Cake Endeavours

What kind of cake do you make for a girl who has three boys, is addicted to Coach purses, and decided to be born on Christmas Eve?  A girlie, elegant and as far away from Christmassy as you can get kind of cake. When I first saw the Rose Cake on I am Baker's bog.  I thought of Joy right away and knew I'd make a version of this for her birthday.  It is an amazingly simple technique.  I've used it on cupcakes many times, but never thought of applying it to a cake. I used Martha Stewart's Lemon Cake recipe.  I did a half recipe and used limes instead of lemons.  I forgot to halve the lime measurements, but it tasted really good, if I do say so myself.  The icing is buttercream but instead of vanilla I used almond extract.  I love almond extract; it can completely change the flavour. Happy Birthday Joy!

I know, it's hard to believe that in the 905 there are hockey enthusiasts that are not Leaf fans...they're out there.  At least these two cheer for another Canadian team.   I made a 10" two layer chocolate cake with Oreo cookie buttercream for the filling and crumb coat. Callum and Iain were impressed. :)

One of my co-workers is having her family Christmas today and ordered 4 dozen cupcakes.  The Cookies and Cream cupcakes are a floor favourite.  Instead of the mini Oreo cookie on top I punched out 2 medium holly leaves for each cupcake and added a red Smartie for the berry.

Another cake for a coworker...for the World's Best Book Club. This was a Lemon Cake  from Martha Stewart's site.  The icing is buttercream and I only added blue dye to but it turned green...

I made two dozen of these cupcakes for my co-worker. She requested the Perfect Chocolate Cake cupcakes with fondant on top.  I even cut out the centre of each cupcake to add the whipped cream filling.  I piped on the icing and then put funky circle designs on top. That morning on the subway ride into work I was staring at a girl's gift bag she was carrying and loved the design.  I thought that it would make really cool cupcakes.  The same day I got asked to make these cupcakes.  There was supposed to be one dozen blue and one dozen purple.  However, again, the purple was not my friend and was blue when I rolled it out, but this time it did not magically turn purple when I put it in the fridge over night like last time. Oh well!  I love the way they turned out and so did my co-worker.

Miss E's day care had a bake sale today so I made these cupcakes.  I thought that I could just spread on the icing for the glue without having to pipe it on since I was putting fondant over top, but I was wrong.  It actually took longer than piping and looked a little sloppy.  Fortunately the fondant covered most of the icing.  The snowflakes were punches that I got from Flour Confections .  For the mini cupcakes I piped on some chocolate icing and dotted them each with a Smartie.

Clearly I have a trend in the cakes I've been doing lately.  I really like the black silouettes and fortunately so do the people ordering them.  This cake is for a co-worker, she wanted the same flavour cake as Donna's , with blue fondant and shoes.  That's what I did.  I found different silouettes of shoes online, sized them all about the same and printed them off.  Then I traced them.  When I put the shoes on, there seemed to be a lot of empty space where the toes met and I was going to write in a shoe saying in between each set: 1. If the shoe fits, buy it in every colour 2. Cinderella is living proof that a pair of shoes can change your life 3. Two things you can never have too many of: good friends and good shoes But I chickened out and put little polkadots instead.

I would just like to thank my good friend Joy for yet again giving me a challenge when it came time to do her son's cake...She's very considerate that way. *grin*  It's not entirely her fault, this was Alexander's request to have a Dinobot cake and not covered in fondant.  Plus, she was kind in searching out a picture to go by considering I had never heard of a Dinobot before, let alone one named Grimlock.  Mr. T was horrified that I didn't anything about this.  He proceeded to give me Coles notes on the history of the Transformers.  My eyes glazed over fairly quickly.  Then I got to hear "Me Grimlock, me king!" all morning. The cake was Martha Stewart's Versatile Vanilla Cake recipe, double.  A double batch of buttercream icing.  The original plan was to have a nice evergreen coloured icing.  But when I added black to the green to make it darker it went a very muddy gray.  I was kind of freaking out a bit, but realised it was a cake ...

One of my co-workers retired this week, so of course we had a celebration.  She didn't want a big due, but our floor loves any reason to celebrate.  We couldn't let her go without a proper send off. Donna among other things loves purple and martinis. So, that's what I went with to decorate the cake.  I made the Perfect Chocolate Cake recipe, but the filling was salted caramel icing.  Another co-worker made a couple dozen cupcakes and I brought leftover purple icing and salted caramel to decorate them with.  We put a layer of salted caramel on first then a did a rose pattern with the 1M tip. The cake and cupcakes were a huge success.  Donna exclaimed that she didn't want to cut the cake.  Rather, she'd take it home and frame it. The red velvet cupcakes were from Costco.  They were pretty good!