Pink and Brown theme Cupcakes

Happy Sunday! This week was a very very busy one for me. Being all by myself in this business means there is only me to rely on when the week gets busy and, for me, this means anytime I have more than 2 cakes or one wedding cake. Well, this week I had a wedding cake, 48 cupcakes AND a birthday cake! Today I'm sharing the cupcakes and birthday cake so I can share those techniques with you. Next week I'll share the wedding cake!

So the chocolate cupcakes in the photo are just regular cupcakes with vanilla buttercream and chocolate sprinkles but the pink and white cupcakes are strawberry cupcakes with swirled pink and white vanilla buttercream and there's a fun trick I'd like to share with you so you can do this same design on your next dozen cupcakes!

First pick out which cupcake tip you'd like to use in your piping bag. Now these are those large tips you see at the store that don't use a coupler in your bag. I prefer the large star tip for something like this. Put it into your large piping bag and set aside laying it flat on the counter. Now take some vanilla buttercream and color it any color you would like. Put that into a small piping bag with no tip or coupler and slide that inside your large piping bag which is still flat on the counter. Now do the same with some white vanilla buttercream and slide that bag in so it lines up with the colored icing bag. Carefully pick up your large piping bag so that, hopefully, your two smaller bags inside will slide down to the large piping tip inside the big bag. Pipe a little of your icing out into a bowl until you can see the twin colors coming out. Then pipe onto your cupcakes like you normally would! You will see the two colors swirl out on top! The fun thing is that you can do this with 3 colors if you'd like a more rainbow effect...just add another small bag of colored icing to your large bag. It's fun to see it pipe out onto your cupcakes and your guests will love, and marvel, over the effect!

Bordeaux and Gold Birthday Cake

Onto the birthday cake! This is a little 6 inch cake feeds 12. Since it is 4 inches high you don't want to cut more than a small slice for each person so you cut it in half then cut six slices from each side. Inside is luscious lemon chiffon cake with lemoncurd buttercream. Recipe secret here...I either use jarred lemoncurd or fresh, when I can get it, to make this. It's about a half jar of lemoncurd to 1 cup buttercream to make this filling. Then I mix in enough powdered sugar to make it stiff enough that it doesn't all run out. It's so good I could eat it like pudding!

Outside I used rose, navy blue and burgundy gell colors to create this dark wine colored, or "bordeaux" colored, buttercream. For such a dark color it actually took very little gell to make it this dark and vibrant! This means you don't end up with that chemical dye taste in your frosting. I did the normal fairly smooth crumbcoat and final coat of buttercream in this color. Then piped the edge. I let that set up for a few minutes while I colored royal icing with Buttercup yellow gell till it was a dark gold color. I had to add in more powdered sugar to make the royal icing stiff enough for piping. You can test the firmness by piping a bit onto a plastic lid then tilting it up for a few seconds..if your icing slides then you need to firm it up some more with powdered sugar. I started with the center of the cake and just started freehand swirls and create a "river" off the side of the cake knowing my rose would be at the top of that "river". You can use a patter maker to make swirls for you to follow if you wish. Any cookie cutter very gently pressed into the buttercream will give you a pattern you can pipe over easily! Some of the top pattern went over the sides but I carefully left out a bit of room on the side for the "L" inital of the birthday girl. When I started piping the sides the inital was the first thing I did. Once the piping was done it looked like a wine colored cake with dark yellow squiggles on it. So I took old gold luster dust and mixed in some clear alcohol (I use vodka but you can use clear vanilla extract as well) to make it into a thick paint consistancy. You do not want it watery otherwise it will drip off your royal icing onto your dark buttercream and show. Then, using a detail brush, about the same width as my piped lines, I handpainted the gold onto the royal icing. Because I had colored my royal icing this was a quick process. If I had left my royal icing white I would have had to paint and repaint the lines over and over again to get the true gold I wanted. Once I had all the lines covered and looking shiny gold, I took candy pearls and dumped them into the paint. Rolled them around in the paint and then onto parchment where I rolled them around with my paintbrush until the excess paint had been rolled off. Then I allowed them to dry before adding them to the cake and then did a final touch up with more gold.

Now that last tip is mainly for Californians. Some lawyer upstate decided that if you ate 10 pounds of these metallic colored pearls you might get cancer so he sued the state over it. Never mind that most people never eat more than 5 pearls at a time much less 10 pounds of them...it's still in litigation so none of the cake companies here will ship the gold or silver balls into the state and we are forced to paint our own when we need them. If you don't live in California you can probably go to any supermarket or cake or craft supply store and buy a jar of gold or silver balls. I envy you! For now, I have to either color my own or beg out of state friends to bring them to me when they visit!

