Daisy Wedding Cake

Hi all! The wedding was this past weekend, a fourth of July wedding - we had a lovely time even with the unbelievably hot, hot weather. The cake turned out just great and yes, it survived the transport, and no, it did not melt! Who could ask for more? I couldn't have done it without D's help and JJ's good behaviour - love to you both!

The finished cake:

TA DA! You are looking at over 10 lbs of fondant, another 10 lbs of granulated sugar, and overall one hugely heavy cake! We decided to do it in two parts and finish the assembly at the reception, so that it would fit in our fridge and also be liftable by one person.

The lovely bride and groom cutting the cake:

I will be absolutely honest. It was wonderful seeing Kate and Jim pose for the cake cutting photos. But the cake cutting afterward? AIEEEEE!! I nearly had a panic attack. It was rather painful to watch. I think there's a reason that pastry chefs don't go to the weddings they bake for. I was warned that it would take a lot of willpower to relinquish control at the cutting. Generally I was quite good and stayed away, but truthfully I did wander over a few times to supervise. Anyhow, it all tasted delicious though, and the bride and groom loved the cake. What's more important than that?

Here are a few more photos of the whole process. I'm not going to offer you a schedule for making the cake like last time, because it occurred over so many weeks that I lost track of how much time I spent doing things. With JJ at home, I would just work on the daisies whenever she took a nap, or whenever D was able to watch her.

The baking was completed over two days, well-wrapped and then frozen. The icings and fillings were completed the next day, the splitting, filling and crumb-coating the fourth day, and the fondant and flowers were done the night before the wedding.

A few notes:

• Cake recipes from Confetti Cakes by Elisa Strauss
• Icing recipes from Toba Garrett for swiss meringue buttercream and chocolate buttercream
• Lemon curd recipe from How to Bake by Nick Malgieri
• Satin Ice fondant
• Cake supplies from Global Sugar Art

This was probably the cutest part of the wedding:

There were so many children at this wedding, all ages. The wedding cake provided an endless source of entertainment and whenever I looked over, there were a few kids hovering about it. They would go up to have a look, get their photo taken beside it, smell it, and eye it longingly. They would pick up the daisies on the table, turn it over in their fingers, then gingerly put them back down. They were very, very excited for dinner to be done. So cute!

Field of Daisies

Five hundred daisies lined up on my dining room table, in need of cheery yellow centres:

Some royal icing in the appropriate sunny yellow:

Happy daisies! I certainly hope there's enough for the wedding cake. I have about 50 backups in case of breakage.

Doesn't this kind of look like wallpaper?

The wedding count down begins! Tomorrow: tinting 10 lbs of fondant.

A Spooky Wedding Cake

Last Friday the 13th we were invited to a 13th anniversary party in historic Allentown, and I was asked to make a special cake for the occasion....spooky themed, of course!

And it turned into an surprise wedding. Which means that really, I made a wedding cake! It was a hectic week considering I was traveling back and forth to NYC for my class every day and coming home to work on the cake, but I'm so happy I did it. It was a ton of fun to construct, and the couple who asked me are just super nice and I didn't want to say no. It helped that I had sketched a design to follow. I chose 10", 8" and 6" cake sizes, each with about 1.5" layers inside to get the most height possible. I ordered my first bucket of Satin Ice fondant, which is what my boss uses and actually tastes pretty good, along with a whole bunch of other nifty decorating supplies.

So, according to all the online guides I could find, this amount of cake was supposed to serve about 75 people. The hosts were expecting up to 100 guests, so I made another 2 dozen cupcakes, an idea which I have to credit to Cake Journal - too cute! The faces and eyes were cut from fondant, and the mouths were drawn on with food colour marker...also my first time using such a tool. It worked just like a regular marker, which made it feel a bit weird to be using..

Remember these little guys? I had a whole slew of little characters I wanted to add to the cake, which I started making early on in the week...you can store them covered with plastic wrap and use them when you're ready. Who knew my gumpaste flower cutters would come in so handy...I made the spider legs with a daisy cutter and added two little black balls, and made the bat wings using an orchid cutter, slightly reshaped. My favourites though, are still the pumpkins.

If you want to hear all the details, keep reading and I'll give you the whole cake schedule.

How to Make Your Own Spooky Cake for 75 People on a Friday:
(...when you can't do any decorating on the Friday...if you can, you can push the schedule forward by a day)

Sunday:
1) Up to a week before, make all your decorations out of fondant so they have plenty of time to dry and you can see how they turn out. Make extras in case anything breaks. I made about 4 skulls, 4 pumpkins, 2 ghosts, 4 bats, and 2 tombstones.

