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!

Wedding Cake Testing and Tasting

Can you believe I am actually blogging as promised?! That's because Daddy and JJ are playing downstairs while I upload photos and write! Must be quick here. Here are the results from Friday's wedding cake test run. This is a cake I'm making for a friend's wedding in July, and we had the tasting on Friday afternoon. I did a vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream and lemon curd, and chocolate cake with chocolate ganache. Both flavours turned out great, and we decided to use chocolate buttercream instead of ganache for a lighter textured cake.

Kate was deciding between two styles, both Martha Stewart designs, for her Fourth of July wedding. She loved the berry basket cake, which would look great as a whole but would be potentially disastrous when cut into (can you imagine putting a knife through all that fruit? I'm picturing berries rolling everywhere and bleeding juices). The daisy cake, on the other hand, would cut much better, and looks pretty and fresh. And more wedding-y, if you ask me. That's what we're going with. But I did mock-ups in both.

Some minor disasters didn't stop me from making my deadline, although I did have to recruit help from Daddy after my buttercream decided to curdle. Daddy made the accompanying strawberry sauce, which was delicious, fresh, and a lovely bright red.

Let's have a look at my handiwork:

There are about 55 daisies on this little 6" cake! I'll have to make hundreds and hundreds for the real thing, but at least I have 3 weeks to get the decorations done. I usually do two layers of petals for daisies, but with this many flowers on the cake, luckily it's unnecessary. (second of all, it would be the end of me to make hundreds of double daisies. I would have to cut out a THOUSAND to get the number I needed). Daisy-making will commence this week.

The actual top tier will be an inch taller and more densely covered in daisies like the photo. We might even make a 4-tier cake depending on the total number of guests, but it's possible we stick with 3-tiers and just do a few smaller cakes on the side.

Here's the basket cake, which did look beautiful. The weave is done with a leaf tip, which I thought was a nice innovation. It didn't look as stuffy and old-fashioned as a traditional basket weave, and it also didn't matter if my lines weren't piped perfectly. Unfortunately, this was a mess to cut if we didn't scoop the berries off first, which I doubt the banquet servers would be willing to do on a 130-person cake. Pretty though, eh?

I'm a little nervous about having the responsibility of making someone's wedding cake, but I'm sure it will be fine. Let's just hope it isn't the hottest day of the year that day, and that everything goes smoothly with the transportation. My fridge is going to be filled with nothing but cake that weekend, so Daddy and I are going to have to be creative about what to eat for dinners!

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...

2,000 Cupcakes Later...

This Friday was my first day in the pastry kitchen: a tiny little room with just enough room for two, a convection oven, two big stand mixers, a small table mixer, one big work bench, a little metal cart, a sink...and that's about it. Tiny! I set up and got ready to pipe icing on cupcake samples for the Pennsylvania Bridal Show this weekend.

Five hours, a ton of Swiss meringue buttercream, and 2,000 mini-cupcakes later:

A sampling of my hard work on display. :) It doesn't actually take 5 hours to pipe these, but I had to make many many trips back and forth to the storage unit, fold about 20 large boxes, put all the cupcakes away, and clean up. My arms were throbbing all Friday night...

I think I'm going to really enjoy this internship...the pastry chef does some really, really great stuff. I watched her decorate a 5-tier wedding cake in all buttercream in just 4 hours, with etched snowflakes and silver ribbons and everything, all the while dealing with constant interruptions on the phone, making the buttercream for my cupcakes, getting me set up, and running about to prepare for a bridal show.

I was invited to stop by the bridal show so that I could check out our stand, as well as scope out what the other bakeries/competitors were doing. The cakes I've uploaded in this post are an assortment of what I saw at the show, in no particular order, including some from our bakery.

I forgot what bridal shows were like! Vendors shoving pamphlets and coupons in your hands, giving you free cake samples, models parading around in gowns, pimped out SUV stretch limos... There was even roasted pork loin and chocolate fountain samples. It smelled pretty good, but I was full of cake by the time I got to the other food.

Some of the gumpaste work was just amazing, so realistic! Lots and lots of free samples...I pinched a few for D on the way out...

You know, it's funny when I look back to when D and I got married - I wasn't the least bit interested in choosing a fancy cake! In fact, we had the plainest cake imaginable. Who would have thought I'd be learning to make these elaborate, massive things one day?

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!

Here comes the Bride!

Did you guess what the white dome was?

