figurines suck!

As promised here are pictures of Mom's 60th birthday cake. She has fallen in love with the pacific coast (especially hunting for shells and the pelicans)... so without further ado...

So I am not the most skilled when it comes to sculpting figurines... If they are round and basic I'm ok (like the monkey). But the more complex stuff (like the pelican below) frustrate me cause they look nothing like I think they should.

Overall I think the hand painted shells came out well... The trial ones are, of course, on the back where they are less likely to actually be looked at.

I found some cool pillars... they are hollow and you can fill them with whatever you want (though they suggest not to fill them with liquids). These are filled with 2 different colors of sprinkles. I figured it would add to the ocean theme.

upcoming projects

So as promised at Easter there will be fun cookies for BECKY DAY!!!! Assuming the weekend alone doesn't kill me (pregnant + active 18 month old = tired mommy!)

Guess it's time to break out the cookie cutters and maybe enlist my mom for help with her recipe (since it worked sooo well for me last time). Now to think of a theme... hmmmm

Then next week will be the baking and decorating of NeeNee's 60th birthday cake. I have a great seashell mold for making candy for the edging. She has fallen in love with pelicans and the pacific coast so I figured I do an adult ocean theme. I figure a light blue cake with the seashells for edging and a pelican figure for the top. It only has to feed like 8 adults and 3 kids under 5 years old so it will probably be a 6in round and 4 inch round (or maybe an 8in and 4 inch).

Pictures to follow....

Pics as promised...

Cookies are EVIL!!!!

So how is it that I can bake cakes and make ganache but I can't make let alone bake a simple sugar cookie!

So my mom tells me at Christmas that she has an awesome recipe for really easy sugar cookies. I was running behind so she made us some to decorate and they were awesome. She made a TON of cookies. She claimed that she couldn't make cut out cookies (they always blobbed on her and were indistinguishable) but these came out amazing. So for Easter I decided to use my egg, bunny and butterfly shaped cutters to make some fun cookies.

I attempted the recipe that she sent and that was a huge no go! I measured everything and mixed it according to the recipe and it looked like sand. I finally managed to squeeze it into a ball shape to chill in the fridge (as per the recipe). A few hours later I tried to roll them... HA! I got about 6 cookies worth out of 1/5 of the dough. Baked them as the recipe said and they are the crispest ones I've ever seen that weren't actually burnt. So I went with my back up dough roll that I had in the fridge.

Those rolled fairly well but when baked stuck to the cookie pan! I managed to get a few usable ones so that I can make some fun cookies for the kiddos for Easter. So I've got a total of maybe 20 cookies after working on them for about 2 hours.

GRRRR!

Assuming I don't just throw them all across the room tomorrow when trying to make them pretty I will add some photos.

Figures and 1st birthdays...

So 1st Birthday cakes often present a challenge. You generally have to feed a crap load of people but you also want something that the new toddler can smash and smush. As you can see in this photo... the cake is built in tiers and the top most one is actually only slightly larger than a cupcake.


Figures can be great cake toppers. This monkey is fairly simple to make (mostly just circles and rods). The internet can be very useful to find ideas. This one is a conglomeration of several different monkeys that I found online.

Truffles!

Truffles are soo much fun to make! Plus they're a tasty way to use up left over ganache, other than just licking the bowl!


Basically its the same ganache recipe as an earlier post. Then I used powdered chocolate in a small bowl. I used a melon baller to make them approximately the same size. Then rolled them in the powdered chocolate. The melon baller on its own worked really well when the ganache was cold (from being in the fridge) but they started to stick as the metal melon baller and the ganache warmed.

I wonder how they'd look on a cake?

And then there was cake...

So Jess's cake didn't turn out nearly as cool as I'd hope but he was thrilled with it (good husband!)... The squig was impossible to shrink (with my skills). I haven't figure out a good medium for sculpting yet. Fondant is too soft. Modeling chocolate is too sticky. The x-wing presented similar problems. SO... the computer chips multiplied and became the side decorations. After spending hours trying to get the darn x-wing to work I finally gave up at 11:30 last night. I went to McD's for Jess's birthday lunch and got an x-wing in the happy meal!

As promised here are the photos

The desktop with a dos prompt (but the backslashes are backwards... ooops... but my wonderful hubby didn't point it out)


Here's the finished cake...

Close up on the computer chip thing

Next up... monkeys and princesses

The next project begins...