Anything upright should be cut from a thicker layer of fondant. Attach fondant pieces by moistening slightly with water and a brush. You can use a toothpick for the details, like poking eyes, or making ridges in the pumpkins.

Tuesday:
2) Three to four days before, you can bake all your cakes, remove them carefully from the pans, wait until completely cool, and wrap really well in plastic wrap before putting them in the freezer. Not fridge! You will have suspended them in animation and they will taste fantastic. , with a nice fine, dense texture that will be easy to work with. Choose a recipe that works for wedding cakes, such as a pound cake. I used the chocolate and vanilla recipes from the Confetti Cakes book, and turned the vanilla one into a lemon cake (yeah, I know. I never get tired of this flavour...it's just so good). Oh and the cupcakes were Red Velvet.

3) Prepare your simple syrup to brush the cakes with. Equal parts sugar and water, bring to a boil and remove from heat.

4) Make lemon curd, and save the egg whites for use in tomorrow's buttercream.

Wednesday:
5) Remove your cakes from the freezer; leave wrapped until ready to use.

6) Prepare your icing...I made the swiss meringue buttercream recipe I learned in class, which made about 2.5 quarts. Half was turned into chocolate buttercream by adding cooled, whipped chocolate ganache (chopped chocolate melted into heated heavy cream) and the rest was saved for the lemon cake and cupcakes.

7) Unwrap your cakes, trim them nice and even, brush on the syrup, and do the filling and crumb coating. I decided to pipe the entire filling, but didn't think I needed to spread it flat, and when the cake was cut you could still see all the tubes of icing...not a big deal. Also, when you're using a filling like lemon curd, pipe a dam around the perimeter of the cake to prevent it from leaking out:

Stick everything in the fridge overnight, covered in some plastic wrap:

8) Now, even though you're tired, you should really tint your fondant for the next day, because this is TIME-CONSUMING! It took D and I about 30 minutes to tint all the purple by hand. The mixer didn't seem like it could handle kneading the fondant, which is too bad. We tinted about 4 lbs of fondant total which was more than enough. Don't forget to make black, too. About 1/2 pound should be fine.

Thursday
9) Cover your cake board. I bought a 1/4" masonite board which is pretty sturdy. For a bigger cake, you'd probably want to get a 1/2" thick one. Wrap it with cake-decorator's foil or florist's foil, or if you don't have either, just use wrapping paper like I did. With the cake cardboard under the bottom layer and all the fondant, it shouldn't get too greasy.

10)Pull out your cakes, and then knead the purple fondant to warm it up. Cover all the cakes with fondant. With a serrated knife, trim the cardboard base flush with the cake. To make the swirls, roll out small pieces of black fondant and taper the tips. Wet a small brush with water, and paint a swirl directly on the cake. Don't use too much water, or else the black will run everywhere! Carefully follow the water swirl with the black fondant and press gently to adhere.

I think I've written about stripes before in another tutorial:

11) Dowel your cake. I'm not going to explain it here because there are hundreds of tutorials on the internet. I like using a stake through the whole thing to give it more support. Assemble the tiers 2 and 3.

12) Make a small batch of royal icing. Pipe your spiderweb design on the second tier, and pipe some more webs onto some parchment to dry. They break easily, so pipe more than you actually need. Now, attach two skewers to the back of the moon and 13 sign with royal. It'll dry hard as rock by the next day. Next, tint the remaining royal icing purple and pipe the borders.


13) Oops, I forgot about the word plaque...that's just a circle of fondant and food colour pen. Make sure it's still pliable and adhere to the cake with a little water.

Friday Party Day:

14) Stick on the piped spiderwebs with a dot of royal icing, because they're not going to travel well in a box. Pack all the rest of your cute little decorations in a paper-towel padded tupperware, and bring a pastry bag of royal icing along with a small round tip and the tip you used for the borders.

15) Once you get to the party, insert the moon and 13 sign and glue on all the decos with royal. Pipe your last border, and you're done! Try your best not to drop the cake now :)

The cake dissected...

Fondant Pumpkins

I'm test driving these pumpkin babies for a big edible project I have coming up in a couple weeks!

Other cake decorating news: I'm registered for Toba Garrett's class in NYC, starting in just over a week! It's the first course of a three-part series. Post secondary education is important!

