Too hot for cake

Yes, there really is such a thing as too hot for cake.

It has been record highs two days in a row here in Denver -- and it's been too hot to move, much less do much of anything with cake. I am getting things pulled together for Threadcakes, and if we get lower temperatures tomorrow (we are promised to), I will do the photos for the tutorial on gumpaste for Friday.

I will have to make cake this weekend regardless -- I am doing the trial run of the various cupcake flavors for Denver HandmadeHomemade in July, and since this next one is going to be outdoors, having to worry about stabilizing icing in the heat should help ensure that the cupcakes look delicious from start to finish next month. (And yes, there will be a post out of that, too, so two two two things in one!).

Cake 101: Lesson 9 Gumpaste

This is really more of lesson 9a.

So what is Gumpaste? It is a modeling compound you can use to make more elaborate structures out of than chocolate or fondant.

I usually buy mine either in the premixed pouches or in the cans you add water to, but it is possible to find recipes online.

It takes a varied drying time - the frames for the movie cake dried far faster than the center disk of the reel - and, like fondant, you can mix color in or paint it on afterwards.

Stay tuned next week for part b in which I will show how to use it.

Threadcakes is open

And once again, I have not done anything at all before it opens. Who, me, procrastinate?

Actually, that's not entirely true. I have the gumpaste on hand, and I think I have settled on a design.

The design itself is from a penguin shirt. The penguin will be out of gumpaste and reside on the top of a three tier cake.

The three tier cake will be done topsy-turvy style (there's a first time for everything!) and will be covered in fondant in a light blue with snowflake fondant cutouts on the tiers.

In my head, it looks awesome. In reality, we shall see. (Also, it's totally an excuse to buy another cricut cake cartridge so that I have one that does snowflakes.)

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.

Cake University

You may have noticed that I'm a little behind on Cake 101.

The next lesson is intended to be gum paste, and as I am getting ready to do Threadcakes, I thought I'd do a picture tutorial instead of just text, so it'll be a little bit.

Additionally, we are shooting two episodes of the blip.tv series this weekend (if all goes according to plan) and hopefully I will have them up at the beginning and end of July (if I put them up all at once, what content do I have to keep my readers coming back?)

I have not forgotten you, dear students of Cake University, never fear! Just think of it as summer break.

Handmade Homemade July 14th

I will be vending at the Denver Handmade Homemade market on July 14th, 4-8pm at Green Spaces (1368 26th Street, Denver, 80205).

So be sure to get your vote in for what kind of cupcakes should be there, and if you're local, come on down and see me!

A poll!

For those of you not following Denver Cake Ninja on Facebook (and why not?! :D), here is your opportunity to tell the Cake Ninja what she should bake if she gets into the Handmade Homemade market.

Your options are:

Black (Guinness) and tan (vanilla or Harp) cupcakes with marshmallow frosting
Chipotle red velvet with cream cheese frosting
Creamsicle - orange cupcake with vanilla buttercream
Gingerbread stout with marshmallow frosting
Chai with cardamom buttercream

The three top vote-getting cupcakes (votes counted here and on Facebook) will be the ones I make for the market and the locals can come and get some.

Not local? Dying for a dozen of any of those flavors? The Cake Ninja will ship, contact me for pricing and availability. Local, and still dying for a dozen of a flavor? Same thing -- contact me for pricing and availability.

Wednesday Randomness

I am slowly trying to get back into the habit of regular content for the blog, and will be doing a bunch of tweaks and updates to the website to add additional pages and content in the nearish future, but for now you get the couple most amusing search terms that brought people to this blog of late.

1) "i m doing cake i too often" - impossible. No such thing as doing cake too often.
2) "how to decorate wilton carousel cake" - I am not sure the neon ninja carousel was quite what they were looking for there.

The rest were pretty straightforward -- pint glass/guinness glass was pretty common, and "the movie camera cake" had a fair number of hits as well. I was pleased to see that googling "Denver Cake Ninja" returns something somehow affiliated with me for 80% of the first page of links. (There is a bakery in Denver that talks about its cake ninjas, but while they may live in Denver, they are not the Denver Cake Ninja.)

In addition to getting the website to have more information, I'm getting new business cards (with the awesome logo) and probably will be getting different labels to put on cake/cupcake boxes. Since I'm looking at doing the Handmade Homemade market, I will need labels that list out the most common allergens that could be present in the food. (I will also have sheets with the actual ingredients of whatever I end up making, but it's good to have the warnings on there.) I am also leaning towards buying or making a t-shirt/apron with the logo to wear (possibly both). That way I'm a walking billboard for my own stuff. Look also for possibly an appointment widget on the blog that'd allow people to schedule cake and cupcake deliveries. I have a feeling that if I can get the ball rolling this thing just might be successful.

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!).

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.