Floral Ombre 50th Birthday Cake

For my aunt's 50th birthday, she asked me to make her a cake!  I obviously happily said yes :)

I pretty much had free reign on the cake, so I thought I should try something new.  I had bought the Wilton's gum paste flower cutter set, so this was a perfect excuse to use it.  Since I like purple and ombre always looks pretty, the colour scheme was chosen!

My cousin said that Red Velvet with Cream Cheese was his mom's flavour of choice, so that was chosen too!

This was a 2 layer cake, covered and filled with cream cheese icing and then topped with fondant.  This was a big mistake!  Cream cheese icing does not work well under fondant at all, hence the dome like shape! It doesn't hold it's shape and just slides around creating large bumps. When I needed to use cream cheese icing under fondant again, I created a buttercream dam around the cream cheese filling and then covered the cake in more buttercream before covering in fondant, which worked much better.  Buttercream stays fairly firm at room temperature which allows the cake corners to be sharper after it's covered in fondant.

I spent hours creating these little flowers, and  then went to work adding them from the bottom up.  I think the effect was pretty :)

From this view you can see how the cream cheese icing made the cake so lob sided :(








The '50' was made a few days in advance, so the gum paste had time to dry.













In the end, my aunt and family enjoyed cake, so I was happy with the overall result :)

A mishmash of my recent baking

Sorry I haven't had much time to post anything lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been baking! :)

Here are a few things I've made in the past month or so...

A coworker of mine ordered this cake for his friend last minute, so I made my go to chocolate cake and decided to ice it with Italian meringue buttercream.  I was excited to decorate it since I wanted an excuse to use my new cake comb on the sides.  It was so easy to use and made the cake looked finished.  I did a reverse shell border around the edge, made some fondant letters with my tappits and it was done!











I made these chocolate cupcakes for my nephew to share with his friends on his last day of daycare. He was excited to help me put the sprinkles on, but even more so to eat them, especially the icing!

This cake I made for my cousins belated graduation BBQ.  Congratulations Hannah :)  It was a red velvet cake filled with cream cheese icing and covered with chocolate ganache and marshmallow fondant.  With this cake, I got to use my new quilting impression mat for the sides, it didn't make the groves as crisp as I wanted, but it was much faster than doing each line individually. 




That's all for now, but more posts coming soon!

Care Bear Cake

I was asked to make a cake for a combined 1st and 5th birthday party.  The girl who was turning 5 loves care bears, so I made a care bear cake, which had a care bear and a cake tier for each child :)

This was a fun cake for me since I loved the care bears growing up and in order to make the cake accurate I had to do some research, which meant watching some care bear episodes :)  The Care Bears have really changed since I was a kid, now it's all computer generated, but the episodes were still fun to watch.

This was my first time trying to make figurines and it took me forever!  I spent at least 2 hours on each.  

I found getting the right shape of the faces to be really difficult.  I was continuously trying to adjust it until it was as close I could get it.  I used a mixture of fondant and gum paste to make them, so I tried to work as quickly as I could as it started to dry out and harden.

I made all the body parts separately and left them to dry overnight.

Then the parts were all stuck together with water.  I used props to hold the arms up while they dried over night.

The bottom tier was a 4 layer 9" vanilla cake and the top tier was 4 layer 6" chocolate cake.  They were both filled with Italian meringue buttercream and covered with chocolate ganache.  The ganache I made had too much chocolate to cream, so as I was using it, I had to thin batches of it out with dashes of more cream, but it still worked out well on the cake.

I made the LMF fondant the day before and tinted it blue.  The first time I tried to cover the top tier I rolled the fondant too thin and could see through it to the ganache in some parts, but since the ganache was pretty firm, I just peeled the fondant off and tried again until I was happy with it.  I find when using LMF fondant, you have to roll it a little bit thicker than store bought fondant, but that's okay since LMF tastes better than store bought, it's ok to have more of it on the cake.

The cake board/drum was covered in fondant the day before stacking.  I made the mistake of covering the board too late before, so I knew to cover the board at least a day in advance to let the fondant on the board dry before trying to put stuff on it, otherwise the fondant on the board is soft, so it nicks and rips while stacking.  After covering both tiers with fondant, I put some bubble tea straws in for supports and stacked the top tier on.



