Time to get back to it...

I guess I decided to take some time off from blogging about my baking adventures. To be honest, I didn't realize it had been quite that long since my last post (March?! Really?!). It's been a busy spring/summer, but I'll try harder to post more often so you can drool at your computers :)

Since March, I've done lots of projects, but some of the bigger ones are the ones I'll post about. The first was a baby shower for a set of twin boys. The theme was "Two Peas in a Pod" and I got a request for a small cake and frosted sugar cookies.

For the cake, since it was a pretty simple white background and since the mother-to-be loves my frosting, plain ol' buttercream worked just fine. The decorations (leaves, pea pod, small flowers, and baby faces) were made using gum paste. It dries a bit harder and faster than fondant and is still edible so it works perfect for when you need a small amount. I have to say, this cake was a lot of fun to decorate. Pretty simple, but lots of little flowers and leaves and really small swirly things.

The cookies were going to have a pea pod and the same smiley faces on them. I follow a blog called My Kitchen Addiction (you can follow the blog here) and she does the most amazing decorating with royal icing (smooth looking frosting that looks seriously impossible). I thought I'd give that a shot for these and did a small test. Epic fail. I wish I would've kept photos for you to see...but I didn't. Just believe me...awful. In fact, since I got a new phone, I don't even have a good picture of the cookies. I do have this blurry one of the final cake/cookie table though...so that's good enough right?! I stuck with what I know I can work with (more buttercream icing) and they turned out pretty cute.

A very Dora birthday

This weekend's project was a very Dora inspired birthday cake and cupcakes for a very cute little girl named Ariya. I scoured Pinterest for some ideas and found a few different things I liked from different cakes and pictures, but not one that I liked altogether. I decided to take a few different ideas and try them out. I think they turned out pretty cute. 

The cake is vanilla and the frosting is a swiss meringue frosting (similar in taste to buttercream, a little less sweet, and MUCH easier to make look smooth - almost like a fondant finish). I was a bit disappointed that the meringue frosting doesn't color as well as regular buttercream. I used "electric" food coloring for the colors, but the purple on the cake still ended up looking more pastel than electric. You can see the difference in purple colors on the stars at the top and flowers on the sides of the cake. Same food coloring but totally different colors. Below is a picture of the cake before the Dora cake topper I bought (yeah, I'm not attempting to make Dora and that little monkey guy out of fondant quite yet...)

I made small batches of regular buttercream for the cupcakes and round dots at the base of the cake. Now those turned out to be the electric colors I had hoped for. The stars and flowers I made out of gum paste. Not quite as tasty as the homemade marshmallow fondant I make, but it's so much easier to work with plus it seems to dry so much faster, making it easier to cut out and use almost immediately when you're doing shapes like stars/flowers. I wouldn't use it on anything huge, but for shapes that no one is going to be eating I think it works great. Below is a picture of the cupcakes. I used an angled piping tip to create a flowery look underneath the flowers I cut out of gum paste. 

Here's the finished product after I delivered them to the party, including the Dora cake topper and candles. Some of the stars got a little crooked in the car on the way to the party...but I was just glad when I woke up on Sunday morning they were still attached to the wire holders* I had put them on the night before.

*I bought the curly wire holders at Michael's in the baking section. I think they're the Duff brand...also the same brand of food coloring I used for these. I cut them to different lengths and then attached a star to the top of each one.3

Let's get tropical

 Over the weekend I made a tropical cake for a friend's birthday party bash with a Hawaiian theme. We settled on pineapple cake (she doesn't like coconut, so I can't actually call it a pina colada cake, right?) with a rum buttercream frosting and mango filling. I was pretty convinced the mango filling tasted awful, but it turns out I just don't like mango. I was reassured at the party that the cake and filling was excellent, thankfully!

Below is a picture of my disaster of a kitchen, but with the cakes nicely settled on their travel cardboard. I definitely didn't want to travel across town with a 3-tiered cake in my car. Yikes.

Once I got to the party, I added some extra leis to the cake and a few umbrellas from the bar, and even a palm tree made it on there. Pretty cute right? It does help to put the cake in the fridge after the first layer of frosting, then you can really smooth out the second layer before the fondant goes on...but I didn't have the space in the fridge or the time to make that happen...but once you cut it no one notices anyway, right?!

I'm Still Here!

I swear I didn't fall off the face of the Earth since my last post. I was gone for a few weeks over the holidays and then apparently very busy in the new year, including two back-to-back trips out to California for work. I haven't done much baking, but I did get an awesome new book for Christmas called Baking: From my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan, and I think you should know about it.

This book is pretty fantastic. While I was home for Christmas, I made some key lime meringue pie, sugar cookies, Russian tea cakes, and a vanilla pudding with chocolate ganache from the book. The key lime pie is my favorite by far, and since I've never made a meringue before, I actually made the pie twice while I was home just to get it down (and because everyone wanted more).

If you like to bake, even just a little, I'd seriously recommend this book. I've made it my mission to try and make everything in it...including that lovely black and white cake on the cover. I've paged through the entire book and marked pages that I'd like to try first, but everything in it looks good. Nothing in the book seems too complicated or advanced, so even if you aren't a baking whiz you could still use it.

That's it for now kids. I do have some more baking jobs coming up including a Hawaiian themed birthday cake and a Dora birthday cake. I'll be sure to post lots of pictures when I complete them!