A Lot Of Catch Up!

So I have SEVERAL projects to really blog about! So I'll just do a quick show and tell of a few of the projects now and maybe do a more in depth blog for some of these projects later!



This is my little brother's birthday cake. He said he wanted a chocolate fudge caramel cake. I used the most dense chocolate cake recipe I had and then filled in between the layers with homemade caramel... but I cooked the caramel to the hard ball stage in the cooking process, so it wasn't soft like I'd hope. Cutting into it was a chore! But I'm told it was pretty good in spite of the hard toffee... Next time I'll try not to over cook the toffee though!! Living and learning...


This was a strawberry-citrus cake. I adapted a butter pound cake recipe that I love to use for this cake. I added zest from lemons, limes and oranges. Then I smothered the cake in a citrus glaze and topped it with strawberries!! I think fruits are the best decorations. This cake was very refreshing and possibly my most favorite cake! It was also very sweet because of the glaze, so a sweet tooth may be required on this one!




I designed this wedding cake for my friend's, Bryant and Liz. It was sooo much fun to work on. I painted the scroll work on with piping gel and a stencil I created based on some sample pictures Liz showed me.




Over 15 hours!!! I got VERY involved with this cake. I did a sample cake for my neices so I thought I had a pretty good idea of how long this would take... the sample cake I did for my neices was about 1/3 the size of this cake and did not have 1/2 the decorations... a fact I did not factor in when I started this cake! LoL It is a rice krispies treat base (made with strawberry marshmellows and Cupcake Pebbles Cereal) and then I hand painted the towers (plastic pieces from a castle cake kit) with piping gel, and rolled them in sugar A similar method was used for the tower tops, only I used regular icing to coat the tops and then rolled them in sugar crystal sprinkles. The windows and the draw bridge were also in the cake kit, and I piped the decorations on those. Turned out pretty good though!



This cake is probably my most favorite cake I've ever made and I will definitely have a separate blog with this cake! This is the groom's cake for my dearest cousin, Jenn's, wedding. It was the most fun I've ever had designing and building a cake! And with how many prayers of mine were answered in assembling this cake, I'm not sure I can take all the credit for it!
I'm just so happy it turned out well and I didn't end up in a chocolate coma. I was chewing a LOT of gum to keep from "sampling" the cake!!! My kitchen was so heavily perfumed you could practically SEE the chocolate floating through the air... Heavenly... well, heavenly torture actually. But so much fun to make, in spite of the chocolate temptation!

More to come later, but hopefully not TOO much later!
~tinu

A "Krispy" Cake!

For my little sister's birthday, she asked for rice krispies treats and/or brownies... no cake!!! So I had to get creative!

I designed a cake out of rice krispies. It was 3 tiers of regular rice krispies "frosted" with fruity pebbles krispies treats. Delicious. The fruity pebbles complemented the regular rice krispies keeping the fruity from being too overwhelming. I will definately be making these again!





Very simple, but this was a fun cake to make. I made brownies as well and used star shaped cookie cutters to cut them out. Super cute, but I forgot to get pictures of them! Sorry! I'm told they tasted pretty good too.
Until next week!
~tinu

Bundt Cakes

I'm obsessed with bundt cakes. I've been making about 1 bundt a week since I bought my bundt pan last month! So this blog entry is dedicated to the bundt cakes I've been experimenting with.

The first is the Golden Almond Cake. I've probably made 4 of these. My husband likes them so they don't last for very long in my home. And the smell of the almond is just amazing!





Now I haven't gotten to taste this cake, it's a White Chocolate Raspberry Cake. One of my coworkers and my little sister each got a piece and the rest was given away to a neighbor family who was moving. It smell good though and I'm told it tasted good too!



This weekend I went nuts (it was a stressful week and I needed some baking time to cool off!) I made some Pillsbury sweet rolls, Rhodes rolls, and then I got down to the homemade stuff. I made two loaves of bread, banana-nut muffins and a Cordon Rose Banana Bundt Cake.

I discovered that the fastest way to ripen bananas. Freeze them over night! Just make sure you have time to defrost them before you use them. They get kinda mushy so defrost them on a plate!

I made the banana cake without any nuts. It tastes like the banana muffins, but it just felt like something was missing without the nuts. I really like the dense moist texture. I doubled the amount of sour cream used to make it extra moist. Delicious!

~tinu

Dad's Birthday Cake!

My family celebrated my dad's birthday last week and I got to make the cake!
I make a Chocolate Butter Cake with a thick Milk Chocolate Buttercream.

4 lbs of chocolate went into the frosting. 3 lbs of milk chocolate and then to keep it from being too sweet, I added 1 lb of dark chocolate. Then butter to soften it into a frosting texture. Next time I may use a heavy cream to help soften the chocolate as well.

I melted the chocolate down in a metal bowl set over top of a pot of boiling water. The smell in my kitchen was enough to put you into a chocolate coma... It smelled divine... I had to keep chewing gum to keep myself from taste testing.