The rose on top of the cake is just a white sugarpaste rose that I used some of the gold paint to paint the edges. You can buy these roses already made at any cake supply store or even order them online for you to color however you wish if you don't want to make one like I did.

See you next Sunday! I'll share with you the wedding cake and some of the techniques used to make it!

Cat

The Haywoods Wedding Cake

Happy Sunday! This week brings a wedding cake. Summer is my busiest season for weddings, bridal showers and baby showers so the next three weeks I have this type of wonderful celebration cake to share with you.

This cake is covered in fresh vanilla buttercream and then decorated with handrolled black fondant and free form hot pink royal icing flowers. Buttercream is hard to use in the summer. Heat melts it, humidity makes it harder to spread on smooth. But I use what is called a "high temp" buttercream recipe that, fortunately, tastes wonderful and stands up to heat. So far I've tested it up to 104 degrees! If any of you would like this recipe just let me know and I'll be happy to share it! Fortunately it wasn't that hot this weekend. We are enjoying a cooler summer this year and it was only 85 yesterday. That is wonderful weather for a backyard wedding!

Close up of rolled fondant and flowers

The second "secret" this week is the black fondant. Any caker will tell you that black, red, navy blue and purple fondant is the hardest to make. Black can be made with chocolate fondant that you have to add a bunch of black gell food coloring to but it doesn't taste very good and tasting good is as important as looking good! To make any of these vibrant colors you have to add a lot of food coloring which changes the taste as well as the texture of the fondant. Fortunately there are some companies that produce these colors and they taste pretty good too. Duff's (from Ace of Cakes) produces a yummy black fondant. It sort of tastes like a tootsie roll! It rolls out easily, goes onto a cake easily as well but it's not great for doing things like cake toppers. Because it's such a soft fondant you will need to add in a whole bunch of tylose in order to get it to dry up enough for a cake topper or other decorations that stand out from the cake. The other downside to buying your fondant is that it's very expensive. Duff's is available at Michaels and I always use one of their coupons to get it. They had a special 50% off coupon this week so I was able to get this for less than normal. I have another cake coming up soon that is going to need a lot of black so this was great timing for that coupon for me! Fondant, stored properly, can stay fresh up to 2 months and can be used for decorations up to 6 months. So this black fondant, though it was expensive, will be used up before the holidays.

Free form hot pink royal icing flowers

The flowers were pretty fun to do. I don't use a lot of royal icing. One batch will last me a month easily so this was a first for me. I am mostly self taught so off to YouTube I went to see how to make these. Now I get to pass it onto you! First you cover a hard surface, such as really thick cardboard or wood base, with parchment paper. Just tape the edges over to the back of your hard surface. Then mix up your colored royal icing. Put that into your piping bag with the tip you want to use and then cover that tip. Royal icing dries out VERY quickly. If you want to follow a pattern just print it out and place it under the parchment before you tape it down. Then just carefully pipe out the royal icing over the pattern lines. These flowers were supposed to be whimsical so I just jumped in and started piping. Remember to pipe at least double what you think you are going to need...triple if your tip is very small and your pattern delicate. You will have breakage. I piped out 30 knowing I'd need 14 and broke 3 of those. After piping let them sit for overnight to dry hard. Then, using a palette knife, gently lift them up off the parchement. You can attach them to the cake using more royal icing. In fact, if you cover the tip of your piping bag from when you piped your design out onto the parchment, and then seal that up into a ziplock bag, it will still be fresh for you to use for placing your royal icing pieces onto your cake.

Close up of the cake topper

As I mentioned, it's hard to get the black purchased fondant to dry up hard enough for a cake topper. So what I did was mix in a whole bunch of tylose powder, kneaded it well, and then formed my pieces. I made a center post with a dowel and covered it with the black fondant. I stuck that into a styrofoam block and let it dry. Then I rolled out the curli-ques and let those dry up over night. Even then I probably could have let them dry for another day or two to get really hard. I used royal icing that I had tinted black to attach the pieces to the center post and then let those dry for about an hour. Finally I added the royal icing flowers, placed it into the top of the cake and decorated with hot pink buttercream and candy pearls to match the decorations on the side of the cake.

The cake fit the black, white and pink color scheme perfectly and looked beautiful on the cake table for the event! Everyone thought it was just gorgeous. And that's a huge paycheck for a caker!

Next week brings cupcakes again and the two weeks after that bring two very different wedding cakes! Lots to share with you! See you next Sunday!

