Bridal Shower Cupcake Cake

Recently I offered to make a cake for a friend's bridal shower at work.  I'm also making this friend's wedding favours, more on this in a few weeks :)

I was given free reign on the cake and told it only needed to feed 12 people.  Since it was going to be at work, I knew it's always better to have extra cake, in case more people showed up.  From my experience, there no such thing as too much cake at my work place!

I've seen a lot of bridal gown cupcake cakes during the hours I've spent on Pinterest, so I thought I'd give it a try.  I decided to go with this layout, which used 28 red velvet cupcakes.  I actually baked 36 cupcakes, as I tripled the recipe. 

My first batch didn't turn out well, as I accidentally mixed the sugar in with the dry ingredients, so I wasn't able to cream the oil and sugar together.  This caused the first batch to come out slightly oily and not rise properly, since creaming the oil with the sugar is when all the air is incorporated.  The flavour was still good, just the texture was slightly off.  This bad batch worked out in my family/friends favour, as it just meant more cupcakes for them :)   

I chose to use a cream cheese icing and iced the cupcakes using simple rosettes.  This cake looks really fancy, but it literally took less than 10 minutes to ice! 

A few days before the cake was going to be delivered, I made a quick bow out of fondant and left it to dry on a foam pad.  By the time it needed to be placed on the cake, it was all dry and firm.  The only mistake I made was putting it on the cake and then placing the entire thing into the fridge.  As soon as the fondant was in the fridge, it started to sweat and become soft, thankfully it wasn't there for too long and the bow kept most of its shape.  Next time, I'll just place the bow on right before delivery. 

I placed a purple sash and then the bow on top, and the cake was finished!


It was all well received, which I was happy about, and the bride was completely surprised :)  Some even asked for the recipe, which I think is a big compliment, I'm hoping it works out well for them too!  

Week 2: Carrot Cake

So I've signed up for another baking course at George Brown College...I'm taking Cakes 1 :)

I missed the first week, where they learned how to make pound cake.  That would've been good to
learn, since I don't really know the difference between pound cake and butter cake, but oh well, at least I have a new recipe to try.

This week was carrot cake.  It was interesting to learn how to make it in a new way.  I've always made carrot cake using butter and/or oil and adding pineapple for moistness but this recipe didn't call for either.  This recipe called for heating eggs and sugar over a water bath, then whipping them to soft peaks.  Then gently folding in the grated carrots and flour by hand.  We had to be very careful not to over mix, since it is really easy to lose volume at this point.

The icing was a cream cheese icing made with quark folded into whipped cream.  I'd never heard of quark before, but apparently it's a pure form of cheese, unlike the usual cream cheese we buy from the grocery store.  We had to beat the quark until it was smooth before folding in the cream and this took quite a while.  We had to be really patient with it to make sure we got a creamy smooth icing, free from any quark lumps.  

To decorate, I tinted marzipan orange, then rolled it by hand to look like mini carrots.  Using the dull side of a knife, I made lines on the marzipan to make it look more real, then piped green piping gel on the tips. :)

Using an icing comb, I made ridges on the side  of the cake and then added a small almond border to the bottom.

The end result was quite tasty and light for a carrot cake.  I will definitely use this recipe again. 

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 :)   

Week 12: Strawberry Shortcake

It was the final week :( I'm really going to miss class and baking every Wednesday.  I've learned a lot, so I'm definitely going to take more classes, just not sure which ones yet, maybe Cakes I, Pies or Pastry?

The "Strawberry Shortcake" we made this week was really more of a yellow sponge cake with strawberries and cream, since traditional strawberry shortcake is more of a biscuit with the strawberries and cream.  Even though we made a simpler version of the traditional cake, it still turned out pretty nicely. 

We started out making the cake, which was an egg foam batter, similar to the swiss roll recipe.  I learned from the swiss roll that egg foams can tend to be a little dry, so I made sure I remembered to use lots of simple syrup when layering.

While the cakes were baking, we made whipped cream, sliced strawberries and dipped strawberries in chocolate.  Once the cakes were baked and placed in the blast chiller for a few minutes, we cut each cake into 3 layers and started layering.

The layers were yellow sponge covered in rum flavoured simple syrup, a thin layer of whipped cream and then an even layer of sliced strawberries.

We decorated the cake similarly to the black forest but learned to use a comb on the side.  The metal comb was used to create ridges.  The comb is kind of tricky to use as you need to have a thick coating of cream on the side so when you pull the comb through, you don't see cake, but when there is too much cream, it makes it a little difficult to the make the ridges look even.

