AT&T is going to drive the cake ninja crazy

So I'm switching day jobs, and tried to take my phone number with me and that has failed horribly.

So if you were using 303-862-1060 to get to the cake ninja, that number won't work. Email cakeninja at earthlink dot net instead :)

Cake in progress

So here is a cake in progress for my husband's birthday. Right now I am working on the gum paste portions. I am using ready made gum paste from a package, which requires kneading in a small amount of shortening. You can also see my planning pages - both inspiration shots and actual measurements. This cake will be roughly 5.5 inches square by 12 inches tall. I will be using an 8" round cake pan and cutting out the squares from it.

Cake flavor is yet to be determined - the husband has not made his request yet. Next steps will be more structural pieces and some decorative bits. Then the painting and any piping of wording.

Based on the photos, can you tell what the cake Ninja is making? (Family members are not allowed to guess.)

Cake 101: Filling and Frosting

It's been a while since we've had a cake 101 video, but here is the latest installment in Cake University -- filling and frosting. See the Cake Ninja wrangle with her most loved/hated tool -- the cake leveler!

An experiment

As you may have noticed, I am not so great on keeping up with blog content. I mean well, but life gets in the way.

So, I am going to try an experiment. For the next two cakes, I will be taking photos and posting on the process from start (concept and reference art) to finish (happy recipients eating cake).

It dovetails nicely into Cake 101, because I'm doing gumpaste for one of them. (Speaking of Cake 101/Cake University, yes there are videos coming, as soon as my editor has time.)

So we'll see how it goes. I am not promising any specific sort of posting schedule, but both cakes are due September 15th, so expect to see more posts soon.

A slight uptick in jobs

I know I haven't posted in forever, mostly because it's been a very busy life at Chez Cake Ninja.

However, I now have two different cake jobs coming up. For Sunday I am doing pastel cupcakes with flowers, birds, and butterflies for a first birthday party. And for the following Saturday I am doing a carrot cake for a baby shower.

Both are for friends, so it's customers I already had in my rolodex, but there's always the hope that some new business will come out of it.

I did not, as of yet, see any new business due to Handmade Homemade, and with the August HaHo having been canceled, and having to bow out of the September and October ones due to personal business, I am not sure I will. But there's always the December holiday market, and next year.

It takes time and energy to build a clientele, and I need to work on having more of both available.

Handmade Homemade

I still owe a post about the whole HaHo experience, but I am thrilled to announce that I will be vending at the next three Handmade Homemade markets at Green Spaces (26th and Larimer) in Denver.

Come out and eat cupcakes on August 11th, September 9th, and October 13th.

(Of course, this means the first two weeks of September will be crazy cake time - cupcakes for HaHo, a rapunzel tower for Eldest Monkey's 4th birthday (unless she changers her mind, again), and a Tardis for the husband.)

What the ninja has been up to

Lots of prep for HaHo on Saturday.

Too hot for cake

Yes, there really is such a thing as too hot for cake.

It has been record highs two days in a row here in Denver -- and it's been too hot to move, much less do much of anything with cake. I am getting things pulled together for Threadcakes, and if we get lower temperatures tomorrow (we are promised to), I will do the photos for the tutorial on gumpaste for Friday.

I will have to make cake this weekend regardless -- I am doing the trial run of the various cupcake flavors for Denver HandmadeHomemade in July, and since this next one is going to be outdoors, having to worry about stabilizing icing in the heat should help ensure that the cupcakes look delicious from start to finish next month. (And yes, there will be a post out of that, too, so two two two things in one!).

Cake 101: Lesson 9 Gumpaste

This is really more of lesson 9a.

So what is Gumpaste? It is a modeling compound you can use to make more elaborate structures out of than chocolate or fondant.

I usually buy mine either in the premixed pouches or in the cans you add water to, but it is possible to find recipes online.

It takes a varied drying time - the frames for the movie cake dried far faster than the center disk of the reel - and, like fondant, you can mix color in or paint it on afterwards.

Stay tuned next week for part b in which I will show how to use it.

Threadcakes is open

And once again, I have not done anything at all before it opens. Who, me, procrastinate?

Actually, that's not entirely true. I have the gumpaste on hand, and I think I have settled on a design.

The design itself is from a penguin shirt. The penguin will be out of gumpaste and reside on the top of a three tier cake.

The three tier cake will be done topsy-turvy style (there's a first time for everything!) and will be covered in fondant in a light blue with snowflake fondant cutouts on the tiers.

In my head, it looks awesome. In reality, we shall see. (Also, it's totally an excuse to buy another cricut cake cartridge so that I have one that does snowflakes.)

Sneak peek

It's cake archive Monday. I need to pull together a couple of posts about some photos that are on the new gallery page, but here's a sneak peek at the latest cake I did -- you can see it come together in both the July and August Cake University episodes, which we just shot last night.

Cake University

You may have noticed that I'm a little behind on Cake 101.

The next lesson is intended to be gum paste, and as I am getting ready to do Threadcakes, I thought I'd do a picture tutorial instead of just text, so it'll be a little bit.

Additionally, we are shooting two episodes of the blip.tv series this weekend (if all goes according to plan) and hopefully I will have them up at the beginning and end of July (if I put them up all at once, what content do I have to keep my readers coming back?)

I have not forgotten you, dear students of Cake University, never fear! Just think of it as summer break.

Handmade Homemade July 14th

I will be vending at the Denver Handmade Homemade market on July 14th, 4-8pm at Green Spaces (1368 26th Street, Denver, 80205).

So be sure to get your vote in for what kind of cupcakes should be there, and if you're local, come on down and see me!

A poll!

