summer birthday cake #2: flour's yellow birthday cake with fluffy chocolate ganache frosting

My darling and very easy-going husband requested a yellow cake with chocolate icing for his birthday this year so I decided to try a recipe I'd been eying for awhile: Yellow Birthday Cake with Fluffy Chocolate Ganache Frosting from Flour by Joanne Chang.  The photo in the book looks delectable -- thick layers of yellow cake, filled and iced with light brown (thanks to the incorporation of lots and lots of air), super fluffy icing. As you might be able to deduce from the artfully-lit photo above, mine didn't exactly turn out that way.  The cake was fine -- a little dense, but moist enough for a scratch cake and not excessively greasy the way many scratch yellow cakes seem to turn out (not greasy = dry; moist = greasy). I followed the icing recipe to the letter, but it came out soupy. It was the consistency of cake batter -- imagine trying to ice a cake with that.  I can't quite decide what went wrong. Basically, you melt the chocolate with heavy cream over a double-boiler and let cool completely.  Then you whip the butter and cream that with confectioner's sugar, salt and flavoring. Finally you add the chocolate-cream mixture and whip 'til it lightens and thickens.  Easy-peasy, right? No. The most obvious culprit might be excessive warmth, but my kitchen wasn't particularly hot that day. I even went so far as to see if there were any corrections to the recipe posted on Flour's website, but nadda.

In the end, it was yummy, if very frustrating. It was impossible to ice and smooth, and very difficult to decorate. Chilling the icing before piping just made it go straight from wet to rock hard, so I gave up on that. I attempted to pipe buttercream flowers on the top, but they just sank under the soupy icing. Piping on a border was out of the question. Yuck. The peeps were very understanding and appreciative nevertheless and proclaimed it delicious. I have the sweetest family!

summer birthday cake #1: henri's chocolate cake by zoe bakes

People tease me when they hear that I bake my own birthday cake.  They think I have to bake my own cake, rather than want to bake my own cake.  But I spend so much time baking what others want, it's a treat to bake something of my choosing.

This year, I baked Henri's Chocolate B-day Cake (it's a Devil's Food Cake) topped with Dorie Greenspan's Chocolate Malt Buttercream from Zoe Bakes. The cake itself is a recipe that I've turned to on a number of occasions, including here and here. Instead of baking it in a single 3-inch tall, 8-inch round pan and torting the cake, as Zoe recommends, I baked two layers in 2-inch tall, 8-inch round pans. The biggest reason for this was that I don't own a 3-inch tall 8-inch pan. Also, I didn't feel like torting the cake. But mostly the first thing. Instead of prepping the pans in the conventional manner (grease, flour and parchment), I brushed on the handy-dandy pan grease that's never ever failed me in the past few hundred times I've used it. Maybe this recipe has less fat or is too soft, or I just don't know why, but the corners stuck like a, well, like a really bad compound word. Next time, I'll be lining the bottom with parchment in addition to using the pan grease.

Broken cake aside (13-year-old C. thought the stuck parts made a fabulous breakfast, by the way), I spackled the missing bits with the Chocolate Malt Buttercream and moved on.  I was inspired by Zoe's decorating job on her site, but somehow my big dots looked like something less appetizing.  I think it's the brown icing that pushed the resemblance over the edge.  Luckily, it's a very scrumptious cake -- the cake is moist and tender and the icing is rich and chocolatey.  It's one of the rare cakes where no one leaves a glob of excess icing on the plate.  It's soooo good -- I love, love, LOVE this cake!

That's one cake down, and three more to go in our house this summer!

cake balls

One of my internship goals is to come up with ways to use up the large amounts of cake trimmings we discard each week.  Every cake layer we bake gets leveled (so it's nice and flat) and the excess goes in the trash can.  My fellow intern actually created the goal for the both of us, which may explain why I have some ambivalence about what really can be done with the scraps.  As the owner pointed out, the cake may not cost anything for us to use, but any additional ingredients we employ to create a sellable product will.

Misgivings aside, the cake scrap goal remains, so I experimented with making cake balls out of my own cake scraps at home.  Basically you crumble up some cake, smoosh the crumbs with some icing, and pack the mixture into balls.  After freezing the balls (so they are firmer and easily to work with), you dip them in melted coating chocolate and let set. If you want to make cake pops, you follow the same procedure, but place the balls on sticks (I know, kinda obvious... duh).

I was rather unenthused about this whole experiment as I suspected that making cake balls is too labor intensive and costly a way to repurpose the cake scraps.  But... surprise, surprise -- the cake balls are YUMMY!  I used yellow cake with canned (sorry, I'm a busy girl) vanilla icing, and dipped them in melted Wilton Candy Melts.  I still don't know if they are a good fit for the bakery, but they'll make a delicious treat for my circle.

a sneaker

While I was making roller skate number 1 last week, my darling 13-year-old son sat alongside and crafted a fondant sneaker.  He's amazing at modeling little objects -- he's also done a lot of work with Sculpey and modeling clay.

Love the bull's eye detail on the back!

a tale of one, two, three, four! roller skates

The bakery where I am interning recently took an order for a small tiered birthday cake and the customer requested a fondant roller skate topper.  So I've been working on one.  Or a few.

I did attempt number one just as a total first draft without consulting my boss for specifics; I just whipped it up in my kitchen in about half an hour. 

This is roller skate number 1.  I also made a little bow to go on the laces, but it looked funny so I removed it. I brought it into work and the owner loved it!  She suggested that we just tweak it a little and use it.  Somehow that day I was uncharacteristically optimistic and told her, "Nah... I'll make another one, better than the first!"  Easier said than done.  I made my second roller skate at the bakery and as I was lacking all the things I'm used to using -- my usual fondant, tools, lighting, workspace... it all went pear-shaped.  And it took a long time to make that disaster too. Ugh.

Roller skate number 2.  It looks like a clown shoe. The brand of fondant we had at the bakery dries much faster than what I use at home, so the surface looked all slouchy and wrinkled.  Satin Ice, I don't care how much the Cake Boss loves you... you made my afternoon a living hell.  The wheels are not attached because we removed them to dry (otherwise, they get kind of flat under the weight of the skate).  The one improvement I made was the addition of the tongue, which my boss had suggested. I hate, hate, HATE this one.


This weekend, I made two more skates at home.

This is number 3.  I liked it, although I thought it might be slightly too long for the 6-inch cake it's topping and I wanted it to have a little more height.  I tried to get cute with my exacto-knife and made some stitching around the top collar and the tongue, but it ended up looking kind of meh.

Number 4 -- my favorite; we'll see what my boss says.  I haven't attached the laces yet because I am thinking of putting them on after the wheels are attached, so the laces drape down the proper distance.  The toe of this skate is a little more contoured and maybe slightly less cartoonish than numbers 1 and 3.  I also made a variety of wheel sizes for this one (although they can go on any of the skates, really).

It's been an interesting and worthwhile learning experience, but I really hope I don't have to do another one, at least not for this particular cake!