Birthday Cupcakes

Keeping with the theme of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Birthday Cake we made these peanut butter cupcakes and used the left over butter cream peanut butter frosting.  (I did alter the cupcakes: I put in half the sugar, used 1 cup whole wheat flour and then the rest was all purpose four, I also used 1/2 c applesauce and 1/4 c oil instead of the shortening.)   In some of the cupcakes we added chopped pb cups, those that we didn't we put pb cups on top of the frosting.  My daughter picked out these cute pink tea party cupcake wrappers. 

Skate Cake

As tradition goes I made my daughter a special "fancy" cake for her birthday.  Originally she asked for a flower cake with a number 6 on it.  As time drew closer to making the cake she changed her mind and said she wanted an ice skating cake and she wanted it to be blue.  So . . . let the cake making begin.  

This year, as I blog about this event I decided to "write down" all the recipes I used so I didn't have to search and search next time for them.  (Now, I will just have to search for this post)  For the look of the cake I searched and looked at many pictures but pulled most of my ideas from these two cakes.

Ok, so lets talk cake . . . . I'm not really sure my daughter even likes cake so when it comes to flavor she didn't really care.  When I suggested chocolate and peanut butter she totally went for it (our family are huge Reese's PB Cup fans!).  I found this recipe for the cake and used this recipe  for the filling and then I had a brilliant idea to cut up peanut butter cups and put that in the filling.  

When carving and decorating cakes it's a good idea to have a crumb coat and then put a second layer of your frosting.  The crumb coat will seal any crumbs from the cake so they don't show through the decorating layer.  This is especially important when you are decorating with frosting, giving a nice clean look.  I saw that this was very important when I made my daughter's Rocket cake.  This year I did a crumb coat because . . . I have always done a crumb coat.  (Not really a good reason to do something.)  I decided that doing a crumb coast is not only not necessary when decorating with fondant but detracts from the cake's flavor.  Because I was making a peanut butter frosting the crumb coat, a simple powder sugar frosting, detracted from the flavor. - Lesson Learned (hopefully) - Ok, so back to what I did with this cake.  When decorating with fondant it's a good idea to use butter cream frosting as it makes a good glue to help fondant stick to the cake.  I used this peanut butter butter cream recipe.  I also made my own fondant, I made two batches one using this recipe and added blue food coloring and almond flavor into it before I added the powder sugar.  The second batch I used this recipe which is basically the same as the first.

Covering the cake with fondant did not go as smoothly as last year . . . still learning!  First mistake was rolling more than we needed and letting it sit too long after rolling it out.  Our first attempted we failed and had to try again.  The second attempt I think we used too much crisco making it too soft and "melty".

I learned from my new friend some very helpful things about modeling with fondant.  You can use a lot more crisco on the fondant than I thought, it can make it too wet though, but, then you just have to add more powder sugar to it and it's back to normal.  I think I found that when adding so much food coloring to the fondant can cause it to dry and crack. But when making shapes you can just rub and work with the fondant and smooth out cracks and seems.  We tried to make the ice skate out of complete fondant but it didn't work,  The fondant wasn't firm enough and kept falling down and not holding it's shape.  (I would like to try adding Tylose Powder to the fondant to make it into gum paste, which is more firm and stiff.)  We ended up using a cut out shape from card board for the ice skate and a hanger shaped into the number 6.  I didn't have silver food color so I bought pearl dust and painted with it.  I also bought white and blue pearl dust and used that to give the cake a sparkle to it.  We put snow flake "sprinkles" on top as well to give a snow look (not shown well in the picture).

The taste of the cake was very good!  As I cut it the smell of peanut butter brought me to a happy place.  The filling was by far the best part!  I thought the chocolate cake was a bit dry but the frosting was very moist and so the dryness of the cake really balanced that out.  Just about everybody loved the fondant and ate almost all of it. 

Overall I was very pleased with the cake, it wasn't too hard (I was going for simple) and my daughter said it was the best part of her birthday!  I'm still learning and hope to make even more improvements next year. 

