Life and Cake: 2008

Friday, October 31, 2008

Cookies for School

These next two weeks are going to be full of baking: end of school parties, James' birthday... planning to make

Cookies for James' class, for end of term / birthday
Cookies for Sophie's class
Birthday cake for James
MORE cookies for party favors

So these are the first on my list, cookies for James' class, wearing the school uniform. Cookies are lemon flavored, recipe from a friend.

Hmm. Didn't plan my piping well enough - it would probably have looked better piping the tie over the white flooded background, cause right now only the stripes are standing out : P. Actually, the cuff, band details could probably all have been overpiped too..

Isn't it just typical that the least interesting part of cookie decorating - colour mixing - should be the most time consuming? I only had two colours besides white to mix up and I was already moaning and groaning over the time it took to get there. And isn't it disgusting how much gel colour it takes to build up to a nice bold shade? And frustrating that guidebooks always tell you to add colour "a dab at a time"? At one point I was pushing gollops of gel into my mix, heck about your "dabs"!

The other mistake I made was in the consistency of my soft flow icing... I don't know why I was so stingy with the water. My lines kept breaking up or showing air bubbles in it.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

First Commercial Deal!

Okay, I made a loss, but I had so much fun doing these, it didn't matter.

James' teacher asked if I could make cupcakes for her daughter's birthday and I was really happy to. The recipe was from the Cupcake bakeshop again, Vanilla cupcakes. Blew my budget by getting vanilla sugar and vanilla beans - didn't have time to make my own vanilla sugar, unfortunately. Also, used all the good stuff - Nielson-Massey vanilla extract, Lurpak butter... The cream cheese frosting was much appreciated - funny why Singaporeans are all so fearful of butter. I personally feel nauseous thinking about eating buttercream, although I will decorate generously with it : ).

Some of the bits look really messy to me. Had some trouble with some of my fondant shapes. Cut them out the night before and stored them over night in an airconditioned room. They were nicely dried on top, but their backs were stuck on the cue cards I use to move them around on. Must remind myself to ditch the cue cards next time. Will they stick to a cookie sheet? I suppose if I sprinkled cornflour on it first, it might not?

Mmm - fresh out of the oven. They smelt good!!

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Teachers Day cupcakes

Again, from the Cupcake bakeshop, for teachers day... Hadn't a clue how to whip cream so ended up with lavender butter on my first attempt... I saved for use on toast, and also in the cream cheese frosting. Yum! Had some problems finding lavender, fortunately happened to pass a tea shop in the basement of Raffles City Shopping Centre which carried it.

Searched youtube and found a helpful video on whipping cream. Phew. Am really enjoying all of Chockylit's recipes, and want to work through them all if I can : P !

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes

Hooray, another excuse to bake! This time, Children's day celebrations at church. We were supposed to bring 12 snacks each for every child we have, so that was 24 from me. Went to theCupcake Bakeshop site, which I think has the loveliest cupcakes ever, with such interesting flavours! The ice cream cone cupcakes looked so appealing, thought they would go down well with the kids (they did : ) Wonderful recipe, very straightforward, not a problem to carry off for newbie like me. Great tip on filling the cones, I really went conservative, and even then still had some spillage...

The other useful tip was slashing bottoms of sturdy white cupcake holders, and using that as an ice cream cone stand - that helped a lot when icing the cones and later for transporting them. I supposed I could have baked them stood up in those cupcake holders on a baking sheet, but I used my muffin pans instead, because I have 2 of those : ). I had to stuff aluminum foil around each cone for stability. Although when filled with batter, the cones are quite stable enough on their own, once the cake starts to rise, it only takes a gentle shake to send them spilling over... as happened with my first batch : P.

Here's my reject pile... casualties from the first batch, plus one "Ran out of icing" and one "Icing too cold"

Sophie enjoyed them!

The cakes themselves turned out really well, soft and fluffy, very tasty. Buttercream icing was too sweet for my taste, as always, but what to do - as I understand, you need the sugar for the icing to be able to hold up at all. The ice cream cone did get mushy fast, especially in our hot humid weather, but not too badly.

