An elephant-themed first birthday cake

It has been almost 3 months since my last post. I have done some baking within that time but I haven't had the time to sort through photos and write about them. I am hoping to complete my MSc within the next year so I've been really scaling down on the baking projects. I do certainly miss it as a creative outlet but I'll get back to it soon enough. In the meantime, I will be posting a few projects that I had done in the summer. 

This was an elephant-themed birthday cake for the first birthday of a friend's son that I made back in July. I apologize for the grainy photo quality. I didn't check the settings on the camera before I started taking photos so I didn't notice that the ISO had been set really high. 

My friend really liked the elephant cake that I did for a baby shower back in March. The birthday boy's favourite colour is yellow and we thought that brown would be a nice contrast colour. I wanted to make the cake a little different from the other elephant and decided to do a 3-dimensional elephant instead. 

I've made 3-D animals in the past and they usually consist of a separate body, limbs and head. For this cake I wanted to keep the "Republican" elephant shape, meaning that it had to be formed with one piece of fondant. It was harder than I thought to manipulate the one piece of fondant into the desired shape, particularly with the trunk. The fondant that I use dries rather quickly and it was mixed with tylose for stability, so I really had to work fast. It took a couple of tries before I was satisfied with the shape. In retrospect, I wonder if it would have been easier to use modelling chocolate as it is easier to manipulate without seams and wrinkles. 

The balloon was made from gumpaste for fast drying and attached to floral wire. I had to make the balloon fairly thin as the floral wire was a higher gauge (thinner) and I wanted it to be able to support the balloon without putting any weight on the elephant's trunk. In the future I will keep some heavier gauge floral wire on hand. 

I wrote the birthday boy's name out on little modelling paste circus flags and used an extruder for the fondant 'string' and bows. 

The flavour was a rich chocolate cake with raspberry swiss meringue buttercream. For the buttercream I used thawed frozen raspberries, pureed them and then strained them for a fine mesh sieve to get rid of all of the seeds. It was a subtle raspberry flavour. If you want a more concentrated flavour you could probably reduce the puree on the stove and allow to cool before adding it to the buttercream. 

It's close to midnight...and it's my last cake of the year

For months I had my sister try to convince my nephew that he wanted a Despicable Me themed cake for his 3rd birthday party as I just had a hankering to make some cute yellow minions. This worked for short while but soon he changed his mind and requested a Harry Potter werewolf cake. Not really wanting to try to come up with a design that might fit that request, I continued to have my sister show him cute videos of minions. Enter my older nephew. He was watching a video for Michael Jackson's Thriller and the younger one became fascinated with it. Not only did he want a werewolf cake, but it had to specifically be a Michael Jackson werewolf. For weeks leading up to the party, I hoped that he would change his mind. Once the invitations went out, I started the planning process on how I would make a Michael Jackson Thriller werewolf cake.

We celebrated my brother's birthday a few weeks ago. My sister-in-law brought out this delicious chocolate cake and my nephew exclaims, "werewolf cake!" I looked at the chocolate frosted cake and thought to myself, 'wow, if he thinks a frosting-covered chocolate cake is a werewolf, this is going to be an easy cake'. And the he added, "but I want a face on it."

For the past few weeks I have been thinking about how to make a werewolf. I definitely wanted it to be cute/cartoon-like since it was for a 3-year-old child. I thought about making the whole cake a standing werewolf but then I thought about how I didn't think my nerves could handle the drive with a cake that required significant structural support. It also would have meant the possibility of not having enough cake servings unless I wanted to make a 3-foot-tall cake.

I decided to make the werewolf jumping out of the cake. The body was made from rice cereal treats. I have recently found it easier to work with pre-made rice cereal treats vs homemade. It is much easier to get a more condense and solid shape and I don't have individual pieces of rice cereal and gooey strings of marshmallow sticking all over my hands. The head was also make from rice cereal treats. I have to admit, looking at the cereal form, I really didn't know how it was going to end up looking like a wolf. I used modelling chocolate on the head to form facial details like eyebrows and to fill out the cheeks and the mane. At this point it looked like some form of voodoo mask. I covered the head in fondant and used a modelling stick and additional fondant to make the fur. I added variations in fur colour with white, brown and black petal dust. The position of the arms ended up being a bit funny. Instead of an 'I'm going to get you' position, he looks more like he's saying 'I don't want any trouble!'

The hands, nails and teeth were made with gumpaste. I used a stitching tool to give a ribbed looked to the collar of the varsity jacket.

I also dusted the cake with petal dust to make it look like dirt and more graveyard like. I painted his name on the cake using red gel paste mixed with vodka.

