Salzburg Old Town Waterfront

Hello everyone! I'm back from my incredible Castle Tour in Europe! As promised, here are some of the best photos. Above is the Salzburg Castle up on the hill overlooking the gorgeous Old Town. The whole city is a gem to be admired but this was my favorite shot of Salzburg. (just click on the photo to see the larger view)

Neuschwanstein Castle

The highlight of this trip for me was Neuschwanstein Castle. The castle in Disneyland was modeled after this real life castle in Germany. It is truly the most romantic castle I have ever seen. You can really see how the heroic and romantic knights tales were created from sights such as these!

Lucern

And, finally, my favorite city, Lucern. You have to love a place that has so much amazing architecture and swans swimming in the lake! Of course the Alps towering over it certainly helps! It's not a large city and we were blessed to be staying near the heart of it so walking tours were wonderful!

Giraffe Bridal Shower Cake

But, finally, I'm back home and back at work. This week features a Bridal Shower cake for a special client. She is having a destination wedding (with a marvelous wedding package) that, unfortunately, does include cake but doesn't include a custom cake so we created one for her Bridal Shower instead. The Bride-to-be loves giraffes so it was a cute personal touch to make these for the cake topper. They are hand moulded from sugar paste and fondant and are completely edible. The daisies echoed the theme of the entire shower as did the colors yellow and brown.

This week's secret is a simple one. If you look on the sides of the cake you will see the sugar daisies along with the ones piped onto the cake. All I did to make sure I got uniform flowers was to use a cookie cutter daisy, in two sizes, and after letting the buttercream frosting firm up for an hour, gently pressed the cutter into the frosting and then, using royal icing which dries quickly, just piped over the outline! Easy peasy!

This upcoming week bring Graduation in our area and a special grad cake for a Disney fan! Also, a quick thank you for anyone who has been reading this blog over the past year! Yup, it's been a whole year since my first post! Hopefully I can keep coming up with interesting cakes and tips to keep your reading for at least one more! Do me a favor and post a comment to this post if you have been reading since last June! Thanx!

See you Sunday!

Cat

Disney Themed Mother's Day Cake

Happy Mother's Day USA! Hope you all found a fun way to celebrate...even if it was just finding "me" time and a way to relax. We had a huge family party with a very special theme to celebrate and the cake pictured above is the cake I made for the occasion.

My mom has a "big" birthday this year and for the past few years she's been talking about going back to Disneyland. So we, as a family, decided to take her for her big birthday to Disneyland, as a family vacation. So we gathered up as much of the family as we could, some live out of state, some couldn't attend, and invited them all for Mother's Day Dinner. Mom had no idea that the second reason was to surprise her with the birthday gift/vacation. It was a wonderful surprise, we took her breath away, and at the end of the dinner were able to enjoy the cake!

Now with the cake it was a bit hard to come up with a design since it was a "big" birthday cake, a Mother's Day cake as well as a Disney themed cake. I settled on making her favorite type of cake, lemon coconut creme, and using her favorite color, yellow and topped the cake off with a fondant flower "Mickey" ears topper. Since not everyone likes coconut I made the second tier a mexican hot chocolate cake with buttercream filling. It was delicious! Now you are probably wondering what the bottom tier is...it's a dummy tier! It's sole purpose was just to make the cake design look grand!

And this is where this week's secret comes in to play. When ordering a special occasion cake, or if you are a caker yourself, when designing a cake like this one, you can use a cake dummy to boost your design rather than getting more cake than your party can actually eat. So you don't waste food and you end up with a more impressive centerpiece. Quickly, a word of caution here: using a dummy tier is not going to save you much money with your baker. This type of tier is usually priced at 80% of what a real cake would be priced since most of the work is still done on the outside of the cake dummy...the same work that is done on the rest of the cake. The only advantages to using a cake dummy is to get a grander looking cake and not wasting food. Obviously, for this design, those were two big factors on why I used it.

Now here is a second secret, if you are a caker. I use crisco all over the dummy tier if I'm covering it with fondant. This makes it easier to remove the fondant when the event is over. I don't bother with this for buttercream since it will easily wash off with hot soap and water. However, you can extend the life of your dummy if you cover it in plastic wrap first before putting on your buttercream layer.

