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.