Cake Therapy

It's that time of year again . . . . birthday cake making.  I'm sad to be making this without my best friend, but life moves on . . . even if I don't want it too.  I did consider not making anything super fancy this year because my friend won't be with me (I may come up with all the ideas but she is one that makes it all happen).  But thinking through it I figured that I need to make a cake, not necessarily for my daughter (does she really care? she's happy with just about anything).  No, making this cake is more of therapy for myself.  I do have fun baking and creating, this is the time that I have an excuse to make art.  I'm a terrible drawer! but I do like creating things and baking and this puts them together!
So lets talk cake.  My daughter has been taking ice skating lessons this year so we are doing an ice skate theme cake.  It's not going to be super crazy, I want to keep it simple . . . . simple and easy . . . except for making the ice skate I'm hoping it shouldn't be too hard (but things always go wrong and the "easy" things always seem hard).  As far as the cake flavor I'm making a peanut butter cup cake (chocolate cake with peanut butter filling). A new friend is coming over tomorrow and we shall make a cake . . . . it will be great (hopefully my kids will let us work).

Lessons in Birthday Cakes

I have been trying to write this blog for over a week but was first uninspired, then unmotivated and then I was kicked off line because our VPN was blocked. Here I am, finally writing this all down. I am writing this blog, not really for others to read but for my own future reference. I want to document the things that I have learned from making these birthday cakes so I can remember for future endeavors (if I dare to try again).

This all started 3 years ago when my not yet 3 year old daughter told me she wanted a Rocket cake from Little Einsteins for her birthday cake. At first I just laughed but as I thought it over I thought that I could possible do it. I looked online for cake ideas and found something that I liked, thought of a plan, and then asked my friend (an artist) to help me. I was actually really pleased with how it turned out.

The only problem with this cake was that there was too much! I could have just done the rocket and had plenty of cake (we aren't huge cake fans). I made a 9x13 chocolate cake that was used for the sky (covered in blue frosting). The body of Rocket was made from two round cake (one was actually cooked in a bowl), the recipe I used was given to me by my sister that is suppose to be very good for carving and shaping. The engines were made out of gluten free chocolate cup cakes.

Summary of the things I learned from making the Rocket Cake
1) Freezing the cake makes it a lot easier to carve and frost
2) Doing a crumb coat frosting will help seal in the crumbs so your final frosting coat is nice and smooth
3) When trying to get a a deep red frosting you should mix it up at least a day in advance, when you stir it up the next day it will no longer be pink but a nice brilliant red

The next year we decided for my daughter's 4th birthday to have a Dora the Explorer themed party. This year I wanted to try making fondant and I also wanted to make the cake taste good. Although I think the cake is pretty cute (my favorite were the stars shooting out of the cake) I almost gave up in the middle of the project and was really disappointed with the end result. However, I was happy with how the cakes tasted, the top was red velvet and the bottom was chocolate with chocolate ganche & raspberry filling.

A few things I learned from making this two tier Dora Cake:

1) Marshmallow fondant dries out & cracks very easily
2) When covering a cake with fondant you need to do it quickly or else it will pull, tear and crack

3) It is very important that your cake is carved flat, DON'T try and cover mistakes with extra frosting - too much and the frosting melts and then the fondant falls/droops
4) Less filling (as well as crumb coat frosting) is best; when using a filling you don't want too much or the cake will bulge.

For my daughters 5th birthday she wanted a princess theme so I thought doing a castle could be simple enough. I started searching on line again for ideas and found some ideas that I liked. After the previous year's fondant frustrations, I wasn't looking forward to working with it again. But my friend pointed out how much prettier the cake with fondant looked and I figured I could give it one more try. I hoped to remember the mistakes from the year before and improved on it.

First thing I did was make the marshmallow fondant much more "wet" than the previous year. This made working with it a bit easier, it didn't dry or crack as much. I also rolled out the fondant much thicker than the previous year which also helped with the cracking. Secondly, I decided to go back to the dense vanilla & chocolate cakes since I wanted to build with it. I knew they wouldn't taste as good but hopefully they wouldn't fall, bulge or slide.

