Happy Birthday, Aunt Mimi: Completed

Happy Birthday, Aunt Mimi!

(+10 skill points -> 190/400)

Yesterday the Wingler and Scannell families celebrated Aunt Mimi's 60th birthday in Johnson City, TX.  When we first received the e-vite, I asked Aunt Mimi if I could supply the cake.  She was thrilled that I asked, but then I got nervous.  This cake had to be special because this was such as special occasion!  Here's the scoop ...

Stats:

• 2 tiers: 6" and 8" round
• French Vanilla cake (Duncan Hines box mix)
• white chocolate IMBC icing and filling (top tier)
• white chocolate with Bailey's Irish Cream IMBC icing and filling (bottom tier)
• royal icing accents

This was definitely a challenging cake; it took about 12 hours to complete.  Earlier in the week I baked, leveled, and torted the cake ... and, of course, made cake balls with the scraps.

 

 With my last cake for Jenny, I made coffee IMBC (Italian Meringue Buttercream).  For Aunt Mimi, I took it up a notch and made IMBC with a shot of Bailey's Irish Cream.  This was for the bottom tier since it would be bigger and for the adults.

The icing was being a little fussy while I was making it.  I had to throw it in the fridge to firm up so it could stabilize.  When I added the crumb coat to the cake, it seemed rather thin.

Afterward I made the white chocolate IMBC and found that to be much more firm and stable.  It went on smooth and thick.  I then added white chocolate to the Irish Cream icing to see if it would help and it did.  It also made it even yummier!

 

 

The cakes went into the fridge to firm up until I could finish everything on Friday evening.  There wasn't much time for me to take photos at the end.  My mother-in-law and sister-in-law came over to lend a hand.  I had made some biege MMF (marshmallow fondant) earlier in the week for the top tier.  The bottom tier was going to use the left over fondant from Halloween's cauldron cake.  The top tier was covered without a hitch, but the bottom tier was a whole different story.  The bottom tier fondant was made with dark chocolate cocoa powder.  We believe that the cocoa threw the whole batch out of wack.  I took it out and saw it was incredibly dry (it crumbled into dusty clumps when I kneaded it), so I added some drops of water and some shortening.  I rolled it out again and tried to place it on the cake: disaster!  The fondant cracked everywhere and looked awful.  Luckily the cake was firm enough for me to lift the fondant back off.  There was no way I was going to make another batch of fondant this late at night.  In my stubborn head it was either this fondant or no cake at all!  Anne and Ashley watched me struggle as I added more and more melted marshmallows trying to save this fondant.  Thankfully it finally loosened up and began to behave.  The bottom tier was covered (again) but this time successfully.

Now for stacking the tiers.  I was concerned about the drive from my house to Johnson City and how the cake could survive the trip.  The cakecentral.com forums provided a lot of information on how to travel with cakes, and I took away some great tips.

The cake sat on a 12" cake drum, which is basically a round cardboard cylinder.  To support the top tier, 4 wooden dowels were cut and inserted into the bottom tier:

Using the 6" round pan, I traced a circle on to the top of the bottom tier.  A pat of icing was smeared within the circle to help the top tier stick.  The top tier was placed on the supports and centered.  In order to keep the top tier in place, another wooden dowel was pierced down the center of the entire thing, including the cake drum.  I eyeball-measured the height of the cake including the cake drum and cut the dowel appropriately.  One end needed to be sharpened to be able to pierce 2 cake boards plus the top side of the cake drum.  I couldn't find my husband's pencil sharpener so I used a knife to whittle a point.  The point wasn't getting sharp enough ... I wasn't going to risk trying to skewer my cake with a blunt end.  I searched for the pencil sharpener again and finally found it.  Anne and Ashley watched me in silence and probably slight horror as I took a hammer and "staked" my cake.  Luckily the dowel went into place without any excessive damage.