Black Forest Adventures

More baking : )

Last weekend, for a friends' birthday, I thought I'd try a black forest cake. I had real difficulty with the genoise though... came out really dense, not light and airy... think the bain marie part did me in, hee hee, all because of laziness! I used my medium sized saucepan and bowl, which left not a lot of room to whisk 6 eggs and sugar vigorously. So after transferring to the mixer and beating for requisite 6-8 minutes, I was still not achieving "a ribbon that stays on the surface for a few seconds".. : P. But the volume did triple!!! Other than that, wonder if the way I added the dry ingredients affected it? The book says "slowly" - but what IS "slowly"? Like very small trickle slowly? Or "within 1 minute" slowly? Alarmed by the way putting in quickly reduced volume, but also remember reading somewhere that you do not want to overbeat once flour is added, or you will get a tough cake. So don't know what the right pace is. Also had a problem with my springform pan, which was an expensive looking free gift from Meyer, but also non-stick! So my cake didn't rise as much as it probably could, because it was pulling away from the sides, and worse - my batter kept dripping out the bottom!!!! Asked my baking guru friend, who recommended a kaiser pan from phoon huat. So will buy when I next attempt something requiring that.

Here it is... ended up using 1.5 recipes of genoise, because although I could have split one into three layers, they would have been REALLY FLIMSY discs. Anyway, what saved it was Griottines (sp?) from Culina...used a whole jar (including juices!) and they were so yum. Whipped the cream ok too, having learnt from a previous cupcake experience - will have to put that up later just for the whipped cream lesson alone! Fortunately our friends love alcohol so they enjoyed the cake!

Saturday, August 16, 2008

A Charlie and Lola Cake for Sophie

So Sophie just celebrated her 2nd birthday - and I really wanted to make a cake for her, since I had made one for James' 3rd.

There it is! James' Blues Clues cake! I didn't think i was up to baking the cake itself, so I used a Betty Crocker instant mix (it still came out lopsided!) Then I made up some royal icing and iced away. Took me seven hours. Mad. I expect a really experienced person could have whipped this out in ... 2 hours? There were loads of holes, but these are cunningly hidden by my carefully angled, non-flash photo : ).

This time round, i thought I would try my hand at actually baking the thing from scratch - no more instant mix! A friend had recommended Baking Illustrated. So, no time to muck around with piping decorations - I was going to go with an icing topper. Sophie really loves Charlie and Lola, and. I trawled the net sighing over said cake toppers being sold on e-bay. Unfortunately, being ever last minute, I only had a week, and I was pretty sure nothing would make it here on time. Happily, I found out that Bake-It-Yourself will print out icing toppers of your own custom images -and they only need 3 working days! i filled out their template and e-mailed it off - horrer, they came back the next day to say their printer was down and sorry, they wouldn't be able to do it.

Yikes. How on earth was I going to pipe Charlie and Lola on a cake? If mainly-blue-Blues Clues took me 7 hours, i think Charlie and Lola would take me several days. So I remembered about fondant, which I had once played about with 15 years ago in school (Friday afternoon classes were given to all kinds of things - I did philosophy (in which my teacher mainly talked about Freud and sex), cake decorating, creative writing.. can't remember what else). Watched a few "how-to" videos on youtube, and plunged right in. So here are my building blocks...

Lola #2 - thinner and scarier looking than Lola #1, who was fat and friendly, but melted to death. Headless until just before the candles were lit. her skirt took ages!!!

Sizzles and a ladybug we call Sidney. Yes, I know, Sidney is a spider.

Hearts and butterflies in Charlie and Lola patterns - #1 and #3 were easy to do - just drew on rolled fondant with edible marker ink. The poppy pattern (#2) was more complicated - long tube of white wrapped round with red, sliced up and tiled, rolled flat, black dots using edible marker pen.

