Peonies and piping

It was about two and a half months before I made another cake after the one that I dropped. I wasn't necessarily discouraged. It's more a lack of time. Less than a week after the cake disaster, we hopped on a plane to Europe and spent a fabulous two and a half weeks in Paris, Edinburgh, Aberlour, Castle Combe and London. Two and a half weeks was fabulous but it wasn't enough time to get through all of the gorgeous pastries that I wanted to try. After that, I really had to focus on my graduate studies. Before I knew it, it was already November and my mother's birthday. 

I wanted to take the opportunity to practice a couple of skills - flowers and piping. I had seen quite a few beautiful wedding cakes with lace-like piped pattern and wanted to give it a try. There were a lot of very similar cakes and I wondered if there was some sort of template out there or if people were just piping the design freehand. I perused a couple of cake decorating stores and could not seem to find any templates so I decided to just give it a shot on my own. The flower shape I used for the lace is a dogwood flower. I bought some very fine decorating tips - size 0 and 00 to do the intricate lines. When I got started I realized that those tips were just too small for me to work with on a cake. Since I moved a size up for the smaller tips, I unfortunately did not have tips large enough for the thicker lines and ended up just cutting a hole in the end of a disposable piping bag. It wasn't ideal but it worked. From far away, the piping looks neat enough. It was not as smooth as I would have liked close up. One of the tools that I find extremely helpful when piping royal icing or doing stringwork is this yellow spatula-pick thingy. It is absolutely fabulous for scraping off mistakes or broken lines. I don't actually know the real name for this tool but 'Boo-boo stick' seems appropriate given it's most useful function. 

I've only attempted one peony-like flower before. I like them because they still look very pretty if not terribly realistic or accurate. There are lots of tutorials online. There are also a few different styles of peony cutters. I used this one. I did the veining of each petal by hand using a gumpaste veining tool. It was tempting to purchase a silicone mold kit but they are quite expensive and at the rate I'm making cakes right now, I might make one peony a year. I think I liked the overall shape of this peony better than my previous attempt. I left it more open at the bottom so I didn't need any filler petals when I placed it on the cake. I still ended up having it quite condensed in the centre and would like to try again to make it even more open. 

The flavour of the cake was coconut and it was filled with pineapple swiss meringue buttercream. To make the coconut cake, I took my favourite vanilla cake recipe and switched out the milk for coconut milk. I also pulsed some unsweetened dried coconut in the food processor and added it to the dry ingredients. I added a bit of coconut extract to the simple syrup but found that it smelled really artificial so I made another batch of simple syrup and added only one drop of extract. It was a little better. 

For the pineapple buttercream, I used canned pineapple chunks along with the juices to make a pineapple reduction. I pureed the pineapple reduction and added it to the buttercream. It was a subtle flavour but nice. 

A Pretty Blue Birthday

This cake was a variation on Mich Turner's 'Art Nouveau' cake from the book The Art of The Cake. I loved the simplicity of the design and thought that it would be a lovely cake for my sister's birthday. 

Instead of the simple 2 layer flower on the cake in the book, I decided to try to make a more full and ruffled bloom. I used modelling paste to make this flower instead of gumpaste as the modelling paste takes a little longer to dry and gave me more time to manipulate the petals. I discovered in this process that I do not like my plastic ball tool. It actually has a seam in it that catches the modelling paste on occasion and tears or comes close to tearing the petals. I think that investing in a metal ball tool would be worthwhile for future flower-making attempts. The centre of the flower is filled with little balls of modelling paste lightly brushed with lustre dust. 

The swirly design is piped on with royal icing. The book offers a template however I just freehanded the design. I did use my inscriber tool to lightly mark where I wanted the swirls. You don't want to be too heavy handed with this as your royal icing 'strings' may not fall exactly where you want them to, especially when making big swooping swirls on a larger cake. Speaking of larger cakes, this cake is shown as a cute little 4-inch cake in the book. If you want to do a larger cake (this one is an 8-inch cake), be prepared to have a lot of patience piping on the little accent dots. 

My nephew thought that the design on this cake looked like an octopus. I guess at age 7, you are more likely to associated swirls with an octopus rather than art nouveau. 

The cake itself is Sweetapolita's Vanilla Bean Latte Layer Cake with a few minor variations in the buttercream. My swiss meringue buttercream recipe makes about 8 cups of buttercream so I used 2 vanilla beans in addition to a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and increased the instant espresso to 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon. I love the look of buttercream speckled with vanilla bean seeds. 

