Flashback: Charlotte's 2nd Birthday

Last summer I took a several month blog hiatus while I was in my first trimester of pregnancy and also enjoying some family vacations. As a result, several milestones didn't make it on here. And since I use the blog as much for myself as an online journal as I do to connect with others, I'll be putting up several posts from last summer.

Charlotte had a Purple Bubbles themed birthday party to celebrate turning two. Whether it's actual bubbles, the bubble game on my phone, or "bubble water" (seltzer), there's nothing bubble-related this gal doesn't like.

Purple Bubbles cake

A mini cake for my mom, who shares a birthday with Charlotte

Cake pop favors

"Charlotte" bubbles banner in the background.

"2" sign was made from foam board, spray painted purple and then spray painted with glitter paint, and hung with a white ribbon (it was actually a bright purple, but it's hard to tell with the lighting here)

Table decorations, including a framed painting of Charlotte's

I ordered four 3' balloons online and had them inflated at the local party store.
Beware though, they didn't all fit in our SUV and my mom had to drive over and help with transport. Oops!

This photo is awesome because it's so out of character for my little stage actress. She was struck with a sudden case of shyness during Happy Birthday.

In the background I attached a picture from each month over the past year so everyone could see how much she's changed and some of the fun things she's done. They were attached to a 6' purple board, but there were too many photos for the purple to be seen. A slideshow of the photos is at the bottom of the post.

 The two birthday girls.
Charlotte is wearing her Giant's cheerleader outfit that Ouiser made her,
along with her Giant's pom poms that we got for her.

Our annual photo spot, painted by Giovanina.

Simple Purse Cake

B's lovely sister turned 30 today so I made her a little clutch with a matching change purse. As most of my cakes are, it's charmingly flawed, but although I'm a perfectionist in many areas, cake isn't one of them. Even charmingly home made cakes are pretty labor intensive. Still cute nonetheless. Now if only I could train myself not to eat a metric ton of buttercream icing while making the cakes, the whole system would be vastly improved.

 

Sweet surprise

I had some cake supplies to use up (2 mini cakes in the freezer plus some old decorations), so I put them together with the buttercream frosting I made on Sunday and dropped them off at my sister-in-law's house for an end-of-work surprise. Because do you know what pregnant women don't receive nearly enough of? Surprise cakes!

Life List: Get paid to decorate a cake

As of 1:30p last Friday I am an official cake baker for hire.  B's coworker saw the remnants of various cakes I've sent with him to work over the last year - so they don't stay here for me to eat - and liked the idea of supporting a local woman instead of a grocery store.  Rock on, Kathleen, thank you!

Kathleen's son Connor was turning 6 and wanted a Pokemon cake.  The instructions were: a sheet cake, big enough to feed 30 people, a Pokemon/Pikachu theme, and room for characters to place on the cake.

The sheet cake shape was actually more challenging than the unknown theme.  It's harder to decorate and frost a big flat surface than the stacked cakes I usually make.  But thanks to the glorious internet, I was finally able to figure out something that I liked.

The ball on top is a separate cake and is the Pokemon "poke ball." I didn't dive far enough into Pokemon lore to find out exactly what said ball does, but it seemed to be a big deal.  The lightning bolts are for Connor's favorite character Pikachu.  Pikachu throws lightning bolts, which, incidentally, seems like a really effective little power to have.  Note to self.

The name is the actual Pokemon font, printed out, traced, and cut out from fondant.  And the lightning bolts were rigged to some wire.  Many thanks to the engineer husband who figured out a way to attach the bolts to the wire when the first method didn't work.  Let's just say that wire and food weren't meant to stick together.

The inside of the cake was dyed fluorescent yellow to match the lightning bolts, which never photographed quite as bright as they were in real life.  And the little characters - which she had at her house - were going to be placed around the poke ball.