With Jess's birthday right around the corner (March 13) I will be starting the next cake project. He prefers butter cream icing to fondant so if anyone has any tips for making butter cream icing look smooth (finished) please feel free to pass them along. If I come up with anything I'll pass it along.

For now though I'm just working on the toppers. He's got a thing for computers (go figure) and so I'll be making a bunch of fondant and royal icing computer chips. I'm also going to make a scale model of a computer (desktop).

We watch the cake shows too (Cake Boss, Ultimate Cakeoff and Ace of Cakes) and on one of them they made a Squig (a video game alien monster thing) so I'll be trying to make a small version of that as well to top the cake.

I'll add pictures as I finish the toppers...

Ganache

So I realized that I posted a photo of my Ganache but didn't tell you how I made it. It's a simple thing really. Just make sure that if you're going to use it for a cake filling you have about 6 hours for it to chill. You can also make it like a week in advance too if you want.

8 oz chocolate morsels (pick a kind that you'd eat plain by the handful)
2 T butter
3/4 C heavy whipping cream

Put the chocolate in a metal bowl. Melt the butter in a sauce pan and then mix in the cream and bring to just boiling. Pour over the chocolate and let it stand 5 minutes. Whisk until it becomes shiny. then cover and refrigerate.

I triple the recipe for a 3 layer 6 inch cake with a 3 layer 8 inch cake topsy turvy cake.

and the verdict is...

Here's the chalkboard placard that announces a sweet girls birthday. She loves to read so I've included a bookworm as well.

And the entire thing...

Ganache is ...

Ganache is a wonderfully tasty but evil thing to add to your cakes. It is essentially chocolate, heavy whipping cream and butter melted and mixed to form all sorts of fun and yummy things. I made some for two of the four layers of the topsy turvy or "mad hatter" cake I'm making for tomorrow.

Here are the four cakes (3 layers a piece). The chocolate looking ones are the ganache ones. I find it is MUCH easier to work with and get a clean (smooth) crumb coat than icing from a can.
You can see that the first layer I attempted was not quite cooled (refrigerated enough so it looks a bit, well bad...) but the other 3 layers make up for it.

Here is an example of how the cake is engineered. The bottom layer is cut so that the upper layer fits in flat. This helps keep the cake stable while proving the illusion of crookedness.

Here's what the crumb coat looks like before the cut is made.

This is the top layer covered in homemade marshmallow fondant. I still need to learn how to do this part correctly.

Here is the ganache just before being refrigerated.

I'll post photos of the finished cake tomorrow... I'm still keeping the receiver of the cake in the dark as to the final dazzling cake.

baking, baking, baking, baking, baking....

Yep that's right... 5 Boxes of cake were baked this morning/afternoon. I am in the process of making a topsy turvy cake and needed 3 layers of each size. SO, 3 layers of 10 inch round, 3 layers of 8 inch round, 3 layers of 6 inch round and 4 layers of 4 inch round were baked. Yep... Biiig cake. They will be stacked and covered in homemade fondant tomorrow. I'll post pictures of all the cakes once I cool them and have a chance to take and upload them...

the joys of Fondanting...

So I was having a conversation today at my local restaurant supply store, about which was better for finding affordable tools. We started talking about cakes and fondant. I was saying that I managed to find a decent and easy recipe for homemade fondant. The woman I was talking to said she'd found a recipe for marshmallow fondant but it was confusing and she didn't think she'd done it right. I told her about mine and she seemed to think it was easier, so I figured I'd share it on here. So here it is...

1 16oz bag of mini marshmallows
1 bag of confectioners sugar
2T water
Crisco

Put the water and marshmallows in a microwave safe bowl and nuke for 30sec then stir and repeat until all the lumps are gone. Add some powered sugar and stir. Once the mixture has cooled a bit put Crisco all over your hands then coat in confectioners sugar. In a slightly smaller bowl add 1/4 of the bowl of powdered sugar. Pull out a pool ball sized hunk and plop it in the bowl of sugar. Fold and kneed in as much sugar as the ball will take. It should become the consistency of gum that's been chewed for like an hour and no longer sticky. Set the ball aside (I use another bowl with a dusting of sugar in it) and repeat the process in pool ball/softball sizes until all of the marshmallow stuff is gone. Combine the little balls into a big ball and put it in a Ziploc or other big seal-able bag. It's best if you can make the fondant a day or more ahead of time but it can be used as soon as it's made. Best if its cooled to room temp.