For those of you not following Denver Cake Ninja on Facebook (and why not?! :D), here is your opportunity to tell the Cake Ninja what she should bake if she gets into the Handmade Homemade market.

Your options are:

Black (Guinness) and tan (vanilla or Harp) cupcakes with marshmallow frosting
Chipotle red velvet with cream cheese frosting
Creamsicle - orange cupcake with vanilla buttercream
Gingerbread stout with marshmallow frosting
Chai with cardamom buttercream

The three top vote-getting cupcakes (votes counted here and on Facebook) will be the ones I make for the market and the locals can come and get some.

Not local? Dying for a dozen of any of those flavors? The Cake Ninja will ship, contact me for pricing and availability. Local, and still dying for a dozen of a flavor? Same thing -- contact me for pricing and availability.

Wednesday Randomness

I am slowly trying to get back into the habit of regular content for the blog, and will be doing a bunch of tweaks and updates to the website to add additional pages and content in the nearish future, but for now you get the couple most amusing search terms that brought people to this blog of late.

1) "i m doing cake i too often" - impossible. No such thing as doing cake too often.
2) "how to decorate wilton carousel cake" - I am not sure the neon ninja carousel was quite what they were looking for there.

The rest were pretty straightforward -- pint glass/guinness glass was pretty common, and "the movie camera cake" had a fair number of hits as well. I was pleased to see that googling "Denver Cake Ninja" returns something somehow affiliated with me for 80% of the first page of links. (There is a bakery in Denver that talks about its cake ninjas, but while they may live in Denver, they are not the Denver Cake Ninja.)

In addition to getting the website to have more information, I'm getting new business cards (with the awesome logo) and probably will be getting different labels to put on cake/cupcake boxes. Since I'm looking at doing the Handmade Homemade market, I will need labels that list out the most common allergens that could be present in the food. (I will also have sheets with the actual ingredients of whatever I end up making, but it's good to have the warnings on there.) I am also leaning towards buying or making a t-shirt/apron with the logo to wear (possibly both). That way I'm a walking billboard for my own stuff. Look also for possibly an appointment widget on the blog that'd allow people to schedule cake and cupcake deliveries. I have a feeling that if I can get the ball rolling this thing just might be successful.

Updates

So, you may have noticed the updated look and feel of the blog (sadly, no new content, but I am working on it).

The logo is the delightful work of artist extraordinaire Rachel Dukes, of Poseur Ink.

It was an interesting process -- I started with one idea, she did a fabulous sketch, I came back and said "wait, no, what I really want is , please don't kill me" and she did another fabulous sketch, we refined the colors, and here's what you see - a ninja chef octopus, which if you know me personally, you know makes perfect sense as a logo.

In other news, I am trying to get into the July 14th Denver Handmade Homemade Market to actually sell some cupcakes. If I get in, I will let everyone know what time and where to come and find me.

And, last but not least, I have a facebook page for Denver Cake Ninja now, too. So feel free to like that and get updates and weird rantings about cake :D

Otherwise, I have some cake and cupcake photos to upload, a solid idea of what the next two Cake University videos will be, I just need it not to be 90+ degrees since that's not a friend of frosting in order to shoot them, and I'm getting ready to start on Threadcakes again (Opens mid-June, closes mid-August. Gumpaste, ho!).

Finding the time to get it all done

I have fallen behind on my updating schedule, for which I apologize to my readership.

It's been a little hectic between work, trying to get the yard put into our house, and chasing after two young kids. It's not an excuse, and I need to do better, but it is an explanation.

Tomorrow night I need to go shopping for a birthday, and for ingredients for cupcakes to be baked Friday and frosted and shipped on Saturday. I'm trying a new method of packing for the shipping and hoping this turns out better than last time where 1 package was fine, and 2 were pretty much destroyed. Since I'm doing these cupcakes for a charity auction, it's important to me that they be done right. Unfortunately, the labels I ordered won't be here in time. I do have some awesome cupcake boxes that match the blog colors that a friend sent me though, and I'll continue to tack my business card up top.

The leftovers will either be eaten at home or taken to my work or my husband's work. Cupcakes always go over well. However, that's a good six hours out of my night/weekend that I'll have to cram in after the girls go to bed and in the morning, and it takes away from family time.

So the cake ninja would like to know -- how do you make time to bake/make art/do other things you enjoy?

Cake 101: Lesson 8: Fondant

Ah, fondant, delight and bane of decorators everywhere. Most people complain it tastes awful (and some do), but it's exceptional for giving a smooth surface to a cake and keeping it moist and delicious.

This being 101, I am only going to give a quick overview of what fondant is and how to use it. Possibly in a later Cake 101 video, I will show how to apply fondant to a cake.

So what is it? It is a sugar and marshmallow (usually) mix that can be rolled out into sheets and draped over cakes or used to make cut-outs, flowers, borders, etc.

You can buy it premade (and pre-colored if you like) or you can make your own. You can color it by mixing the icing color in as you knead the fondant or you can airbrush or paintbrush color on later.

There are a million and a half tools out there to help you with fondant and to cut fondant, but I have found that cookie cutters work just as well as the specialized tools. The ninjas on the ninja carousel cake were from cookie cutters. I free-handed the sections on the carousel to match the sections on the carousel tops, and then rolled out fondant ropes to twist together.

The Guinness cake seen previously in the cake archive is covered in white fondant, which was then painted with a vodka and icing coloring mix. I used the same technique on the "fail" cake for threadcakes, and the movie camera cake. The border on the Guinness cake is just fondant balls rolled together.

Fondant can seem daunting, but like everything else, it's just practice practice practice. Next week, we'll talk gumpaste.

