That time I made an edible colon...

Over the years, word has gotten around that I make cakes as a hobby and sometimes I get requests to make cakes for friends or acquaintances. If things align with my schedule and it's something that I think is feasible in terms of my skill set, I will try to do it. This cake request came at a really busy time in my life and at a time when I wasn't sure how I'd be feeling health wise (more on that in a future blog post) but I could not pass up the opportunity to make such a fun cake combining two things I love: healthcare and baking. Notice how I didn't say 'colonoscopies' and baking...because that would just be weird...who would want to combine a colonoscopy and a cake?? Ahem. 

This blog has primarily been about sharing my experiences making cakes. I think I have posted one recipe and I have not done any tutorials. The lack of tutorials is because I am not an expert at cake decorating and also because I am usually pressed for time and cannot take step-by-step photos. For some reason, I felt compelled to take step-by-step photos of how to make the colon for all those people searching the internet on how to make an edible colon. If by a minuscule chance you've arrived at this page by searching on edible colons, I hope you find this helpful. If you weren't looking for cake decorating information, I just don't know what to say. 

It has been over a year since I made this cake. Time has flown as always with other things on my plate and I also wanted to edit the names off of the front of the cake for this post but had no idea how. Please note that my photo editing skills are non-existent. 

Since the colon was going to be on top of the cake and was relatively small, it didn't make sense to carve it out of cake. Making it out of pure fondant, gumpaste or molding chocolate is too heavy and would also be difficult to transfer to the top of the cake. I went with good ol' rice cereal treats. As I've mentioned in the past, I find the prepackaged treats easier to use as I feel you can condense them much easier into the shapes you need and get a smoother surface versus freshly made homemade rice cereal treats.

Alright, so where does one start when making a colon? The first step was to make a template for the colon. I did an image search for a colon I was happy with (I think it was from a textbook) and printed it to a size to fit the top of a 9-inch cake. I printed it slightly smaller than I wanted the final colon to be as items tend to get larger as you add layers of fondant/chocolate (1).

I taped the colon onto a cardboard cake board and covered it with wax paper for my work surface. That way I could easily see the picture of the colon and also had a way of sliding the completed colon onto the finished cake.

Next, I rolled little balls of rice cereal treats to closely resemble the size of each distinct section of the colon as per the picture (2). Once I completed all of the pieces (3), I melted some white chocolate candy melts and used a small brush to attach everything (4). After that, I painted the entire colon with melted chocolate to be certain everything was secure and it makes it yummy (5).

The next step was to give the colon a bit more dimension. I used modeling chocolate to round out some sections and to adjust the size, as well as to shape the rectum (6). Once I was happy with the overall shape I used a flesh-coloured mixture of modeling chocolate and fondant to cover the entire colon. I added details using the same chocolate/fondant, such as the polyps and the appendix, and finished off by using various colours of petal dust to add depth to the colours (8).

I let the colon settle for day (covered in the fridge) prior to transferring it to the cake, and while I worked on the endoscope controls, the cytology brush and forceps. Now for my PSA: Cancer Care Ontario recommends all individuals over the age of 50 be screened for colorectal cancer every two years (Fecal Occult Blood Test or colonoscopy depending on your risk). Now before you start running, my cytology brush and forceps are not to scale! If caught early, colorectal cancer has a 90% chance of being cured. So get screened!

The forceps and cytology brush were made with both modelling paste and gum paste. I used small scissors to make the teeth on the forceps and the bristles on the brush. 

The "semi-colawn"

So there you have it. This is the closest post I have to a tutorial and it's about a colon. 

I had a lot of fun making this cake. After it was complete, I threw the printed picture of the colon (which had been severed by this point) into the recycling. The following week, my husband was leaving for work only to find the colon picture on our lawn. My husband sent me a picture and I laughed out loud all the way to my doctor's appointment. I had to phone my sister so I didn't look crazy walking down the street laughing to myself. His friends started making colon jokes like, "did you perform a colawnoscopy?" or "was it a whole one or a semicolon?". 

My husband said that I have a knack for making scary or gross things cute. I hope I achieved that with this colon cake! 

My next post (if I ever get to write it) will be about why I haven't been baking/blogging very much in the past year so stay tuned...

Celebratory Layer Cakes!

I have disappeared for the last several months - almost eight months to be exact. Life has been busy and I have not had very much time for baking and blogging. I've been working, researching, organizing, purging, crocheting, singing and doing a little bit of baking here and there. I thought I would take some time to post a few of the cakes I did that I didn't get a chance to write about as I do not foresee a lot of time for blogging in the near future - more on that later in a couple of posts.

I had no idea what to call this post. What cake isn't 'celebratory'? These are two cakes that I did for family way back in May 2014. It has been so long that I'm not even 100% sure of what the flavour of the first one was. It definitely had something to do with almonds! I rarely do cakes that don't involve fondant decorations but I wanted to try some simpler but no less scrumptious looking cakes.

The first one was a Mother's Day cake - I know it doesn't look very Mother's Day-ish but really it was about the flavour. My mom doesn't like chocolate cake - although she has admitted to enjoying mocha cake with dulce de leche buttercream. I know she likes coffee flavour, so I made an almond flavoured butter cake with espresso based swiss meringue buttercream (I'm 98% sure that was the flavour) and garnished with toasted almonds. 

I was insistent that the almonds had to be sliced almonds but not blanched. Without the skin, they would just blend into the colour of the buttercream. They were a little harder to find but they look much better than blanched! 

The second cake was for my sister's birthday (same weekend!). I learned that my sister really enjoys chocolate malted milk balls and decided to run with that for a cake flavour. I wanted the cake to have the flavour of malted milk throughout and have a similar texture. 

