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.