Belated Halloween

Nothing terribly exciting/out of the ordinary happened this week. In consequence of this, you my 3 loyal readers, getting another cake post--mostly. I had leftover buttercream icing (handily already died orange) and fondant from the cake I made 3 weeks ago and I had a Halloween party to go to this past weekend (yes, that would make it November, but everyone dressed up anyway). I decided I would put together a pumpkin cake--both in flavour and in appearance. I made the cake last weekend using Fine Cooking's brown butter pumpkin spice cake (so delicious) and baked it in one of my Pyrex bowls so it would be circular. When I was finished I feared the cake would be a bit too small for a large-ish party so I baked an extra single chocolate layer as well.

The cake before I added the stem. I was really happy with the bumps and ridges I added to make it look more pumpkin-like.

I began the decoration process on Friday (I baked the cakes last weekend and put them in the freezer). I stacked the cake, 'glued' it to the plate then slathered it with buttercream. The buttercream came out of the freezer in excellent shape. I've tried to preserve buttercream before, but I didn't give it enough time to return to room temperature. If you try to re-whip buttercream that's been frozen/refrigerated and don't let it warm up enough it can turn into a curdled looking mixture. You can fix this by heating it up (the microwave will work fine) and give it a good whirl with a mixer, but the first time this happened to me I didn't know this and ended up throwing the batch out. Once the buttercream was applied I smooshed ridges into it with the sides of my hands then added the fondant. I wanted more lines on the pumpkin so I took the dull side of a knife and indented the cake further.

Stem added. I was even more happy with the cake when I added the stem.

I sculpted the stem with leftover fondant then stuck it onto the top of the cake. Just a little water and some pressure was all that was required.

The cake after I added the shading. It was dark by this time so I wasn't able to get as good a picture as the earlier ones.

We were out for pretty much all of Saturday (market, groceries, lunch, aerial practice and a bunch of other stops on the way), so I ended up spending the last hour or so after dinner and before the party applying details to the cake. I thinned brown colouring out with a splash of gin, then used a paint brush to apply it to the cake. From there I used a makeup sponge to smooth out the lines.

Jack-o-lantern face added.

I was really rushing at this point. It was probably 20 minutes before we planned to leave for the party when I cut the face out from the Jack-o-lantern. Perhaps I should have just left it, but oh well. It looked all right, and I figured that most people aren't all that great at carving real pumpkins anyway. In hindsight, I should have made a pattern out of paper to trace onto the cake to get it even--I'll remember that for the next time I do something like this.

Andrew, looking manly in his Scotsman get up.

Andrew in his costume for the party--it was medieval themed.

Me, in my 'saucy medieval gal' get up.

I didn't make this costume. I agonized over the issue of whether or not to make the costume myself for sometime, but eventually I had to acknowledge the fact that I hadn't finished a sewing project that was more extensive than hemming pants in years. I bought the outfit off of Etsy. Eventually I'll turn it into a steampunk costume once I've got the right accessories.

Ciao,

Andrea

Wedding cake, the fourth

I made another wedding cake this weekend (wedding date: October 14th). This one was a bit odd in a couple of ways. For starters, I made the cake in one place then transported it to another to do the decorating. Second, I only had part of a day to complete the work (i.e. I started icing at 8:30 am Friday, and had to be finished by 4:00 pm for the wedding). Also different (although not the least bit odd), I used my very own stand mixer to make the cake. We've been saving up Canadian Tire money for months and we finally had enough for me to cover the entire cost of a Cuisinart Stand Mixer. It's beautiful, and fast and it's my new baby (although I'll still kneed my bread by hand).

I baked the cake two weeks ago—bottom layer of chocolate, middle layer of vanilla, and two layers (another middle, and a small) of chocolate-vanilla zebra-stripped—then slipped them into our new cube freezer. Last week I made the leaves and set them out to dry in an egg carton to achieve the curled-up look. Then on Friday I set to finishing the decorations. I should point out that the lovely Andrew assisted me a here. Being busy the couple of days leading up to the wedding he was kind enough to level out the cakes for me and apply the first (crumb) layer of icing. Then Friday morning I slathered on two more layers of buttercream plus the fondant. I had all three layers suited up by about 11:30.

I find that the application of buttercream and fondant almost always take the longest. This might be because I've yet to do a really complex cake design, but it only took me another hour and a half to complete the cake. I'd changed my mind several times over how I wanted to decorate it. At first I'd thought I might go for some type of medieval theme, but quickly recognized that I simply didn't have the time for that. Then I settled on the fall theme, but wasn't sure how I should accomplish the motif. I scoured through cake pictures, toyed with the idea of drawing with a paint brush and food colouring, to finally settling on this piping/brushing technique. Naturally I'd never tried it before. Whatever. It worked. I was reasonably happy with the result, and the couple seemed pleased too.

Full-length shot of the cake.

Close-up on the side, showing the piping/scrolling work.

Top down shot, catching the leaves on top.

Mmmm...cake. I'm thinking of doing one for the Hallowe'en party I'm going to.

