July 2010

I made this cake to experiment with a few techniques that I learned from watching a YouTube video on how to get a smooth surface with buttercream icing. So to start, I made a 6″ chocolate cake using my go-to chocolate cake recipe. I also made a batch of Wilton’s regular buttercream icing and replaced the vanilla extract with mint extract. I tinted the icing green using Wilton’s gel color Kelly Green.

For some reason, my cakes sank in the middle and overall while baking. Not quite sure why that happened with such a small cake, but it gave me a chance to try something. A crumb coat. Yes, a crumb coat is pretty basic but I have never used one before. Why? Well laziness had something to do with it, I won’t lie. I have been able to get relatively smooth and crumb-free icing without the crumb coat, so I figured why bother with the extra step. But I tried it this time and I don’t think I’ll ever skip this step again! First of all, it eliminated a lot of frustration not having to worry about crumbs. I am easily frustrated, so I appreciated this I used a butter knife to slap on the icing and fill in any dents in the cake (caused by the aforementioned sinking). And voila – an even, though crumb-filled, very thin layer of icing. I popped it in the freezer for faster crusting before my next step.

Now normally I use an offset spatula to ice cakes and it works very well. But in the video, they used an icing smoother like this:

I don’t own one of these and I didn’t want to drive down to Michaels (25 miles away) and risk them not having one, so I took a trip to my husband’s happy place – Home Depot. He goes there several times per weekend anyway and it’s practically across the street! And there I picked up a set of 3 plastic putty knifes in 6″, 4″, and 2″ widths.

First I used my small offset spatula, starting at the bottom of the cake and working up. I put it on in large globs and it didn’t mess with the cake or crumbs (due to the crumb coat!). Then I used the putty knife to scrape the sides while turning the cake on a turn table. It worked perfectly! Lastly I smoothed the top and the wide surface of the knife really helped.

Now really the whole point of this cake was to test out a method called “the paper towel method”. Using a non-patterned/textured paper towel (Viva brand) you lay the towel onto the crusted cake and basically iron it with a fondant smoother. The key words here are crusted cake. My icing had not crusted. This recipe is a crusting buttercream, but since it is so sweet, I normally cut back on the sugar by about a 1/2 a cup. And that change to the ratio of fat (butter and shortening) to sugar caused it not to crust. And I didn’t realize this until I already had the icing on the cake so it was too late to add more sugar. So…the paper towel method will have to wait for another day.

In the meantime, my coworkers thoroughly enjoyed this experiment

June 2010

I have 3 cakes to do in the next 6 weeks so I thought this weekend would be a good time for some practice. I had a list of 5 different things that I wanted to test out – mostly things that I will need for my upcoming cakes – so I whipped up a batch of cupcakes to help me out.

First, Almond Cake. I used this recipe from Wilton for a basic white cake (which I had not made before) and replaced the vanilla extract with almond extract. I quartered the recipe and came out with an even dozen cupcakes, so I can only assume the full recipe would yield 4 dozen (!).

Next up was, Raspberry Filling. I have made cakes with raspberry filling before but I have always used seedless raspberry preserves out of a jar. They are delicious, but slippery and tend to bleed through the cake, so I thought I’d try my hand at a homemade filling. I picked this recipe at random and I found it to be easy and tasty. I halved the recipe and got a little more than a cup of filling. The only downside to this was that it was not seedless.

My next step was Filling the Cupcakes – another first for me. I cut into each cupcake on an angle and sliced a circle out of the top. I just used a Ziplock bag with the corner cut off to pipe the filling into the cupcake, and then I replaced the top. Cinchy!

Now for icing. First up was Dark Chocolate Ganache. The family friend who made my brother-in-law’s wedding cake (and mine also!) used this icing on their cake and it was SO good. She kindly shared the recipe with me and I whipped up my first ganache. Delicious!!

Finally, I wanted to try an Amaretto Buttercream. I ended up with sort of an adapted Swiss Meringue buttercream. I started with the same adapted recipe that I used for the Margarita Cupcakes (Annie’s Eats, adapted from Martha Stewart’s recipe). I had planned to replace the tequila and lime juice with amaretto. Except that I didn’t get around to stopping by the liquor store. So I used some almond extract instead. It turned out well. Next time I will not be so lazy and I’ll pick up some amaretto!

