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.