Ciao,

Andrea

Wedding cake with flowers on top

I recently completed my third wedding cake. It was a smaller affair than the other two (3 layers, 8 inch, 10 inch and 12 inch); however, like the other two, I was more-or-less given a cart blanche to do whatever I felt like. This might seem like a great situation for a cake decorator, but I feel it's more nerve racking (maybe because I'm still new at this?). What if what I choose to do doesn't appeal to the couple, or what if my design idea doesn't work out in the end, etc, etc. I was given colours: red and white, but that was all. I opted for flowers, as it seemed the easiest/most appropriate, and chose to make them from fondant rather than icing (also due to ease). Below are pictures of the process.

The middle layer fondant-ed up. The red was so soft I was worried it might melt if the day was too warm.

I got free fondant at the end of my cake decorating course (so I suppose it wasn't really free since I paid for the course...). I figured a) if it was taken away from me at the airport it didn't matter; and b) if it turned out to not be very good I could just buy more. It nearly was taken away at the airport (they didn't know what it was, and seemed really concerned by it) and I ended up having to buy more white as the free stuff was too dry to roll out without cracking. The red as noted above was really, really soft, which made it easy to work with (getting it on the cake was a cinch) but it also meant it was really droopy. Some of the first roses I made with it turned to mush. Later on I added more icing sugar to it, which seemed to help strengthen it up.

My small army of fondant roses...I'd already used some by the time I took this picture. I think there were over 40 all told.

I was rather proud of my roses, the mottled ones in particular I thought looked really pretty. Andrew helped by rolling and cutting out of the petals while I did all the shaping. Making the flowers took...a couple of hours (I did make 40)? But setting them out on the cake took minutes.

The cake top after the first round of flowers.

At first I wasn't too sure how many flowers I would use throughout the rest of the cake, so I limited them on the top. Once I stacked it I realized there wasn't space for adding flowers on the other layers so I just kept arranging more on top.

The cake about 92.5% done, just a few finishing touches to add on the actual day of the wedding.

Once the cake was transported from my parents place to Andrew's parents place, I stacked the cake (transporting cakes is just a blast...really...) so it could sit in the fridge for the next day and a half. When I'm in Ontario I prefer to bake and apply the base layer of fondant at my parent's place as they have a lot of space (including multiple fridges), then I stack and decorate at Andrew's parents (or actually at his grandmother's). Being a small cake the staking took about five minutes and I used straws as supports--they're way easier than dowelling. You just slide the straws in, then snip them off at the desired height.

Completed cake. More flowers on the top with a few on the bottom section (partially to hide an unsightly mark), and ribbon for trim.

I added a little bit of shinny Christmas wrapping ribbon to trim the white layers and hide the bumpy edges at the bottom of the cake. Also, as you can see I did some quick, easy scroll work around the red cake layer. I think it gives the cake a bit of 'funk' and keeps it from being too traditional or boring. Also, at this point I can cover a whole cake in free-hand scroll work in about ten minutes, so it was a bit of a comfort zone-thing as well.

The full view from the side of the cake. I think the middle layer with the scrolling was really effective.

One more close-up on the flowers. This was actually the first time I made fondant flowers. They were fairly easy to do, even without the special flower tools (the ones that kind of look like dental equipment).

That's about all I've got. Unfortunately I didn't stay at the wedding for the cake cutting (did I mention that above? It was a family wedding), the term used to describe me after dinner was 'peeky.' Both Andrew and I have been fighting off head colds, and I didn't get much in the way of sleep the night before and simply couldn't stay. The drive from the wedding, which took place in Acton (why yes, it is worth the drive--Ontarians, you know what I mean, everyone else, you can scratch your heads) to our lodgings was around an hour and I fell asleep on the way.

Ciao,

Andrea

Quicky cake post

While I'm still composing my actual blog post, I've tossed up a few pictures of the dummy cake I put together at a 3-day cake decorating course I took from NAIT (Northern Alberta Institue of Technology)--tonight being the final night. I signed up for the course months ago (they fill up fast), even so, I had no idea of what I was going to do until the second class (the first class was spent covering the cakes with the fondant, so no decorating happened). My plans hit a few bumps along the way (a bronze colour that turned out orange, black sponging that ended up all over my hands--and green to boot) and if you look real close, you can see icing oozing out under the pieces.

The quick sketch for my cake plan that I put together last Monday on my lunch break.

The top two layers as the were at the end of the second class. At this point I was convinced this was going to turn out as the fuggliest cakewreck I'd ever made (Why yes, I did just reference my two favourite blogs in a single sentence).

My gears. They took forever to make. All I had were circular stamps so I cut out a bunch of circles, then used a smaller circle to take out the ridges for the gears.

Top view of the cake. The clock face was partially drawn on with plain black colouring. I didn't have a paint brush (I used  the pointed tip of a flower tool, actually), so it was a bit tricky.

Partial side view of the cake. You can catch a glimps of some of the gears I made, and the boarder I dressed up with little circles I cut to look like screws.

More of the gears cascading down the side and a slightly better look at the boarders done in silver and gold.

Full side shot of the four tiers.

It turned out okay in the end (although not as beautiful as I'd hoped), but I seriously thought I had a full-on cakewreck on my hands.

Ciao,

Andrea