Fondant and Gumpaste

Last year I took two cake decorating classes, because this is what I want to do with my life, yesterday I started the Wilton Fondant and Gumpaste class. I like the Wilton classes because they are offered at two craft stores here where I live and they are way less expensive than university classes (which I would love to take eventually just cannot afford)
Last night we learned how to make gumpaste mum, rose and carnation bases(we will be making the whole flower next week), and a fondant bow. Learning to make a bow was perfect because my little sister wants a bow on her wedding shower cake.(btw she asked me not to do her Wedding cake anymore I'm pretty bummed)
Making the bow is really simple and I will be putting up a tutorial soon. (I need to clean the house up so I have room to do a tutorial)  So stay tuned and excited!!! One girl in our class didn't have enough fondant to make a big one so she made a little on and it was ADORABLE! The basic things you learn can be adapted to make almost anything your heart desires :)

Fondant weekend is a not so fondant weekend

So this weekend I was going to make fondant I got all the weird ingredients like glycerine and glucose, and got all the ingredients out and realized... I didn't bake a cake to cover! (face palm) So I decided to make a chocolate cake. The recipe I am using comes from the book The Cupcake Bible pg 78.  Since this is originally a cupcake recipe I just had to bake it a little longer, cupcakes take 15 min to bake, the cake I baked between 25-30min.

Since my man was out with his friend, it was just me and my baby boy. I thought he would be happy just playing with play dough... but boy was I wrong. He kept asking me questions, and wanting snacks... so finally because I was getting no where in the baking process I asked him if he wanted to help me make a chocolate cake, and of course his answer was yes. And it was a lot of fun, for those of you who have kids and love to bake if you haven't involved them in the baking process yet, you should! I didn't let him do anything messy, I would measure out the powder ingredient, let him dump them into the bowl and mix them. And of course after the cake was complete we both got one of the beaters :)

Chocolate cupcakes(made into cake)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

1 1/3 C All purpose flour
3/4 C Unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tsp Baking powder
1/2 tsp Salt
1/4 tsp Baking soda

1 C Sugar
6 TB Unsalted butter softened
2 Eggs
1 tsp Vanilla
3/4 C Milk

In a medium sized bowl mix together the dry ingredients set aside.  In a large bowl beat sugar and butter with an electric mixer until fluffy.  Add eggs and vanilla; beat until well blended. Alternate adding flour mixture and milk, beat at low speed until combined. This mixture is thick.

For cupcakes:  spoon batter into muffin cups, bake for 15mins or until toothpick comes out clean.

For cake: cut a piece of wax paper that will fit in an 8" pan, put it at bottom, then grease and flour pan. Pour in batter and smooth. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

 Let cool then remove cake from pan and place on cooling rack.

I decided I am going to fill the cake with chocolate mousse and chocolate ganache.  But won't be able to make them until next weekend so I am freezing my cake to use then.  For those of you who haven't frozen a cake before, after the cake is cooled, wrap it in saran wrap, then foil and place in freezer. You can freeze a cake for up to a month, so if you are doing this every week and not using them, I would date them.

If anyone has good chocolate mousse recipe and/or a chocolate ganache recipe, I would love to try it!

My sister who doesn't eat cake

My little sister and I have a lot in common.... one of those things is we don't like to eat cake because growing up we only had dry boxed cake... so my goal is to make a cake for my sisters wedding that is sooo good and moist that she likes cake again. So today I called her because she asked me if I would be offended if she had someone else make her cake, I said no I wouldn't be offended at all, but I wanted to save her some money.

I asked her what flavor of cake and she said vanilla but didn't know what kind of filling she wanted, so I looked up several awesome recipes for filling and she shot them down because her fiance doesn't like fruit in his dessert!!!! There went all my great ideas :s but alas, I spoke with him and we agree on a vanilla cake with chocolate filling and for his grooms cake I will be making a sort of "death by chocolate" cake. 

I haven't made very many homemade cakes so this is my chance to practice making them and perfect at least two recipes  before August. I also haven't ever worked with fondant before so I am really excited to try new recipes this weekend for homemade fondant!!

The design for the wedding cake is simple: white fondant, with black ribbon at the base of each tier and real red roses at the top. There will be a black vine piped from the bottom tier to the top with fondant leaves.  Then for the guests there will be cupcakes with a red butter cream rose and black leaf on each of them.

I can't wait for this weekend!

So any readers have any good ideas for ANY cake fillings(with or without fruit)!! I would love to hear some feedback!

2011 in a Nutshell

2011 had many great moments. I am just going to put the highlights of this year : Baked Potato Soup, Starry Night cupcakes, Pizza and the Tea Party I catered. Last year was a lot of fun and I learned a lot I also started taking cake decorating classes and hope to show everyone how to do these things as I figure them out and I hope to be better at this blogging so I can share my new knowledge and recipes!

Baked Potato Soup
I found an amazing baked potato soup recipe.... I was short on funds so I tried to use all the food I already have at home, so one day  I was really hungry and wanting Chili's baked potato soup.  My boss pointed me in the direction of Cooks.com and I found a few recipes that I took home, well yesterday she said I should look for the actual "Chili's" recipe. So I Google searched it and found one from www.topsecretrecipes.com, the only issue I had with their recipe (besides lacking some of the ingredients) was that it had boxed mashed potatoes in it.... I'm sorry but they don't taste the same, they do not have the right texture...... just blech!!

Baked Potato Soup...mm

.....anyways I digress...

I stumbled across this other recipe and I happened to have all but one ingredient. So I went to the store and that one ingredient was on sale 2 for $4, so I bought two and some lunch meat, and I went to the bakery and there was a bag of rolls discounted down to 1.79.. So I spent a total of $13 or so dollars, if I were just counting the ingredients $5.79... that is amazing!! It took about 1 hour or so all together prep and cook time. And I have to say for my first time not bad... I did add a few things that it didn't call for spice wise but I do that sometimes :) Even my two year old loved it.

Needless to say...I was pretty dang impressed with myself that night and soon this year I will be posting my adjusted recipe.




Starry Night Cupcakes

Last year in February we made Starry Night Cupcakes for the taste of art auction, they were the talk of the dessert table! We had a birthday party the night before so we didnt get started mixing colors and decorating until midnight. We were finally done at around 5:15 am. The most time consuming part was actually mixing the colors, we had 3 shades of blue, 3 shades of yellow, brown, and 4 shades of green.

First we start with cupcakes.

Then we put them in a frame and used some chocolate cookies to bridge any gaps, and frosted them with chocolate frosting.




Next we outlined the painting on the chocolate frosting and start to outline

Then we started to fill in the outline with the appropriate colors

We actually did end up making another green, to stand out a bit more, our browns and greens were  blending too much. After we filled it we actually took a bobby pin(we didnt have any tooth picks... yes it was clean!) and started to mix the colors. And this was our end result.

I think we did an amazing job,  unfortunately it only raised $22.00 for the FCA. One of my friends saw a picture of it and said she would have paid $100.00 for it!

Pizza 
A while back I had made an excess amount of spaghetti sauce so I decided to make pizza. Well the night I was going to make it I realized I had no recipe for the crust so I went to my one cookbook that tells me how to do EVERYTHING(Betty Crocker Cook book, it is surely a book everyone should have!) this was the result :)

Tea Party

In April I catered my best friends birthday tea party, it was a lot of work but really fun! From a watermelon shark to chocolate covered strawberries it was a flavorful and a night to remember. We all dressed up "vintage-like" and had a blast.