More Wilton

So, last week I was complaining about a new product from Wilton (it's that time of year -- spam us all with new products). This week I am actually going to give them praise.

Icing tips and couplers. They are difficult to clean. I usually end up throwing mine into their mesh bag and putting them in the silverware holder, and while it gets them clean, it makes them a little beat up. Wilton must have been listening in on my complaints, because there's now a dishwasher tray for your icing tips. I may just have to pick one up.

Ninja Carousel Cake

Here is the infamous neon ninja carousel cake.  Due to some cake wonkiness, it wouldn't stack quite the way I wanted to, so this was the cake with all of the candles (and some fondant ninja cutouts)

Here is a closeup of those ninja cutouts.

Here is the side view of the carousel of ninja awesomeness.

And this is the top view. The carousel is from Wilton, but the decorations are all my own insane imagination.

Cake 101: Star Fills

Here is our second instructional video. This time it's all about how to fill cakes in with the star tip. Happy Caking!

Really, Wilton?

So, Wilton just had their "sweet-up" where they started showing off their new products for 2012/2013, and some of them are just making me shake my head.

The one that has me most annoyed at the moment is their new decorating bag sleeve.

Yes, you see that correctly -- instead of using a glass, like the cake ninja does, or an empty pringles can (a tip I picked up in the comments on their announcement) -- Wilton would love to sell you yet another tool to store in your cabinet.

Really, Wilton, this is the best you can do? How about a funky new icing tip? A cake leveler that actually works? A cake carrier that will accommodate some of the bigger shaped cakes (like the giant cupcake)? This cake decorating ninja is not amused.

Here is a closer look at the cakes from Friday.  (I always end up making two since we do a wide shot and a close up run-through.)

Lamb cakes

I keep swearing that one of these years I am going to buy one of the infamous Wilton lamb pans and make a cake for Easter. In red velvet, because that's how I roll. (And I like the delicious weirdness of a blood red cake when you cut the lamb open.)

I have to admit I find the whole lamb cake thing kind of creepy. I suspect it'd be really easy to make a zombie lamb out of it. Might be funny at Halloween, though.

Tell me, what sort of weird cake would you like to make?

On Hiatus

Life has gotten a little hectic (mostly my own fault! :D ) so I am putting the blog on hiatus until Monday, April 2nd. This should hopefully give me enough time to build up a backlog and get back on track.

On not taking it personally

Over the weekend I made two nearly identical cakes for the next installment of the cake ninja video series. I was feeling lazy, so they were just funfetti cakes from a box. Due to what I was demonstrating, the cake I took into work had less frosting on it than I might usually put on a cake.

So a coworker of mine turns me and says "this is the best cake you've ever made." And then realizes he might have said something insulting when I reply "it's from a box."

However, you can't take this kind of thing personally -- for him the combination white cake, funfetti, and minimal icing was the greatest thing ever. For the  next person, it'll be something entirely different.  You can't please everyone all of the time, so try not to take it personally when you don't.

The 2010 Threadcake

I referenced the various things one can do with chocolate in the Cake 101 post on Friday, so here are some examples of how I've used it.  The cake is based on the Threadless design Fail, which features a cow stuck jumping over the moon.

Rice krispy cows, covered in white candy melts and painted with brown and pink.  The tails and horns are squashed tootsie rolls.

 The moon is yellow candy melts in a form I made from foil.

 Cow sitting on the moon.

 The trees were all roughly freehanded using candy melts and paintbrushes.

 The finished cake. The lights are small led lights (the twist-on kind) turned on and pushed into the top of the cake.

Cake 101: Lesson 7: Chocolate

My apologies for the lack of post last Friday -- things got a little hectic around here and posting fell to the bottom of the to-be-done list.  On the bright side, it gave me a couple of extra days to think and I now know what the next three lessons are.

Today's lesson is chocolate. Not as in chocolate flavored, although a good chocolate cake is a divine thing, but as in the myriad of things one can do with chocolate.

Here are some of the common ways you  might use chocolate

1. Straight -- either pieces of candy on top of a cupcake, or chocolate curls on the side of a cake (I made a cake once for my best friend that involved shaving down a 2lb block of dark chocolate with a cheese grater to get tons of little curls).
2. Melted -- chocolate flavored almond bark, baking squares, candy melts (which may have a chocolate flavor, but aren't really chocolate), etc.  Both the cupcakes featured this week and the week before had candy melt/almond bark chocolates on them. You can buy a million different chocolate molds, and it's a quick way to add decoration. I've also used candy melts over molded rice krispy treats for things like cows, and you can paint with them to do freehand work. (See Monday's cake archive post for some examples).
3. Modeling chocolate -- this is a sort of putty-like chocolate that you can either sculpt as is, or you can sculpt over a wire armature to make figures. I've seen it done a lot on various cake shows, and I saw some advertised for kids in Target recently. It's on my list of things to check out, but as I'm not the most proficient sculptor, I have tended to shy away from it.

So tell me -- do you use chocolate to decorate your cakes?

Cricut cake

I have been resisting and resisting the lure of the cricut machines. Firstly because they require cartridges, and secondly because they're quite spendy. However, it was a rough week at work last week and I happened to get an email showing the cricut cake mini at 60% off, and in a moment of weakness I bought it.

It arrives in the mail today, and it's everything I can do not to plan on running home from work at lunch to play with it. I will report back on how it goes. I have gumpaste in the house, and it comes with one built-in cartridge.

Valentine's cupcakes

I made these cupcakes for a fundraiser.  Red velvet cupcake, marshmallow buttercream frosting, and the hearts are made from a mold and candy melts.