I hope you enjoyed the cake this week as well as the story behind it. Surprising my mom and being surrounded by most of my family, including all my kids and grandkids, made this the best Mother's Day celebration ever for me.

I'll be out the next two Sundays but then returning on the 28th! I'm vacationing with my mom for two weeks in Bavaria! Yup, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Leichtenstein...a castle tour! I'm so excited to be going and seeing and doing this with my mom! When I get back I will post what I'm working on as well as a photo or two of the best of what I see on my vacation! Hope to see you back here then!

Cat

Chocolate Decadence Cake

Happy Sunday! These week brings a little bit of indulgence that you can enjoy! This Chocolate Decadence cake is a Mexican Hot Chocolate Cake filled with fresh buttercream then covered with a layer of buttercream, then ganache and finally whipped ganache and white buttercream!

Now here is how you can make a version of this cake. There are tons of ganache recipes online. Find one and make it. It's really really easy, it just looks hard! It's really just shaved up chocolate, or even chocolate chips, and hot cream. You simply pour the hot cream onto the chocolate, give it a few seconds to melt then stir! Let that cool down a bit then pour over your cake. Yup, that easy. Now let me give you a few tips for this. Use a glass bowl if you can, the cream gets hot and the glass will conduct the heat into the chips of chocolate better. Stir the mixture till very smooth and shiny. Let this set up till it thickens a bit before pouring. Now fill your cake and put it onto a wire cooling rack. Set up foil, with the edges curved up, under that to catch the drippings of ganache and so you don't waste it. Once your ganache is thickened use a big spoon and begin pouring the gananche from the center of the cake and watch as it spreads out beautifully over the cake. Now I covered this cake with buttercream first to add a layer of flavor but you can just pour the ganache right over the bare cake. Once your cake is covered let it set up for a few minutes so you can see any spots you missed. Use the drippings you collected in the foil as well as any left over in the bowl to recoat the cake. Remember to put down new foil before doing this. Then let your cake set up about a half hour before you try to move it to your cake plate or serving platter.

If you want whipped ganache to decorate your cake with then you will need to let the leftovers set up in the refridgerator for at least 12 hours. When totally stiff you will want to whip it with a mixer till light and fluffy. At this point you can spread or pipe it on like you would regular buttercream icing. You can just use the same tip you bought for the rose cupcakes! It will instantly look like a fancy bakery treat!

Hope you get a chance to make this up...I'm sure any Mom in your life would love it!

And speaking of Mother's Day! Next Sunday is Mother's Day here in the US so I will be posting Saturday instead. I have a very special cake planned for our dinner on Saturday night and can NOT wait to share it with all of you!

Cat

Benjamin's Baby Shower Cake

Happy Monday! Ok, so I'm a day off of my usual due to Easter and travelling. I just got back from a wonderful rollercoaster week at my daughter and son in laws house...they had their baby on the 14th and I stayed to help. I'm missing my new grandson already! A few days after his birth I had a baby shower cake to complete...nope, this biz doesn't stop for babies!LOL!

The Mom to be is a past client, I did her Plumeria Wedding Cake last summer! I wanted this cake for her to be extra special but with my daughter about to have a baby I knew I couldn't promise too much. So what I did, and you can do this too, is to make all the pieces that went onto the cake and then let them dry out. Carried those with me, packaged carefully to prevent breakage, so that if I had to do so I could buy a store bought cake and put the decorations on it. Yup, that's a "secret" that I passed onto you a few weeks ago! This was my back up plan in case we were at the hospital the day of the shower. Fortunately my grandson made his entrance 3 days before so I was able to get the cake made and decorated in time for the shower.

All of the decorations, from the hat to the booties to the sports balls and the letters are all made from fondant that has had a bit of tylose added to it. Tylose helps the fondant to dry a bit quicker. The cake is frosted in fresh buttercream and the pieces were added on with royal icing as "glue". The actual cake is lemon with lemoncurd buttercream, the Mom to be's favorite cake. The cake is offset to show off all the little balls on the cake, including the two on the back. There is only one hockeypuck as a mini spotlight to the Mom to be and Dad to be's passion for the sport..and their team, the San Jose Sharks.

And check out the water bottle next to the cake! Those are part of our event companys work. We do custom water bottles for any event. This one was, of course, sports themed so the water bottle lables were customed designed to match the rest of the decorations for the party.