Text - someone tell me if there is an easier way, short of buying cookie cutters! I printed out the text on a piece of paper, laid it over rolled fondant (big enough for one letter), used a craft knife to poke the outline of the letter through the paper onto the fondant, took off the paper, used a cutting tool to cut out the letter. By which time the fondant was pretty dry, so I got lots of uneven edges and fiber-y bits. But I was really pleased with it anyway! Fonts used - American Typewriter and Bodiac.

The finished piece - taduh!
Can you see how slick Lola's sweater is?! I learnt my lesson after numerous casualties, and assembled the cake in an airconditioned room. Took it out to snap the photo - what, 3 minutes? - and already they were starting to ooze!

In the meantime, whilst I was mucking about with the fondant - buying two types - Wilton (not bad - didn't taste great, but like anyone was going to eat the fondant bits anyway - NO ONE in my family would- they peel off all extraneous sugar and scrape away the cream); Phoon Huat - freshly made, cheap, disaster! I rolled it out and couldn't lift it off my non-stick mat. Had to scrape it off with fork, leave mat under hot water, and scrape remainder off after - making one lot-> marshmallow fondant - worked better than the phoon huat stuff, but I think i added too little water. Plus I couldn't get any normal crisco and had to get a huge tin of "butter flavored" crisco, which is SHOCK HORRERS bright yellow. What am i supposed to do with the rest of it?! Anyway, as i said, in the meantime, Bake-It-Yourself had actually e-mailed me again, the same day they wrote to say they couldn't do it, to say they COULD. But over-excitable me, by then thoroughly obsessed with making the fondant stuff work, did not check my e-mails for another three days, by which time I was well invested in the fondant venture. But I still had to buy the cake topper.

So I made another cake.

Cake 2
The icing image turned out really well I thought! I was afraid the colours would come out too dark or smudged, but it came out great. So, it was good having to make this other cake - I tried out the chocolate layer cake recipe from Baking Illustrated, and decided to go with it instead of the yellow layer cake recipe.

About the baking - I finally invested in an oven thermometer and a digital scale, and that has made all the difference. So happy I've managed to bake something soft enough to cut and eat, vs first cake I made for hubby's birthday, which was like a rock, could be anchor for small boat. (but he valiantly ate 2 slices and said it was yummy, wasn't that sweet? We gave the rest away, and our nice friends didn't say anything at all). I forced myself to be super anal and meticulous following the recipes, and they turned out really really well.

Leftover Fondant
One week after, James suddenly begged me to "Please make Mr Men cupcakes". Don't know where that request came from, i suspect my helper must have been trying to distract him from something - this has happened a few times.

James: "i WANT to blow bubbles NOW - yes now, even though it is pouring rain and lightning is striking all around us and several trees have been blown over by gale force winds"

My helper:"Hey, wouldn't it be nice to make cupcakes? Do you want Charlie and Lola, Barney or Mr Men on your cupcakes?"

James:"I WANT to blow ... cupcakes? Mr Men! I WANT Mr Men cupcakes! Mummmmmmy...."

Smart way to head off a tantrum huh? I have to remember this tactic more often - because I will sometimes keep going back and forth with him "But it is raining and you will get struck by lightning" "i don't care, i want to blow bubbles now!" "but you'll get wet and sick and you won't be able to swim.." "I don't care, I want to blow bubbles now!", "we'll do it tomorrow, ok? if its sunny?" "I don't care... " etc. etc. etc.

So anyway, he was supposed to help, but he fell asleep and woke up only in time to stick the Mr Men ontop of the cupcakes. The icing is awful messy, but I was pressed for time : ) - we made them in an afternoon. Here they are:

Wanted to make 17 Mr Men for 17 cupcakes, but ran out of fondant. My marshmallow stuff didn't hold up well to being coloured and manipulated. Mr Noisy and Mr Happy are my favorites.

What happened to Lola:

James watched me model everything for a week, and somewhere along the way developed an obsession with "eating Sizzles' eye." So, he actually asked permission to "eat Sizzles please.", and bit off his nose. Usually he loves sugar, but he didn't finish the rest. Sizzles was made of the Wilton stuff, so maybe it really does taste unpleasant? I dunno, I thought it was ok.