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. 

Caaaaaaake

Zombies have taken over birthday season. 

I am always looking around for inspiration for cake designs - books, stationary, tableware, textiles, you name it. For my birthday, I had initially intended to make a feminine, elegant and pretty cake. My husband and I have birthdays that are 1 week apart, so we decided to have one joined get together. Since we were doing a joint party, I decided that the cake should reflect the two of us. Enter...zombies? We have a bit of a thing for graphic tees. One of my favourite designs that my husband has is called 'Acquired Taste' by Patrick Spens.  I recently saw my husband wearing that shirt and thought to myself, 'that would make a really cute cake'. It features a group of zombies longing for a brain meal, while one loner zombie is left behind just wishing he could have a sandwich.

I enjoyed making these zombies, especially because the less 'perfect', the better and more zombie-like they looked. The characters and clothing are made with modelling paste. The 'dirt' is black petal dust mixed with a little confectioner's sugar and the little hair spikes are made from gumpaste.

In order to support the characters in standing and walking positions on the cake, I allowed them to dry with a long piece of spaghetti inserted into one or both legs and then inserted this into the cake. I typically try not to use anything inedible in my cakes, but if I had been transporting this cake, I probably would have used wooden skewers instead. 

Rather than making one lonesome zombie wishing for a sandwich, I made zombie versions of my husband and I, sharing our birthday cake. I initially designed them to be holding hands, however I did not have a large enough cake board on hand, so their wasn't enough room to have them holding hands with the cake in front. I used grosgrain ribbon for the cake board instead of satin as I didn't think a shiny satin would really go with a zombie cake.

The brain is made from Rice Krispies and covered in modelling paste. For the cake, I made a mocha cake with dulce de leche swiss meringue buttercream which was the flavour of our wedding cake. The cake recipe was from Martha Stewart Weddings. I halved the recipe and this was enough for an 3-layer 8-inch cake, and a 2-layer 5 inch cake (I made a shorter top tier so that the brain was within reach of the zombies). I had a little leftover batter and this was enough for 12 mini cupcakes. For the buttercream, I used about 1/2 cup of dulce de leche and beat this into about 8 cups of vanilla swiss meringue buttercream. The cake is covered in chocolate fondant. 

We had a lovely birthday get-together with our families. They seemed to enjoy the cake theme as did my oldest nephew - he took the brain home (I know which side he's on....).

Care Bears countdown to a 3rd birthday

Birthday season continues with a Care Bear themed cake for my nephew's 3rd birthday.

My sister-in-law did not really have a theme for my nephew's party but thought that she would somehow work in the Care Bears since he loves them. She gave me a list of care bears that he would recognize. I chose to make Tenderheart Bear for the top of the cake.

I decided to fashion his arms in a cheery 'Happy Birthday!' type pose, however, with the direction of the eyebrows my husband felt that it looked more like he was being held up. He suggested that I make some bandit bears to accessorize the cake. Unfortunately for my husband, I didn't think the bandits would fit the birthday theme and I also didn't have time to make any extra bears.

What are the Care Bears without the abundance of clouds and stars and rainbows a-la-Care-a-lot? I framed Tenderheart Bear with rainbow-coloured stars dotted with a couple of hearts. I surrounded the border of the cake with various sizes of clouds made from fondant. It took quite a bit of fondant to make the clouds and it made the cake quite a bit heavier than a typical 9-inch cake.

The most fun part of the cake was the inside. It was difficult to get a good picture of it at the party and it's much neater for pictures if you cut a cold cake (not so good for eating though), but you can get the idea.

It was 6 thin layers of vanilla cake filled with lemon swiss-meringue buttercream. I got the idea from Sweetapolita's Rainbow Doodle Birthday Cake and thought that it would be perfect for a Care Bear Cake. I used the cake recipe from the website but made my swiss meringue buttercream using fresh lemon juice and a few drops of lemon oil versus lemon extract. The layers of buttercream are almost thicker than the cake layers! The kids (and adults) loved the bright colours of the cake. 

While making this cake, my husband put on a Care Bears movie for me to watch on my iPad. It brought back many happy childhood memories. This is such a wonderfully cheerful cake for a 3rd birthday and I hope that my nephew enjoyed it!

Party Girl Birthday Cake

This is the fourth post in one week aka let's see if I can use absolutely every cake decorating tool I have in the span of a week. It is officially birthday cake season. It appears that 70% of my family has a birthday that occurs between March and May (mostly May). Among those cakes are a few non-family-related cakes here and there. This was one of them. This party girl cake was for a 40th birthday party. The request was for a cake topped with an inebriated party girl surrounded by champagne bottles.

There are so many options out there for party dresses. For inspiration I browsed the Nordstrom website and picked a design that I felt I could successfully make. I decided to make a ruffly party dress with a ruched waistband. As I was making an orange bow for the border of the cake (the birthday girl's favourite colour), I made the dress in a fuchsia pink as I thought the colours would go nicely together. 

All of the decorations are made of modelling paste with details painted on using petal dust mixed with vodka. The spilled champagne is piping gel tinted with a tiny bit of yellow gel paste.

The cake is a 10" devil's food cake filled with chocolate swiss meringue buttercream. I crumb coated and masked the cake in vanilla buttercream since I was covering the cake in white fondant (I do roll my fondant fairly thick but didn't want to take any chances).
The orange bow is made with gum paste and the message is piped on the cake board using royal icing.

Stay tuned for many more birthday cakes in the next month!

Spring and Easter Cupcakes - Take Two

Last week I wrote a post about Spring and Easter themed cupcakes and cookies that I had made for a bake sale at work. I got to do a bit of a reprise this weekend as I was asked to make some Easter themed red velvet cupcakes for an Orthodox Easter gathering. 