Photography

As you might have noticed by now, I am not the world's greatest photographer. I do a passable job on my children, but a relatively terrible job on my cakes.

It's one part angle, and one part lighting, and one part just not knowing what I am doing. I keep thinking about getting one of those white box setups like they sell to make your eBay stuff look more awesome, but the cakes often won't fit in that.

One of these years I will get it figured out. In the interim I ask you all to bear with my awful photos.

Oscar Party Cupcakes

These are the cupcakes I made for our annual Oscar party. Cupcakes are chocolate (with chocolate frosting) and funfetti (with vanilla frosting). The production slates are made from white chocolate and chocolate almond bark in a mold I bought off of Amazon.com. It was a lot of work, but well worth it. (The cupcake stands are from Wilton -- I bought them on clearance a couple of years ago when Linens And Things went out of business.)

Cake 101: Five Minute Flowers

I am pleased to present our first how-to video. Cake 101: Five Minute Flowers.  We filmed this late last year, but my editor/cinematographer has not had a chance to put the edited version together before now.  Let me know what you think:

Cake, Cake, Cupcake

Lately, I find myself making more cupcakes than anything else cake-wise. Partly because they're faster (or at least it seems that way) than making a regular cake, partly because they're easier (especially if I am skipping any decorations), and partly because it just seems to be the thing to do right now.

Cupcakes are easier to serve -- just hand them out, and easier to store the leftovers than a whole cake. They're also easier to ship (although I've run into a few issues there of late). However, I find that they're not as fun of a canvas as a whole cake.  With a cupcake you have a limited amount of space/canvas to work with and I usually default to some sort of chocolate decoration on top or a single icing flower. With a full cake, the sky is the limit - you can decorate the top, sides, etc.  I'm starting to try to find time to pull my threadcake together (I have a design in mind, and gumpaste waiting for my attention), so there will be more cake-cake in my future, but for now it's cupcakes all the way.

So what's your preference? Cake? Cupcake? I don't care just give me sugar!?

Drop flower mini cupcakes

I made these mini cupcakes for the cake ninja video that still needs to be edited together. It's just a spice cake box mix, with the standard Wilton class recipe frosting. The drop flowers are done with the drop flower tip, and the leaves are done with tip 357 (wilton) which is not a leaf tip, but I like the effect it gives.

Cake 101 Check-in

So we are six lessons into Cake 101, and I thought I would take this opportunity to ask you, my loyal readers, what you think so far.

What do you like?
What do you dislike?
What would you like to see covered?
Do you want to see more pictures?

I am interested in what you have to say, so lay it on me please so we can work together to have a series that's fun to read and write.

Perfectionism

I suffer from perfectionism. I want everything to look just right, even if it's just cupcakes to eat because I wanted cupcakes.

Right now I'm working on some oscar party cupcakes. I haven't made the cupcakes yet, but I got a chocolate mold in the shape of a slate, and I've started making those. The first batch has not turned out nearly as well as I would like it to -- understandable since it's a new mold and I need to learn its intricacies -- and I find myself more annoyed than I truly ought to be.

I do this to myself in my day job, too, though. I want everything to be neat, elegant, and work flawlessly the first time.  The reality is, as I've said before, humans are messy and flawed and nothing we do is going to be perfect. I do want to get better than I already am, and I want to do well in things like Threadcakes (and possibly Sweet Times in the Rockies next year), but I have to allow myself to not be perfect.

80th Birthday cakes

For Chris' grandmother's 80th birthday, in 2009, I made four cakes.  Originally when I volunteered to make the cakes, I was going to take the week between Christmas and New Year's off and have plenty of time. Then I was laid off, so I'd still have time, and then I found a job and they asked me to start on the 29th of December, so I ended up doing a couple of late nights that week to get all of the cakes done.

The rectangular cakes are sour cream fudge (minus the coffee due to an allergy in the family), with chocolate buttercream in the middle.  The round cake was both sour cream fudge and the chocolate cake recipe on the  box of Hershey's special dark cocoa because I had a cake fail to turn out correctly.

The cakes are all something related to Chris' grandmother's life. First up, the CU logo. This was done with the technique of tracing the image with piping gel in reverse and then laying that onto the cake and icing over the gel.

She's also an avid bridge player, so this cake pays tribute to that. The card suits were all done using a large cookie cutter to put the outline on the cake and then piping that in with a star tip.

And she likes to golf, so I made a golf course.  The brighter green is the grass tip, with a river of blue frosting and the sand trap is toasted coconut.

I also made a golfer out of gumpaste. The golfer looks more like Mr. Bill than the birthday girl, but it was my first attempt at figure making, so I can't say that it turned out too badly.

Last but not least, this cake uses royal icing drop flowers and the vine outlines were done with a press kit I have that's scroll work. The letters are also from the letter press -- much too neat to be my own handwriting.  Unfortunately, you can see where the bars that hold the letters ended up a little too deep in the cake.

The cake boards are all standard cake boards, covered in gold wrapping paper with a layer of plastic wrap atop that to make them food safe.  I thought the gold was much nicer than the standard white cake board, and doing it with plastic wrap and wrapping paper is cheaper than the food-safe foil paper sold for that purpose.

Cake 101: Lesson 6: Inspiration is everywhere

Lesson 6: Inspiration is everywhere.

I probably have something approaching 20 books on cake now, everything from recipe books to little books of decorating tips and tricks. I have books that are aimed at the home baker and books that assume you've had at least some pastry training. I have books that provide step by step instructions and books that are more about the art of the cake. Each of them informs how I approach cake and how I approach decorating.  Some of my favorites are Martha Stewart's Cupcakes, Sky High: Irresistable Triple Layer Cakes, the Ace of Cakes book, and Hello, Cupcake! and What's New Cupcake?.