The cake flavour was nice although I felt the texture was a bit dense. It may be that it is the intended texture of the cake or perhaps I over mixed the batter, although the cake layers rose quite well in the oven.  

The flavour of the buttercream was wonderful and it gave me a great idea for another May birthday cake. Stay tuned! 

Pearly Pops

Cake pops. Popular and tasty as they are, I have never had much of an interest in making them. As much as I love chocolate, I find the process of dipping things in chocolate to be both tedious and messy. I admire those who have popularized and mastered these tasty morsels of cake mixed with icing.

I had some leftover chocolate cake scraps and vanilla frosting and rather than letting these sweet commodities go to waste, I decided to make cake pops. There is a cake from Mich Turner's The Art of Cake that I have been looking forward to trying. The cake design was inspired by a Chanel clustered pearl necklace. I thought I would try this design on a smaller scale on the cake pops.

For the inside of the cake pops, I used leftover devil's food cake and mixed it with vanilla frosting. I did not measure anything. I added cake and frosting until I achieved a texture that seemed easy to work with.
I rolled the cake mixture into loonie-sized balls. I dipped the lollipop sticks in melted white chocolate wafers before sticking them into the cake balls and put them in the freezer to set.

I melted more white chocolate wafers in the microwave and re-warmed as needed throughout the dipping process. The first few cake pops cracked as the chocolate set. After a quick search on the internet, I found out that there are a few theories as to how this can happen. One theory is that this happens due to the cake pops being too cold therefore it is advised not to dip them directly from the freezer. Another theory is that if you compress the cake pops too much when rolling that they may expand once they've been warmed and dipped in chocolate causing the coating to crack. I took them out of the freezer and as they warmed to room temperature, they did not have cracks as the chocolate coating dried. The only problem was that by the time I got to the last two cake pops, they were too warm to stay securely on the lollipop stick. I suppose the best compromise would have been to keep them in the fridge. I found the chocolate a bit thick to work with, so thinned it with a few drops of grape seed oil. The chocolate cake was unfortunately too dark for a white chocolate coating which led to a grey-ish hue.

To decorate the cake pops, I made a small batch of royal icing and tinted 1/3 of the icing gold, 1/3 ivory and left 1/3 white. I piped the balls using a no. 1, 2, 3 and 4 tips. Unfortunately I had only one no. 1 tip as I think the pearls were better with smaller tips and left less of a peak. You could brush the peaks down with a damp brush but the process was already quite long and it was really just a practice run for a full-sized cake. After I finished covering the cake pops, I used gold lustre dust and a white-ish lustre dust mixed with a little vodka to paint the gold and ivory pearls. The effect was not quite what I had hoped to achieve but I think it will be easier on a larger surface to get a higher proportion of smaller-sized pearls and it will look much better on a white background then then a grey-looking background.

The most important thing was that they were delicious! I do not think that these will become a staple of my cake decorating ventures but was happy to have tried them.

Citrus-y Carrot Cake

I have quite a few goodies from Christmas for cake baking, inspiration and design. This week I used Mich Turner's The Art of the Cake and my new flower cutters to make this 6-inch carrot cake.

I made the flowers using modelling paste made with fondant and tylose powder.

The design is piped on with royal icing and is the lace design from the book. I think that I made my royal icing too stiff as the design in the book looks softer and shinier. I also used a quick royal icing using water, meringue powder and icing sugar with a small whisk rather than using egg whites which may have also affected the consistency of the icing for pressure piping. I think that the overall effect is still lovely though.

The recipe for this very moist carrot cake with a hint of citrus is also from Mich Turner's book with one minor alteration in that I used toasted pecans instead of walnuts purely due to my taste preference. I am also not a fan of raisins but they are rum-soaked, so I thought I would give them a fair shot. The cake has the added moistness of a citrus-based syrup that is meant to be poured over the cake as soon as it is removed with the oven. I used the syrup as you would use a simple syrup and brushed it over my cooled cakes after levelling. The cake is iced with cream cheese frosting that I also spiked with a hint of orange extract.

Overall this was a great project to work on my flowers and my piping skills. This is also the first time I've ever made carrot cake. I will definitely be adding this cake flavour to my repertoire although I may omit the raisins - they remind me too much of fruit cake.