Cat

Picnic Basket Cupcakes

Happy Sunday! This week brings a Family Reunion Picnic that required Picnic themed cupcakes! These are some of the finished cupcakes before they were packaged up and delivered for the picnic. I made both chocolate and vanilla cupcakes, all topped with vanilla buttercream as well as the fondant tablecloths, baskets, flowers and royal icing ladybugs I shared with you a couple of weeks ago.

There are two things about cupcakes. One is that they seem like they are easy to make. The other is that they go stale really quickly. Compared to a wedding cake, cupcakes are easy to make. But whenever you try to make any more than a dozen they become a bit more challenging than one would expect. But since they are baked in paper cups that allow air to permeate them and start to dry them out you will find you have a more limited time span in which to make and decorate them and still present a fresh product.

There are a few tips that will help you out in a case like this where 3 doz of these were needed. First off, as you noticed from my previous blog, the decorations were made a couple of weeks in advance so it was more assembling the pieces to the cupcakes after baking than decorating them. You can bake the cupcakes in foil wrappers which will help with drying out but, in most cases, the wrappers will be paper. So the best thing to do is bake them at the last moment possible. I aim for less than 24 hours before they will be served if possible. So I bake them, cool them and then place them into the carriers. You can get these at any Michaels or cake decorating store or even just save the plastic carriers from the muffins you buy at the grocery store and, after cleaning and drying well, use those for transportation and to help your cupcakes stay nice and moist. After placing inside the carrier then top with icing and any decorations you may want to use. This leads to less handling of the cupcakes, less air that gets into the sides where you touch the wrappers and less of a chance that you will mess one up after the icing and decorations are placed on top. To place this type of decoration I used royal icing as "glue" between the pieces. The tablecloths stuck to the fresh buttercream but then to adhere the baskets and flowers I used royal icing. It dries hard and fast so you take less of a chance of the decorations getting broken during transportation. Even if that transportation is from the counter of your kitchen to your kitchen table.

Close up

But, in the end, it's fun when a client sees something like these adorable Picnic Basket Cupcakes and thinks they are the cutest things she's ever seen. That's big payment for a caker and she gets to be proud of what she is serving all day long.

This upcoming week brings a wedding cake! Lots of work to get it done but I'll share the finished product next Sunday!

Cat

4th of July Pinwheel Cake

HAPPY 4th of JULY USA!

I hope everyone out there has a wonderful holiday filled with family and friends, fun and fireworks! We sure are!

In order to celebrate this holiday for our family I decided a special cake was in order. And, as always, I decided to try to extend my caking knowledge at the same time by learning a new technique and pushing myself a bit more!

Since I had to learn a new technique to make the pinwheel design I had decided upon I thought I'd share all of those steps with you! Step One is pictured below:

Step One: Blue square and stripes

First I had to make a square of colored fondant that was mixed with tylose so it would dry faster. I made it a bit smaller than I wanted to end up with since I knew I'd have to roll it out again after I added the stripes. The stripes were cut from white fondant with a ruler. Then I brushed just a bit of water on the back of each stripe and laid them out on the blue fondant. I let this set up for a minute then carefully rolled the piece out again. You have to be very careful to roll it out a bit in each direction, horizontally, vertically as well as corner to corner in order to preserve your white fondant design and not distort it too much. You also do not want to roll hard enough that you press the white design all the way through your colored fondant. You want the back of the piece to be one solid color.

Step Two: Trimming and cutting

The cake I made is a 6x4 so I knew I wanted the pinwheel to hang over just a teeny bit so I trimmed the final square to 6x6 then cut in the fold lines for the pinwheel. These are cut all the way through for folding later on when it sets up enough to do that. Then the piece is left to dry for a few hours. The trick is to let it set up enough that it will roll without collapsing right away but not so set up that it cracks. So check it about once an hour till you reach that stage.

Step Three: Folding and Supporting

The final step before allowing it to dry completely is folding the pinwheel into it's final shape. If you have ever done this with paper then you already know how to fold it up. The only difference is that you are not hooking the fondant onto the fondant but rather, folding the tips down so they can be used to adhere the rolled pieces to the flat pieces with a bit of water. If you don't know how to fold a pinwheel you can do what I did and find a video on Google. They are easy to learn how to make. Once the rolls where adhered to the flat corners (I could let go and they didn't come back up again) I used rolled up plastic wrap (I use Press and Seal) to make round supports for the rolls so that they wouldn't collapse before dry. Then I let it dry for 24 hours. I then removed the supports and let it dry for another 12 hours before placing it on the cake.