However, you don't have to have a book on cake to be inspired. One of my favorite sites is Cake Wrecks, partly to laugh at the wrecks, but mostly to look at the Sunday Sweets and take inspiration from them. There are tons of other forums on the web, too, filled with people posting about their cake experiments.  Heck, there's my perennial head-banging effort in threadcakes -- cakes inspired by t-shirts.

You can also find inspiration in the every day -- maybe there's a photo in a magazine you like, or a pattern on wallpaper, or that funky building you pass every day on your commute.  It's always worth trying to recreate what you see, even if it doesn't turn out, because you might just learn something new.

Where do you find inspiration for your cakes?

She wore red velvet

I used to swear up and down that red velvet was not a chocolate cake, recipe be darned, but if it's not, then what is it?

You can of course, go to wikipedia and learn the entire history of red velvet cake.  There are more recipes than  you can possibly imagine, but it's usually buttermilk and/or vinegar, red food coloring (artificial or natural, like beets), and cocoa powder.  Cream cheese is the traditional frosting, although buttercream is also popular. I recently made red velvet cupcakes and topped them with a marshmallow buttercream and decorations made from candy melts.

I always think of it as a not really a chocolate cake - it's not chocolate cake to me because the flavor isn't smack you in the face chocolate, it's more like the wallflower at the party chocolate -- there, but drawing attention to itself. The red originally came from the reaction of the vinegar and the cocoa, but is not a requirement -- you'll see everything from pink to blue velvet and are only limited by your imagination (rainbow velvet, zebra velvet, you name it), although I think white would be nearly impossible given the natural color of cocoa.

Why velvet? That, I have no idea. I do find that it's usually a slightly moister cake, depending on the recipe - so perhaps the denseness means a velvety mouthfeel? The cupcake recipe I used had a high amount of oil in it, which made for a tendency to cling to the cupcake wrapper, but also a nice level of moisture in the cake, even a few days later.

Neither fish nor fowl, with its most distinguishing feature being its color, red velvet is an odd cake indeed. It's not my personal favorite, but it's definitely enjoyed a resurgence of late. So, red velvet yes or no?

Chipotle red velvet

For his birthday this year, the husband did not want a fancy cake. He just wanted a spicy red velvet cake. So, that's what he got.

The cake is a chipotle red velvet cake, the recipe for which I found on Salon after googling.

As you can see below, I was lazy and did not level my layers. I usually don't unless they're very much out of whack or the cake construction requires perfectly straight tops. This one did not.

So, it's three 9" layers of chipotle red velvet. The filling in the middle is a roasted jalapeno jelly.

The frosting is a mascarpone cream cheese frosting. The ingredients for the frosting alone were nearly $20, but it tasted so delicious I did not mind. (This cake is a perfect example of why ingredients matter. Cheap mascarpone or cheap chipotle would not have been a good choice here.)

I used the royal icing letters you can buy at the store instead of writing in frosting -- mostly because the mascarpone frosting was not of a good consistency for piping, and I did not think a straight buttercream would be a nice taste combination.

I must confess that the cake was actually too spicy for me to eat much of. I had meant to use a strawberry jalapeno jelly for the filling, and grabbed the roasted jalapeno out of the pantry instead, and that turned out to be too much heat for my poor palate, even with the cooling effect of the icing.  However, the birthday boy was quite happy with it, so that's all I can really ask for.

How about you -- ever made a cake you couldn't eat? The Cake Ninja welcomes your input.

Cake 101: Lesson 5: Frosting

It's Cake 101: Lesson 5: Frosting. I know the series is kind of jumping around a bit, but that's mostly because it's how things organize themselves in my mind as I go. That said, if there's something you'd like me to cover next/soon in the Cake 101 series, hit the comment button and let me know.

So, frosting.  There are probably 7 million frosting recipes out there and what I use depends on what I'm doing.

For a standard cake that I don't intend to do any decorating on (i.e. it's just cake and frosting) I generally use whatever frosting the recipe calls for. Cupcakes are mostly the same way -- some of the time I use this great frosting recipe from Hello, Cupcake! that involves marshmallow fluff. I've also used that as a base layer on a cake before and discovered that you shouldn't refrigerate it because it gets gummy.

For decorating cakes, I use the Wilton class recipe -- it's meringue powder, shortening (not butter, although you can do it with butter, the consistency is just a little different), water, powdered sugar, and flavoring.  This recipe is close -- use all shortening instead of butter, add 1 tablespoon meringue powder, and use water instead of milk.  The class butter cream recipe on the Wilton site doesn't match the one I have from the booklet for the course I took, so I'd recommend starting from the linked recipe.  You can add 3/4c cocoa powder to make a chocolate icing -- I recommend doing so if you intend to color the final product black as it gives a darker base to start from.

How much water you put in determines the consistency of the final product -- the base recipe gives stiff consistency. Add 1 tablespoon water per batch of icing to make medium consistency and 2 tablespoons to get to thin. Here's how I use the various consistencies.

• Stiff  - this is what you'd use to make the Wilton rose, and what I use for making some flowers.
• Medium - borders, drop flowers, some other flowers (pansies, sweet peas) piping (with piping gel added), stars, shells, etc. This is also what you would use if you were covering a cake in basket weave.
• Thin - this is the base icing for covering a cake. I also tend to use thin with piping gel for leaves.

Lastly we can't forget royal icing.  This is a stiffer consistency icing used to create various decorations. There's also a technique called color flow where you use a thinner royal icing to fill in shapes.  The advantage to royal icing is that the decorations made from it will keep for months.