Since class has ended and it may be a little while until I take another one, I will keep baking and posting about what I make...so feel free to make suggestions on things you would like to see :) Thanks for reading!

Week 10: Chocolate Swiss Roll

It was another busy week with the chocolate swiss rolls.  I had a substitute partner this week, who was there from another class, so it was nice to share the workload.


The cake part of this recipe was fairly simple with only 4 ingredients: eggs, sugar, cocoa and flour.  We started by making an egg foam with the eggs and sugar, this was whisked until it really increased in volume.  The flour and cocoa was folded in by hand to ensure the egg foam didn't deflate or over mix.

With an egg foam batter, it is important to work quickly as the batter is continuously deflating until it is in the oven.

The batter was baked on a large sheet pan covered in parchment paper.  Baking a thin cake allows for easy rolling but I also think it leads to the cake baking slightly dry, but this can be fixed with lots and lots of simple syrup.

Next was the chocolate glaze.  We boiled some heavy cream with glucose and added that to dark chocolate.  The glucose was added to make the chocolate glossy.  This was set aside to cool while we made the Italian chocolate buttercream to go inside the roll.

The buttercream was my favourite part!  I'm never going back to the standard American Buttercream made with just butter and icing sugar again.

With Italian buttercream, since the sugar is cooked and slowly added to the whipped egg whites, the icing turns out much smoother.  Adding lots of butter, makes it very silky.

Before spreading the icing, I brushed a heavy amount of brandy flavoured simple syrup over the entire cake to keep it moist.  The buttercream was spread fairly thinly over the cake, but next time, I will spread it even thinner since it makes the rolling much easier.

I sprinkled a few raspberries and toasted hazelnuts inside, then rolled up the cake.  Once I made the rolling as tight as possible, I masked it with more buttercream :)  Last step was to drizzle chocolate glaze on top and decorate with chocolate accents, raspberries and hazelnuts.

Since I made the mistake of piping buttercream onto chocolate glaze that wasn't fully cooled, my buttercream rosettes slipped off of one of the swiss rolls and I had to redecorate.  This is how it turned out...

Week 9: Black Forest Cake

This was a busy week, since it was our first week making an entire cake.  We baked the cake, torted, filled, masked and decorated it. 

I found out that my partner has dropped the class, but another person was partnerless for the day, so we paired up.  As a pair, we made three devil's food cakes.  One each and a spare incase something went wrong.

Devil's food cake is just a special name for moist chocolate cake.  The recipe was straight forward and yeilded 3 - 7 inch rounds.  Once the cakes were baked, we immeditely flipped them out of the pans onto cake rounds and put them into the
blast chiller.

While the cakes were cooling, we made the whipped cream for the icing.  We had the choice of using commerical grade whipped topping (what we used in Week 4), whipping cream, or a mixture of both.  I chose to use mainly whipping cream with a little bit of whipped topping for sweetness and stability.

When the cakes were sufficiently cooled, we leveled the top of the cake, cut it into 3 layers (torted) and brushed each layer with a kircsh flavoured simple syrup.  This helps keep the cake moist and adds more flavour.

We piped multiple concentric rings of icing on each layer and filled the gaps with cherry filling.  This was done twice and the top layer was inverted to get a level top.  We used a ready made cherry filling, but if I was to do this again, I would make it from scratch.          

Then it was time to mask the cake.  We didn't actually spend too much time on this step as most of the cake was going to be covered anyways.  A big block of chocolate circulated around the room and we each used our knives to make chocolate shavings.

Since our spare cake turned out well, we decided to decorate it as well and each take home half.  Here's how it turned out:

It's too bad my half didn't last the drive home...oh well, I think it still tasted good. 

Week 4: Piping and Masking

This week was all about learning the basics of piping and masking. We used a cake dummie and commercial grade whipped topping for icing (this icing is equivalent to what most grocery stores use for icing).

The instructor taught us how to fill the icing bag by folding over the top to keep the edge clean. She suggested never to fill the bag more than halfway as it usually causes a mess and that it is easier just to refill.

We were shown how to do a crumb coat with an offset spatula and get the sides straight using a bowl scraper.

After masking our cake dummies, we practiced piping on a tray with a star and straight tip. We learned that it is easier to squeeze the piping bag from halfway through where it is filled so that there is less strain on your forearm. Once we practiced all the different piping techniques, we were instructed to decorate our previously masked cake dummies.

Here is what I made