Nostalgia

*sigh* I miss making cakes...will you give me an excuse to make one?

S-U-C-C-E-S-S. That's the way you spell delicious!

We did it!!  We made an attractive AND delicious cake that fed all of the guests!

It was a long process, but absolutely, positively worth it.  I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Here's how the weekend went down:
Thursday
Fly from Denver (12:59 am) to Charlotte (6:00 am).  Fly from Charlotte (7:55 am) to Baltimore (9:00 am).
10 am - home to begin mixing and baking cakes.
11:30 am - fall asleep on the couch.
1:00 pm - wake up to sound of Mom mixing more batter.  Get up and help.
4:00 pm - begin frosting the cakes that are cool enough to do so. Cover and stack sheet cakes in tub for transport.
6:00 pm - set cakes aside, go to dinner.
7:30 pm - mix and bake last two cakes, then frost ALL remaining layers.

Friday
10:00 am - wake up and clean off counter top, prep for fondant.
10:15 am - fondant all three layers of cake, place them in their box/carrying container, then take over the fridge with them.
12:00 am - buy wedding gift (yay employee discount!)
1:00 pm - drive to venue
2:00 pm - lunch with some of the wedding party
4:30 pm - rehearsal!  in the heat :(
6:30 pm - rehearsal dinner with the most delicious crab cake ever!
9:00 pm - drive home.
10:00 pm - check on cakes to make sure they're still okay (they were.)

Saturday
Wedding Day!
7:13 am - wake up, shower, haul ass.
8:45 am - pick up friend and head to Annapolis for nail appointment
9:30 am - Manicure/pedicure with bridal party
11:00 am - sushi lunch with TWO for ONE special!
2:00 pm - Head back to venue to get hair done and change into dress.
3:15 pm - CAKE ARRIVES at venue!  Run downstairs to unload car and bring cakes into the reception area.  Poke holes in each layer and insert skewers for support. Assemble layers.  Pipe frosting around connection points.  Place cake topper in GOBS of frosting and add flowers.
4:00 pm - get makeup done.
4:30 pm - help bride into her dress, make sure everything is perfect :)
5:50 pm - head downstairs
6:00 pm - WEDDING! :)
6:15 pm - pictures and cocktail hour
7:00 pm - reception
7:05 pm - Make a toast to the happy couple.
8:00 pm - dancing!
8:30 pm - Cake cutting and eating.
9:30 pm - track down a piece of cake (after they had all been put away...I was too busy dancing)  bring cake to dance floor to eat.
10:00 pm - hear that the cake was DELICIOUS from many people, hear that someone ate 6 pieces.
11:30 pm - Go home and collapse.

SUPERB wedding, superb weekend!

Things are shaping up!

Ok, let's be honest.  I don't really expect to win "best wedding cake of the year", but the cakes are definitely starting to improve.  I've really come to enjoy the sugar jolt that I get from the cake sample I have.  Same cake and frosting as usual (both made with coconut milk instead of cow milk), but this time we tried a 'flavored fondant'.  It tasted MUCH better than the Wilton version...which I will never EVER eat again.

The fondant was a bit sticky, which made it difficult to flip during the rolling out process, but was manageable with some help from powdered sugar.  I've gotten better at rolling out the fondant without grumbling angrily.  After putting the fondant on top of the cakes I piped some of the excess frosting around the seams and in a heart on top.  It's actually quite presentable.

Back into the swing of things

So I feel like I have been on an unannounced cake hiatus.  I'll blame school and work...but it's still time to get back into it.  Especially the decorating.

The cake we made today helped me to realize that I have the piping skills of a 7 year old (give or take 3 years).  So while my cakes and frosting taste absolutely delicious, I have this strange desire to actually have it LOOK good too.  Weird, I know.

Anyway, we dyed the frosting yellow because I am already sick of white cakes (plus, let's be honest - colors are way more fun!).  After stacking the cakes and frosting them we decided to practice putting a border around the cake.  This is where my lack of skills became quite apparent.

You've gone...vegan??

So my friend (the bride) cares about the treatment of animals.  She has very recently decided that she will only get eggs and meat from a local farmer who (I assume) treats his animals humanely (before ending their lives).

What does this mean for me??  NO BUTTER or MILK in the wedding cake and the eggs that I use must be acquired from said farmer.  I hope he has a LOT of chickens, because we're planning to make about 7 cakes.