You can of course, also use frosting from a can, but I find that the average can of frosting does not have a consistency that stands up to piping decorations. You can also buy pre-made icing and icing mix from Wilton, but I don't find it that hard to do, so don't spend the extra money to buy pre-made.

So that's the lowdown on the sweet stuff. Questions? Comments? The cake ninja is, as always, all ears.

On Handwriting

It is inevitable -- at some point you will have to write something on a cake.  If you have perfect handwriting then you're in luck and the worst you have to worry about is keeping it in a straight line.

However, if you're more like the rest of us, it can be a tricky proposition. I am lucky in that my handwriting with icing is somewhat better than my handwriting on paper. This is likely because I force myself to slow down and think about what I am doing when I write in icing.  A little piping gel mixed into the icing goes a long way to help with that, too as it gives a smoother line of frosting.

So you have to put words on a cake -- what are your options?

1. You can just go for it and write on the cake. 
2. You can use a letter press set (mine is all caps in normal printing, but I believe you can get message sets in cursive as well). The caveat here is that your icing has to have enough time to set up and get a hard crust, otherwise when you pull the letters out they won't have definition and you'll mess up the nice job you did making the icing smooth.
3. You can print out the wording you want in a nice font, place a sheet of wax paper over it, and trace the letters out and then transfer them to the cake. I strongly recommend using royal icing if you do this as it will set harder and stand up better to the transfer.
4. You can print the wording out reversed and do a piping gel stencil onto the cake and then trace over that with icing.
5. You can buy royal icing letters from the store and use those.

I tend to go for options 1 and 2, but have also done 5 in a pinch. It all depends on the look and level of perfectionism you're looking for. How about you? How do you write on cakes? The cake ninja is all ears.

The movie camera cake

Just a note -- the cake archive posts are not in any sort of chronological order. Just whatever I felt like showcasing that week.

This week is one of the most technically complex cakes I have made to date. It was for my husband's 30th birthday (the Guinness cake was for his 29th) and since he's a cinematographer and editor, he asked for a movie camera.

Unfortunately, I do not have fantastic pictures of it because most of the pictures were lost in the great computer crash of 2010.

This is the completed cake.  It's several pieces of cake in varying heights and shapes, covered in fondant and painted black. The silver portions on the camera itself, the slate, and the film reel are all done with gumpaste and painted silver.

 Cake lit up with 30 candles.

 Birthday boy blowing out the cake.

The process was as follows -- I found a couple of images online of movie cameras and asked my husband to select which ones he liked best. I then started with the reels (those are 6" round cakes) and sized the rest of the cake pieces to be proportional to the reels based on the measurements from the images.  Each of the pieces was covered in fondant individually and then painted black using a vodka and black paste icing color mix.

The gumpaste was white, and I used varying sizes of circles to make the knobs.  The square portion on the camera and the reel were done free-hand.  The center of the reel is a disc of gumpaste painted black. The rest of it was colored silver using a vodka and silver dust mix.  The slate is a piece of gumpaste painted black and then I used white royal icing to do the bars at the top and to write Happy Birthday on it.

The cakes themselves were a mix of cupcake recipes scaled up, and a couple sections were from a box mix because I had one recipe that just refused to play nice. (See this post on failure for details.)

All told, I think the cake took about 20 hours over the course of two weeks -- two weeks because the gumpaste needed adequate time for the shapes to dry and then for two or three coats of silver and black to dry. I made the fondant (from the marshmallow recipe) two days before, and the cakes were all done the night before, with the assembly being done partially that night and mostly the next morning.

The most important part though was that my husband was thrilled.  (Of course, last year he just wanted a plain old boring cake, but that's okay!)

Cake 101: Lesson 4: Mixers

Mixers are one of those subjects that everyone has an opinion on, and here's mine.

The way I see it -- there's three ways to mix a cake: by hand, with a hand mixer, or with a stand mixer.

There are some things you just can't do by hand and/or shouldn't try to: frosting, whipping egg whites, divinity.

I used to think that a hand mixer was all I needed in life. I have a cuisinart 70 watt hand mixer, and it'll do a double batch of stiff frosting without even breaking a sweat.  I'd get annoyed at recipes that specified "use a stand mixer" (I'm talking to you, Alton Brown!).

Then I got a Viking stand mixer as a gift.  There's something to be said for the ease and simplicity of being able to add ingredients without stopping the mixer, scraping down, adding the ingredients, picking it back up, etc. I'm also getting a better consistency out of the frosting, and making bread is much easier. Plus, it's black and silver and shiny and sleek and bad-ass.

However, that doesn't mean you should run right out and buy a stand mixer. If you're not going to be making a lot of cakes on a regular basis, then a hand mixer is probably right for you.

The cake ninja's quick take is this:
Stand mixer pros: easier to use, handles stiffer frostings and larger batches, can be left to run on its own while you do other things.
Stand mixer cons: expensive, heavy, takes up more space in the kitchen.

Hand mixer pros: lightweight, takes less space, quick to assemble.
Hand mixer cons: not suited for large batches, gets tiring to hold for long whiles, cannot be run unattended.

I still use my hand mixer a lot (makes killer mashed potatoes) and I think both it and my stand mixer have their place in the kitchen.  If I'm just doing a quick box cupcake mix, there's no reason to pull out the stand mixer. On the other hand, if I'm doing a double or triple batch of frosting, I'd much rather take the effort.

As far as brands go, that is entirely up to you, your budget, and your preferences (the cost of an additional bowl for my mixer makes me cringe, but there is something to be said for the relationship between price and quality).  I'm fond of the ones I have, but you should do your research and decide on your own.

