Rock Band KISS Cupcakes

I can barely believe I made these! I do not like the band KISS. I would never listen to their music. But my daughter is a different story. She got her father's taste in music. Sigh. I gotta say though - I had fun with this birthday cake idea. She got several KISS albums for her birthday so they helped me with the designs. I copied the word "KISS" and designed the make-up for the cupcakes onto paper, using the albums. I cut out the paper patterns with a small scissors and then I cut them out of thinly rolled fondant with a small knife. I did not even try to make eyes as I can never do realistic eyes in any medium. The whole family LOVED the KISS figures and the cupcakes were delicious!

These were chocolate cupcakes, covered in chocolate fudge icing. All the decorations are fondant. To make the 12 cupcakes, I divided the chocolate cake recipe in half and added 2 Tbsp. applesauce. 

40th Birthday Cake

This may not be my most beautiful cake ever, but a good deal of thought went into it. I made it for my older sister who insists she is not having any more birthdays. ha ha. But she is always busy at something and she is great at what she does, so I had to celebrate it. I put a few of her favorite and/or most important roles and passtimes on her cake in three dimensional fondant figures.

 

The cake itself is a two-layer carrot cake with cream cheese icing and filling. The figures are all fondant and gum paste. Warning: do not put fondant on cream cheese icing until you MUST because it softens quickly due to the fat in the cream cheese. It also turns shiny and looks greasy. Here's the view from the other side:

 

It was easy to decorate, once I had made the figurines. I marked off the cake in 6ths (hidden under border that was added later) and then piped the lettering. Then I added the borders and finally I added the figurines at the last moment. My only regret is not giving more space where it was needed around the tent and less around the "40" but that's how it was divided. And apparently I should have written "Carol is 39 again."

Canadiens fooler cake

My son wanted a cake that would look like a puck with the Montreal Canadiens symbol on it. Only, since his name is Adam, he wanted an "A" instead of an "H" in the middle. Here's how it turned out:

The cake is a chocolate, two layer cake. All the icing and the filling is buttercream except the "C", which is rolled fondant. I had extra icing so I did the fancy 3-layer deep shell border, but I don't think Adam even noticed it!

Happy Birthday cake!

How would you decorate a cake for a six year old who can't decide what he likes? Here's what I did:

I made a "6" cake! I used two round pans for the bottom and a heart pan, cut in two and trimmed to make this 2-layer cake. I filled it with lemon curd (think lemon pie filling) and iced it with buttercream.
Here's what the first filled layer looked like:

I should have used a different color than purple as an accent - it might be too "girly" for him. Or I could have made the cake darker blue but it will still taste the same!

A Flower Garden Cake

This could have been a Welcome Spring cake, or an Easter cake, but at our house it was a birthday cake for a four year old girl! She loved it.

It was a chocolate cake underneath, with a buttercream filling. Pretty standard stuff. Melody helped me make the 4 bugs on the cake and we had great fun doing it! Fondant and gum paste are just as much fun as play dough.

This is just a closer look at the details. The smiles on the bugs are an exact match of my pinky fingernail!

Two layer Chocolate Birthday Cake

Here's the resulting two-layer Chocolate Birthday cake with Orange buttercream filling:

close-up of the chocolate icing before the banner went on.

It was awesome! Everything about it was delicious! Melody thought it was great. I loved the orange flavor in the filling and the new chocolate cake recipe was lighter than my old recipe. When I make this recipe again, I will put some of the chocolate chips deeper into the batter. I really liked the contrast of the white filling against the brown cake. Very nice.

It was a simple cake to decorate, since Melody wanted "just chocolate icing". I just spread it on roughly and poked in the fondant flowers I made a while ago and added a fondant banner that I piped with piping gel. I liked this cake. It had more cocoa than my other cake and tasted more chocolate-y. I certainly recommend it! Enjoy!

Rich Chocolate Cake with Buttercream Filling

This is actually part one of the birthday cake for my soon to be 3 year old. The original recipe calls for peanut butter and milk chocolate morsels and a creamy peanut butter milk chocolate frosting.

 But, I followed my plan from yesterday and made it with chocolate chips instead. I had to trim the tops flat and that is where most of the chips were, sadly. Here's the recipe:

Rich Chocolate Cake
2 cups all purpose flour
1 3/4 cups sugar
2/3 cups cocoa
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup milk
1 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
2/3 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two 9" round cake pans.
Combine flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large mixer bowl. Add milk, water, oil, eggs, and vanilla. Blend until moistened. Beat for 2 minutes (batter will be thin). Pour into prepared pans. Sprinkle 1/3 cup chips over each cake layer.
Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire racks for 10 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.

I did all that, and then I trimmed the tops flat (where most of the chips were, but I'll save those for later).

Then I filled it with orange flavored buttercream icing.

I'll show you how I finished it and decorated it tomorrow! I will also tell you how wonderfully delicious it was, I hope!

The chocolate cake dilemma

After the monumental chocolate cake from the last birthday that lasted me about 7 servings, I decided I don't want chocolate cake again for a while. I still love chocolate, but thought it might be time for a change.

