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.

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!).

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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.

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.