Nothing Fancy but It's Good

I purchased this book. Not sure why I blogged about it on my regular blog though. You can get caught up there.



I decided on making a Coffee & Praline Layer cake. I won't give the recipe, due to copyright yada yadas. Go buy the book. It's good and low priced on Amazon. I'm just trying to find good cake recipes for underneath my fun cake projects.






The cakes themselves were not too difficult to make.





While the cakes cooled, I made homemade praline. Note to self: MELTED SUGAR IS MOLTEN LAVA! Holy SMOKES!!






This was my first time working with mascarpone (NOT MaRscapone, MaScarpone). It was very easy to work with and really bland, until you added the powdered sugar. This above was colored this way due to adding coffee to it, and was only half-way done. There was more sugar to be added, which thickened it up.

The bottom cake was iced, another layer stacked on top, both cakes were iced, the home-made praline was cracked and sprinkled on top and voilà ! [It's not "Wahhlahh", people. (Yes, I saw that written like that fairly recently.) It's French and basically means, Look There! Voi from Voir (look or see) and La (there). Look There! voilà !]

The coffee icing was excellent, the cake was firm but not dry. Great cake recipe, but if you're a coffee-hater, this one's not for you.

The Sun Rises and Twilight is No More

I have been asked a few times, and the answer is, Yes. Yes, it is sometimes painful to cut into your pieces of art. Alas, it must be done.

I am still looking for the ever-elusive best-cake-ever recipe though. The outside looks amazing, but it's the inside that counts. The recipes I have tried, and I have tried many, are still not good enough for me. *sigh*

Twilight Cake

OK. I'm a Twilight Mom. I admit it. Not the stalkery-crazy kind, mind you. Yes, the books started off a little juvenile, but she got better. They are fun, they are fantasy and they have Edward.

I search the 'net and find several people making Twilight cakes, fantastic Twilight cakes, so I thought I'd give it a go. I bought some black and red fondant from Into the Oven, because there is no WAY I am going to color white fondant black. It would take forever and kill my arms in the process.

Here we gooooooo.


First, I realized..I have a lot of pans. This was me trying to figure out how to stack them. I opted for two layers instead of three, of the dome pans in the background.

I got a fantastic, wonderful cake recipe from Bakerella. This recipe was SO tasty! But the larger if the two cakes was so moist, it fell apart on Thursday night while I was trying to move it! Oh well. I kept the broken cake pieces in a plastic container and we've been munching on the pieces.

Tonight, I go back to my old, firmer butter cake recipe and make a rather large 10 " cake. (The 6" one from last night survived (pictured below).




While the large cake cooled, I covered the smaller one with fondant, and began making the chess board.







Next came covering the larger cake all in black and stacking the cakes.






I covered the bottom of the small cake with a red fondant ribbon, created the red chess piece and the "bloody" flower, which was bloody hard.




The larger chess piece. Yea. Difficult. I put it on a skewer to give it support. I won't even tell you what Jacob and I ended up naming it by the end.











Off to Wal-Mart I went. I was out of apples.















The apple for "Twilight," the flower for "New Moon," the ribbon for "Eclipse" and the chess board and pieces for "Breaking Dawn."

Here is the final product.

Wall-E, the Final Cut

Here he is folks. Wall-E for Isabel's birthday party.






Wall-E, sans hands.





Side view, with one hand holding flowers.














Lighting the cake. It was a fun birthday party for our girl.

Wall-E Cake, takes 1 & 2

A few weeks back, we rented Disney's "Wall-E." Isabel was in love. We had the movie 3 days or so, and she must have watched in 4-5 times.

I decided to have a Wall-E themed party for Isabel's 5th birthday. Five! Aack! I digress.

I wanted to try my hand at a Wall-E cake and scoured the net for ideas.

Take 1

I went the fondant route the first time. That was A LOT of work. Click on the above picture. You can see my attempt at covering the "wheels" with fondant. Having to color fondant a velveeta cheese yellow, and black and grey was time consuming. I got frustrated.

Then, Florida had a cold snap. YES we did. It was 27 degrees one day. So, the heat in the house is on...and Wall-E became mush. Melted fondant mush. I was pretty much over it and Wall-E take 1 went into the garbagio.

Take 2

I found this Wall-E cake on the net. Isn't it fun? They used off-the-shelf cake mixes and icings. They did a great job, so I throught I'd try it this way instead. No fondant. Just icing and lots of it.

Icing the cakes was NOT fun. Box cakes are just too moist. They crumble. It was a mess. The grey strip was icing on their cake. There was no WAY I was going to apply gray icing over yellow icing. I decided to use a strip of gray fondant. THIS strip above was too thick and its weight slowly dragged it down the side. I took it off and made a new, thinner one.

Check out the mess above.

Yea. Not pretty. TEST RUN!

Then there was the "how do I make the arms, eyes, and neck" thing. I spent some time using cereal boxes to make the shapes, then I colored them with grey paint.

Below is sort-of the finished product. Sort-of because I did not paint the head/eye area grey yet, nor did I cover the neck with icing to hide the tube there. I didn't want to waste my time.

I need to make his eyes smaller, and they were a PAIN to make. (Aweee, droopy Valentine roses). And I think I'm going to cover the next cake in yellow fondant, but not the wheels. I like the wheels as is. I need to find black piping icing in a teeeeeny tube to make the words. These words here were made with little bits of black fondant and I don't like them. I'm also not going to use box cakes. I'll make a home made cake.

Oh, and I'll be ordering a back-up cake from Publix. :)

Update: Want to see the Final Take? Click here to see the Wall-E cake for the party.

Meet Marjorie

Take two on the chick cake. Take one was ducky, really.

I'm a perfectionist, and so I can pick pick pick, but all in all, it came out swell.

Isabel saw me writing on Marjorie, and HAD to do it as well. Marjorie was given a tattoo on her heiney.

Marjorie attended the Central Florida Letterboxing Winter Gather today, where she was photographed and enjoyed by some of the attendees. :)

The Chick that Became a Duck

Aye-aye-aye. Thank goodness I am all about the practice runs.

I decided to try and make a Chick named Marjorie, Ryan's Marjorie actually. I always try a practice run, to iron out the kinks, and boy were there kinks.

1) I forgot to grease the small bowl. BAD move. You can see the small, beat up cake behind Isabel.

2) I did not fill the small bowl with enough batter. So, no grease and low batter = squashed head.

I used a small and medium bowl. Next time I will use the small bowl, with more batter, and the large bowl for the body.

I also used store-bought icing, chocolate. I knew it would make a mess but I did not want to waste all the butter and sugar on a test run so I was ok with the chocolate mess we made.

Isabel helps me smooth on the fondant.

Then for some reason, she ended up less of a chick, and more of a duck. *sigh* So I just went with it.

And this is why I do test runs. Sorry Marjorie. :)