The chocolate was so pretty!

This was the cake, pre-frosting.
I may go a bit lighter on the frosting next time.

I used a small decorative scraper to put a decorative side on the cake.

I used a star tip to pipe the edge around the top and bottom of the cake.

And then I was having so much fun and I had some frosting left over, so I did a few more rows around the top. The buttercream got kinda melted so the last two rows looked less like the star tip and more like Hershey's Kisses.

Here is the cake, complete with candles.

A shot of the cross section of the cake.

Plated with icecream. I was told that it was also good with a little milk poured over it.

I'll have to make this again next year when I can try it!
~tinu

if at first you don't succeed, try, try again... and again... and again...

So I decided to test out a cake from my new cake book!!! (I got it last Friday!) It's a carmel cake and you have to make a batch of carmel to mix into the batter... Well I've had a bad habit of not reading directions completely and assuming I know what I'm doing. Baking has almost cured me of this habit, but it still happens from time to time. And it happened when I made the carmel.
I read the ingredients and added all of the carmel ingredients into the pan (brown sugar, milk and butter). I had finished dissolving the sugar and was starting to let it carmelize when I re-read the directions to get ready for the next step and realized that I should have reserved some of the milk for the next step. First batch of carmel goes down the drain :::sigh:::
I was starting to get impatient with the second batch. I got the ingredients mixed in correctly, but I really didn't want to wait forever for the carmel to get to the "soft ball" stage. I decided that I'd crank up the heat a bit... just help it along... and I burned the second batch. So the second batch of carmel joined the first batch :::sigh:::
I was ready at this point to just settle for burnt carmel. But my husband knew it was going to bug me and he got me motivated to give it one more shot. I just had him keep reminding me to be patient so I wouldn't sneak in and crank up the heat :) You'd really think that just leaving the sugar to boil (you can't stir it or it'll be ruined) would be the easiest part of the baking process, but it's easily the hardest part for me, to just wait! But finally my patience paid off! The 3rd (and final!) batch of carmel came out perfect!!!

dissolving the sugar and melting the butterit starts to curdle up as it begins to boil

waiting... forever!

finally carmelized and the reserved milk has been wisked in

the batter all mixed and ready for cooking!yay! the cake is out of the oven!

it was good plain, but I felt like it needed more

so I decided to carmelize some apples to top it off

butter, milk, brown sugar and apple slices

here is the pretty plated cake I presented to my hubby!

and here's my piece! LoL but I think all mashed up is the best way to eat any cake!

I really like it. I think next time I make it I won't cook the apples as long. They were a little mushy and I think having them still crunchy would even better!

I'm thinking I might try out a coconut cake this weekend. I saw it in my book and I'm dying to try it. I'm not a huge fan of coconut, but the cake looked so pretty! We'll see :)

~tinu

Birthday Cakes!

Thank you for the pictures Steph!!!

I made these cakes for my niece and nephew's birthdays.

The cake began to sink! But now I've discovered a way to keep the columns from sinking into the cake. I guess I'll attempt a columned cake again soon, see if the straws to help support the columns work out better!

These cakes were easily the most fun I've had with cake decorating!

I did a carmel cake tonight... more on THAT project later!
~tinu

a few more photos

So I have a few more pictures!
These are some final shots of my latest cake project. My Relief Society asked me to make the desserts for a Visiting Teaching Social. I wanted the cakes to look really sophisticated, so I decided to make two chocolate tortes, decorated with fruit. I did that once before, for a family party and it looked really great.
I didn't think that two tortes would be enough, plus I wanted to be able to eat some dessert (I've given up chocolate for this year) So I choose to do a two tiered white cake with orange moussiline buttercream too. I was stumped on how to decorate it though.
Then my husband wanted to taste test the scraps for me. I took some of the cake that was left over from leveling the tiers and frosted it with a bit of buttercream. My husband topped it off with some of the strawberries I'd originally planned on using for one of the tortes. I tasted my husband's addition to the buttercream, and since I was doing fresh fruit on the torte, I decided I should carry the fresh fruit decoration theme onto the buttercream.
I altered my original plan for one strawberry torte and one raspberry torte to two raspberry tortes and then I decorated the buttercream with strawberries and mandarin orange segments. I'm really pleased with how they turned out!

cakes set out for the social

white cake with orange moussiline buttercream
w/strawberries and mandarin oranges
dark chocolate torte with fresh raspberries and raspberry sauce

I was nervous about transporting the cake, so I took a picture before I left home,
just in case something happened while transporting it to the church!

I'm still gathering pictures from other events, and I'm hoping to maybe have some step by step photos for a project this weekend. But that may depend on if I actually get some time to work on a project this weekend...

If anyone has any pictures from cakes I've made, could you email them to me?? Thank you!

~tinu

my first cake

Well I figured I'd start with a few pictures of the first cake I ever designed, my wedding cake!







I'll get some more pictures up from other projects, as soon as I track them down!!
~tinu