Step Fou: Placing the Pinwheel on the Cake

To place the pinwheel onto the fully decorated cake I made a base out of the same color of fondant with tylose that I used to make the pinwheel out of in step one. I made the circle a bit smaller than the center of the pinwheel, about 1-1/2 inch, stuck a small dowel into it to look like the "stick" of the pinwheel and then set it onto the center of the cake. I then brushed the top with a bit of water and placed the pinwheel on top. I gave it a few minutes to set up then used red frosting to make the "button" in the center.

This was so much fun that I'm now planning a cake with lots of mini pinwheels on it for Easter next year! Lots of different colors and decorations, of course!LOL!

I hope you all have a great week. Those cupcakes I told you about last week are up for me this week. I'll post final photos of how those turn out on Sunday! Have a very Happy 4th of July!

Cat

Step One: Making Miniature Picnic Baskets

Happy Sunday! Today's post is all about the work that goes into making the little sugarpaste pieces that go on a custom cake. One of the most common questions I get about custom cakes is why they cost so much. A "grocery store" cake is typically a standard buttercream and takes all of 20 mins to make...not including baking time. You do a quick icing job then pipe around the cake, using a textured tip, and trim with another textured tip...top with buttercream flowers and you are done. A custom cake often has sugarpaste pieces that go on it as well as intricate piping that could take days for the pieces and hours for the piping. Today's project is an example of the work that goes into a custom sugarpaste piece. I have an order for 30 custom cupcakes coming up in two weeks so I'm working on the sugar pieces that go on top. I begin with marshmallow fondant (which is marshmallows and powdered sugar) and add tylose to it so it will dry quickly. I formed a "snake" out of it and cut more or less the same size pieces for my baskets. I rolled them into balls then, using the matt as my flat surface, I gently squared off the sides to make rectangles. Then I used the exacto knife to gently score the "lid" of the basket. Then let them dry overnight.

Step Two: Basecoat of the "paint"

Next comes the painting of the "wood" color. This is just vodka, or any clear alcohol, and gell food dye. In this case, chocolate brown was used for my primary wood coloring. This takes a few coats and you have to let them set up and sort of dry to a tacky finish between each coat. I used the exacto knife to score the center of the lid after the first coat went on so that the color of the second coat would help define the lid opening. Once again, these need to set up and dry overnight.

Step Three: Detail painting

Using a regular brown "paint" I used a detail brush to paint on the basket weave lines. I had saved my paint from the night before to help brush out anywhere the original paint color didn't cover evenly. Then I let it set up again overnight.

Final Step: Adding the "leather" straps

Day three of this project and I'm finally to the "leather" straps of the baskets. This is just a darker colored fondant that's been mixed with a whole lotta tylose so it dries very very quickly. It's rolled out thin and trimmed into a square of 3 inches wide by 4 inches long. Then that is divided into 1-1/2 inch by 4 inch sections and then strips are cut..making each strip 1-1/2 inches long. They are pressed onto the basket and using a skewer I positioned them so that they are in a "carry away" position. Then let them finish drying. You will only have a few minutes to mess with the straps before they are dry to use the skewer to arrange them into whatever position you want them very quickly.







So there are the baskets, completed and ready to go onto the mini tableclothes I made along with the flowers and grass. So before the cupcakes are even baked I have spent at least 3 hours making the pieces as well as 3 days of drying time for the handpainting. I'll post the completed cupcakes the weekend of the 9th! In the meantime all of this has to dry solid so after the cupcakes are baked and iced I can simply top them off with their mini cake toppers for presentation!







Next weekend is the weekend of the 4th...only one cake that weekend but I have grand plans! Can't wait to see how a new technique turns out!







Cat

Star Trek Father's Day Cake

Happy Sunday and HAPPY FATHER'S DAY! This week's cake is for the Father's in my life. Both my husband and my son-in-law are Star Trek fans. Unfortunately I don't get to make these cakes for clients since it's copyrighted (can't make money off of copyrighted items) but I DO get to make them for family! And this one was fun to do but a challenge when you know you are going to be critiqued by true fans. In fact, there's a third Trekkie coming to dinner who will be taking a look too!

This cake is handcarved from a half sheet cake. It's yellow cake with vanilla buttercream filling and then covered in buttercream and then fondant. The fondant was handpainted with two colors of gold and trimmed in black. The black was shiny and picked up the gold off the board so that it looks like there is gold in the trim but it's solid black. As I have mentioned before, it's easy to paint on fondant. You just use a clear alcohol of some sort, like vodka or clear vanilla, and mix it with either luster dust or gel food colors to make a thin paint consistancy then paint on in layers. For this cake I painted on a darker "old" gold luster dust paint and then a shiny "new" gold over that to give it a bit more depth and add to the design of the insignia. Just make sure to stop and let the paint dry between coats or the new coat will start to "pick up" the old coat and you won't get an even surface.

