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 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 7: Eclairs and Cream Puffs

This week we got back to sweet stuff by making eclairs and cream puffs!  They are both made with the same batter just piped and decorated differently.

They were fairly simple to make, just very time consuming as you actually cook the flour mixture before piping it and putting it in the oven.  The flour is cooked in a boiled butter and water mixture until it forms a film on the bottom of the pot, then transferred to a mixer where the eggs are added slowly.  This mixture is piped out into either rosettes or lady finger (cream puffs or eclairs, respectively).  The batter has a very eggy flavour, but that doesn't matter since it's really all about the filling or chocolate on top :)


Once baked, the rosettes and lady fingers are hollow and easy to pipe.  You can either pipe it into the side/bottom or just cut off the top and pipe inside.  With the eclairs, we watered down pourable chocolate fondant, dipped the lady fingers inside and filled with whipped cream.  For the rosettes, I filled it with raspberry jam and more whipped cream :)











I think I will be making this recipe again!

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