June 2010

I was asked to bring a dessert for Father’s Day dinner with my in-laws and I thought I would deviate from cake for a change. I asked my husband what kind of dessert his dad would like and he said “peanut butter”. I thought brownies and ice cream sounded good so I did a Google image search for peanut butter brownies and picked the one that looked the most delicious to me. I used this recipe from Cookie Madness and though it took awhile because there are multiple steps, they were DELICIOUS!

The main part of it is basically peanut butter brownie/cake/cookie marbled with melted chocolate and butter. My marbling skills leave a lot to be desired. The top looked nice, but the marbling didn’t go all the way through. And then the topping is peanut butter, butter, and vanilla with chocolate drizzled on top. They weren’t really what I would think of as brownie consistency…they were more like a cross between a really dense cake or a really chewy bar cookie. And I actually think it would have been good without the topping also. Or maybe with a chocolate ganache topping. Either way, I definitely loved this

June 2010

It’s amazing how Facebook can reconnect people. April and I were very good friends waaaaaay back in elementary and middle school and into high school. Fast forward, oh, 13 years or so and we got back in touch via Facebook. It turns out that April got married the week after I did and now she and her husband have just welcomed a beautiful baby girl, Reagan Kathryn. And that’s where the cake comes in…

Reagan’s christening is this weekend and April asked me to make a cake for the occasion. Luckily, I had just made another christening cake last month, so I was able to reuse the basic design. April asked for carrot cake with cream cheese icing – yay! I love this combination for two reasons: 1) both the cake recipe and the icing recipe are so good (in my opinion anyway!), and 2) the cream cheese icing is really easy to work with. April also asked for something very plain – she said she liked white and ivory and she said I could also throw in pale pink.

So first up was two batches of the carrot cake recipe to make two 11×15 sheet cakes. I also made a triple batch of my go-to cream cheese icing recipe. At some point during this process, I also rolled out some plain white fondant and cut out a cross. And then came the letters. I had tried to do letters for the last christening cake, but I was having so much trouble getting the fondant out of the cutters that I just gave up. This time, I tried dusting the cutters with cornstarch and rolling the fondant pretty thin. This seemed to work much better!

I originally had white letters on the cake to go with the white/ivory theme. But I was afraid they wouldn’t stand out well enough. So I tried outlining them with some pink tinted icing, but that just made it worse! So I tinted some fondant pink and cut out a new batch of letters and I think the pink looks better.

So my second christening cake is complete! I hope April and her family like it

Faced with a lovely 3 day weekend, I decided to tackle a cake experiment. Covering a cake with rolled fondant. Yikes. I had numerous issues with this cake, but overall I’m happy with my first attempt. My husband says it looks like a 4th of July cake. Yes, I suppose it does, but Memorial Day is a patriotic holiday too!

I used my standard yellow cake recipe (Wilton’s) and substituted lemon extract for the vanilla extract for a lemon flavored cake. Note: overfilling cake pans is a very, very bad thing. I used two 6″ round pans and filled them to about 3/4 full and they rose and spilled on the bottom of my oven. Hot mess. But, the cakes came out in one piece (sort of) and they were delicious, so no serious harm done.

Next I made up a batch of buttercream icing (Domino’s recipe) and again replaced the vanilla extract with lemon extract. I also added the zest of one lemon.

I was planning a raspberry filling – just seedless raspberry jam. When it came to filling and icing this cake, I had the same problem I had the last time I made lemon raspberry cake: raspberry jam is very slippery.  I did pipe a ring of buttercream around the filling to keep it in the middle, but it did leak out the sides a little. Had I not been planning to  cover the whole thing in fondant, I would have been angry – it was looking messy! But, because I planned to cover it all up, I didn’t have to worry about crumbs in the frosting, etc. After frosting it, I popped it in the freezer for a few minutes. When I took it out it was much easier to smooth the sides and get a flat (ish) finish.

I used Wilton’s ready-made fondant for this. I used about 1 package (24 oz). I tinted most of it blue, and then a smaller part red, and left a tiny part white. With the red and white, I cut out some stars with cookie/fondant cutters and skewered some of them on lollipop sticks.