Now for the decorations :)  I made rounds of white fondant for the clouds.  The rainbow was made by rolling out long strips of each colour, sticking them together with water and forming them into an arc. This was left to dry for over 24 hours until it was firm enough to stand up.  It was stuck into the cake with toothpicks.

The letters and numbers were made with tappits and then the stars were cut out by hand.






This cake took me many hours to make spanning over an entire week working every week night after work and then another 5-6 hours on the weekend, but I'm pretty happy with the results and so were the customers, so that's all that really matters :)

Winter Topsy Turvy Birthday Cake

I was asked to make one of my closest friend's son's first birthday cake!  She wasn't picky, just wanted a topsy turvy cake with a wintery theme.  So, I got to work watching videos and reading tutorials on how to make a topsy turvy cake.

As it was around the holidays and I had lots of other baking to do, I baked the cakes 2 weeks in advance and placed them in the freezer.  This not only helps me be less stressed closer to delivery, but also makes for a moist cake that is easy to carve with less crumbs.  I also made the LMF (fondant) about a week in advance and tinted it the colours needed.

The bottom tier started out with 3 layers of 9" round confetti cake (I doubled this recipe).  After a week, I thought that the 3 layers were not tall enough and made another 2 - 9" rounds from cake mix.  The middle tier was made out of 4 layers of 6" round chocolate cake (the only change I made to the recipe was adding some instant coffee to the boiling water, to enhance the chocolate flavour).  The top tier was rice krispie treats cut into a cube. 


I filled and stacked both cakes with Italian meringue buttercream (IMBC).  With the confetti cake, I alternated the scratch cake with the mix cake.  This was important to do as the cakes had very different consistencies and colours, so not alternating would make it look very odd.

Then came the carving...this part was kind of stressful for me, as I was worried about the angles and accidentally cutting off too much, but the cake was very forgiving.  I cut on an angle from the top corner down and then took the trianglular piece of cake off, inverted it and stuck it back on with icing to steepen the top angle.  I also tappered the sides of the cake slightly to exaggerate the topsy turvy look.  For the bottom tier, I made a flat area in the middle to fit the middle tier snugly.  I put bubble tea straws vertically in this area to support the weight of the middle tier.  (sorry I didn't take the picture after the straws were inserted)  

I then crumb coated the bottom tier with more IMBC and covered the middle tier with chocolate ganache.  I realized at this point that both of these tiers were much too tall and removed 2 layers from the confetti cake and 1 layer from the chocolate.  I started thinking what was the point of baking the extra 2 mix cakes, but realized I wouldn't have had the same height with just the 3 layers of scratch cake, so it wasn't a complete waste of time :)




It was probably past midnight, into the day of delivery and it was time for fondant :)  There are some flaws in the fondant, but most of that was all covered with decorations.  :) 




 A few days before delivery, I made the royal icing snow flakes.  I drew snow flakes out on paper, covered it with wax paper and piped over it with a small icing tip.  These dried for a few days to made sure they were hard.  I made lots of extra snow flakes because they are super fragile and break easily when trying to attach to the cake with royal icing.



The top tier was done 2 days before delivery, I covered it in red fondant and white fondant ribbon.  For the bow on the top, I made the small loops separately and let them dry over night before sticking it all together with royal icing.  The 'tissue paper' for inside the box was rolled fondant, left to dry on an uneven surface.  This tier was stuck to the middle tier with more royal icing.   







The cake drum was covered in a thin layer of fondant (I did this last minute, but if I was to do it again, I'd do it in advance so the fondant wouldn't be so soft when putting the cake on).  I cut out various sizes of red fondant circles and attached them to the middle tier with water.  The snowman was made out of a 50:50 mix of fondant and gumpaste.  I used tappits to make all of the letters.

After many many hours in the kitchen, the cake was ready for the box :)
   





They had a really nice set up and I think the cake fit nicely in it :)  Happy First Birthday Zac!