The design piped on to the cake was inspired by a logo made by Jan Zabranski.  Royal icing was mixed with brown food coloring and piped using a disposable plastic piping bag.  This is my first time to use the plastic bags, and I must say it was a delight!  I may only go back to parchment if I need a small amount of icing piped.  Anne and Ashley helped make the candy cup on top.  They melted candy bark into Wilton's Cordial Cups candy mold.

On Saturday morning the cake got packed into a large plastic bin.  The bottom was lined with non-slip material (the stuff you put in your kitchen drawers so your dishes don't slide around when you open them).  I made it snug in the trunk by surrounding it with other things I had back there.

The cake made it through the 1.5 hour drive to Johnson City just fine.  When it was time to cut the cake, I explained that some people don't like the taste of fondant, and I wouldn't be offended if they wanted to peel it off of their slice.  Kathy said it was the best tasting fondant she's ever had!  Kim said it was addicting and kept nibbling on it after her cake was gone.  I thought it was ok, but peeled it off anyway so I could taste the IMBC better.

A big thank you to Anne and Ashley for helping me with this cake!  Happy birthday, Aunt Mimi!

Happy Birthday, Jenny: Completed

Happy Birthday, Jenny!

(+5 skill points -> 180/400)

Friday was my co-worker's wife's birthday.  Poor thing has a broken toe!  This was a nice opportunity to make something for her and try out a few things.

Stats:

• 8" round
• French Vanilla box cake mix (Duncan Hines)
• iced with white chocolate & coffee flavored IMBC
• shell border on the bottom
• rosette border on top
• script using thinned IMBC with a squeeze bottle

French Vanilla Duncan Hines cake has got to be my favorite cake in the whole wide world.  I'm going to bet this cake tastes awesome.  I made everything in one night, so this took a while and I was pretty pooped at the end.

I'm sticking with using baking strips from now on.  The rose nail method just doesn't work for me.  This cake baked up very nicely in an hour. 

IMBC is so fickle ... I was worried about it destabilizing when both chocolate and coffee were added.  The milk chocolate was heated in the microwave first so it could cool down by the time I was ready for it.  Chocolate remains viscous for a good while, even when not hot.  The IMBC needed something liquidy but not hot.  Here's 3 oz. of baker's white chocolate.  I actually should have used more, but I wasn't thinking correctly.  It should have been 6 oz.

The coffee syrup was 1 1/2 Tb of instant coffee with 1 Tb hot water.  Again, made early so it could cool down before being added to the IMBC.

The IMBC was a little frustrating.  The meringue part of it went fine, whipped up real nice.  The cake got leveled and torted while the meringue cooled down.

After I added the butter it went soupy.  Perhaps I didn't let the meringue cool down enough?  I gave up whipping it and stuck the mixing bowl into the fridge for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile I prepared the cake box.  The "secret" Walmart by my work has a little section for cake decorating!  I found 10" x 10" x 5" cake boxes for $1.  Oh I call it the "secret" Walmart because it's pretty hidden from the road it's on.  There are a bunch of trees that block visibility to the store.  There's only one sign and it's not properly lit at night.  You have to know exactly where it is or you'll miss it completely.  The other day I meant to stop by it after work, but I must have been listening to the radio or thinking about something.  I drove right past it and didn't realize until it was too late!  The next day I made sure to pay attention.  I bought some non-skid material for cake transportation.  It's the stuff you put in your kitchen drawers to keep things from sliding around.  I cut out a square and put it in the cake box.

The IMBC when back to whipping ... no dice, still soupy.  I thought, "Uuugghhh ... I don't have all night to do this!  I'm exhausted already!"  Back into the fridge it went, this time for 15 minutes.  After that, it started to stabilize.  The chocolate and the coffee were added without difficulty.  The icing was thinned more than usual, but it was just fine.  It glided on to the cake like a dream.  It also tasted awesome.  The white chocolate was subtle, but it made the IMBC taste even smoother.