I started out with a chocolate butter cake. For the crunchy texture found in a chocolate malted milk ball, I thought dacquoise would work well but it is a meringue that is traditionally made with nuts like hazelnuts or almonds and layered with buttercream or whipped cream and I did not want any nutty flavours overshadowing the malted milk flavour. I ended up making pseudo-dacquoise which was essentially large layers of chocolate meringue (piped in a large swirl) that I also added Ovaltine (original, not chocolate) powder to in place of some of the cocoa powder. The swiss meringue buttercream was chocolate with more Ovaltine added to it. I was worried that the Ovaltine might add a gritty texture to the smooth buttercream but it ended up being fine. The result was my cake version of a chocolate malted milk ball. It was very hard to cut into slices to serve but the flavour and texture was exactly what I wanted. 

I wanted the outside of the cake to be fun and birthday-like and you can't achieve that any better than with colourful sprinkles a-la-Sweetapolita. I originally did not plan to put the sprinkles that far up the cake but I got a little carried away - it just got higher and higher. You can never have enough sprinkles though. I decorated the top with large piped shells and chocolate malted milk balls. I must confess that I think I bought a pound of malt balls of which only 17 ended up on the actual cake and the rest ended up in my stomach - not all at once but they were gone much faster than I'd like to admit!

Spring, I invoke thee!

Yes, it is summer now, but I made this cake before it was even spring. There was snow outside. I shudder at the memories. This was a birthday cake for my sister-in-law. She loves the super sugary frosting grocery store cakes and always asks for extra flowers on the cake. I decided to make my own version of a sugary flower cake. 

We had such a horrible winter everything was white, grey, brown and just dirty looking for too many months! I was ready for some vibrant spring/summer colours. 

I am not fabulous at piping flowers with frosting. I much prefer working with fondant or modelling paste. Personally I think that it is not only easier (for me anyway), but you can get much more creative with the types of flowers you can make. This blue ruffle flower below was made with several different sized circles of modelling paste. I thinned out and ruffled the edges using a stick tool with a tapered end. I then placed the layers one by one in a small bowl with the largest circle on the bottom and getting smaller as I got to the centre of the flower.

I used plunger cutters for the daisy type flowers. The make the centres, I took some brown modelling paste, pushed it through a strainer, scraped it off with a knife and then used a circle cutter.
I also made ribbon roses which I think are really cute. The thick, puffy look is a nice contrast to the thin ruffled flowers.

I used a 5-petal flower cutter to make the other flowers - I don't even really know what to call them since they aren't modelled after anything real.

Since my sister-in-law enjoys sugary frosting, rather than just simply icing the cake, I decided to pipe ruffles around the cake for a maximum frosting to cake ratio. I used a rose petal tip (#104) to make the alternating shades of green ruffles. I had a bit of trouble when I got to the top edge and turned the tip the wrong way around prematurely but the overall effect is still there. 

The cake of course was vanilla with vanilla frosting - no shortening used in this 'grocery store' cake though. Just lots and lots of butter!

Bachelorette Cake

This cake was made for a friend's bachelorette party back in February (yes, all the way back in February). Given my time limitations with work and school, the bride-to-be's sister kept the design request relatively simple and picked a fun and flirty bustier in purple and grey to match the wedding colours.

I am self-taught in terms of cake carving. I have seen some bustier cakes online in which they use a heart shaped pan for the top and bottom of the cake. I've also seen cakes in which the bust part is created using a bowl or ball-shaped pans. I am sure that this approach 'wastes' less cake (there is no waste of cake in this household!) however I don't own any heart-shaped pans and also wanted more control over the shape. Also, carving layered cakes versus using a bowl or ball-shaped pan ensures that every bite of the cake still has a good buttercream to cake ratio. 

Once again, I did not plan to take pictures of the process of cake-making, so this picture is taken with my iPhone with less-than-optimal lighting (not really complaining about a sunny day as we had so few this winter). I used a 9 x 13 inch pan and traced it onto a large sheet of freezer paper. I then sketched the outline of the bustier within 9x13 space. I cut this out and used this as my carving template. To make the top of the bustier (it feels strange to write about breasts and cake together but also feels immature to say 'cake boobs'), I baked and filled three 5-inch round cakes. I cut the template apart where the cups meet the bodice and used it to carve away the top of the bodice part to make room for the cups. Once everything was in place, I worked on carving the curves working very gradually until I was happy with the final shapes. I crumb-coating the entire shape, put it in the fridge to set and then covered it in purple fondant. 

It is very challenging to get dark purple from white fondant. I would have liked a darker purple but time was not on my side. I used a ribbon cutting tool for the detailing on the bodice and around the cups. To make the frills, I cut about 1-inch wide ribbons from fondant mixed with some tylose and used a bulbous gum paste tool to ruffle the edges. 

The cake was chocolate filled with chocolate swiss meringue buttercream. With the cake and the fondant-covered large board, it ended up being quite a large and heavy cake to transport. I was extremely worried about dropping it. I somehow managed to hold this cake with one arm while locking the door to my house, and then proceeded down my icy steps and very icy driveway in very high stiletto boots to a taxi. I safely made it out of the taxi, across a very slippery lobby floor and got the cake to the party in one piece. Whew!

I have a couple of more projects to write about and will do that gradually when I need breaks between analyzing my data for my research. Cake-making will continue to be infrequent but I hope to be up and at it more frequently after the summer. Alternatively, if any of you blog-readers out there are statistics aficionados who like to help out random people on the internet, I can get back to baking sooner!

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.