This past weekend was Z's wedding shower and bachelorette party, and I made her this little bride cake for the occasion!

I can't quite remember when the obsession started, but for the longest time I have wanted to make a Barbie doll cake (just ask D). I saw one like this on Cake Central, and loved how elegant it looked as a black dress form modeling the wedding gown. Inside, it's a lemon cake, doused in lemon syrup, filled with lemon curd and blueberry preserves, and iced with cream cheese frosting under the fondant. All the details are piped with royal icing.

I have to say, this is my favourite cake to date....it was a super fun to decorate - just like being a kid again and dressing up my dolls. I want to make another one already!! I guess I can, now that I own the Wonder Doll cake pan. Any future brides out there? :)

So, Saturday morning the cake traveled (quite well!) to the shower, where it received many 'oohs' which got a bit embarrassing (although, really...who minds a little ego-flattering??) It appears the bride-to-be enjoyed her cake...here she is, about to make the first cut:

If you look carefully, the groom is peeking out of her hoodie

Between nine of us, we ate about half the cake. I heard that Kodiak enjoyed a nice big chunk of shower cake...lucky doggy!

Ouch! That's my bum!

Considering the outer layer was ripped off and reattached, the inside doesn't look half bad:

* * HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN BRIDE CAKE* *

This took a little bit of planning, as I didn't want to be making it last minute and messing up the decorating. So, my cake schedule was as such:

Tuesday: I made the lemon curd with Devon (in an impromptu baking lesson)

Wednesday: I made the lemon syrup and cream cheese frosting

Thursday: I baked, filled and iced the cake. There was a bit of a disaster with the cake - the entire outer surface ripped off when I was turning it out of the pan, probably because the cake was still too hot, and unfortunately this was one of the only times I didn't line with parchment thinking that a cone shape would be easy to invert. Luckily, I managed to salvage the outer portion and stick it back on and glue the whole thing together with the cream cheese icing. The whole thing went in the fridge in two layers of plastic wrap to settle.
Friday: Dyed the fondant, covered the cake and piped the royal icing details.

Having a schedule was really helpful, and I think being organized made the process more enjoyable, rather than running out of time for decorating (like I have done several times in the past). Plus, there would be time to make another cake if the baking didn't go well. And, it felt like there was less clean up because everything was done in stages.

1. Dye a walnut-sized ball of fondant black (wear gloves, or prepare to have black hands). Dye a large clump of fondant in ivory for the dress and the bust.

2. Covering the doll pick:

• First, pull off Barbie's arms and head (I know it sounds mean but how else will you have a lovely dressform?) Snap off the little pokey bit on the neck. Form three tiny 0.5 cm balls of black fondant and press them on the neck and two shoulder sockets to create a smooth edges for the rest of the black fondant to mould to.
• Roll out the remaining black fondant to about 1/8 inch thick and drape over the neck and shoulders, as if covering a cake. Gently press the fondant against Barbie's upper body.

• To reduce bulk on the dress bodice, trim the black fondant where the top of the bodice will fall (just use a paring knife)
  

• Next, wash your hands thoroughly! If there is any trace of black, it will stain the ivory fondant, so put on gloves if you have to (or, you can do these steps in reverse order starting with covering the cake first)

• Roll out a walnut-sized ball of ivory fondant, and drape over the pick-end of Barbie's body. Carefully press the fondant against the doll to the edge of the black fondant. Again, using the paring knife, trim the ivory fondant in the shape of the bodice. Press the black and ivory edges together to form a complete seal.
  

3. Covering the cake:

• Ice the cake so that it has a nice, smooth, domed shape. I applied another layer of icing to the photo below.
  

• Roll out your fondant and drape over the cake, which will create the dress ruffles naturally. You can straighten the ruffles out a bit if they fall unevenly, if that bothers you. Trim with scissors or a sharp knife.

4. Almost done! Time to insert the doll pick into the centre of the cake:

5. Finally, make a small amount royal icing tinted in ivory. Pipe the dress details on the bodice, the waist, and the skirt, and anywhere else you want. You could pipe a necklace, or add ribbon trim, flowers, dots, lace...the possibilities are endless! (Gold or silver dragee would be pretty too - I searched my entire apartment but couldn't remember where I had stashed them, so no sparklies for me).

Last but not least, giving credit where it's due. Here's the photo from Cake Central that inspired my cake:

Whew, that was a long post. Enjoy!