For the bottom cake (purple tier) I used a dense chocolate cake (actually tasted pretty good) baked in two 9x9 pans and layered them. The second pink tier and the purple towers I made a 9x13 dense vanilla cake. After freezing all the cakes I assembled them together using a thin layer of crumb coat frosting. The top tier I carved to a nice square shape and the towers were cut using circle cake cutters with wooden skewers placed in the middle to hold them together. The bottom pink towers are made of chocolate gluten free cake, also cut with cake cutters and held together with wooden skewers.

I have to admit that going into the project I had a bit of a bad attitude, I was nervous and thought it was going to be a disaster. But once into it I started to have fun! I was really pleased with the final outcome thinking it was super cute. It was really pretty simple to make and everything went pretty smoothly. I did struggle frosting the towers, the carved cake kept falling apart. But once I let them freeze it was much easier to frost.

Here are a couple things that did go "wrong" with the Castle cake (but I'm not exactly sure how to improve for next time).
1) Most of the towers were fine but a couple of them the fondant began to slide off (possibly too much crumb coat frosting? possibly the fondant was too thick and heavy pulling it down?)
2) After sitting out all night the fondant's color faded; I guess it needs to be covered but how do you cover a huge carved cake?
3) Need to make sure the cakes are carved evenly and flat (I know I "learned" this the year before - I did a much better job but still had some mistakes

So after making 3 "fancy" cakes I think that I have learned a lot but the big question is "Was it worth it?" I was a little disappointed with my daughters reaction when she saw the finished caked (but she is a bit like her mama and doesn't show too much emotion). But we all have great memories, I had fun creating a master piece, and hanging out with my friend as we made eatable art.

Fondant Frustrations

My daughter turned 4 and she wanted to have a Dora birthday cake. After last year's Little Einstein's Rocket cake I was up for making a Dora cake. This year I wanted to try and make and work with fondant. I researched and found that making marshmallow fondant was pretty easy and would taste good. For the most part that was right. Making the actual fondant was easy. Coloring it was pretty hard on my hands but in the end I was happy with the colors.

The next step in making this cake was to make the actual cake. I decided to make a red velvet cake (my favorite cake and I thought my daughter would appreciate the red/pink color) for the top tier and then chocolate (my daughter's favorite) for the bottom tier. I have heard so much about ganache this year that I also wanted to make chocolate ganache filling and put some raspberry in there as well.

Carving the cake was my first mistake. I accidentally carved it incorrectly which I then tried to correct with frosting (second mistake). By the time we were done decorating the frosting was melting and sliding off the cake and taking the fondant off with it.

In preparations for making this cake I read up and watch a few videos on using and decorating with fondant. Everyone I watched made it look easy to cover a round cake - WRONG!! I think the first thing we did wrong was take too long to cover it (it should take you no longer than 5 minutes). The second thing was I think that the fondant was a bit too dry causing it to crack. We ended up covering the top tier twice to cover up all the bumps and cracks.

I didn't have enough fondant to cover the bottom cake so I thought I would quickly make another batch. Well I have no idea what went wrong but that batch was way too dry and I could barely roll it out. As I placed it over the cake the fondant tore right in the middle making it practically unusable. At this point in my mind I was screaming thinking I wanted to just give up - this was WAY TO HARD for some one's 4 year old birthday cake!!! I took a deep breath and my friend & I figured out a way to salvage the cake. We ended up taking another piece of fondant and wrapped it around the bottom covering the parts that had fallen off. We then proceeded to cover up most of the other cracks with stripes. I was relieved and very much please with how it was coming along.

After putting flowers on the top tier it was getting late and we needed to go to bed. At this point though I noticed that both the cakes were bulging but there wasn't really anything I could do about it. I loosely covered the cakes, opened the window (it was cold outside so I made my kitchen a fridge) and went to bed hoping the cakes wouldn't fall apart overnight.

In the morning I was happy to find that the cakes were still together and had set up a bit because it was pretty cold outside. That day, the day of the party, I put the finishing touches on the cake. I made some confetti and placed those on the cake and then, my favorite part, I added shooting stars. I cut out thick stars from fondant and placed them on wires. I then put the wires in straws (to keep the dirty wire from contaminating the cake) and put them in the cake.

The end result was far from perfect but was still cute. My daughter loved the cake and said the flowers were her favorite part. I have a lot to learn and perfect when decorating with fondant but over all I had a lot fun.