I hope that helps. Remember -- there is no one true way to mix. Comments, questions, suggestions on where to get flame decals for my mixer? The cake ninja is all ears.

Threadcakes

Yes, I am already thinking about threadcakes again.

Three years, only one cake submitted, and I haven't been overly happy with any of them. However, it's winter, and that means that I won't be fighting awful heat and humidity. And, the rules are the same as last year, and the guy who runs it has stated publicly that we can start baking now.

So I'm starting to think about it. If I started now, I would have plenty of time to do gumpaste (and redo it when I hated it).  The issue is just picking a design.

The first year I did this is not a pipe and my cake wasn't stacked well and the rice krispie pipe plant was too big for the cake.

The following year I did fail and the results were better, but not fabulous.

This year I did Color Wheel and I liked it in concept, but not in execution (largely due to not using good ingredients).

Winning cakes have all been from much more complicated designs, but I'm not certain I want to sign on for that level of complexity.

Oh well, it's only February, I have time to figure it out.

Cakelets

Last week I promised that this Monday I would show you the other cakes I made at the same time as the Guinness cake, and so I shall.

(As an aside, schedule your backups, kids, for I have found that I am missing pictures of a couple of cakes because I lost them in a hard drive crash. This is especially saddening as one of them was a fantastic all-white three tiered anniversary cake.)

So, the Guinness cake was for my husband's birthday, and the cakelets were for a baby shower and for my oldest daughter's first birthday.  They were all made over the same four day period. I'd just been laid off, so I had plenty of time to finish them in (thankfully I found a job relatively quickly).

The cakelets are from a NordicWare pan sold by Williams-Sonoma and the cake itself is from the recipe that came with the pan. The brighter colored ones are done with my usual icing recipe and the pastel ones are cream cheese icing and colored sugar.

The baby shower had a theme of ladybugs and dragonflies, so those are the only cakes I used. I'm also thinking, looking at this, that I only used a round tip for the decorating. I wanted to create an evocation of the colors/shapes of the cakes without overloading them with frosting. However, feedback I got from the client was that some people didn't think the cakes had enough frosting.

In contrast, as there was no real theme (picnic, sort of) for my daughter's birthday party, I used all of the bugs in the set, and went wild with the colors.  I'm using the round tip again (I would guess probably a 3 and a 5 or 7) as well as a flatter tip to get the ridged black lines.  Nothing really special here technique-wise, just following the contours of the pan. Sometimes though, simple is better.

I will continue to troll the archives -- there's more fondant, threadcakes galore, and some really interesting early cakes still to come.

Cake 101: Lesson 3: Pans, pans, and more pans

Lesson 3: Pans, pans, and more pans

I am not even going to attempt to claim to provide a comprehensive overview to every type of cake pan available. Instead, I am going to hopefully provide you with a quick reference guide for the next time you're contemplating a cake and its pan.

A note about brand -- everyone has their loyalty to a particular brand. Some people prefer Chicago Metallic, some people prefer NordicWare, some people prefer Wilton, others just whatever they can buy at their local store. The majority of my pans are either NordicWare or Wilton, but that's my personal preference. You should use whatever pans work for you.

A note about silicone pans -- I hate them. I have never had a cake come out of them successfully, so I do not use them and do not recommend them to others. However -- your mileage can and most certainly will vary.

Lastly, always be sure to only use as much batter in the pan as your recipe and/or pan calls for.

So here's the Cake Ninja's quick reference on pans:

• Round pans - your bog standard cake pan. Come in various diameters -- most commonly used are 6", 8", 9", and 10", although you will see multi-tiered wedding cakes going to 16" and beyond. The average household oven may not hold a 16" or greater pan successfully.  I like to use bake-even strips with these, especially on the 10" pans and you should use a heating core on anything greater than 10" (and some people do at 10" -- quick note, you can substitute a flower nail placed head down in the pan for a heating core).
• Rectangle pans - 9"x13" is the most common here, although you can get them up to full sheet size (which probably won't fit in the average household oven either). I have them in both glass and metal, and use them almost interchangeably. One thing to note -- you will not get perfectly square corners out of these pans as they're all slightly rounded.
• Other tier shapes -- you can get hearts, diamonds, pillow shapes, etc in tiered sets for wedding cakes. I have not used any of these personally, but do covet a funky paisley shaped one from Wilton.
• Bundt pans -- come in all sorts of styles these days. These are the pans with the hole in the center and often with some sort of fluting on the edges.
• Angel food pans -- like a bundt pan, but straight sided. These you do not use cake release on -- the cake needs to stick to the sides to rise properly.
• Shaped pans -- I have these in multiple varieties. There are the pans that are a single shape/piece (cartoon character, butterfly, castle, etc) that then gets decorated. There are pans that are in two pieces (bee hive, soccer ball, giant cupcake, etc) that are then put together and decorated. And then there are many mini-cakelet pans that come in various configurations (trains, cars, bugs, wedding cake shapes, mini bundts, etc).  These are usually of a heavier metal than the round pans, and all of mine are NordicWare.
• Springform pans -- not used for cakes, but a must if you're making a cheesecake. These pans have a side band that springs/clips into place around a bottom rim. You would not want to use these for a cake as the batter would probably run out.
• Cupcake pans - come in three sizes (mostly), the standard 12 cupcake pan, mini cupcake pans (I think mine hold 24), and the jumbo 6 cupcake pans. You can use them with papers or without, but if you do it without you need to be very good about spraying the pan.