Next week we dive into some chocolate decadence! See you Sunday!

Cat

String Work Cake

Happy Sunday! It's a very happy one for us since our grandson arrived on Thursday! We have been enjoying his company since!

Today's cake is a demo cake. I had been taking a Master Decorators class. I wanted to work on detail work which included different piping techniques as well as sugar flowers. Over the next few months you will see examples of the new flowers I learned how to make but this week you get to see the piping techniques. I was required to show 7 different techniques in this one cake for my final "exam". For this cake I used bridge work, string work, line work, coronets, ruffling, sugar flowers and shell work. That's a lot of different looks to try to put into one cake and we had to come up with our own design, not copy from the teachers work.

I have to say this is the hardest bit of piping work I have ever had to do on a cake. The instructor warned us that for every 1 string we got to string properly we would end up wiping 3 away. I had no idea that was an understatement! It took me two hours to do the string work alone! The fun new technique that I learned was the ruffling. I've done a form of ruffles before but this is such a more realistic, not to mention easier, version of what I've done in the past!

Now you are probably wondering why I bring up my classwork here in the blog. For one thing it was something that took me 3 months to learn and a whole lot of work and I wanted to show you all that I'm still learning. No matter how much I think I know about decorating, there is still more to learn and it's fun to discover new things to do with sugar and icing. But the other reason is to encourage others here that may be reading this to go out and explore the classes in your area. Michaels has several levels of classwork and many cake supply shops also offer them. Lastly, check online to see if you can find one that works for your interests. If you still can't find something that works for you then please do explore YouTube. Yup, you'd be amazed at how much I've learned thanks to that website! Tons of videos that you can play over and over again till you get the technique down and all for free! Can't beat that.

More cakes to come over the next weeks. Next week I'll share with you a baby shower cake I delivered just this afternoon!

Cat

Rose Birthday Cake

Happy Sunday! As promised from last week, there's more on the "rose" technique that you used on the cupcakes last week. Since I found the tutorial (http://iammommy.typepad.com/i_am_baker/2011/02/rose-cake-tutorial.html) to make this lovely design I have seen the design popping up all over the place in one form or another. This is my own version.

Due to the fact that this is a very small cake, just 6 inches by 3 inches tall, I didn't want too much buttercream frosting on it in proportion to actual cake. The roses take a lot of buttercream to make so I decided to lightly frost the sides and save the roses for the top. Now if this was to be a larger cake, say a 10x4, then roses all over it like in the tutorial would be fine. There would be a lot more cake to icing ratio then. Lastly I wanted to add a bit of "bling" to the cake and that's where this week's secret comes in!

If you visit Michaels, or any other craft store that has caking supplies, you will see a whole section dedicated to sprinkles and sugars and glitters in which to embellish your cakes and cupcakes. Edible glitter is in flakes, not sprinkles, and can give your cake that little bit of extra sparkle when you need it. It's inexpensive and a little goes a long way. Unlike sanding sugar or other types of sprinkles, edible glitter doesn't alter the texture of the icing very much so you don't end up with a gritty feeling in your mouth from it. One of the many reasons I prefer it to sanding sugar.

Over the past few months I've been taking "Masters" classes. Next Sunday I'll share with you the outcome from my final "test" for the course!

Cat

"Rose" Cupcakes

Happy Sunday! This week brings some new fun stuff I can share with you! Fun stuff YOU can do for your own cupcakes that is easy to learn! These cupcakes require only some buttercream icing, a piping bag and an extra large open star decorating tip. This tip looks like a pointy top crown.

Put the tip into the bag (no coupler needed) and fill the bag with buttercream. Twist the top of the bag and hold it straight up and down about an inch from the top of your cupcake. Starting from the center of the cupcake swirl the icing around in a flat circle and when you've covered the entire cupcake let up the pressure and angle down to finish the line and stop and pull away. You can practice this on wax paper a couple of times to get the hang of it but once you do this will be SO easy for you to do quickly!

Close up

Now another fun tip for this design. At Michaels you can find spray cans of food safe dye that you can use to add color to your roses. Lay your cupcake onto wax paper and, holding the can about 6 inches away, lightly spray on your color. A fun combination for this is to spray on some yellow and then a lighter layer of pink. This makes some really beautiful "roses" for your party!

More on this technique next week!

Cat