I hate making small batches of royal icing, so tried piping the "Happy Birthday" with melted chocolate in a squeeze bottle.  That did NOT work.  The chocolate was too runny and it looked awful.  I was able to scoop it off the top and re-ice the cake.

I tried thinning down some of the IMBC with the chocolate.  That got loaded into the squeeze bottle and I piped again.  This time it wasn't that bad.  I wasn't shooting for knock-out looks.  Simple shell border on the bottom, rosettes on top.  I wanted to put coffee beans in the rosettes, but when I practiced one on a piece of foil ... well, it looked like a little booby.  Ah, I should have taken a picture!  Ha.  Well, no beans for the cake.

I'm not pleased about how it wasn't so smooth on the sides of the cake.  Last week I bought Viva paper towels for smoothing down icing.  I would have had to refrigerate the cake for a while to do that, but I was already running out of time for the night.  Maybe next time.

FAILs:

•  IMBC was too hot when I put the butter in ... patience is a virtue!
• squeeze bottle piping might be good for some things, but maybe not script
• don't make cake boobies
• not enough milk chocolate
  

FTWs:

• IMBC tasted awesome!  I'll use this next week for Aunt Mimi's 60th birthday cake
• IMBC pipes so smooth ... I loved the rosettes ... I want to use this on cupcakes one day with my 1M tip

Happy Birthday, Jenny!

Cake Balls: Completed with Badge

Cake Balls I'm actually proud of!

(+5 skill points -> 175/400)

After Halloween, no one wanted to take any cake home with them.  I was stuck with 2/3rds of a cauldron cake!  I also had a lot of left over red velvet cake from the Dragon Age Congratulations cake.  Cake balls is the best way to get rid of scraps.  I learned that I can use my Oxo Good Grips Dough Blender for crumbling the cake and mixing in the icing ... which is awesome because I had yet to use that thing for anything else!

Unfortunately I don't have any photos of what happened to the cauldron cake.  Those cake balls got dipped in Wilton's red candy melts.  My husband loved those!  I don't own a double boiler, but I wanted to try using my little crock pot to heat the candy melts.  I've used it before for chocolate fondue.  It actually worked well, I think.  The bad thing was that the candy melts were so thick!  The cake barely survived being dipped in it.  I even added a lot of shortening and vegetable oil to make it thinner, but I'm not sure how much that helped.

The chocolate was the complete opposite.  It was the oiled chocolate fountain chocolate I used before in my first cake ball attempt.  The red velvet cake was dipped in this, but never "set" (see photo above).

I thought both tasted yummy!  When I took them to work, I called them "Tainted Darkspawn Blood Drops" (from the Dragon Age video game).  It was a hit!  Here are some of the responses I got:

Wow Chris,
The tainted darkspawn blood drops are sooo good!
^_^ Thanks,
- James

holy cow those blood balls rock 
excellent job chris
- Stacy

The chocolate ones are on the top ten list of best things on the planet! I think it helped that they didn't set. :)
- Nancy

Quick Congrats Cake: Completed

Congratulations to the Dragon Age development team!

(+5 skill points -> 170/400)

Dragon Age was released in stores today!  It's been getting amazing scores from game sites.  I whipped up a cake last night to bring to work so we could celebrate.

Stats:

• 10" square
• red velvet box cake (Duncan Hines)
• IMBC icing and filling
• decorated with cherries
• drizzled chocolate

I gave rose nails another shot, but they still didn't seem to prevent "doming" while baking.  I ended up cutting a lot off the top and having to build up the corners with extra icing to make them appear level.  That was ok, though, because the scraps went to cake balls :)

There wasn't enough left-over IMBC from last weekend, so I made a 1/2-batch while the cake was baking.  IMBC can be difficult to ice with.  Sometimes it slides off the cake or off itself when layering.  It's a good thing it tastes great, at least.

After crumb coating and adding a final layer, I was all out of IMBC.  "Crap!" I thought ... what to do, what to do ... I looked at the cake balls I made ... no, too big to go on to the cake ... Eureka!  Cherries!  I had some frozen cherries left over from last weekend's punch.  Cherries made a quick border and some drizzled chocolate finished it off.

It was neat to use my new squeeze bottles to drizzle the melted chocolate (that I was using with the cake balls) on to the cherries.  It even let me do a simple script!  I was pretty pressed for time because I started so late.  It's amazing what chocolate can save!

Now for the bad news!  It didn't look that good by the time it arrived at work.  The cherries had thawed and were leaking dark red juice everywhere.  The cake shifted around in the box a little and the edges got slightly damaged.  No one at work seemed to care; they loved it anyway!  Congratulations to the team at Edge of Reality in Austin, TX for helping make such a great game!

FAILs:

• cherry juice got everywhere!
• ran out of IMBC
• couldn't find appropriately sized box for transport

FTWs:

• cherries were a good border substitute
• chocolate in squeeze bottle worked well
• pretty good cake in such a short amount of time
• getting more XP with IMBC
  

Happy Birthday: Completed

Happy Birthday!

Cake for my in-laws

+5 skill points -> 165/400

This was a quick cake since it was so last-minute.  No photos of creation process, again, because it had to be done before guests arrived.

Stats:

• 8" round
• yellow cake box mix (Duncan Hines)
• vanilla IMBC icing
• IMBC bead borders, dots, and script
  

This cake was made without any hitches.  It baked up nicely and I didn't have much trouble icing it.  The decorating isn't fancy, but we had a great time serving it.  

My practice cake was a useful introduction to IMBC.  I ventured to make a full batch for this cake so I could have plenty to work with.  IMBC tastes more ... mature?  It's definitely not your run-of-the-mill birthday cake icing (that would be "American buttercream").  I used the recipe from a previous post and it turned out fantastic.  It didn't even really destabilize that badly during the whipping.  It was creamy and smooth; I added vanilla flavoring (my fav).  No trouble crumb or final coating it.  A cup of frosting was mixed with Americolor's "Electric Blue" ... the color was underwhelming.  I thought it was going to be bright neon ... but it just looked like light blue.  Oh well, so their birthday cake isn't going to melt any faces ... we'll deal.

I've never piped a bead border outside of my Wilton class.  It didn't go as well as imagined.  IMBC pipes a little different than American buttercream because it's so light.  I had to really stick the tip down for the bead to take hold before applying a lot of pressure, otherwise it just piped out a snake.  Making the dots on the side of the cake were much easier.  They were placed randomly, but it probably would have looked better if they were uniform.  Again, we'll deal.

Happy Birthday, Mom & Dad!

News Flash! Or Should I Say, Flash News!

A couple weekends ago I got my early birthday gift: Canon Speedlite 430 EX II Flash.  This goes on my Canon Rebel XSi.  You may have noticed some of my pictures in the past are not so awesome.  As a working mom, I have little day-time to work on cakes, so most of my cake photos are taken in my kitchen at night.  Poor lighting = bad photos.  But now, no more!  I can use my flash to bounce light off the walls and ceiling to create seemingly ambient light.  I look forward to photographing all my sweet creations so they can be preserved long after the last slice has been eaten.

Halloween Cauldron: Completed

Spooky Cauldron

A Halloween Cake
+5 skill points -> 160/400

The Wingler family had a great Halloween.  We celebrated our mom & dad's birthdays together and threw a fun Halloweeny party.  I made a black cauldron cake ...

Stats:

• 8" x 6" round (4 layers)
• golden butter cake box mix (Duncan Hines)
  
• chocolate buttercream (Wilton recipe, butter-flavored Crisco, melted chocolate)
• colored with Wilton's Color Mist (black)
• piping gel "stew"
• fondant accents (MMF)
  

A few things wrong, a few things right ... what was once incredibly frustrating turned out to be pretty fun in the end.  Here's how it all went down.

I baked the cakes on Thursday to save me some time.  Everyone was coming over on Saturday at 3 pm, so I wouldn't have any time that day.  This is the first time for me to use the golden butter cake from Duncan Hines.  I've used the chocolate one and it was yummy and firm.  This batter was thick!  I had to push it around in the pan to try and level it out before going into the oven.

I'm not sure what goes wrong, but my center "fell".  This happened with the chocolate cake too.

I figured it was ok because I'll be carving this cake out anyway.  The cakes cooled and wrapped in plastic to await its destiny in the fridge.  I also made a batch of dark chocolate fondant for the cauldron.  I used a normal half-batch recipe and added 1/3 cup of dark cocoa powder.  That also was wrapped in plastic and waited for a much different destiny.

On Friday I finished most of the cake.  Here's a picture of the chocolate buttercream sitting next to the dark chocolate fondant.  It was the Wilton buttercream recipe using butter-flavored Crisco and 3 ounces of semi-sweet baking chocolate.

I carved a depression into the top layer so the "stew" could be properly contained.  This was cut with a steak knife.

Up we go!

The steak knife was used again to carve a lip at the top of the cauldron.  The bottom was trimmed so it tapered inward.  I was disappointed that I couldn't achieve a bulge, but this ended up being ok.  Here's the buttercream crumb coat.

Now for the series of fails.  I rolled out the chocolate fondant on to some 20 gauge clear vinyl that I purchased at a fabric store.  My Wilton Cake Dividing Wheel was under it to help me measure what I had rolled.  The fondant was waaaayyy too dry.  I nuked it; still no help.  I added water; not good enough.  Finally I melted more marshmallows and that made it perfect.  Rolling it out to 18" was difficult (the cake was actually 5.5" high and 7" wide).  It kept tearing or sticking.  I kept swearing.  I draped it over the cake, but one side was too short.  I cursed and took it off to re-roll it.  It kept tearing or sticking.  I finally decided to make more fondant so I could have something thicker to work with.  After a lot of foot stamping, I got a good circle of fondant on to my cake.  More swearing to come.  There was no way I was going to get rid of the wrinkles.  This was a tall circular cake.  The fondant made huge folds on the sides.  AND it was going from wide to narrow (remember the tapered bottom).  I gave up and cried.  I asked my husband why I couldn't have failed hours ago and given up then?  He asked if there was anything he could do.  He gave me a hug and helped me make spooky things to go into the "stew".  That was fun.  It was even strangely satisfying when my husband got frustrated when trying to roll out fondant for his bat wing.

We made:

• bones
• leaf
• eyeball
• tree frog
• bat wing
• mushroom
• teeth
• claw
• tentacle
  
• paw
• and a tongue!

 

I dug out a big cardboard box and stuck the cake in it.  After using the entire can of Wilton Color Mist, the cake only looked slightly darker.  The little coloring there was appeared to be dripping down the sides.  More crying.  I concluded the cake was going to look too awful to serve to family.  We were celebrating my in-laws birthdays and this was an unacceptable birthday cake.  It was 2:30 in the morning.  I went to bed knowing I'd have to make a whole new cake when I woke up.

The next day, it wasn't bad at all.  The coloring dried up and the cauldron looked more like dark brown clay or cast iron.

The cake must go on!  The "stew" was teal colored piping gel.

Into the pot, they go!

 

 

 That's that!  When the family came over, many didn't even realize it was a cake!  My father-in-law took a bite out of the eye and then stuck it to his forehead.  He answered the door to trick-or-treaters and said "I've got my eye on you!"

Fails:

• didn't make enough fondant
• fondant wasn't moist enough
• couldn't cover cake in fondant!!! (I really should have done a practice run)
• couldn't color the cake black (see previous post on Color Mist)

FTWs:

• husband and I had lots of fun making creepy stuff out of fondant
• piping gel look really good
• people thought it was just decoration!  (that's good, right?  I'll take it as good...)

The taste of the butter cake and the buttercream didn't thrill me.  I ended up making another cake anyway.

Happy Halloween!!!