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?