Now here's April, and the youngest makes a request for her cake: "I want chocolate cake with chocolate icing and flowers coming out of it like Kimberly's." She's turning 3. How can I say, "no"? Therein lies the dilemma.

So, I started looking for a different chocolate cake recipe that might be a bit lighter. I compared at least 6 recipes. Tomorrow I shall bake one that is called "Rich Chocolate Cake with Creamy Peanut Butter Milk Chocolate Frosting". Sounds devine. Although, I plan to make it with Orange flavored butter cream filling and frost it with my usual chocolate fudge icing. There is a lot more liquid in this recipe than my usual chocolate cake recipe. There is also some baking powder. We'll see if it leads to a lighter cake.

Two Tier, Two Layer Chocolate Birthday Cake, part 3

Remember me? The two tier, two layer Chocolate Birthday cake? Of course you do. I've been eager to get back to this one and finish it. Today was the day! I had a lot of fun! Every step of this cake was an "I love you" to my daughter.

When I last showed you this cake, the four pieces were still separate and the filling was made. I filled them that day and they've been tightly wrapped in the freezer until today. I made up a batch of buttercream to, as the Cake Boss would say "dirty ice them."

Here is what they looked like after being "dirty iced". The smaller one is directly on a tinfoil covered cardboard that is just its size. I set it on a cookie tin so I could pick it up without mussing the icing. I stuck it to the cardboard with a small blob of piping gel. I wanted to make sure my top layer doesn't squish my bottom layer, so I inserted 5 separators (I cut 2 bamboo skewers to size and pushed them in.)

This was just to show you... then I pushed the spacers in all the way. The dents around the top were made by a plate the size of the smaller cake, so I could be sure the picks would be within the edges of the upper cake.

Next, I used my handy dandy Wilton's Easy Roll mat and rolled the green to size for the smaller cake. Love the round markings - you can get the fondant the perfect size the first time! Then you just invert the whole thing over the cake and smooth it down. This hunk of fondant was, I realized too late, a little small for my cake and I had to do some stretching, which left it a bit bumpy around the edges, but I will cover that with the decorations. I did the pink the same way and then carefully set the green cake on the pink one. So far, so good. 

Funny, I didn't mean to leave anything but the cake in this picture, but it is a clear picture of what tools are essential to the process: offset spatula (on the left) to smooth buttercream and fillings (I LOVE that tool!), white smoothing tool, to ensure a smooth fondant layer, the shortening wrapper - use a dab of shortening to prevent sticking to the fondant and finally, a pizza cutter - to trim the fondant nice and neat around the bottom of the cake.

"Hey, it's starting to come together", I thought, as I added all those bowling pins and balls. I stuck those on with a bit of piping gel. The black details are tinted piping gel. I rolled the green and pink fondant in the ziplocks into long strands. Using the circle markings on the mat, I made them long enough to fit around the larger of the two cakes. Then I cut them into bits with the pizza cutter (but not on my precious mat!) All the bits were the same size so I could make them into even little balls to trim the cake. Remember how "every step of this cake was an 'I love you' to my daughter"? Well, let me tell you, there were a lot of "I love you's" when it came to rolling the 92 balls I made and applied to the cake! 

And there you have it! Took all afternoon and into making supper time, but it was fun and it looks just like I wanted it to. I take no credit for the idea, by the way, it was on the internet at CakeCentral.com, but the execution was all me!

Happy Daisy Cake

Today I went to work, baking up a storm. After making a dozen oatmeal chocolate chip muffins, a dozen and a half apple oatmeal muffins and two and a half dozen blueberry bran muffins I realized I had nothing new to show you! So, I looked through my old pictures again and found the birthday cake I made last March. I'll call it my "Happy Daisy Cake".

It was a chocolate cake (do you see a trend yet?), with chocolate fudge filling. I covered it in butter cream icing and a layer of yellow fondant. I made this cake as the final cake in my Wilton's fondant and gum paste flower making class, which is where I easily learned how to make the daisies and the leaves and the swags. They were all made from fondant/gum paste mix. My daughter loved her cake! I have a tool to cut the ribbon, but a pizza cutter does the job in a pinch!

Tomorrow I'm going away to an un-wired house for a few days so I'll see you when I get back!

Mom's Birthday Cake

Our house is still in the recovery stages of the flu, so nobody is eating much and I haven't baked a thing in days. It is weird. But I had to show you something nice so I looked up some past projects and wanted to share this one with you. It is a carrot cake I made for my mother in November. I covered it in a cream cheese icing and all these lovely flowers. She loved it - because it was home-made, a carrot cake and it had cream cheese icing.

I made the flowers and leaves out of fondant and a bit of gum paste. I cut them with fondant cutters (plastic cookie cutters). I shaped the petals with a fondant shaping tool. I got the tool and cutters in my Wilton's Fondant and Gum Paste Flowers course supplies. Cookie cutters and a knitting needle would do the same trick. Here's some more detail of the cake:

I thought I had tinted the cream cheese icing for the trim and writing a pretty blue, but I was not happy with it once it was on the cake. By then it was late and I left it. My mother loves me anyway! I noticed that the flowers went soft again once they were on the cake. I think they soaked up the fat from the icing beneath them. It all tasted delicious anyway so it was all good. This time, I did the writing free-hand.