My Sister's 30th Birthday Cake

A week after my boyfriend's birthday, it was my sister's birthday :) She turned the big 3 - 0! So obviously I decided to make her a cake in the shape of a '30' for her birthday BBQ. She wasn't too fussy about the flavour of the cake, so my mom suggested a pound cake as a lot of our family likes that. I mixed up her classic recipe by separating the eggs and whipping the egg whites to stiff peaks before mixing it into the batter. This made the cake less dense but kept the rich buttery flavour.

To make the '30', I doubled the recipe and filled 3 - 6" round tins and a loaf pan. I used two of the 6" rounds for the '3' and the other 6" round plus a bit of the loaf pan for the '0'.  I torted the cakes and used a circle cutter to cut out the centers.  This pick was taken before I removed some of the burnt parts on the '3'. :s  I did it in the toaster over, but with a tall cake, that gets pretty close to the element. 



A day before decorating the cake, I made a batch of Italian Meringue Buttercream (IMBC) and put it in the fridge.  When I was about to decorate, I realized I'd forgotten to let the icing defrost to room temperature :(  I thought I could just whip it to room temperature and ended up with a weird separated mix with a pool of liquid at the bottom of my mixing bowl.  Luckily, I kept whipping it for a few more minutes and it all came back together, but not exactly to the original consistency of the fresh batch.

I covered the cake with yellow tinted IMBC and started rolling out the fondant.  Decorating with fondant circles didn't actually take too long, attempting to get smooth IMBC, that was the difficult part, but I just strategically placed the fondant circles over the messier parts and I think it turned out pretty well.

The fondant was all coloured with Wilton's gel colours.  I did that a few days before decorating, because when I work colours into the fondant, I find it makes it quite wet and sticky, so resting for a few days makes it easier to roll out.    

My inspiration for this cake was:  Kendal - by The Pastry Studio.  I liked the style and colours, but changed them slightly and mixed it up with the shape.

Rosette Cupcake Tower

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me to make her birthday cake :) I was excited as this was my first actual cake order!  She requested a chocolate cake with vanilla icing and red velvet cupcakes.  She asked that the cake be green and the cupcakes to be blue, yellow and green, other than that she's really easy going and gave me a lot of freedom with it.  Here's how it turned out.

The cake was 3 layers of Extreme Chocolate Cake with Italian meringue buttercream icing.  The 24 cupcakes were Red Velvet with cream cheese icing. 

The cakes and cupcakes were all decorated with rosettes.  If your remember, I like the rose cake and have made it before in Week 4 of Baking Arts.  I tried to improve on it by making the colours have a gradient, with a darker green on the bottom, but it ended up looking like the middle colour was the same as the bottom colour :( I still think it looks pretty though.

I had some problems with the cream cheese icing for the cupcakes holding it shape when it was piped because it was too soft.  If you look at some of the cupcakes, there isn't too much definition on the rose, so I think next time I make this recipe I will use more powdered sugar to stiffen it.

The cake turned out very moist, I find the sour cream really makes it almost a fudgey consistency :)   

Toronto Blue Jays Birthday Cake

I was asked by a friend to make her birthday cake and she requested a Toronto Blue Jays Cake!






So, I attempted my first frozen buttercream transfer.  After watching a lot of youtube videos...here's how it turned out:










I printed out a mirror image of the Blue Jays logo, covered it in wax paper and started to trace it in icing.  The layering or order of colours needs to be done so that the details aren't lost when doing larger sections.










If attempting to do this, it is important to use a buttercream that is at least 50% butter to shortening or it will not freeze solid, making it difficult to remove from the wax paper and transfer to the cake.






The cake was 3 - 9 inch layers of swiss chocolate cake, filled with an italian chocolate buttercream and covered in an italian vanilla buttercream.  The buttercream was made by whipping egg whites to stiff peaks, slow adding sugar that has been cooked to a soft ball stage and then whipping in butter once the temperature has come down.  The timing in making this icing is critical as you don't want to over whip the whites as you are waiting for the sugar to cook.

After the cake was torted, filled and masked.  I covered the sides in some coloured sugar.  Then it was time to take the frozen buttercream transfer out of the freezer and place immediately onto the cake.  It is important not to let the transfer sit out more than a few seconds as it will start to melt and may warp the image as you take it off of the wax paper.

I finished with a simple shell border around the logo and bottom and that was it :)