Blue & White Wedding Cake

I'm here to show you my newest cake project:

I spent this past weekend making a miniature wedding cake as a practice project for my portfolio (that's right, I am making a PORTFOLIO. First ever!). I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, except for a few minor things that probably aren't noticeable to anyone besides the decorator. If you're interested in my critique, scroll on toward the bottom - I'll add my notes there.)

This would have been done and eaten sooner, except that the weather was absolutely horrid yesterday which prevented me from taking any decent photographs with my little point-and-shoot camera. So, today was the big photo day. I even put up some wrapping paper behind the cake to hide messy background (talk about going pro).

My goals for this project were to practice several decorating techniques for my portfolio: hand-molded roses, scroll piping, stripes and dots, applique and detailed cut-outs, borders, doweling and working with multiple tiers. The roses were made with fondant, which I find easier to work with than gumpaste. The fondant doesn't dry as quickly and has this kind of pretty soft glow to them (that is, when they're still semi-damp. I don't know how they'll look in two days...)

I made the doily cut-outs using a scallop-edged cookie cutter, a small round tip and a petal tip; the whole thing is glued on with a bit of water.

Why, yes! That is real cake inside! That's a lemon blueberry cake (I think this my latest favourite combo) on top, and chocolate on the bottom.

The middle tier's real, too...

Yummy.
The cakes have been divided up and sent to good homes around Columbus.

Here are a few pictures of the process...I traced the stencil design onto parchment using food colouring, and then pressed the parchment onto the fondant, kind of like one of those temporary tattoos.

Making a lovely mess in the kitchen, much to D's dismay.

Minor problems with the cake:

1) Top square layer is too big for the circular base. I was thinking the sizing would work out just right at 8", 6" and 4", but I forgot that a circle is a lot smaller than a square...always measure is the lesson.

2) Top tier is slightly uneven at the top and some sides, which I tried to hide in the photos. This is a result of becoming tired and impatient during the most important part of the process...the layering and crumb coating. I guess I could have fixed it by applying another layer of buttercream to even it out, but I got lazy. Oh well.

3) The blue food colouring I used for stenciling isn't fully covered by the royal icing. I've never piped over-top of a design before, so it took a bit of getting used to.

4) The lines on the second tier aren't all straight or lined up along the centre of the cake. I free-handed it, when I should have marked it off first with a ruler.

5) I forgot to cover the bottom edge of the cake with a ribbon or piping to cover the board. Doh.

6) The fondant started cracking at the corners and edges, probably from being overworked during tinting. There you have it, my critique. Next time, I think I'm just going to cover a styrofoam form so that I don't have to worry about the cake going stale if I'm delayed by the weather.

My last day at the bakery is this coming Saturday, which seems crazy since it feels like I just started working there. But, it will be good to have a few days off before our move. I've been busy with some other things too...working on a new resume and putting together my portfolio. I've just sent off my internship application to a popular bakery in NYC, so I've got my fingers crossed about that.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A Cake with Blue Dots, and more!

In today's second blog installment, I've got more cakes to show you, starting with the one I made for my volunteer job this week. This one was number 4 in a series of fondant exercises, and the practice is going well. The cake is actually baked from scratch this time (I usually use cake mix, which is the norm for these volunteer cakes), which took longer than I expected, and as a result I was a little short on decorating time. That's what I get for not baking the cake ahead of schedule! So, I didn't mix any new colours and just used what I already had - like this bright blue I made for the fish cake. I cut out all the dots using different sized piping tips and pasted them on with a dab of water, arranging them from the bottom up. It's not my favourite decorating job, but it's not that bad either. I think it's the colour I dont' like. Anyhow, I used chocolate chips for the writing, which I melted in a ziploc bag and stuck a plain tip in. This seems to be my prettiest writing job yet, if I say so myself.

This week I received a few pictures of the cakes I've been helping with! Remember how I made two cake layers way taller than normal? Well, here they are, the top and middle tier. I don't think people would have really gave it much thought. See how smooth the icing is?? That's what a month of practice will do! Imagine if this was my full time job!

Here's the bridal shower cake from last weekend. It was meant to match the invitations, which were aqua and chocolate brown. I never saw the finished cake, so it was fun to get the picture in my email this week. Like the dress? Like the daisies? Guess who made those? ME!! (and in my opinion, they're the best part of this cake)

Alright, enough gloating. Must stay modest. Stay tuned for more!

Yellow Stripes!

My best effort so far, what do you think?

