Final final cake

I've been saving this (read: too lazy to write up a post) for awhile. The final cake for the Wilton Gumpaste and Fondant course.

That's real cake under all that fondant and gumpaste. I'd meant to use a dummy cake, but it was more expensive to get a bunch of styrofoam circles and glue, so I ended up cheating and buying a cake at the grocery store at the last minute. Scrape off the horrible balloons and border, cover with powder blue fondant and voila! the foundation for the final course cake.

I wanted to make the favour box with a drape coming out of it and daisies spilling all over. The centre of the daisies are coated in sanding sugar, giving it this great sparkle. Learnt that trick from my cake teacher.

The bottom border was a mess. It took me so long to roll out a rope of fondant that it started to dry and crack. Again, I cheated - I didn't have a rope quite long enough to go all around the cake, but the drape hid that.

A friend said it looks like an Ascot hat. Can't say I disagree (^_^)

Happy Harvest

This is the same Pumpkin Honey Cake from about a year ago. I persist in trying to decorate with cream cheese frosting, which is almost always way too soft to do anything by slather on, hence the messy basketwork and sloppy rope border. Giving the frosting some time in the fridge might have helped, but I'm also the world's greatest procrastinator. This cake was barely finished in time to take to my friends' annual harvest party.

The fondant pumpkins and gumpaste ghost proved to be the chief distractor from my less than stellar piping work. My other secret was that I took the cake to the party in a pink cake box. A friend's friend could not believe it didn't come from the store.

I had to hit two stores over two weeks before I could get a hold of orange food colouring. Halloween season is exactly the wrong time to be looking for that particular colour. I dusted the pumpkins in gold shimmer dust. Fabulous stuff! Here's another (grainy) look from a different angle.

What drew me to try the pumpkin honey cake recipe: if you ever watched the Smurfs, there's an episode where entire village gathers for Smurfberry honey cake, this giant confection that Baker Smurf pulls out on a wheel wagon that is some three Smurfs tall. I've been on the lookout for something-honey cake since!

The recipe made a lot of frosting. I had enough left over for the cake trimmings as well as a batch of quick pumpkin cupcakes (to try and use up the leftover pumpkin, which only comes in giant cans (>_<)).

Early Halloween

Chocolate fondant inspired this early Halloween themed cake. I'd bought two pounds of chocolate fondant for the final class wedding cake, but I'd already made up my mind that if I had enough left over, I would make something Halloween-themed because the light-on-dark look suited it.

I got a set of Halloween cookie cutters after hunting around for a right-shaped ghost cutter. I knew I wanted one that ended in a tail rather than the wavy bottom reminiscent of the ghosts in Pacman. This was a bit bigger than I intended; I'd originally wanted a ton of ghosts swarming the tombstone greeting. At first, I tried rolling out the chocolate fondant and then making the cut-outs and replacing them with white inlays. But I couldn't get it right, I couldn't find a way to glue the seams or get the white fondant to bond with the chocolate. After a couple of attempts, I gave up and ended up just sticking the ghosts on. I was reminded in class the following week that I had indeed talked to my teacher about this, and she had suggested laying the chocolate fondant on the cake first, and then making cut-outs directly on the cake. Oops. I think if the cut-outs were smaller, my initial method might have worked.

Another lesson learnt was the tombstone. Originally, I meant for it to be standing up but I didn't allow sufficient time for it to dry and it ended up cracking and breaking when it slipped from my fingers at one point. I did the flooding with royal icing, because it's what I had on hand. Apparently the difference between royal icing and Color Flow is that royal icing will dry matte while Color Flow is a little shiny. The eyes and mouths were done with edible marker.

Course 3 Final: Wedding Cake

Ta-daa! My first wedding cake.

For the final Wilton Course 3 class, we assembled wedding cakes. Everything was pretty much done at home - the roses, the icing and filling the cakes, bringing them in either covered in fondant or buttercream. We had been encouraged to do pretty much whatever we wanted but that if we didn't want to make 40 roses at home, we'd better be prepared to blow the teacher away, she warned. I made the roses over three evenings, because each layer has to dry a little before you put the next one on.

I'd come up with this design; nothing new or innovative, but it provided me the opportunity to learn how to stack the cakes (vs tiering), do a ribbon border, freehand scrollwork, and fondant drapes (which the teacher later told me we'd be doing in the Fondant & Gumpaste class).

I wanted the base to be an off-white, and I had ivory dye which I used. But I thought it came out still too white, so I used a drop of chocolate brown dye to try and speed up the process. To my dismay, it turned a shade of warm pink. I didn't have enough to start over so I ended up just covering the cake with it. Wish I'd taking a picture before I put the ribbon on, because my fondant work was pretty raggedy (>_<)

I'd left off picking the ribbon till the day of class. As it was held at a craft store, I figured I'd just get it then. I was thinking of a wide organza ribbon or narrower satin band, but could find neither. As luck would have it, I spotted a cotton brown ribbon with two narrow strips of pink in it! I could now pass off my fondant colour as not-a-mistake!

