her clothes?

In which I am a sore loser

When I found out that my cupcakes did not win anything at the State Fair, I was disappointed but not surprised. I've only been doing this stuff for a year, there must have been better submissions than mine.

And then I saw the winners.

 The red ribbon was well deserved. Those birds are darling and I love the lacy cupcake liners.

But really - a big, boring orange lily and not even a fancy liner? I have yet to go to a wedding that served cupcakes, but I would damn well expect something a little fancy.  And those pumpkins? That's all you're going to do? Nothing else to jazz it up? Bah.

I guess the scoring must have come down to the taste and such. Perhaps vanilla chai spice is not as popular as I thought. Perhaps the texture of my awkwardly baked cupcakes lost me points. I hope I get a score card of some sort so I can make adjustments for next year. Because there will be a next year. This just got personal, Creative Activities judges. I will win you over one way or another.

Look at my adorable cupcakes!

Some of the other also-rans. 

I thought these were particularly adorable. Campfire cupcakes!

State Fair Time!

At long last, the famous C&H Sugar Cupcake Decorating Contest entry!

The theme for the contest is Fall Wedding Cupcakes, which I found very uninspiring at first. I got some very good advice from my dear friend Chris which put things in perspective, and I got to work. For the sake of originality, I wanted to avoid pumpkin flavored cupcakes. Some Pinterest browsing gave me ideas for other fall flavors. I made test batches of a few recipes and forced my friends and coworkers to taste them all. The chai cupcakes were definitely the best, so I adapted the recipe for my tastes and purposes. (Side note: if you like chai, you will love these cupcakes. I can't get enough of them!)

My mortar & pestle and a spice grinder. I used whole spices and ground them myself for the most intense flavor. 

 I tried to be tricky with my oven to get super poofy cupcakes by preheating to 350 and then turning it down to 325 when I put the cupcakes in, but my oven is a piece of garbage when it comes to temperature regulation. They did not come out poofy at all, much to my dismay.

Cardamom!

 I used one of my newest Wilton toys, the cupcake filler tip. It claims to be an easy and drip-free way to fill cupcake pans. It is definitely cleaner than trying to scoop the batter with a measuring cup like I usually do, but you can see in the picture I still managed to drip a bit. As for easy - not really. You have to apply a great deal more pressure to get the batter through the drip-proof tip, and you can't squeeze from the back of the pastry bag like you were using icing - I found that a milking-the-cow motion worked the best. I'm going to continue using it since I've already got it, but I wouldn't tell anyone else to run out and get one for themselves.

Squeezy squeezy. Look at my super cool apron!

I forgot to take pictures during the process of making the gum paste decorations. It took about two weekends to get the desired result. Adding food coloring to the gum paste didn't get the right intensity of color that I was looking for, so I painted the dried decorations with another Wilton product, the Dab'n'Color. This turned out even better than I expected - the colors are beautifully variegated and mottled and super fall-like. Added bonus: the leaves are lighter on the back side just like real leaves!

The end result. 

We turned them in this morning. Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern was doing some filming, which leads me to believe he's got an Episode on a Stick in the works. Either that or someone at Food Network thinks cookies are weird! I feel pretty confident about my chances, because the entrants before and after me had boring looking cupcakes and I suspect they were pumpkin flavored. Cross your fingers and wish me luck that the judges like cardamom as much as I do!

Work birthday - Jackie

The theme for the cake decorating competition at the State Fair this year is fall wedding cupcakes. I am mightily uninspired by this theme. Fall wedding cake? Sure. Wedding cupcakes? I can do that. But fall wedding cupcakes? Get ready for a sea of pumpkin cake with gum paste leaves, judges. I've been kicking around some ideas, and I used Jackie's birthday cake as an excuse to try some out. 

 I have all of the supplies for Wilton Course 4, but haven't been able to take the class yet because NO ONE ELSE WILL SIGN UP FOR IT. Since I'm not an idiot, I decided to take matters into my own hands and try some of the flowers from Course 4.

 I taught myself the stargazer lily and the Gerbera daisy, yay go me. The lilies look great but man alive do they take forEVER.

 My thoughts on this design: the purple is too violet and not burgundy enough, the burgundy is too purple and not red enough, but the orange and yellow look great. Obviously I've got way too many flowers for the size of the cake, but imagine that as the top tier on a four tiered cake, with the flowers cascading down one side...lovely, no?

Bender cake!

Next in line for the work birthays was Greg, a rapper and Futurama fan. I decided to mess around with fondant and see if I could make Bender's head. Sure enough...

It turned out perfectly. Now I want to make a Planet Express Ship cake!