Next came rolling out the fondant. This took 3 attempts. I dusted my counter top with powdered sugar and rolled out the fondant to about a 16″ circle. I lifted it over my cake and it cracked around the edges. So I took it off, put the cake back in the freezer, and headed to the interwebs to find out what to do. I read tips about using shortening to fix cracks and using cornstarch to dust the work surface (especially in a humid climate – and today its VERY humid!). I rolled it out again and it was better – much less dry. But I tore it. So onto attempt 3. One more time and it seemed to be working. I lifted it over the cake and it didn’t crack (as much). I smoothed the top and sides with a fondant smoother and my hands and it was working pretty well. Except  for the folds on the sides. I wasn’t sure how to get rid of them. Should I cut them? (No.) I think my fondant was still a little dry so it wasn’t standing up to the stretching that it should have. I assume that a little stretching would have smoothed out the folds. Luckily I was planning to cover the cake with fondant decorations, so the imperfections were covered!! I attached the stars to the cake with water. I brushed a little onto the back of the stars with a tiny paintbrush and that seemed to work.

May 2010

I found myself with a weekend completely free of any plans or commitments – bliss! I hadn’t planned on baking, but I couldn’t resist

I was reading Annie’s Eats and found a recipe for margarita cupcakes. I love margaritas and of course I love cupcakes so this was a no brainer. I actually used my standard yellow cake recipe (Wilton’s) instead of the recipe on the blog because I knew I had all the ingredients on hand. I just left out the vanilla extract and added about a teaspoon of lime juice and a teaspoon of lime zest (this was for a 1/4 recipe).

The frosting is basically Martha Stewart’s Swiss Meringue Buttercream – but with lime juice and tequila added. The first time I made this icing, it was honestly too buttery for my taste. This time, with the added lime juice, and the slightly different ratio of butter to sugar, I thought it was an improvement! Of course, it’s all a matter of your preference.

As Annie notes in her blog, the tequila flavor really doesn’t come through. She recommended brushing the cupcakes with tequila, but I opted not to do that. I’m not a huge fan of alcohol in desserts so I was worried it may be too much. I did like her idea to make a simple syrup with the tequila, but for this time, I just added it to the icing.

May 2010

I know this isn’t cake, but it’s still dessert so I wanted to include it here. As I was perusing Pioneer Woman’s blog the other day, these yummy little lemon bars caught my eye. Since we were headed to my parents’ house for Mother’s Day, I thought I’d give this recipe a try. It was pretty simple, and they turned out great! They were a little tricky to get out of the pan in neat little pieces, but that was the only trouble. They have earned the nickname “yummy evil”

May 2010

A friend of mine, Krissy, had a beautiful baby girl in January, Annie. (I made the jungle shower cake for one of Krissy’s showers.) Annie’s baptism was this weekend and Krissy asked me to make a pretty pink and white cake for her girl!

We decided to go with my standard yellow cake recipe and vanilla buttercream icing. I did an 11×15 sheet cake (I have now added this size pan to my arsenal!) and it was 2 (skinny) layers. I wasn’t sure how much cake batter I would need for this size pan and I thought I had determined that one batch which would normally fill 2 8″ or 9″ pans would be sufficient, but it made for a very skinny cake. If I had wanted to do just a single layer cake, I would have had to have made a double batch for the pan. Noted for next time!

I made the decorations out of fondant. I bought Wilton’s ready made white fondant and tinted it with Wilton’s Pink gel color. I cut out the cross with a knife and a ruler and I used a cookie cutter for the flowers. I made a triple batch of vanilla buttercream icing and had a little left over.

The only issue I had with this cake was the lettering. I tried to use my letter fondant cutters, but they are tricky. The fondant is so hard to get out of the cutters and I ended up giving up and deciding to write on the cake with the icing. I need some practice with my writing! It always looks too child-like to me. Maybe because I’m not used to writing in cursive? Anyway, more practice is needed

April 2010

My good friend, Nicki, was going to a birthday brunch for her friend, Sam. Sam’s boyfriend was planning to surprise her by proposing at the brunch! The plan was to top some cupcakes with fake diamond rings – all except Sam’s which would be topped with her real engagement ring. Nicki asked me if I could make the cupcakes and I was happy to!

Half of the cupcakes were carrot cake with cream cheese icing, tinted green. The carrot cake recipe I used is one that I had used before for Nicki’s Christmas cake. I halved the recipe this time and ended up with 12 cupcakes. For the rest of the cupcakes, they requested red velvet cake. I had not ever made red velvet cake from scratch before so I needed to find a good recipe. I posted a request for a recipe on The Nest and my fellow Nestie, Mary, highly recommended this recipe. I only needed about 6 cupcakes, so I made only a third of the recipe (and I got 10 cupcakes). I was very pleased with this recipe – the red velvet cake was delicious!

I made up a double batch of my go-to cream cheese icing recipe and tinted half of it with Leaf Green color and half with Lemon Yellow color and voila – surprise engagement cupcakes