All in all, I was pretty happy with how it turned out.  The $40 I received for the cake allowed me to buy some supplies at the baking supply store.  Not to mention that it was really satisfying to challenge myself with a new theme, do the hard work, and then get to ship the cake off and out of my house. Although I will say that I never stop being amazing at how much work goes into producing such a very simple looking cake.

I'm hoping that there were enough satisfied mothers at the party that I get to do a few more of these over the next year. I'll keep you posted.

Halloween Cake: partial fail

So here's the story of the Halloween cake in two parts.  Part One is the plan and the first steps of success, Part Two is the total failure of the plan and the lame recovery.

The plan was to have a 3 tiered cake with orange and black layers and chocolate frosting.  The outside was going to be covered in purple fondant with a tree and bats painted on the side, and some tombstones and weathered pumpkins to add some 3D ambiance.

Day 1

• Make all the cakes from scratch and make the double batch of chocolate buttercream frosting from scratch.  This whole thing takes a LOT longer than you would think - damn.

Day 2

• Cut cakes level, stack, fill layers, coat outside with frosting to make an even surface. 

• Mix black food coloring gel into white fondant to make gray fondant for the tombstones.  Roll out the fondant, cut and weather the tombstones, write on them with edible marker, and let dry.  

• Mix the black food coloring gel into clear liquor to make edible paint.  Use the edible paint to weather the pumpkins - paint on and wipe off.

At this point, everything is going fine. See?

OK, here's where the plan falls apart.  First some cake background.   Fondant is the smooth white stuff that covers 90% of the cakes you see on TV.  It tastes like shit, but it makes for pretty cakes.  No one eats it; there is real frosting underneath and that is what people actually eat after they kind of peel off the fondant from their piece of cake.

I've used fondant for decorations but never to cover a cake with.  Pretty much everything in the land of internet cake stuff has the same opinion: homemade marshmallow fondant (mmf) is god's gift to cake world! It tastes so good! It's so easy to make! It's so much easier to cover the cakes with! You'll never go back!

So despite never trying to cover a cake with real fondant to see if it was actually as bad as people think, I went straight for the MMF fondant. FAIL. Epic fail. All of the directions on how to make it are exactly the same.  So I followed the directions and I covered my surfaces, and I kneaded like bread dough, and I kneaded some more, and I rolled out, and I tried again to roll out, and I spent nearly an hour trying not to give up.

Then I gave up.

Then I tweeted my thoughts on MMF - which can be seen to your right, where all of my tweets go.

Except for the argument that it's cheaper to make your own (true), I'm not buying any of the other PR crap out there.  Marshmallow fondant - comprised of marshmallows and confectioners sugar until you get a dough - still tastes like shit! And even if it had worked out, I didn't see how the consistency was any different (except worse) from the regular stuff.

So, despite my visions of how pretty my black painted tree would have looked on my purple fondant background, I gave up and choose sanity over beauty.  It was so sad.  To have spent so many hours in the kitchen and so much physical pain (b/c I have a weak body and am not meant to do physical things for long periods of time like regular people can) to not get what you set out to, sucked. 

On a positive note - which I'm forcing myself to find - you can see in the first picture below that the cake is perfectly round without any tilting, and that the top is perfectly flat.  That's harder to achieve than you'd think, and is the result of practice, so it's good that the effort is paying off.

I have every intention of trying again with regular fondant to see if I can successfully cover a cake with it, so when I actually follow through on that I'll keep you posted.  In the meantime, I ended up with a regularly frosted cake with nice layers and some random decorations on top.  At least it tasted good.

 

Present Cake

We had another birthday last week so there was another cake. B's sister turned 29 so I made her a present cake loosely inspired by that oh-so-famous little blue box. The cake looks pretty home made, but honestly, I don't aspire for perfection on these things, I just strive to have them look pretty and actually get done on time.