I enjoyed his reaction to the cake. He hung on to his dad and said, "It's scary...."
After singing 'happy birthday' I played the Thriller song and video on my phone for him. He is so entranced by that video. I don't remember how old I was when I first watched that video but I would think that 3-year-old would be scared, especially when the zombies are rising from the graves. He can't take his eyes off the video. It's like he sees it as an instructional dance video. He does the zombie walk and he sings along and mimics all of the dance steps. He even does an excellent MJ spin!

It was certainly a fun cake to wrap up a busy year of work, school, moving and baking. I have to say, I am pretty tired though and I am happy to put the cake decorating supplies away for a couple of weeks. I think I'll start off the year with a few simpler projects. I look forward to the baking challenges of next year. I'm sure my nephews will dream up some impossible cakes for me to make.
Happy New Year everyone!

Humble Beginnings - January 2010

So while most bakers are ramping up their baking for the holidays, I've decided to take a little bit a of baking break. It might have something to do with the string of cakes I've done lately while working full time and doing my masters. Whew! I have to admit, I did a little baking today...just a touch. I made a quick batch of chocolate peppermint macarons - so quick that I barely waited for them to cool prior to filling them with peppermint buttercream.

While I'm on a bit of a break, I thought it might be a good time to reminisce about the early days!

I took my first intro to cake decorating course in November 2009. In this course I learned royal icing and buttercream basics - stars, rosettes, shells, rose buds, daisies, roses, leaves, etc., and how to level, fill, mask and ice a cake in buttercream.

The end result was a good foundation of piping basics, however I really wanted to get into decorating cakes with fondant.

My first fondant-covered cake was done in January 2010 for my nephew's 1 month old celebration. I did some 'research' using Google and found some videos on YouTube in order to learn how to cover a cake in fondant and also how to do some basic animal figure modelling.

My nephew was born in the year of the Ox, so my first fondant figure was a very chubby ox.

I attempted to make modelling paste by adding tylose powder to fondant (which is still how I do it now), but at that time, I did not know about letting the fondant set for a few hours to a day prior to modelling with it, so the fondant was still quite soft. The result was a Chinese ox that became obese by the next morning. I also had not known about letting the body set before putting a large head on the body, hence the head had sunk back a bit so that he was looking up a little. I attempted to fix this by sticking a piece of fondant at the back of his neck to hold his head up properly - enter neck fat on my already obese ox. 

I was really anxious about covering my first cake in fondant as I had read about all of these terrible things that could happen, such as lumps, air bubbles, tearing, cracks, etc.

It was simpler than I thought! Beginner's luck I guess. The cake was a butter cake filled and masked in vanilla frosting. I covered the little 5-inch cake with fondant first. It was perfectly smooth - I was so happy! The perfection did not last long. I moved my cake over to roll out the fondant to cover the 8-inch cake. While rolling out the fondant, I put the end of the rolling pin into the 5-inch cake. I smoothed it the best that I could. I've said it before -  there is always a back of the cake. Lesson learned: move your covered cakes away from your workspace for safety! 

So, this cake was my first fondant-covered cake. Although I received a good foundation in my intro to cake decorating course, I think that it's important to know that you can learn so much with reading various free resources on the internet. It is helpful to look at several different resources on the same topic (there are many different opinions out there!) and then decide what makes sense for you. This cake was an encouraging start and the beginning of a wonderful new hobby. 

We three penguins...

are wishing a 2-year old girl a very happy birthday!

This cake began with a request for a snowflake-themed birthday cake. I had a few thoughts about little winter characters that could make it cute but consistent with a winter theme. I thought about little snowmen (snowpeople?), a little girl in winter garb, and then while shopping for cake supplies (which lately, seems to be a weekly adventure), I came across an older winter issue of Cake Craft and Decoration hiding underneath new issues with an adorable penguin on the front cover. I just had to make penguins!

I feel like each penguin has its own distinct personality...

As a trio, they look as if they are singing 'Happy Birthday' or carolling!

The cake itself was vanilla, filled with chocolate swiss meringue buttercream, and masked in vanilla. This week I rolled my fondant just under 1/4" thick as planned. I probably wasted a bit more fondant than I needed too but was happy with the smooth results - at some point I will figure out what fondant amounts work best for me - for now I prefer to overestimate the amount of fondant I need to cover a cake. Since I wrote on the challenge of air bubbles last week, I thought I should mention that I did get an evil air bubble on this cake. Just so you know, the simple pin pricking and smoothing out with your hand/fondant smoother works like a charm when you've masked your cake in buttercream rather than frosting. Not to worry for frosting-lovers, I have a plan for adhering fondant to frosting with better results.

And to end this post, a little penguin carolling in front of the fireplace with stockings...

I'm going to be taking a little decorating break for the holidays to spend some time with the family - a perfect time to write about some of my older cake adventures...