So after getting over the initial ingredient shift panic, I calmed down enough to realize that I could be creative with the cakes.  Instead of milk I used coconut milk, and in lieu of butter - crisco!  So while the cake now makes the cut, my arteries hate me.  My "sample" pieces are getting smaller and smaller...which is arguably a good thing anyway.

So in summary - this cake was still quite delicious, and I even subbed the coconut milk and crisco into the frosting.  Both parts turned out great, though I used the "butter flavored" crisco, which really just tinted the frosting slightly yellow.  Oh well, the whole cake still disappeared quickly once I brought it in to work.  (Surprise!)

Rolled Buttercream a la Blizzard

Blizzards are a great time to bake cakes!  The only downside...I don't have the normal number of cake consumers to help distribute the calorie load.  Alas, we'll manage.

Anyway!  I went back to the good ol' standard white cake supreme this time.  I still LOVE this recipe!  Super easy to make, not an overwhelming number of ingredients, and REALLY light and fluffy.  Superb!  Since it was a 'whatever cake' (read: it had been a while since I made a cake and I was avoiding homework), I used some of the leftover chocolate buttercream frosting from several cakes back to ice the crumb layer.  The two layers also came out quite uniform, so there was less of a weird leaning Tower of Pisa thing going on.

Making the rolled buttercream was an interesting experience.  I used the dough hook attachment for the mixer (for my first time EVER) and it was quite odd.  It did mix everything, but the time lapsed addition of the powdered sugar ensured a constant vapor cloud of sugar.  I was worried that I would get a sugar high from breathing it in for so long.  Two pounds of sugar and a cup of crisco later...and we have a pretty cool almost-fondant topping.

The rolled buttercream was quite a bit less hearty than the fondant, so rolling it out was more difficult.  I ended up putting quite a bit more powdered sugar in as I was rolling it out.  Once rolled, we slabbed it on the cake without any major disasters!  Hurrah!  Mom is the official excess buttercream cutter, and we're still working on the technique for that.  The main issue so far is making sure that we leave enough buttercream (or fondant) to go all the way to the bottom of the cake.

This tastes SO MUCH BETTER than Fondant!  I will say it now: Fondant Sucks.  Rolled Buttercream Rocks!

Oh how I love food coloring!

Today's cake choice: Red Velvet with cream cheese frosting.




The successes:

• The cake looks beautiful - I'm getting better at smoothing the icing and NOT pulling up globs of cake crumbs.
• Playing with food coloring was fun and turned the cake a deeper shade of red.
• The frosting was a good consistency and stayed a bright white.

The areas for improvement:

• Two of the layers came out lopsided (probably) due to uneven temperatures in the oven.  This meant we had to shave off quite a bit of the tops of the layers.
• The cake is pretty dense, which isn't really relevant because we aren't using this recipe for THE cake...but still worth noting.

Final Verdict: Taste was delicious!  Too dense as the recipe called for all purpose flour and not cake flour.  Cream cheese frosting was very sugary at first, but then tasted more cream cheese-y towards the end.  A chameleon frosting, if you will.

Cake was completely demolished by my coworkers.  Yum.

My "off the record" Birthday cake

So you know you're a grown up when you make your own birthday cake.  That, or you have been deemed the best baker in the family.

Anyway, I thought this would be a fun project for two reasons: I picked a german chocolate cake (YUM!) and I didn't have to worry about the physical appearance because it was for my birthday.  Clearly I was wrong.

Turns out this was the messiest and ugliest cake I have made so far - but it did turn out to be delicious (in the end).  One would think that if you published a book of 'tasted cake recipes for a year of weekly cakes'...you would have some sort of proofreaders or recipe checkers.  This was clearly not the case - and the CUP OF SUGAR that the frosting utilizes was left out of the recipe entirely.  To add on to the problem, I had doubled the recipe for the frosting (at the suggestion of said recipe book) in order to 'cover the sides of the cake' as well as the top.

Ok seriously?  I don't know how many INCHES thick your frosting layer is, but mine is a REASONABLE amount.  This doubled recipe made more than enough frosting for TWO entire German Chocolate cakes.  TWO.  What a waste of time and resources.  Since the sugar was left out of the recipe - I had to reheat the frosting and then dissolve the sugar into it hours after the initial creation of the frosting.  Stupid stupid recipe.

The cake ended up being a HUGE mess.  The cakes didn't hold together well and the layers ended up breaking in the transition from the pan to the placement for frosting.  Superb.  Add to that some icing that looks like goop and kept dripping down the sides of the cake into a lovely ring around the base of the cake, and you get one annoyed me.  Luckily my coworkers could not have cared less - as German Chocolate cake is an apparent favorite of EVERYONE I work with.