The "secret" this week is about carving. I always freeze my cakes (bake, cool, torte or level as needed then wrap well with cling wrap or, my favorite "Press and Seal" wrap then freeze over night up to one month) because it gives moisture inside the cake that makes it taste much better. But for carving freezing is a must. The cake doesn't have to be hard frozen but it helps. I use a serrated bread knife for the large cuts and a small paring knife for the fine cuts. This is much easier to do when the cake is solid and not soft like it is when it has thawed out. You can either fill the cake before or after carving, your choice. I usually fill before carving but in this case, with such a flat cake, it was easier to fill after. Anything with fine edges or curves should be carved after filling. Then I covered it with a crumbcoat and let it sit overnight to thaw and settle. It doesn't have to be that long, you can wait 3 hours and then finish but I prefer to let it settle overnight when time allows.

There are two reasons for waiting for the cake to thaw and settle. If you try to put the final buttercream or fondant layer on a frozen cake, as it thaws it will release gasses that can escape the crumbcoat layer but not the final layer and you can end up with gas bubbles on your cake. In buttercream they will pop and part of your buttercream will just suddenly fall off your cake. In fondant it will make a huge bubble on the side of the cake and even if you pop it you will not be able to smooth it out. The second reason to let it sit for awhile is to allow the spaces in the filling part of the cake to settle. Some of your filling could squish out and create a bulge around the middle of your cake. If you wait till it settles then you can smooth this bulge out and have a smooth cake side.

Last tip that someone gave me this week on frosting a cake. When you finish frosting with buttercream, before adding the final trim of frosting or ribbon to the bottom, run an offset spatula between the cake board and the cake, just an inch or so from the edge, to break the seal. This will allow any trapped gas or air to escape. Give that an hour or so then trim as normal. This helps the gas/air to escape from between the crumbcoat and final buttercream layer. If you are covering your cake in fondant remember to either mist the cake with water or spread on piping gell so the fondant will adhere to your cake. By the time the cake has set for 3-24 hours the buttercream crumbcoat will be dry and the fondant will have nothing to stick to so make sure to moisten it so it will.

Next week I begin work on miniatures for cupcakes that are coming up early next month for a family reunion. I'll share with you the steps and the final products next Sunday!

In the meantime we are going to have a great day filled with BBQ, yummy cake and two great Father's to honor!

Cat

Goofy Themed Grad Cake

This week's cake was a Graduation Cake for a special Grad I've been blessed to get to know over the past 4 years. This kid is something special so it was a wonderful thing to get to design and then present his High School Grad Cake to him this weekend.

We are all Disney Fans in both families but due to copyright law I can't make a Disney figure without their permission...easier to buy Trump Towers...so I needed to fit the licensed figurine into the design instead. Well, this kid has had some uphill climbs in his life and this was a big one for him to finally reach the top so the idea was to have his favorite character standing on top of the mountain of boulders, each step noting a year of school that he completed. You can see a close up of the steps below: And he's a chocolate fan...ok, he's beyond a fan...so there was no question on what flavor the cake was going to be. I have made him my "there can't be too much chocolate cake" cake and he ate it up with delight so my challenge here was to top THAT cake with even MORE chocolate! The answer seemed clear...top my normal chocolately cake with ganache! YUM! So this cake is my triple chocolate cake with fresh chocolate buttercream filling then covered with chocolate buttercream and finally topped with a thick layer of chocolate ganache. That was the ticket! The Grad and his family loved the cake...and that was, after all, the goal. So Happy Graduation Nick! We are proud of you!!



Ok, so each week I share a "secret". Well, this weeks secret is for the more advanced caker. For the boulders I "marbled" fondant. I used white fondant then with skewers I spread on lines of cream, brown and black gel food coloring then gently kneaded it into the white, making sure to only make a few turns. Then I flattened it out and drew more lines of black. This is because I wanted the predominate color of the boulders to be grey. Finally I made a snake of that marbled fondant and a snake of white fondant and laid them side by side. Then twisted them, flattened them out and twisted again. Finally I was able to make a snake, cut it in half (so one side is flat, one rounded) and mould the boulders out of that. Finally, once they were all in place on the cake (yup, there's frosted cake under there) I used a misting spray bottle to spray the boulders to give them a bit of shine. Give it a try..it's a LOT of fun!



This upcoming week brings Father's Day and a very special First Father's Day Cake! Can't wait to share it with you next Sunday!



Cat