Cake Endeavours

Woohoo!  It's my 300th blog post.  This the most I have ever been dedicated to writing about anything.  I've never been good at keeping a journal or anything like that.  I am so proud of myself for keeping this up.  It's such an amazing reference guide for me to back through.  I never dreamed that I would stretch this far out of my comfort zone in the world of decorating and try so many new techniques and recipes, even making up my own.  Who knows what crazy things my family, friends and co-workers will ask me to do next.  This is by no way a challenge that I am throwing out there! Anyway, today was a very busy day for me in the world of baking and cake decorating.  I did all my baking the night before so that the cakes could get nice and cold in the fridge overnight.  When I have multiple cakes to do in one day, I try to do most of the steps for each cake at the same time. I put the cakes on their boards, do the filling and crumb coat of icing.  Before I went off to fini

I can't believe that this my 4th year doing cakes for Erika and Stathis.  This year's theme was a combined mad science.  Normally I do each their own cake and I wasn't getting off easy by only having to do one! Vicky asked me to do a 3D beaker.  Mr T corrected me again, that it is a round bottom flask and not a beaker.  Science was never my forte in school.  So, this is my interpretation of a round bottom flask. To build it I used two 6" round layers and a half baseball pan followed by three 4" round layers.  All chocolate with chocolate ganache filling. Covering the flask in fondant proved to be a harder task than I anticipated.  It ended up that I did it in three parts.  The seams are covered with green trim.  Really only middle one makes no sense, but it looks better than showing the seam.  Instead of rotating the vertical seam to the back, I rotated it to the side and covered it with the "potion" dripping out.  The 5 and 7 represent their ag

I love doing flowers.  Any kind when it comes to decorating cakes and cupcakes.  I really love doing daisies.  They are just so happy and summery.  When a co-worker asked me to do some cupcakes for her sister's birthday as a last minute request I can never say no when I get I chance to do these. The request was for a dozen chocolate cupcakes.  Normally, the minimum for cupcake orders is two dozen.  However, I had two cakes this weekend and both of them chocolate.  I was going to be hardly any work to scoop out 12 cupcakes worth of batter! I cut out the daisies a few nights in advance so that they would have lots of time to harden and wouldn't go soggy absorbing all the moisture from the icing.  I also added some white gel dye into the icing to make it super white.  Otherwise it would have been very obvious that the icing was off white underneath the white fondant flowers.

Today, I went out to  Krumbs  in Newcastle to help with decorating cookies.  I was going to teach Sherry-Lee some of my techniques for decorating sugar cookies.  Decorating is not necessarily difficult, it requires planning, patience and a lot of time. It was so much fun to do!  I got to try doing all different kinds of embellishments.  I think my favourite is the mini polka-dots.  Making the cookie dough, rolling it out and cutting out the cookies I find so painful!  Sherry-Lee did all that work while me and Anne  In future, we will use this collaboration again. After we were done with the 3 dozen shamrock cookies we moved on to doing 8 dozen more cookies for an event.  I was going to put the details of these cookies in this post, but I will save it until after the event.  I don't want to ruin the surprise. :) Sherry-Lee sent us home with a dozen of the cookies and a loaf of  honey oat bread .  I will work for fresh homemade bread. Ha!

Mr T. turned 39 this year.  He was not impressed.  He really didn't want to celebrate his birthday.  But I still wanted to make him his own cake.  He works so hard and is such a tremendous help to me when I am baking.  I couldn't do it without him.  Making him a cake is the least I can do to thank him.  Besides, 39 is just a number!     Mr. T loves his doughnuts, so I went back to the theme of doing up a giant doughnut cake for his birthday.  Boston Cream is his favourite.  I used my French Vanilla recipe for the 2 8 inch layers, homemade vanilla pudding for the cream and a chocolate ganache for the top.  Mr. T was happy with his cake. :)

A former coworker asked me to do her wedding cake.  A few weeks ago we drove out to Niagara Falls on a very blistery gloomy Saturday.  Traveling with a two tiered icing covered cake is stressful on a good day, but in what turned out to be a 2 1/2 hour drive in a snow storm with an accident blocking lanes on to the Burlington Skyway bridge was CRAZY! This was an 8 inch and 6 inch tiered cake with ombre effect in purple roses.  When decorating with the roses, I normally start and the top and work my way down.  For this cake I started and the bottom with the darkest purple I could get.  Then after each row I lightened icing a little.  I ran out just as I got to the top.  Grr! When we go to the venue, Double Tree Fallsview Resort and Spa, beautiful hotel, we headed right to the reception hall to drop everything off.  I realised that I didn't bring a cake stand.  So we had to quickly run out to Target.  With all the stores closing, who knew what I would be able t find.  Thankfull

I made these cupcakes for two gatherings.  The first was for Family Day.  We had some of the Coles gang over. It was a little more subdued then our get together last year where we had a big competition of Minute to Win It games.  We did end up playing Bounce It, Jenga and SPOONS.  Boy are we a competitive  bunch. We also really like our desserts!  I made these chocolate cupcakes with a raspberry/strawberry buttercream icing.  The fruit gave the icing a really pretty pink colour. The 2nd gathering was at work.  Our whole team had to do a major presentation and to celebrate finishing it I brought in the cupcakes.  Fortunately on Monday night (Family Day) we drove my cousins back downtown and were able to drop off the cupcakes at work so I didn't have to lug them on the subway in the morning!

Last month I got to do my first Cat in the Hat cake.  It was a 3 layer 8 inch cookies and cream cake with buttercream filling. I had sent Mr. T out to the Bulk Barn to get the box and to also buy an 8 inch cake pan. I only have two 8 inch pans and I decided to finally get a third pan to for more options.  For some reason, there is a shortage on these pans in the city right now.  I was also really low on white fondant.  I had enough to cover the cake but it had been exposed to air for too long and was really hard to knead ad roll out.  Because it was so dry it cracked easily.  So annoying!  Fortunately I was covering most of the cake in red dye. The cat and the fish I printed out on thick card stock with a toothpick taped on the back.  The droplets of water are made with wire and fondant.