A Few Firsts

I have never made meringue butter cream, simply because I was afraid to. 
I had been baking all week and had two cakes to make at the end of a long week, both requiring butter cream frosting. I didn't have enough confectioners sugar and did not want to run to the store (twenty minutes there, twenty minutes back and you know how it is the supermarket...) because the clock was ticking away. I decided to make an Italian Meringue.  Why not take a chance and overcome a fear. I got the recipe from the book "Sugar Baby" by Gesine Bullock-Prado and followed the recipe to the "t". This recipe requires a lot of patience and determination. Everything that Gesine said would happen, did. It curdled, it fell apart but I kept on whipping it and I ended up with a lovely butter cream. I will have to double the recipe next time because I had barely enough to cover a three layer cake. Which brings me to my second first. Since I did not have enough butter cream, I decided to make lemon curd to fill the cake with. I checked the "Sugar Baby" book but did not have the organic agave nectar called for in the recipe, so I used Martha Stewart's recipe. It was so easy, what was I so afraid of? Perfectly tart!

All of the above was so I could make my mother a beautiful cake for her 79th birthday.

It was a 3 layer lemon cake, cannot remember where I got the recipe but it did have greek yogurt in it. The flowers are made of fondant (Duff's) and the flower centers are mini marshmallows that were cut in half. I thought they would stick because, well, marshmallow is sticky. Nope, they fell off so I had to make royal icing to glue them on with. Since there was not  enough Italian Meringue butter cream, I had to steal the regular butter cream from my other cake to do the piping with. I  have made this lemon cake a few times before and it was perfect, this time it was a little too dense, not sure what happened. 

Chocolate Ruffles

       It was time for our annual gathering of family before my mother-in-law returns to Florida for the year. This event always falls out at the same time as my brother-in-law's birthday. He is a huge chocolate lover so every year he requests a very "chocolatey" cake and I am always happy to indulge him. This year my m.i.l. asked me to include all the birthdays of everyone present by writing " Happy Birthday Everyone". I still hate writing on cakes so I used leftover fondant letters from previous cakes. Somewhat of a cop out, I know.

       The decorating of this cake was inspired by a cake I saw on another cake blog. I thought it was so beautiful. The baker had piped vertical rows of butter cream ribbon, graduating the coral color from light to dark. It was stunning. Since I was making chocolate, I decided that graduating from dark to light would be so lovely. I "mis"remembered what the inspiration cake looked like, that is why my ruffles are horizontal. I actually ran out of butter cream!

         To assure that my brother-in-law's chocolate desire was fulfilled, I made a dark chocolate cake with a brownie and chocolate glaze filling. It was out of this world!

Chocolate Candy Cake

This  cake was made to celebrate the eighteenth birthday of a friends son. How well  does anyone know an eighteen year old boy, who knows what they want? Nothing too feminine, meaning no flowers or maybe "man" flowers, what ever that might be. What are his favorite things? Kinda hard to know when he doesn't reveal too much about himself. I was stumped. So I just started looking at  pictures of cakes, not a hardship I can assure you! I came across a few cakes that were decorated with candy, not cutesy but rather sophisticated. That was what I would do! I made my version using "Kit Kat" bars around the circumference, as well as malted milk balls. Originally I wanted to use fall colored "M&M's" also. After going to four different stores, I realized that would not happen. No one had them,arghhhh! Ah, but "Reese's Pieces" come in fall colors. With peanut butter on my mind I thought of "Reese's Peanut Butter Cups" and decided to chop them up and put them in between the layers. "Oh no", I thought, "what if someone has a peanut allergy!". A quick text, and I got he okay to go ahead with the peanut butter. So, I made a 12" vanilla layer cake with chocolate butter cream frosting and tons of candy. It was fun and I want a piece. Maybe there are leftovers :-)

Do You Want Fries With that?

I have been wanting to make a hamburger cake and was so happy when someone asked for one for their son's birthday! The cake was made of  3 layers, two vanilla, one chocolate. The chocolate became the burger and obviously the vanilla layers became the bun. I froze the cake in order to carve the shapes. (I heard freezing made it easier to carve) Since I wasn't using fondant, I did a modernist spin on the  tomatoes, onions and pickles with butter cream. The lettuce was also made from butter cream but it was actually leafy looking. There was no cheese on this burger because the birthday boy is not a fan of cheeseburgers. I don't know what happened to the condiments after the hamburger bun top was put on. Did they maintain their shape or did it all squish into one mass of butter cream? I think the most difficult part was mixing the color for the bun. I actually used a real bun as my guide along with my daughter Jess's acute sense of color mixing. I hope it was a hit with the birthday boy and enjoyed by all!