We will obviously be cross-checking any recipes from that book from now on.

Always trust your instincts!

Mhmm - I knew it. I just KNEW it. Freezing a cake screws up the texture. Plain and simple.

Many people commented on the fact that the cake tasted good, but the texture was different from before..."it wasn't as moist" was popular. Thus, I have confirmed my decision to NOT freeze the cakes ever. So, I'll simply spend the day or two before the wedding baking 6 layers of cakes. NO SWEAT!

The royal icing = a favorite. Pretty sure this is going to be the official icing of the wedding, but I will clearly still experiment from time to time.

The fondant was not my favorite. It was sort of chewy - which I hear means I overworked it. I found this amusing because I think I kneaded it for a total of 2 minutes before giving up and just rolling it out. However, I am willing to try working with fondant again because it made such a fantastically smooth cake! So I suppose I am now searching for more fondant recipes to make my own SUPER-fondant that actually tastes good and behaves how I want it to.

Thats right fondant - I'm the boss.

Cake III

This was a heavily experimental cake. We decided to attempt freezing and thawing with this cake and also tried using fondant for the first time ever.

So I made the cake on Tuesday and only kept it in the freezer until Friday (because I am a wimp and am afraid of ruining my delicious cake streak by deep freezing a cake just yet). It thawed nicely, but I cannot yet vouch for the taste/moistness/consistency because we are serving the cake tomorrow. I actually followed the time-temperature guidelines for the baking time of this cake and was sorely disappointed. We have been convection baking at 25 degrees lower than the recipe calls for (and leaving the cakes in for longer). This cake was more overdone than it's predecessors and that makes me sad. Thus, I will continue with my never fail formula of: Temperature - 25 degrees = Perfection!

The fondant was surprisingly fun to use. As we had nothing large enough to roll the fondant on...I ended up using the kitchen counter. This did mean that I had to stand on a chair for a significant amount of the rolling time...but it worked! I eventually got the fondant to the desired 1/4" thickness and it was even a shape that (loosely) resembled a circle! Victory!

However, the two cake layers are just a bit mis-matched and thus the cake is lopsided if you see it from the wrong angle. Embarrassing. And you can see two tiny folds in the fondant at the bottom of the cake. But other than that - totally gorgeous and probably the best first-fondant cake EVER!

...Let's just hope it tastes good...

Great Expectations

So I went in to work today and had just opened my locker when...

Coworker #1: Cake?

Me: Hello to you too.

Coworker #1: Any cake?

Me: No...I'm bringing them in on Sunday's.

Coworker #2 rounds the corner...: cake?!

Really? This is what it has come to? I knew people liked sugar, but I think my coworkers are getting spoiled.

Should I use these new powers for good or evil.....?

Why my coworkers are awesome!

Turns out...they're great enough to step up to the plate and eat any and all sample cakes that I bring in for them. Isn't that nice of them?

And with all those free cake samples they are happy to give me tips on whatever they can. One of them actually has a cake baking business that she runs with her sister. Another coworker is bringing me her 'never fail' recipe for a flour-based buttercream frosting. And several people have given suggestions on types of cakes to make next.

Mostly, I'm just glad the leftover cake isn't around the house...otherwise we would be in trouble!

Cake Numero Dos, or A Lesson on the Consistency of Frosting

Frosting is a finicky friend. We tried to get clever with this cake by creating three different frosting consistencies for:

1. The crumb layer

2. The top and sides of the cake

3.The decorative frosting

Turns out, we're just not that good at working with frosting yet. The crumb layer worked out pretty well, but when we went to ice the sides of the cake gravity overcame us. If you've ever seen the cake from "Sleeping Beauty" (the one with the broom handle holding up the cake layers and all of the frosting and candles sliding down the handle), this was a scale model of that (video below).

Eventually we just started wiping excess frosting off of the base of the cakeboard and throwing it in the sink. The recipe made a lot of frosting.

We used Colette Peter's "Colette's Cakes: The Art of Decorating" as a guide/inspirational source. (Thanks to Leigh for recommending this to us!) We used her Chocolate cake recipe and the buttercream frosting with almond extract instead of vanilla. As there was almond extract in the cake and the frosting, we decided to decorate the cake with crushed almonds. In the end the cake looked better than expected, but was still a bit too sugary.

On the plus side, we now have a tub of extra frosting in the freezer to play with whenever the mood strikes us.