So there you have it, a quick guide to pans. Anything I missed? Any pans you love? Any pans you hate? Want to tell me how wrong I am for hating silicone? Have at it! :)

A rose by any other name

So there are a couple of ways of doing icing roses. There's the one you most commonly see in cakes from stores, and that Wilton teaches, with the fluffy curved petals. And then there's the one Martha Stewart teaches in her cupcake book that is more of a spiral.

I have never mastered the Wilton rose. I practice and practice and practice and they're still fairly awful. On the other hand, I can rock a spiral rose like no one's business. But, the Wilton rose is the one most people associate with roses, so I keep going back and trying to make it work.

What cake technique do you have trouble with?

Guinness cake

As promised, Mondays will feature various cakes I have made and I will talk about the cake, the lessons I learned, and the techniques I used.

First up, an early experiment in fondant. This one was for my husband's birthday, and he's a huge fan of Guinness.

The cake itself is this recipe and I made two batches of it in 9x13 pyrex pans. The fondant is this marshmallow fondant. This recipe is my go-to fondant recipe. Even people who don't like fondant like this recipe.

You can see here, looking at the top of the cake, where I have a line from rolling out the fondant across the gap in my table. Lesson 1: have a big enough surface to roll the fondant on.

You probably also notice that the color is uneven. I do not own an airbrush, and because the color had to be partially up the cake and I was not confident in my abilities to line the fondant up, I chose to paint the color on instead.  I was using a foam brush, I believe, and the color was thinned out with vodka.  I have since switched over to bristle brushes for painting and get somewhat better results. Some day I will buy an airbrush, but I'm just not making enough cakes right now to justify the expense.

The balls around the bottom of the cake are just there to hide the edge. You can also see from the above angle that I didn't get the bottom of the pint glass quite even. I was trying to match the contours of the Guinness glasses we have.

However, I am rather proud of the Guinness logo. It was done by printing out a large scale version of the logo, then carefully cutting that into a stencil. Once the stencil was complete, I carefully filled it in with yellow buttercream, let it set and then lifted the stencil straight up.  The detail is not as clean as if I had piped it, but I find it works admirably for designs without a lot of fussiness.

Stay tuned -- in the weeks ahead you'll see the cake I made as a follow-up for my husband's 30th birthday -- it involves a lot more fondant and shaping. Next week, though, I will showcase the rest of the cakes I made for this birthday celebration, and it was also my oldest daughter's 1st birthday.

Cake 101: Lesson 2: Ingredients Matter

My apologies for the delay in continuing this series -- the birth of my second daughter at the end of November threw off my schedule for a bit. However, it is a new year and I have a renewed commitment to this blog. I am working on a backlog of posts that should allow me to post on a MWF schedule for the foreseeable future.

Mondays will be a look at cakes I've made and a discussion of the techniques in them. Wednesdays will be free-form musings on cake, and Fridays will be the Cake 101 series. I am also hoping to have a video on drop flowers available in the near future, but that will be dependent upon my editor's schedule and he's a bit busy.

So, without further ado, Lesson 2: Ingredients Matter.

Here is a cake frosting made with powdered sugar, meringue powder, flavoring and shortening (the standard recipe I use) with all of the ingredients at their best:

And here is a cake I made where I ran out of powdered sugar, and the shortening I was using had partially liquefied:

Note the difference in texture and consistency. The second cake has a grainier texture, and the frosting is sliding off the cake. The first cake has nice crisp texture and the decorations are where they should be.

Ingredients matter -- especially those that are going to be the first ones seen by people looking at the cake. Quality matters -- cutting corners will only result in unhappy cakes and unhappy people eating the cakes.

So let's talk ingredients. The following is strictly my opinion based on my experience thus far, your mileage can and will vary.

• Flour - I almost never use cake flour, just standard all purpose and I haven't had a problem to date. I will sift it if the recipe calls for it, but that's about the extent of worrying I do. I also don't adapt my recipes for higher altitude, and haven't had a problem there either.
• Sugar - I tend to prefer dark brown sugar if the recipe calls for brown sugar, use the store brand granulated (white) sugar, and mostly use store-brand powdered sugar. I have not found that using name brand sugar makes a difference.
• Eggs - use whatever the recipe calls for.
• Shortening - I use the store brand and haven't had any problems. I do not use butter flavor for my frosting because it's yellow and it'll tint the frosting.
• Baking soda/baking powder -- I tend to use name brand here, but that's personal preference.
• Spices and extracts - always use the best you can afford. Spices (clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, etc) and extracts (vanilla, orange, peppermint, etc) are where the bulk of the flavor in your cake will come from and cheaping out here will be noticeable. If you're making white frosting and want it to be white, use a clear extract.
• Chocolate - never use cheap chocolate. It's worth it to spend the extra for good chocolate. Although I don't necessarily feel the same about cocoa powder -- my preferred there is Hershey's Special Dark.
• Booze - if the cake calls for booze (liquor or beer) use good liquor or beer. There's a scotch cake I make (with nuts and raisins) that I use Macallan in. If I won't drink it, I won't bake with it.
• Raisins, nuts, molasses, etc - I usually use the store brand as it doesn't make much of a difference.
• Icing colors - I tend to prefer paste over gel and usually buy Wilton, but the gel colors available at Hobby Lobby are also nice.
• Cake release/baking spray - while you could do the butter and flour your pan method, I far prefer baking spray/cake release. Brand does not seem to matter here -- I have had good luck with both the store brand and Baker's Joy.

So there you have it -- know your ingredients and buy what works for you, but try not to skimp on the ones that most affect flavor and appearance. As always, I welcome your feedback -- what do you agree with, what did I forget, and what did I get totally wrong?