I wanted to try my hand at making a fondant bow, and despite the fact that the seemingly simple directions on the internet didn't pan out at all (do they ever?), I was able to get it done with minimal hassles. My random list of things I would do differently next time include: taper the ends of the bows for easier assembly, make the frosting a bit stiffer for better decorating ability, look up a proper recipe for decorator cakes as opposed to the too-moist recipe of regular cakes, use regular Crisco and not butter-flavored Crisco when dying the frosting a light color so everything won't have a yellow tint to it.

Thankfully, nothing critical, just all part of the learning curve. I really do like the way it turned out, it was really pretty and the birthday girl loved it. Her husband jokingly told her to enjoy this version of the "little blue box" because she wouldn't be receiving the real version any time soon :)

An up close of the fondant bow with the glittered tapioca beads on the loops and the fondant gift tag.

Fondant loops drying on parchment paper.

Rolling out the fondant to make the loops. Also pictured is a small container of edible glitter, edible markers, pastry bags, and lots of corn starch all over the counter.

Golf Cake

Several years ago I took the first two Wilton cake classes with my museum ladies, but with the engagement, wedding, move, and baby, there hasn't been time to make any cakes. However, I love the idea of making fun cakes and I could watch Food Network Cake Challenge for an entire weekend and be perfectly content. I never took any fondant classes and I haven't ventured into that arena yet, except for decorations, so for now the cakes are buttercream frosted. It doesn't look as dramatic, but it tastes quite a bit better.

I knew I wanted to do a 2-tier golf cake so I headed over to Cake Central and started perusing the galleries. You have to sign up for a free account to see all of the pictures but it's pretty much the best time waster ever. There are thousands and thousands of photos from extremely talented home bakers. You can either click on one of the pre-determined galleries, or you can go to the search bar and type in virtually any word you can think of and come up with a gallery of cakes that fits your description. "Purple," "Modern," "Snowman," "Golf," etc.

So after I got some golf inspiration, I sketched out what I wanted the cake to look like and then made a 3-day plan for the construction. The party was on Saturday night, so the cake prep started on Thursday. You could definitely do everything in 2 days, but not if you have a baby and not if you have back problems that preclude you from standing in a kitchen for hours and hours at a time.

The cake definitely wasn't perfect, being my first one; the buttercream could have been smoother, the piped lines could have been better, etc, but I was really pleased with the way it turned out. There are several family birthdays coming up in the next few months so I'm hoping to use their celebrations as a great reason to keep practicing. In the meantime, here is a rough idea of the directions and some pictures.



Thursday

* Make white chocolate golf balls (with toothpicks in the back to help them stay on the cake)
* Make raspberry filling for cakes
* Make double batch of buttercream frosting (if you're making a cake that will have decorator elements, you can't use canned frosting, it's WAY too soft)
* Make cardboard squares for bottom of both cake tiers


Friday

* Make 4 square cakes (2 of each size)
* Measure bottom tier, make square template for fondant diamonds (for plaid)
* Make fondant decorations: squares for plaid, tee box, tee box balls, golf green
* Assemble & fill cakes, dowel bottom cake for sturdiness, & crumb coat both tiers
* Refrigerate cakes, then wrap in saran wrap


Saturday

* Make extra batch of frosting because the first 2 batches weren't enough (oops!)
* Frost cakes
* Stack cakes & insert main dowel
* Decorate sides (plaid & golf balls)
* Decorate top
* Pipe on white for plaid, pipe on grass edges

Sketch

White chocolate golf balls.
The toothpicks were inserted towards the very end of their drying process so they'd stay upright.

Top and bottom tier.
Filled, stacked, doweled, & crumb coated.

As it turned out, I didn't have the grass tip like I thought I did, so I had to make due with a different one, but it turned out ok.

In the world of cakes it's SACRILEDGE to put non-edible decorations anywhere on the cake. I think that's absurd, even for professional cakes, but that's just my opinion. The non-edible elements on the top are the flag, the small golf ball on the green, and the golfer. The sand trap (brown sugar), the water hazard (piping gel and blue food coloring), the green (fondant), and the tee box with the balls (both fondant) are all edible.