The scrollwork was choppy and difficult at the beginning but it got a bit easier and more flowing towards the end. I went with big loops because it got really tiring and I had to cover the whole cake before I did anything else. Next time, I'll try for a little more patience and smaller scrolls. For a first attempt, I think my draping was ok, but I'd like to learn how to make it a little more fluid. I thought it looked a bit stiff. I left the roses on their toothpicks to hold the fondant drapes in place and also to give them different heights and orientation.

p.s. The top layer was the Golden Butter Cream Cake from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible. It is the bestest, melt-in-your-mouth-est butter cake I've ever had. Go bake it!!!

First-time fondant

My first attempt at fondant. It was at the Wilton Course 3 class, where we are making a present cake (I call it that although the teacher called it a "package cake". When I first heard the term, I was wondering why we were going to be dedicating a class to cake mix).

Working with and draping fondant was a bit of a mini-nightmare. I was late for class and showed up after all the intro information and everyone was well on their way kneading fondant. In quick, whispered tones, I asked the gal next to me what we were supposed to be doing and with how much. I kept kneading well after everyone had started rolling it out. But when I rolled mine out, it tore when I tried to pick it up. The teacher said I hadn't gotten it pliable enough, mushed the whole thing back into a ball and told me to keep going. I also managed to knead a lot of air bubbles into it, so that when I rolled it out, there were huge air pockets like hideous pimples that pricking and deflating didn't really help.

I tried marbling it for the bow with a mix of royal blue and lemon yellow. I get tired of dipping toothpicks very quickly, so I didn't get a whole lot of colour into the fondant. I wasn't happy with the final result, I thought it looked washed out and boring. Then my teacher suggested I use the white lustre dust I'd bought. I'd gotten it on a lark, but when she started dusting it onto the bow with a big paintbrush, the cake took on a completely new look! It made all the difference (^o^)

I've since gotten lustre dust in Peacock Blue, Ruby Red and Super Green. Will be looking for opportunies to break those out soon.

Kai faan

Over Labour Day weekend, I made one of my most favouritest foods in the world...Hainanese chicken rice!

This is meant to be a dessert blog, but I had to share. Hainanese chicken rice or Hoi Lam kai faan (Cantonese for "Hainan chicken rice") is a complete meal by itself. A whole chicken cooked in water that forms a stock that makes the soup, rice and the chili-based condiment (at least that's how my Mum did it). The chicken and soup I usually flavour with ginger, garlic and spring onions. For the rice, I render some of the chicken fat to which I add a couple slices of ginger and then the rice to coat. This goes into the rice cooker with some of the stock and salt. I even found some frozen pandan (aka pandanus aka screwpine) leaves that you tie in a knot and lay it on top of the rice to give it this lovely, indescribable fragrance.

Here's the chili condiment. My mum would pound fresh chilies with garlic and ginger and add lime juice, salt and a little chicken stock to the mix. Fresh chilies, at least the kind I'm familiar with, are hard to come by. There are jalapeños and serranos and Thai bird chilies, but the regular long and skinny red chilies aren't usually available. I don't even know what variety they are. So, I substituted the fresh chilies with sambal oelek from a bottle. It's not quite the same, but beggars can't be choosers.

When the chicken is done, I plunge it in ice-cold water which is suppose to give the skin a smooth texture and form a thin layer of jelly between the skin and meat. I haven't been terribly successful getting the cooking times just right. So far, there's been no jelly under the skin for me.

Here's what it looks like all laid out. The chicken is deboned and cut into almost-bite-sized pieces on top of a bed of cucumber slices and a thin mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil and more chicken stock is poured over it. I've garnished it here with more spring onions, but cilantro works too. I like to add cabbage and tofu to the stock to make the soup. Firm tofu, when boiled for a long time, causes little holes to form, filling with whatever liquid it's cooked in and giving it a spongy, juicy texture.

What I've been up to

I finally got around to continuing with those Wilton classes. Only one cake came out of Course 2. The first three weeks of class were spent making royal icing flowers. My decorating world has really been expanded! You can make a ton of these, they dry hard and are available later for multiple decorating projects.

There are daffodils, daisies, pansies, violets, and my favourite, apple blossoms. Ignore the funky-shaped roses. I was doing the opposite of what I was suppose to do.

And here's the final cake. You glue the flowers on with buttercream and pipe some leaves and voila!