As this was for a family gathering, I wanted to make sure that I had some very kid-oriented designs as well as some more elegant designs for the adults. I did a couple of repeat characters from last week (I loved the little bees and ladybugs) with a little bit of a design change and decided to try out some different flowers and animals. As cream cheese frosting is a bit too soft to pipe flowers with, I made all of the decorations from modelling paste. 

This little bumblebee made the cut from last time. I decided to make them a little bigger so that the smiley face was more noticeable. I used small blossom cutters for the flowers and piped the centres with royal icing. 

I also made the ladybug bigger and indented the back more noticeably to give the illusion of the wings. Rather than piping grass I decided to make it clean and simple and piped a little leaf using royal icing. 

And what is Easter without bunnies? These little guys were very simple to make. I forgot to take a picture of the back, but I made a little fuzzy tail by attaching a ball of modelling paste and then snipping it with a pair of scissors to make it look fur-like.

As with bunnies, eggs and chicks are also often associated with Easter. I found these adorable and easy to make chicks on a blog called Learn2Cook where you can find other really cute and simple Easter-themed fondant figures.

I only made two of these little lambs which appear in the book Cake Art. I find that I have a lot of patience when it comes to figure modelling and attention to detail. I have to admit, I was going a little crazy by the second one while covering the whole body in little modelling paste balls. Maybe I was just tired. I had to wonder whether they actually took the time to cover the back of the lamb for the photo in the book. Just for the record, I did.

I did two types of the flowers. The first flower is a pink poppy-like flower. The second is a buttercup type flower.

And finally, one last group shot. Happy Easter to all of those celebrating this weekend!

A Toopy and Binoo birthday!

When I was asked to make a Toopy and Binoo cake, I must admit that I had to Google the characters to find out what they were. When I discovered how cute they were, I eagerly accepted the challenge. 

This birthday cake was for a 3 year old boy. I was given a few pictures as ideas but I was also told to put my own spin on it for an original creation. I wanted the cake to be fun and colourful like the show. I did some research by watching clips on YouTube. I saw a jungle theme, clouds, bubbles, island themes, you name it, but I could not find anything that would inspire a birthday cake. I then came across a DVD cover for an episode called Binoo's birthday. Perfect! It was colourful, there were streamers and bubbles and stars.

The characters are made from modelling paste made with fondant and tylose. Details are painted on with petal dust (powder food colouring) either dry or mixed with a little vodka. I also use edible marker for some of the details.

I was asked to make a cake with Toopy and Binoo on it but as I was making it, I felt that it wouldn't be complete without also including Patchy Patch (Binoo's plush doll companion).

I made the streamers using gumpaste. The number '3' is made from modelling paste. I find that it is easier to work with to create a nice number (the gumpaste dries too fast). You just have to ensure that you leave  enough time for the number to set.

Both the twisted rope border and bubble border are made with modelling paste. For the bubbles, I tinted the paste with a hint of blue colouring and also finished them with lustre dust for a bit of sheen.

The cake is chocolate filled with chocolate swiss meringue buttercream and crumb coated and masked in vanilla. This cake took quite a few hours to make and along the way I did have my doubts as to whether the colours would go well together, especially after I had covered the cakes in their respective colours and they were sitting side by side without any decoration. It all came together in the end and I was really happy with the finished product. It was bright, colourful and fun just as I had hoped it would be. 

Humble Beginnings - April and May 2010

Although I technically did not take a baking break this weekend (I made plain, lemon and chocolate meringues and Chinese egg tarts), I decided to continue my "Humble Beginnings" series of posts about some of my earlier projects.

My second decorated cake was for my nephew's 1st birthday in April 2010. Although I like the cleaner look of fondant on a cake, it was requested that the cake be covered in frosting and to have chocolate frosting in order to maximize the opportunity for chocolate-covered-face photos.

I had a really difficult time getting the frosting smooth on this cake despite numerous attempts at using a spatula with hot water. I have since learned to make my frosting a bit thinner when covering a cake and to use a pastry scraper to get my sides straight. Also making a higher edge on the sides of the cake allows you to sort of tuck the edges neatly onto the top of the cake making a straighter edge. Swiss meringue buttercream is also much easier to work with but it's not as tasty for a kid's cake.

This was my second attempt at figure modelling and I think it was a bit more successful as the characters did not end up looking obese. My favourite character is the zebra. The colours and theme of the cake were chosen to coordinate with the birthday party invitations.

In May 2010, my other nephew had his 5th birthday. The birthday cake was Super Mario.

I teamed up with my sister to make all of the figures for this cake. We made a plan by taping rough paper cutouts of all the characters, bushes, stars, clouds, doors and boxes to the cake tins and took photographs for reference. My sister, having never worked with fondant before, did an amazing job making Yoshi and the Koopa Paratroopa.

My favourite character was Lakitu. Apparently my photography skills were also not as good back in the day - I think the plate is in focus rather than Lakitu.

I also thought the Goombas were pretty cute. I remember working on Mario and thinking that it wasn't going to look anything like the character but it somehow all came together, especially once I got that moustache on. I opted to skip Luigi for two reasons 1) I thought that it would be enough trying to get one of the Mario Bros. looking correct and 2) I thought it would look weird with a big Mario on the top and a smaller Luigi on the side.

I was very proud of this cake. It was the first cake that I did where the figures actually had to resemble existing characters rather than random animals which could be more forgiving.

The cake itself was vanilla with vanilla frosting.

My nephew's reaction? "Where's Luigi?". Oops...

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...