Duggan's Island Birthday Cake

Wow, I don't know where to begin this story. I guess with the inspiration; When I was a child my family had a small wooden outboard motorboat. It may as well have been a yacht! We loved that boat. On summer weekends my dad would hitch it up to the trailer while my mom made a picnic lunch then off to the boatyard we'd go. All six of us plus the dog would hop in and we'd sail off on our great adventure in the Great South Bay of Long Island. We lived dangerously, my mom did not know how to swim and we wore no life jackets and sunscreen was non existent. There's no way we could get away with that today! On our adventure, we came across a little uninhabited island in the bay which we claimed as our own and immediately christened  "Duggan's Island". We had a blast!!!! This has always been such a great memory.

Fast forward almost 5o years. My dad's 83rd birthday is coming up and I want to make an over the top cake that represented part of our lives. (I also wanted to practice stacking a cake, harder than I thought. As you will see, it is slightly crooked) I decided on a beach theme since so much of our formative years were spent at the beach. Then I remembered the boat and the island and knew that was where I wanted to go with this. I knew I made the right choice when my father brought up the island in a conversation we were having.

The bottom tier, which represents the ocean, is a 10", 3 layer  red velvet cake without the red. The shells are made of candy melts and brushed with luster dust. I made sand out of brown sugar and crushed  graham crackers over tinted royal icing. Sadly, I did not have enough so couldn't bring it to the edge.The next tier, which represents the beach and sky, is an 8", 3 layer vanilla cake filled with strawberries. The 3rd tier, representing the fluffy clouds in the sky, is a 6", 3 layer coconut cake with lemon curd filling, frosted with seven minute icing and  covered with coconut. All of this topped with a blazing sun. The boat, the sign, the fish, the birds and the sun are made of fondant.

I loved making this cake and learned so much while doing it. My father loved it and that, to me, is the most important thing!

Club Penguin Birthday Cake

A friend of mine asked me if I could make a "Club Penguin" birthday cake for her granddaughter. I said "sure, what is Club penguin?" I really had never heard of it, but why would I? Anyway, she brought over pictures of some cakes that had been made with "Club Penguin" characters so I would have some idea what I was getting into. It seemed simple enough to do.......

I had never made 3D figures for a cake before. So I did some research and found out how to use rice cereal treats to make them. That was the easy part. Covering them in fondant, which I initially thought would be easy, was more challenging than I imagined. I figured it out after some trial and error and maybe a few curses too. They did turn out pretty decent for a first attempt. 

They were huge, totally out of scale for an 8" cake, but I made it work!

Boxing it up was another challenge. Here is a picture of the" jimmy rig" I did. I set another cake box over the cardboard sides that I taped on.

Strawberries; a great way to kick off the summer, it is coming...

I saw a Martha Stewart recipe for strawberry cupcakes with strawberry frosting, my mouth began to water. I have been wanting to make a strawberry cake. Since they were on sale and my daughter had a friend visiting from college, the timing was perfect. I had to make a cake for our guest. I decided to make a vanilla cake,(so many tunnels, another story) fill it with strawberries and make strawberry frosting. I wasn't sure how many strawberries to use in the frosting so I guessed about six. I think it was too many because it was a very soft. I added more sugar and it was too sweet and maybe too stiff, so I added a few more strawberries and a dash of lemon( I read that would cut the sweetness some). I suppose I should have followed the recipe. I chopped up some strawberries for the filling, about six, and then gave the inner layers a crumb coat of frosting so the juice did not absorb into the cake. I was concerned about sogginess. The frosting was a little soft so I refrigerated it and it was fine. As you will see in the picture, some of the juice leaked but that did not have any affect on the cake. It was delicious, I had a large piece just to be sure. Then I had a smaller piece for breakfast to make sure it was still good. It was. 
I packed it up for my daughter to take with her when she returned to Philadelphia. Otherwise, I would have had it for lunch too :-)

Over the Rainbow for the GSA

This is the second time I have made this cake. The first time was for Samantha's 21st birthday. This time I made it for "The First Annual GSA Gala" for the local high school. When I got the invitation for this event, I was immediately planning to make this rainbow cake.
I noted that when I cut open Samantha's cake the seven minute white frosting had disappeared. I think it absorbed into the cake. This time when I made it, I brushed simple syrup on the cake hoping to seal it and prevent the above from occurring again. It worked somewhat. I'd still like to see more white in between the layers. I'll try more icing along with the simple syrup next time.
Then there is the frosting on the top. I tried to mimic what was on the inside but the colors got muddied. I couldn't help but think "Cake Wrecks". But then I added some piped dots and that helped it. I do love how seven minute frosting stays in whatever shape is made; the peaks are fabulous. The cake was delicious and well received.