I've since gone and bought myself more dyes, so you won't have to suffer the pastelly look for too much longer (*^_^*)

Ignore the fact that I'm very late in posting and instead focus on this delicious-looking trifle. This is a white chocolate, berry trifle and it was just the thing for a hot summer day. The recipe called for ladyfinger cookies, but I could not find them at any of the stores. I ended up using Sara Lee® frozen pound cake and it worked pretty well. The berries were mix of fresh farmers' market raspberries and frozen black raspberries from Trader Joe's®. What made this trifle special, I believe, was the use of almond extract in the white chocolate whipped cream. I'm a big fan of subtle layers of flavours that you can't really pinpoint.

And my friend agrees with me (^_^) Good to the last spoonful.

Pretty in Pink

This is a cake made for a baby shower at the request of February's winner (yes, I know it's May). I apologize for the horrible picture. My camera was once again not cooperating and my Photoshop skillz are just plain sad. I couldn't tweak it to look anything like what it did in person. If you can imagine the decorations in pink on an off-white cream cheese frosting surface lightly speckled with orange zest bits, that's what the cake really looked it.

This was an orange spice cake, with orange cream cheese frosting. I heard from my friend that it was quite a success and the showeree described it as a "big, baked cinammon roll" (may not have been the exact words, I forget (>_<)). I'll definitely have to bake it again to see how it tastes (^_^). The decoration was a little tricky as the frosting was quite soft. I thought a star border would be a bit easier to do than a shell border. I also piped ridged strips up the side of the cake because I thought it gave it a more baby-shower look.

Birthday Banana Cake

A good friend of mine has her parents in town visiting. I hadn't delivered her March dessert and it happened to be her dad's birthday. It seemed like a great opportunity to make good on what I owed. We settled on banana, walnut, and cream cheese, which naturally lead me to banana walnut cake with white chocolate cream cheese frosting (the old standby and one of her favourite frostings). For the banana walnut cake, I used this recipe. She had requested it eggless, so I substituted the eggs for a half cup of applesauce and 1 tsp baking soda. I also subbed the buttermilk for yoghurt (what I had on hand) and threw in a cupful of walnuts. I love banana cake, and its sibling, banana bread, for their versatility and sturdiness. It doesn't seem to matter to a banana cake if you use buttermilk, sour cream or yoghurt, if you threw in an extra half a banana or two, or if you bulked it up with nuts or chocolate chips. It's all good :) The cake, like the eggless banana cupcakes from earlier ago, came out a little pale and sank in the middle. You can't tell because I artfully covered it up with frosting (*^_^*) I was assured that it tasted fine and her parents sent me thanks.

Of course, when baking banana cake, you can't bake just one banana cake. Bananas generally come in bunches of six, and you usually only need three to a cake recipe. So this is mine, with eggs. All mine! Om nom nom nom!

"You put the chocolate chip in the coconut"

As I've grown older, I've found my palate changing. I hated tofu as a kid, but I love it now. I thought beer had a horrible bitter aftertaste a few short years ago, but now I seek out IPAs. I didn't like coconut in sweet things...

Like Charlie Brown, I hated having to pick a chocolate out of an assortment box because it would inevitably end up being the coconut-filled one. But as I read the recipe for these Coconut-Chocolate Chip Cupcakes, I found myself thinking, "This actually sounds pretty good. I can't wait to try them."

These wereApril's dessert-of-the-month, for a friend fond of coconut, chocolate and sweet. And they had me saying yes to coconut in sweet things! The coconut flavour was subtle, marrying beautifully with the dark chocolate chips. The cupcake wasn't quite as moist as I thought it would be (I may have overbaked them a tad), but the crumb was wonderful, not too dense or too light, giving the cupcake a nice mouth-feel to go with the sweet frosting. I toasted coconut flakes to decorate the cakes with. I did dip one in shredded coconut, but I wasn't sure I liked the look of it as well. You be the judge.

Perhaps it was the use of coconut flavouring instead of extract. I didn't realize there was a difference till I read the recipe. Flavouring was all they had at the store. I like to believe it was worth the premium, that the flavouring resulted in an un-artificial coconut taste (unlike what the coconut in chocolate assortment boxes taste like). I'll be looking out for more coconut-flavoured desserts.

Mebbe nattō is next.

Transcendence

This post is a little tardy...it's the fourth week of Easter, and this cake was dessert at the Resurrection. Whoops!

I have an internal definition for easy cakes vs. hard cakes. Easy cakes are ones that do not require eggs being separated and egg whites foamed. I lately made an addendum to that rule; chopping chocolate also makes a recipe hard, or at least not-easy. Yet, I can't bring myself to call this a hard recipe because that would be blaspheming against the domestic goddess. Yes, Nigella Lawson is the Domestic Goddess, and this divine confection is her Chocolate Cloud Cake. It's impressively elegant in its apparent simplicity and the overall gorgeous effect vs the chocolate-chopping and egg-foaming effort puts it in the not-really-that-hard category.

