Sunshine in the kitchen

Inspiration.

Per request of my mom I decided it was a great idea to whip up a cake. I had some creative energy brewing and it had been a while since my hands had touched a pastry bag. First thing is first, a chocolate butter cake baked in two 9" round pans was baked. Then I made two types of butter cream, one was vanilla that was then divided and tinted in golden yellow and  moss green. A rich chocolate mousse would top coat the whole cake. Cutting each of the 9" cakes into two layers and layered the yellow butter cream and the chocolate mousse gave it depth and carried the theme throughout.

After crumb coating the cake, setting it into the fridge for a few minutes. Then it was onto the best part, DECORATING!

                                                  Proud in my William-Sonoma Apron

Piece of Cake...with a few bites taken

Playing catch up

Oh, how I neglected you blog. I am so very sorry. I have been a whole lot of baking and not a whole lot of typing. Well tonight I find myself in a bind, I REALLY, REALLY want to bake, but every recipe that I come across I don't have all the ingredients. A simple 5 minute car ride to the market could fix this problem but we are in a tornado watch and have been advised not to leave our house (maybe a little extreme). However, this is the perfect opportunity to catch up on the past few months and my baking adventures.
Since we were snowbound for almost the whole holiday season I was inspired to make some mini cupcakes with "snow" on them. I didn't get a chance to take a picture of the two dozen that were completed and decorated because they were gobbled right up. Lesson learned though- don't try and fill mini cupcakes, it is so not worth the trouble. The toppings were made from royal icing and white edible pearls. The cupcake on the lower left has edible clear sparkles. My new favorite accessory.

At the salon we had our first event "Love is in the Hair" these are the cupcakes that I baked for them. Purple was not the intended color, but purple is my favorite color so I wasn't terribly upset with the outcome. The flavor was a dark chocolate cupcake and butter cream frosting.

I love Martha Stewart. Even though her recipes are super precise and take a million ingredients and have a madness to the order in which they are mixed, you can always count on her stuff to come out perfect. This recipe was taken from her cupcake cookbook. It is a seven minute frosting (umm...took almost 45 mins) and devils food cupcake with chocolate shavings. This reminded me of a hostess cupcake and is one of my favorite.

I had been to AC Moore and wanted this organization box. It is the best tool that I have ever bought, thus far. All my tips, pastry bags, and food coloring are nice and neat. Perfection!

Vavo,  has the patience of a saint. But not when it comes to teaching her recipes, now that is another story. She runs into the kitchen and starts cooking before you can even tie your apron around your waist. I caught her and I made her teach me how to make sweet rice. She doesn't measure though. So it was hard to keep up. I attempted to make a batch of sweet rice with her and we had a good time with it. Mine didn't come out as good as hers though, it was a little crunchy.

I don't know what this pattern is, but its vavos trademark.

I made this cake for my mom to celebrate her upcoming trip to Vegas.

The dice are made from cake that I shaped into cubes and used the star tip to pipe the butter cream and used chocolate chips for the dots.

This is by far my favorite cake. I made it for Easter. It was a Martha Stewart cupcake recipe that I converted into a cake. It was a tad on the dry side. I made a raspberry filling and decorated it with a basket weave.

Once upon a time

I purchased this cook book...I have so many cook books. My goal is to be able to fill a bookcase with all of them some day. While I was in Alaska I bought the Bakerella cakepops book. It took me a long time once I got back to actually make them. I was pretty skeptical. First of all the way they are made did not sound appetizing and secondly the two textures in one kind of threw me off. But I wanted to try them because it would be another adventure. I decided to make the cakeballs because they looked like truffles and would be a pleasant surprise once people began to bite in. Well first Bakerella says GET ORGANIZED!
So I did:

Then it was time to smash the cooked cake, this took a lot of muscle and patience:

Then it was dipping and decorating time. This is the final product that was sent to some very special people in AK.

These were for an order that was made by a coworker and her sister. Apparently they were a hit.

