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: