Christmas 3D Cuddly Bear

This is my first attempt at a 3-Dimensional cake.  The baking pan is the Wilton Stand-Up Cuddly Bear Pan Set.  You need to use a firm cake recipe and follow the cooling instructions included in the pan set to ensure that the cake or the form of the cake holds.  I used a Wedding Cake recipe for this cake.

It’s a bit early for a Christmas themed cake but my friend was hosting a Ginger Bread House Making party before all our other friends left for the various holidays so this cake fitted the occasion.

Fairy (Tinkerbell) Cake and Cupcakes

I made this cake and cupcake set for the first birthday of my friend’s daughter.  She is a lovely little girl!

The cake is frosted with buttercream icing sprayed with blue and violet food color to get an uneven effect.  The flowers are made with royal icing which you should do in advance to ensure that they are dry by the time you use them.  The leaves are made with buttercream icing.  The Tinkerbell topper is something you can get from Wilton easily.  The stars on the wires are also made from royal icing.

I am still on my quest for the ultimate vanilla cupcake recipe so for the cupcakes I decided to try Billy’s Vanilla Vanilla Cupcake recipe. Billy’s Vanilla Vanilla Cupcake recipe is a recipe from Billy Reece, owner of Billy’s Bakery in New York City. Billy was invited to appear in Martha Stewart’s show following great reviews for his cupcakes by Martha’s staff who were tasked to taste test cupcakes around the city. The video of the episode is available in Martha’s website. In the Martha Stewart Newsletter article “New York’s Best Cupcakes”, the top 4 cupcakes are from (1) Billy’s Bakery (2) Magnolia Bakery (3) BabyCakes (4) Cupcake Cafe.

Layered Chocolate Almond Cake with Fondant Letters

Chocolate?  Good!!  Almonds?  Good!!  So why not put them together in a single cake?

This is my “go to” cake (although not in multiple layers).  When I don’t have much time to put together a cake, I usually end up doing this one.  I started covering the cake with almonds during my early attempts at baking and decorating.  I was not happy with the way I frosted my chocolate cake and in desperation, tried to find whatever I could in the pantry for something to hide my mediocre frosting skills.  I found some almonds in the pantry… and, voila!  My go-to cake was born.

As it so happens, this  is the favorite cake of one of the most charming ladies I have the pleasure of working with and her name is — you guessed it right, Suha!  We were planning a surprise party for her in the office and with the number of invitees coming, I realised that one layer was not enough.  I could have gone with making several single layer cakes but I also wanted to do fondant letters which would look good on a tall cake (either a single layer 4-inch high cake or a tiered cake).  I decided to go with a tiered cake.

The cake is your normal chocolate cake, covered in Nigella Lawson’s chocolate frosting and decorated with sliced almonds.  I added buttercream bead borders in ivory around the edges for a finished look.

The letters are made of fondant (with Gum-Tex) with a sprinkling of pearlised sugars attached by brushing the face of the letters with piping gel.

Baby Shower Teddy Bear

It is not my intention to own all kinds of novelty pans.  I don’t see the sense in having a single purpose pan so I generally use the traditional pans.  In the past, I only had one novelty pan which I use often enough not just for cakes but also for gelatin.

I was asked to make a cake for my officemate’s baby shower and I wanted to do a baby or a bear cake.  I initially thought of shaping a baby or a bear myself (that sounded weird) from a rectangular pan but was not really in the mood for that.

I ended up getting a Wilton Teddy Bear pan which I can use as a bear, a baby (be sure to remove the ears though!), Count Dracula or a mummy for Halloween, Santa for Christmas and other humanoid types of beings.  I ended up doing this — a teddy bear in a diaper on a blanket made of fondant.  For the ruffles around the blanket, I added a bit of Gum-Tex to the fondant.

Just a note — When cutting the cake, best to start serving from the lower portion of the cake to the upper portion.  It just gets morbid cutting the cake from the top and having a headless bear midway.  Alternatively, you can cut from one side to the other.

My officemate is vegan so I had to look for an egg-free or egg-less recipe and found an “Egg-Free Dairy-Free and Nut-Free” recipe from the web. I did a taste test a few days before the baby shower to get feedback on the cupcake and all 8 of my “taste testers” liked it. It was very moist and they could not even tell that it had no egg.

Quick Bits:  Fondant with Gum-Tex

Gum-Tex makes the fondant stretchable and pliable and makes it harden faster/quicker.

Quick Bits:  Baby Showers

I can’t seem to find a definitive origin of baby showers.  Early history and various civilizations seem to have records of celebration of birth with family and friends showering the baby with gifts which are mostly hand made.  What seemed consistent though is that before World War II, baby showers were mainly attended by women and held after the baby is born.  After the war, it became more of a unisex event and held on average a month before birth.  Gifts could be for the expectant mom but usually for the baby which can be in the form of clothing and accessories, gold ornaments or silver utensils.  Baby showers differ from country to country and between social strata.  The bottom line is that baby showers are a celebration of life and an event where the joy and happiness of expectancy is celebrated.

Strawberry Pavlova

I was at a party three years ago (I didn’t bake then) and tasted this wonderful strawberry pavlova that an Australian couple brought.  At that time, never in my mind did I imagine that I could end up making the dessert myself.  Never say never!

The pavlova I made is quite different from the traditional pavlova in the sense that (1) it is layered and bigger than usual (2) I used baking pans to make the meringue (3) I also used brown sugar in making the meringue.  Nowadays you can buy the meringue for the pavlova in the supermarket so I though I’d create something different than what is normally store bought.  I found the recipe in the internet and just went ahead and tried it.

Quick Bits:  The Pavlova

The pavlova is a meringue based dessert named in honor of the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova.  Depending on who you ask, it is supposed to have originated from either Australia or New Zealand when the ballerina visited those countries in the 1920s.

Tiered Wedding Cake with Two-Toned Fondant Roses

Twenty-eight hours of my life! It took me that long to make this cake and that is why wedding cakes are expensive!  I am not kidding!  For those of you who know me as being someone who cannot stand to do the same thing over and over again, I actually managed to control myself and do roses over and over again.  Of course,  it also helped that I had to finish the cake to ensure I get the Wilton Course 3 Certificate, otherwise, my four Saturday afternoons would have been for nought.

The Wilton Course 3 covers Fondant and Tiered Cakes.  You learn how to layer cakes and do more complicated accents and borders and flowers.  For our final cake, we were asked to do tiered cakes and it was left to us to choose our own design, for as long as we have fondant roses in our final cake.  Why do we have to have roses?  It’s because making the fondant rose is sort of your gateway to sugar crafting.  I did not want to do the usual cascade of flowers design and thought that this cake would suit me.  For roses, I prefer blue or yellow.  I thought yellow would be good for a cake and I’ve always been attracted to two toned roses.

Our course instructor kept warning us to manage our time and to plan ahead especially since each rose took 15 minutes.  Well, she was not kidding.  For a newbie like me, the first few roses took 20 minutes and I managed to bring it down to around 12-15 mins for a rose that has fully bloomed.  It was natural progression I think considering I eventually made 60 roses.  Some of it were rosebuds so that took less time.

I also decided that I would use real cakes to cover and decorate rather than use dummy (styrofoam) cakes as I wanted to experience the actual and real problems when I layered the cakes.  Better face the problems now that I can still ask the instructor rather than experience it later on when I have no one to ask.  To achieve the standard American height of not less than 3 inches per layer, I had to make 4 cakes (two for each layer).

We had to do the assembly and the finishing touches in class.  One of the things advised in the class was to assemble your cakes in the venue as an assembled cake is difficult to transport.  Humps on the road are just tiered cake destroyers.  I was thus faced with the problem of transporting my cake home after assembling it in class.  My teacher’s advise — put the cake in front of the front passenger seat, drive at 20 kilometers per hour with your emergency lights on and drive with extreme caution especially when going over humps.  I did try to follow that at first but it will just take me ages to get home so of course, I did not follow my teacher’s advise.  The result… my tiered cake became a tired cake when I got home.

It didn’t really matter in the end as I had already planned to slice up the cake before giving it away and that was just what I did.  Someone suggested to me beforehand to try posting the cake on Souq.com (local equivalent of eBay) just to see if some desperate bride would try to purchase it online but with being occupied in making and putting together the cake for 28 hours, I didn’t really have the time for that.

Quick Bits:  Fondant Icing

Fondant is a smooth, malleable and dough-like icing made of gelatin, sugar (s) and water (among other things).  You can roll it to a uniform thickness to cover cakes (as in the cake above) or use it to make flowers (the roses above) and other cake decorations.  I have never tried making it myself as ready-made fondant is usually available and I hear that it is quite messy to make.  If you are interested in making it yourself, a number of recipes can be found in the web or in cake decorating books, one of which is the Wilton fondant recipe.

Talking about fondant, I was watching an old episode (Season 1) of the TV series “Burn Notice” (Burn Notice is about a spy who got a, guess what? — Burn Notice) last night and in that episode the spy actually highlighted another use for fondant which had nothing to do with cake decorating.  I don’t want to elaborate though.  Hint:  Something to do with something that goes kaboom.

Filling Cupcakes and Decorating with Ganache

Old recipe, new look!  I have a layered cake recipe with creme filling and ganache frosting that takes 6-8 hours to make (including chilling time for the filling and chilling time for 2 coats of the ganache).  I always get asked to do this cake that I thought I could try to make it into a cupcake and break the monotony.  I also thought it would reduce all the chilling time.

I remembered that I had the Wilton Tip 230 for injecting/inserting the filling.  The Wilton Tip 230 is part of the Cupcake Decorating Set of Wilton.  That was what I used to insert the filling.  It was the first time I used this tip so had to do a bit of trial and error in the first two cupcakes to ensure that I managed to inject the right amount of filling to maintain the balance between the chocolate cake, the creme filling and the ganache.

Chocolate Revel Bar

I tried this out at my husband’s request.  My husband is not a sweets person, not a dessert person and not a chocolate person , which is a shame as I am starting to do quite a bit of baking.  I find it a bit of a challenge then to find something to bake that he would love as well.

I was in the office a few weeks ago and I got this email from him containing a link to a revel bar recipe with a note asking me to bake this for him.  Apparently, he has fond memories of the Chocolate Revel Bar.  He had tried it when he was in his teens and used to order these bars from his schoolmate in college.  Unfortunately, she migrated to the US and that was the end of his Revel Bar days.  Years later, he found out that these bars were the specialty of one of the northern regions in our country and he used to get some everytime he travelled to that region for work reasons.  Of course the bars were not fudgy anymore and were actually quite dry as he could not buy them fresh.  Come to think of it, I remembered that he brought me a canister full of these bars years ago when we were still dating.

I would say that the chocolate revel bar can actually be called a chocolate oatmeal bar.  It is fudgy and very rich.  You would like to think of it as healthy (oatmeal?  dark chocolate?), but then again, maybe not.  I brought some to work and got a lot of requests that I made a 2nd batch last weekend.  I had to cut it into smaller pieces though (half of the original size) which suits me better.  I got a special request from my officemate today — if I could make a batch for her for her upcoming birthday.  If it is really her birthday, why not?  …Apologies for the skepticism, it’s not the first time someone told me it was her birthday to get a cake out of me.

Going back to my husband, I was dreading (a bit) his comparison of my revel bar against his memory as a lot of times memories can be unbeatable (i.e. watching a 90’s movie and realizing that in your memory the movie was so much better than it actually is).  And he did challenge me to make my revel bar better than his memory of it.  I was so relieved that he thought it was!!  I can now add this to the short list of baked goodies my husband likes which are Dutch Apple Pie, NY or Blueberry Cheesecake, Sans Rival and Mascarpone Filled Buttermilk Cake.

Oreo Cupcakes

So how did I end up making Oreo Cupcakes?

My friend and officemate discovered the Lindt Lindor Limited Edition White Chocolate which is only available a few months every year during spring time.  She went crazy over this chocolate that she emailed Lindt to get more information about it  and they actually sent her a few boxes when it became available this year.  When it no longer becomes available in Dubai, we try to get it for her when we travel to other countries in the Middle East and Europe.

So one day, we were talking about cupcakes and I mentioned coming across an Oreo Cupcake recipe but I was not too sure if I would make it or not.  She came up with this idea that the Oreo Cupcake might be the nearest thing to the Lindt White Chocolate she loves so much.  I was looking for a new project and was also curious if it would taste similar to the chocolate so I ended up making the cupcake.

Overall, the cupcake turned out well although I’m not done with this recipe yet.  I will probably try to do a bit more experimentation the next time I make it and I plan to try using a cookies and cream frosting instead of vanilla buttercream.

Did it taste like the Lindt Lindor Limited Edition White Chocolate?  Not really.  I got another suggestion to use Maltesers instead but I am drawing the line here.  I think this is a new excuse to encourage me to make more cupcakes to bring to the office!

Quick Bits:  Oreo Cookie

The Oreo Cookie was developed and produced by Nabisco (USA) in 1912.  The original version consists of two chocolate disks with a creme filling in between.  Today, the Oreo Cookie has different versions (i.e. Double Stuf, Reduced Fat, Peanut Butter Creme, Mini Bite Size, Halloween Orange Creme, Milk Chocolate Covered, etc) and is said to be the biggest selling cookie in the US. You may go to the Nabisco website for nutritional information on the Oreo Cookie.

Baby in a Pram

This Baby in a Pram cake was made for my god child’s first birthday.  My god child is adorable!!

I used 3 types of icing (1) Color flow for the baby’s head and features (2)  Royal Icing for the daisies (3)  Buttercream for the basket weave, the leaves, the rope and shell borders and to cover the cake (yellow).  The cake itself is a moist chocolate cake.

I had just completed Level 2 of the Wilton course and thus learned how to handle color flow and royal icing.  I found this design in the course book and decided to test how much I’ve learned in that level.

It didn’t really take much time but planning is the key.  I was tempted to apply the  Critical Path Method (CPM).  Color flow takes around 2 days to dry and harden so I had to do that 3 nights before (after drying the face, I had to apply the features and dry that as well).  The royal icing flowers also had to dry so I did all the flowers 2 nights before.  They ended up dry and sturdy on the day of assembly.

Assembling everything was exciting and felt like putting together a puzzle (but one where you knew where each piece fit).  Completing the cake was rewarding and so was the look on the kids faces when the box was opened.  There was hesitation when the cake was about to be cut but, a cake is meant to be cut.  It would not have fulfilled its purpose if it were not…

Quick Bits:  Color flow, Royal and Buttercream Icing

I made the color flow icing from the Wilton color flow mix and used the Wilton recipe. The Color Flow Mix is mainly made of dried egg whites and a whipping agent and Color flow icing is used to make detailed decorations or drawings.  This icing crusts very quickly but it takes a few days to dry so factor this in when planning your decoration.

Royal icing is made from meringue powder (used to replace fresh egg whites), confectioners’ sugar and water.  A number of people use fresh egg whites but I have never tried doing that.  I have used the Wilton recipe for this as well. This icing also crusts quickly and can take several hours to dry.  It dries to a smooth, matte finish.

Most people are familiar with buttercream, of course, which is mainly made from butter/shortening/margarine, confectioner’s sugar and water/milk. I had a blog a few days ago on the Magnolia Bakery Vanilla Buttercream Icing recipe which I have used a number of times, but for this cake, I also used the Wilton buttercream recipe. By doing that I knew I would get the consistency i was aiming for for this decoration.