I'm really happy the way that they turned out. They are a lot of fun to make and also a lot of work. I think Christmas was the perfect holiday to jump right into these because the decorating options were endless.
This was a display that my Mom and I made which included cakeballs and a cranberry pistachio bark which was so beautiful.

For the New Year, everyone in my family was sick, sick, sick. All of my friends were sick as well and I was on my way to being bed bound as well. Before the sniffles took over I made these cupcakes. The frosting is the wilton recipe for buttercream and the snowflakes are royal icing with non perils, edible glitter, and sugar.

3 LONG days for these snow flakes to harden. As I peeled them off I prayed they wouldn't crack. Some did....

For two love birds in Boston....

Until my next adventure in baking

Julie

Mwahaha

I love Halloween. I love how excited all the kids become with the hopes of getting lots of candy. We didn't get as many kids as we did last year, but there was a steady line of kids knocking at the door. I made cupcakes for family friends and their kids.

Pumpkin cupcakes: Orange Buttercream frosting rolled in orange crystallized sprinkles, a piece of green licorice for the stem and pipping gel tinted moss green made the vines.

Eyeball cupcakes: White Chocolate wafer painted with green and black food coloring. Veins were free hand painted onto the cupcake using red tinted buttercream.
Vampire Bite cupcakes: Since I love Vampires, I had to honor them. Just simply dip a tooth pick in red buttercream, poke and drag into the side of the cupcake.

Enjoy!!

Keeping it simple

Going into the final flower design on cakes class I knew I wanted to keep things simple on my cake. I made all of the royal icing flowers on my cake as well as my mom's cake. I really liked the smaller flowers especially because my cake was smaller. The basket weave frosting was made from the Wilton butter cream recipe with coco powder. Both cakes were shipped off to my sister's unit at the hospital. Enjoy!

                                                                    My cake

                                                              My mom's cake

                                           A little Halloween humor for my younger sister

Until Halloween,

Julie

Hey there Cupcake!

I baked up these little treasures as a donation to my alma mater for their open house. Sunshine sunflower cupcakes and a few polka dotted one as well.

I also made brownie cupcakes with chocolate fudge icing.

In my third flower class, I learned daffodils,daisies, and lilies.  Then we reviewed the dreaded Victorian rose. It is going to be the death of me, I practice and practice and I am still having issues with it. Next week is the final class and we learn the basket technique. Can't wait!

Maroon Lily? Yep!

                                   I also got a little surprise from my mom...SPRINKLES!

Filling a tall order

I was given the task to make my older sister's boyfriend's mother's birthday cake. Whooa say that ten times fast. Anyway, a Chocolate Strawberry Shortcake was the preferred and I obliged. I decided to do a test cake to make sure it was what they had in mind.
The cake was created from a few different chocolate cake recipes I had come across. The secret ingredient was a cup of brewed coffee instead of water. The coffee bring out the taste of cocoa powder which was chocolate flavoring.  This was my first time making fresh whipped cream from scratch. I was a little nervous about how runny it was at first, it took a lot of beating to get it to a solid consistency. Then I melted some heavy cream and gelatin let it set and added it to the fresh whipped cream. The strawberries were sliced very thin and stacked on the first and second layer of the cake. A chocolate ganache made from ghirardelli topped the cake and the decorated whole strawberries on the side. My taste testers said it was good and I am hired.
                                                       Here is the finished product

In my Wilton Cake decorating class we learned a bunch of different flowers that are made from royal icing. I have to say I really like working with royal icing because the clean up is so much easier than with butter cream. Betty (the instructor) told me to make fall colors so that we could use them for a harvest looking cake. We learned the violet, the wilton (Victorian rose), the primrose and the apple blossom, and the rose bud. The rose and the rosebud gave me lots of problems. I practiced and practiced but it was a lot of fun. Another thing that I learned, I have a tendency to make my icing very soft. Got to knock that off.

Here are a few samples of my flowers:

Sweetish,

Julie