Hooray, I had absolutely no problems with the fondant today! It totally behaved itself, and I think I owe it to those pointers I got from Baking911. I made sure the cake was completely even and didn't put too much buttercream on the outside (actually, it was more of just a crumb coat). Perhaps it was the fondant smoothing tool I dug out of my cake decorating box? It seemed to ease the fondant into place quite well. The whole thing was over in less than 2 minutes, no cracks, no pleats, no tears, just a shiny... smooth... flawless... marshmallow-looking surface! Happy sigh of relief. Notice how I avoided garish colours today? Yes, I tried. It's more of a garden party kind of cake, I think. Maybe for a tea party of some sort. Speaking of tea parties, I've been curious about making petit fours after seeing them here. Don't they look super cute and delicious?

Getting back to the topic at hand, here's how I did it, if you want to try this at home: once the cake is covered in fondant, place a smaller circle on top and using a toothpick, lightly mark its edge to create a guide for your stripes:

Then, mix your colour choice in fondant for stripes (about a baseball-sized lump for this 8" cake). Measure from the guide edge to the base of the cake (mine was 4.5"). Cut out your 1" wide strips with a ruler (I used this quilting ruler thing - don't forget to wash it first) and pizza cutter:

Now, at one edge of each strip, cut a round concave edge using the circle you traced and a sharp knife.

Wet the back of the fondant strip with a little bit of water. Don't get it too drippy, or it'll go sliding everywhere and the colours will bleed. With curved edge facing up, paste the strip from bottom working up. Use a right angled object to make sure the stripe is completely straight (I suppose you can skip this, but don't blame me if your stripes don't line up when you get around the whole cake):

Work your way around, leaving 1" spaces between stripes, until the cake is 3/4 covered. Measure again and make sure you have enough space and enough strips to cover this last quarter properly - I had to cheat and cut the last strip about 1.2" and spaced it 1.3". You could probably measure more precisely, but I just eyeballed it (I'm a lazy perfectionist).

That's pretty much it! I piped the bottom edge and inner circle edge with buttercream, and glued on the fondant daisies I made in my last post. Really I should have used gumpaste, but I was too lazy (there's that word again) to make new flowers. According to several book and internet sources, a fondant cake can be stored in a covered box in the coolest spot in your house, and it should keep about 2 days with non-perishable fillings (please correct me if I'm wrong, because I don't want to get blamed for anyone eating mouldy cake). If you're traveling with it, well, good luck.

I drove this thing to the hospice center in the late afternoon, in the 95 degree heat, with the air conditioning on full blast. Hopefully the birthday girl enjoys it! Incidentally, I ran into the volunteer coordinator, who asked me if I wanted to help teach the next volunteer cake decorating class, so of course I said yes, I would love to!

There's another birthday cake I'm scheduled for next week, so expect to see more fondant. Hopefully I'll also have some knitting to blog about soon too!

More Fondant Practice: Blue Fish Cake

Delicious little cupcake for my afternoon snack

Before I show you my tacky fish cake, here's the fondant chrysanthemum in action on top of this vanilla chocolate cupcake. I put this under a cake dome and sure enough, the humidity caused the fondant to soften. I've seen it with my own eyes! Fondant doesn't harden permanently! Hence bad for decorations that need to hold their shape well.

Ooh. This is probably the tackiest looking cake I have decorated to date, and I didn't even do it on purpose to embarrass D at his lab party... it just didn't come out quite right...looked much better in my head. Actually, I was going to make stripes...did I mention it was a delicious cake inside?

Once it was deemed officially tacky, I practice my piping skills on it

Aside from colour choice being a little revolting, I once again had some major problems with fondant. Even though it was from a fresh package, the fondant seemed a little stiff after I added all the colouring, but I carried on, since it was still soft-ish. Some tiny cracks at the edges when I rolled it out to 1/4" thick. But, I draped it on, and...cracking!! At the top edges!! Ugh. Plus, the buttercream was squishing around like mad and I regretted having removed the cake from the fridge for so long before covering it with fondant. The result you see is my effort to patch the big holes with vibrant green fish and polka dots.

