Cake Endeavours

My brother-in-law works at the  Budapest Restaurant  on Gerrard St. E.  They have really good hungarian food.  Tomorrow's the chef/owner's birthday and my mother-in-law asked me to make her a cake in her honour. I made a two layer 8" cookies and cream cake with buttercream filling to go with the black and white theme of the chef's coat.  Then I added some flowers that reminds me of hungarian needlework to add some colour. It sliced up really nicely even.  The cookies get a little soft in the baking process which makes for a really yummy flavour. Happy Birthday Edit!

I was delighted to be asked to do Molly's birthday cake.  Especially a minion cake. I made a 3 layer 8" chocolate cake with buttercream filling.  Well, Mr T made the cake as he's become more of the baker in the last several months and I am the decorator.  For this cake he outdid me.  The cake was super moist and everyone loved it.  I gave him full credit! Whenever I try to do a band of fondant around a cake I just can't seem to get it on straight without it looking all wobbly.  Instead I tried to do it in two piece which worked out well but I came up way too short in the end so I added the extra bits at the back to make it look like whatever I did I did on purpose. Happy Birthday Molly!  We are so glad that we were able to celebrate with you.

For Mr T and his brother's birthday I decided to go with a Twix cheesecake for the celebration. Chocolate and caramel are an awesome combination. I followed a basic plain cheesecake recipe in a 9" springform pan; next time I will use a 10" as I normally would have done but wasn't thinking.  I avoided having to do a bain Marie so as I knew I was putting a topping on the cake so it didn't matter if it cracked.  However, if I had I could have saved myself a world of a mess.  The cake really expanded and overflowed onto the bottom of the oven which result in me having to do a full self cleaning of it.  No one seemed to notice burned cheesecake but they did notice it when it was in cleaning mode.  Good times! Fortunately the cake was not ruined.  I was able to trim off the top of the cheesecake so it didn't have a smokey flavour to it!  Then I added a homemade caramel sauce followed by chocolate ganache.  I didn't think it needed so much gana...

Miss E's class put on a play called "The Day They Parachuted Cats on Borneo".  The cats were dropped by parachutes to help control the mosquitos and rats but instead they ended up with lots of cats with no homes and nothing to eat.  A far cry from the type of plays we used to put on as 11 year olds.  Yikes!  Anyway, they were having a bake sale so Miss E volunteered me to make cupcakes. Originally I was going to draw a face on each cat but it looked really creepy.  Miss E agreed.  So we scrapped that idea and just went with the silhouette in rainbow colours. I made two dozen vanilla cupcakes with buttercream icing and placed a cat on each one.  They went over well with her classmates.