It's a flourless chocolate cake, the Grand Marnier is optional in both the cake and whipped cream. I sprinkled perles craquantes Valrhona (it's what it says on the bottom of the container. I think it roughly translates to "crunchy pearls" - they're like chocolate coated Rice Krispies®) on top for decoration. Here's a picture of the unfilled cake:
This picture is up here because it demonstrates my slightly- increasing skill in Photoshop :) I removed a portion of an aluminum foil box from the photo. If you look closely, I'm sure you'll be able to tell where and still see remnants of the box I didn't remove.

The Tale of Two Cakes

Yes, the last post was obviously rushed, but I have catching up to do!

Technically some of those desserts were baked in January. Actually, technically, and in reality, they all were, but please do the time warp with me, so I don't have to go back and edit the time stamps on those posts. I know I'm not suppose to store up posts like this, but this is the last one. Promise.

And to demonstrate that I am in earnest, I'm going to cram two cakes into this one post. I think this is completely valid because both cakes were delivered on the same day to the same venue.

Exhibit #1: Lemon Ginger Cake With Lemon-Cream Cheese Frosting
This was dessert at a potluck. I went with this recipe because I'd bought a Costco-sized bag of lemons, buttermilk only comes in quarts, and I'd bought too much cream cheese for the cake below by a block and a half. I try really really hard not to waste. I tried candying lemon peel but wasn't quite as successful as I was with the orange. I tried to cut corners by using some simple syrup I already had in the fridge, but I completely forgot I had it on the stove. By the time I remembered, the syrup had already begun to caramelize and the peel was shriveled and sad-looking. I tried to rescue it by dousing the lot with water and allowing it to boil some more, but they still ended up kinda stringy-looking. I curled the wet strands around chopsticks and dried them in my toaster oven (because it was taking too long). I liked the cake and frosting combo on this cake; not overly spiced, but something different from the run-of-the-mill chocolate and yellow cake.

Exhibit #2: Lemon-Blueberry Cake with White Chocolate Frosting
For those playing along, this is January's dessert. This cake is a good stand-by. I love making it in the summer, when fresh blueberries are cheap and plentiful at the farmers' market. Because blueberries are out of season, I used frozen ones, which work fine in the cake, but aren't really very good to decorate with, so I ended up piping a shell border around it. I found myself wishing I had something to write on the top.

PB & C Brownies

PB&C are one of my most favourite dessert flavour combos. It can only be further improved by the addition of
B(anana).

Another charity bake item...but we're going backwards here. These brownies were bought back in October but I only finally delivered them in January. What was it they said about good things coming to those who...what? who's they? I dunno...them...they killed Kenny...they're bastards.

Anyhoo, Peanut Butter And Fudge Brownies With Salted Peanuts is the official name of this brownie (there's a better picture on the website). I'm not generally a big fan of brownies, too dense and too sweet. The saving grace of these is that they are neither too dense, nor too sweet, and there's a layer of peanut butter. 'Nuff said!

Chocolate cake *squint*

I wasn't able to recover the large format pictures after all (>_<);;

If you squint really hard, you'll see that I decorated the top of this cake with a chocolate drizzle. I may have gone in too many directions, coz it went from artistic to cat-on-string tangled-up. Oh well. I baked this cake for an elementary school bake auction. I haven't heard how much it managed to fetch yet. I'm hoping for a lot. A friend says I'm a sucker for charity.

The cake was the same chocolate cake recipe from the Definitely Chocolate entry a few posts down. I used the frosting recipe too this time. It was actually very easy to work with. It helps that it was freezing indoors and the frosting stiffened to spreadable consistency before I got impatient and stuck it in the fridge.

On the plus side, this has finally pushed me to decide to get a new camera...when my birthday comes around...in a few months. In my defence, this camera isn't available yet on the market. Vote for your favourite colour!*

*(not necessary the one I'll get)

Still more technical difficulties

Turns out that batch that was stuck on the media card weren't really stuck at all. Some weirdness previewed what was on the card as old images, but copying them anyways and then viewing them set them to rights.

I then proceeded to re-screw up and now all I have of a fourth dessert are tiny thumbnails. *sigh*

While I try and recover that last one, here's a picture of something baked but not dessert. These are gourgères, cheese puffs. Basically pâte à choux flavoured with a little parmesan and gruyere. Very yummy warm with drinkies :)

Technical difficulties

I have three dessert pictures stuck on the obsolete media of my somewhat old camera. Perhaps now is the time to get around to thinking about possibly purchasing a new camera.

I don't like to be photographed, and I don't particularly care to take photographs myself. Taking pictures brings about the need to organize and share them. And I'm just too lazy for that. I figured the old hunk-o-junk was good enough to snap a couple of cake photos every once in awhile. But this! Argh!