So, I then did what I usually do these days: whenever I have any question about something, I immediately go online to see what Google comes up with about the subject. And not surprisingly, I found lots of good info on the search term "my fondant is cracking". In hindsight, I should have done a little research before making the second cake. One particularly good website (though a little visually scattered) was Baking911, which I used before when reading up on cookie-making, which offered lots of suggestions for how to work with fondant. Cracking, I learned, results from several possibilities:

• Fondant is rolled too thickly, so when you drape it on the weight of the excess is too heavy and begins to crack at the cake edge.
• Fondant is too dry (in which case knead some shortening)
• Fondant isn't kneaded well enough (it needs to be very malleable - when you pinch a ball of it between your fingers, it should squish easily without cracks)

There are probably a lot more reasons too, but this was a good starting point for someone like me. And I don't know why I didn't think of it, but the site suggested practicing on the backs of cake pans instead of baking endless cakes to cover with fondant:

Even a measuring cup can have a smooth, elegant fondant covering

Yes, yes, we all know: practice makes perfect - I did it another three times and got the cracking under control! Yippee!

The news of this week: I'm going back to work. No longer a woman of complete leisure. After an extended post-vacation holiday, the bakery finally called and so I'll be going in three days this week. I'll be working closer to home too, at one of their other locations, which will be nice since I can ride my bike. Otherwise, nothing too exciting. We take the car in tomorrow morning to have a rattle looked at, then I decorate my cake, and Thursday I'm working and going to jewelry class.

Mini Pink Cake

On Friday and Saturday, we did three more cakes - a 2-tier green and brown (odd) fondant-covered birthday cake, a 3-tier vanilla buttercream wedding cake, and an OSU groom's cake. Unfortunately I forgot my camera both days, so no pictures to show you. The OSU groom's cake was pretty awesome - it was a red velvet cake with oreo buttercream, which made it look quite authentically scarlet and grey on the inside, and the outside was just white buttercream piped with a giant red octagonal 'O', and decorated with the official buckeye and leaves. Cute!

Not so awesome was the fact that I made two cake boo-boos this weekend. My boss was ultra nice about it, but I felt bad about messing up her creations. First, I somehow managed to put too much filling in two tiers of the wedding cake layers, so that mine stood over 5" tall whereas her bottom tier was only 4 inches tall. Oops! I forgot all the tiers are supposed to be the same height. But it wasn't explained to me that the point of digging a little trench was so the top cake layer would sit flush against the second, and that the total height would not exceed 4". Oh well, I hope it didn't look too weird.

Then, the green fondant cake was giving me pain. Beginner's luck seems to happen to me a lot. Remember the first time I worked with fondant? I somehow managed to get it nice and smooth, and no pleats! What's so hard about fondant? Same for my first pottery wheel bowl. Well, the green fondant didn't go very well. I couldn't stop the pleating, and then it tore! We had to rip the whole thing off and start again, and I was too chicken to try it a second time so I asked A to do it while I mixed other fondant colours.

Clearly, I need to practice my fondant skills, and there's nothing like a little embarassing display of incompetence for motivation. So, here's a mini cake to start, one that looks like it belongs at a My Little Pony party.... I cut out a 3" circle from a lemon cake I broke a little while ago, and covered it with buttercream - note to self, buttercream has to be firm. Doing this small-scale cake was much easier, and I knew what went wrong on the weekend. I had rolled it too thin, and the fondant was a little dry, so it didn't want to ease into place. I had a bit of trouble with pleating on this little cake too, but I think it's also because of the fondant being too dry, and the cake underneath being too soft.

Uh oh...pleating and the start of some cracks!

The star is just some strips of fondant pressed together and cut with a cookie cutter. Another thing I learned about fondant this week is that you aren't supposed to get water on it, otherwise it'll start to do weird things like dissolve, and also that you can't put fondant-covered cakes in the fridge or else the humidity will cause the cake to crack or dissolve or something. Who knew? Anyhow, I'll be practicing with fondant some more this week, since I am making a cake for D's lab party tonight and another one for the hospice centre on Thursday. And since it'd been a while since I had any fondant, I wanted to taste my handiwork:

Verdict: Bleh, fondant tastes kind of gross, like eating a chewy dough of sugar. The buttercream definitely helped it taste better.

Wait, there's more! I also pulled out the gumpaste kit I got from D's parents last Christmas. Although I didn't mix any gumpaste - I just used some fondant scraps to practice. I had read that fondant cracks when it dries, so it isn't as good for making decorations, but so far it's been about 18 hours and I still don't see any cracks. The flowers were fun to make, although the rose was the most tedious - you have to roll out 15 petals of varying sizes for it. I think the daisies are my favourite.


Last but not least, here's Gatsby at his finest, hogging the couch all afternoon, sunning his back and his belly in a sliver of sun coming through the window.

But I'm comfortable here...

A good Sunday afternoon yawn

Stop taking pictures of me!