Lemony Yumminess!!

Another yummy taste test cupcake.

This one was a White Cake from scratch. It seems a good deal of scratch recipes taste like pancake mix to me. So I am learning some tricks. Actually sifting the flour (as the directions suggest) can make a difference because there is less flour - flavor change. Also I have been taking 1/3 of the flour and replacing it with Cake Flour.

I have quoted WiseGeek in explaining the advantage of Cake Flour, "When baking a cake, most cooks aim to create a light, fluffy cake with a tender crumb. This requires a flour with a low protein content, as protein promotes the production of gluten, which can make baked goods more tough. It also means that the flour must be very finely milled, to keep baked goods from getting heavy. Finally, a flour which is starchy and able to hold large amounts of fat and sugar without collapsing is required".

Replacing some of the All Purpose Flour (even after the sifting) with Cake Flour has helped to take away the pancake flavor many of the scratch cake recipes give me.

Now after baking the perfect White Cake Cupcake I then hollowed out the center. Filled the center with a Lemon Curd - here is the recipe for the Lemon Curd recipe (gotta love Alton Brown) - and then topped the whole thing off with a Lemon Butter cream icing.

Ben took a bite of this cupcake and said, "That is what I want to take to school for my birthday." A new family favorite was born.

Copying Is Fantastically Fun

I LOVE LOVE LOVE it when someone gives me something and says "Can you do this?" Sure there is a lot to be said for just CREATING whatever I want, but when I am doing it for another group of people it is much less anxiety ridden when I can just bang out what they want. And Copying something is my total specialty. This cake was one of Those.

This summer the kids were in a play at the local community theatre. Fantastic Mr. Fox. This is the billboard poster. So so simple. So so easy to copy.


First I copied it in making Thank You cards from the cast to the crew/staff of the show. A tad time consuming cutting out all those trees, but easily done. In fact, doing the cards made my brain very familiar with the curves and design of the plays poster so it made the next task much easier...


Creating the cake that we took to the Cast and Crew Picnic. Mr. Fox was most easy of all the cake. Honestly he was also the most fun.


The only real challenge to this cake was that one of the younger actors had serious allergies. Nut allergies for certain, but there may have been other ones mixed in there too. Dairy and Wheat were not though. So the father asked me to be very careful in how I made the cake. I decided to look for a new chocolate scratch recipe. Give me an excuse to look for new things and I will these days.

I threw a lot of cake away that week. Too picky you think? I also sprayed down my entire kitchen with a mixture of bleach and water.......just to be safe.


Everyone enjoyed the cake tremendously. Yea!!! My favorite part of the whole thing though - overhearing Ben brag to those who stopped near the cake not knowing that I made it - he went on about how talented I am - made me swell up that I made him so proud!! Another really cool thing......everyone with a phone took a picture!! Never saw that happen with one of my cakes before.

SWING! Butter Butter Butter

Nothing better then baseball season. Right? Well for the past two years at the end of baseball season I get the chance to make a baseball cake. No one cares what I do as long as it is Basebally (is that a word?).

Last year I did a cake with a raised baseball on it. This year I thought perhaps we needed a bat........then as I began doing the bat I realized - Bats Are Harder Then Balls. Primarily it is the scale that is a challenge. Bats get very tapered at the base - balls are just round. Round is easy. Baseball bats done correctly are not round or stumpy. The last thing I wanted was to create a stumpy bat that might look so phallic it would end up on Cake Wrecks (funny to look at - but I am sure traumatic to be featured on).


See........easy and round.........topped simply with a Vanilla Butter cream..........just about finished. Gotta love Baseballs.


Baseball bat.......well at least it doesn't look like a penis right? But crumbly and messy with that first crumb coat - yeah yeah....that is why they call it a crumb coat. Thanks.


Next step.....the real pretty icing. This year the team was a very dark Forest Green. Plop on top and easily spread across the cake


Then, as normal, I kinda got into the decorating part and forgot to take pictures. Sorry.
Basically - iced the cake - placed the Bat on first - then positioned the Ball - piped on the stitching for the ball - did the lettering and edged the cake.


Way to Go Big Green!!!

The cake was the traditional crowd pleasing flavors - Chocolate on one half and Yellow on the other half. All Vanilla Butter creaming icing. The kids and parents LOVED it!!

Cops and Cake

This one was easy....yet hard. Sometimes people will ask for a cake that I have no clue how to make. The original request was for something that was Fun, but that was a Normal Police Car (the town, not the kind)- it was for a 4 year old, a 13 year old and a 60+ year old. So I figured cute, but close to the real looking car. Sent a few ideas and then got back - less cute - my original was a cartoon type police car along the lines of Speed McQueen from CARS. Admittedly probably not what a 13 year old of 60+ year old would want.

Switched gears then.......get it - car cake - Switched Gears??

Googled the police car in question......not easy to find. Too bad they weren't in another town because every bordering town had pictures of their police cars. Finally found one and began building.


The background obviously needed to be Blue. Why? Ahhhh.....because in my head Police Officers wear Blue. Is that in anyone elses head? Then I began to put the shape of the car up. Then I quit taking pictures because I got into doing the decorating and totally forgot about the camera. Sorry.


In the end the cake looked like this. There are a few subtle detail lines that are carved into the cake instead of done in icing, but it is hard to photograph. The windows I put some sparkly silver flakes to try to give it a reflective look like glass. Hubcaps too.


In the end the cake turned out very cute. Well....not TOO cute. Realistic enough, yet obviously still a bit on the cartoon side.

The cake was half Yellow and half Chocolate Chocolate Chip with a Vanilla Butter cream icing.

Sometimes You Wing It

My wonderful niece's graduation cake. Not hard really until you factor all the elements that went into it.

#1 - not my kitchen
#2 - I was on vacation for an entire week before doing this cake
#3 - I had virtually none of my cake stuff with me and had to make things up
#4 - the few fondant pieces I made ahead of time kinda broke


Still I think the cake turned out pretty cute. Now....does it look like it is leaning a bit? Yeah, that is because the couple of things that were supposed to be bought for me were kinda forgotten - other people have crazy lives too - so we made due with what I could create.


See how the edges of the cake look like they are sinking into the lower layer? That is because the divider to keep it stable is a Butter Box. Yep it is the thin cardboard that surrounds 4 sticks of butter. Then I folded it in half and wrapped it with plastic wrap. Tah Dah......a cake layer divider was born. Although not a terribly stable one. Since I had no dowel rods we used those skinny wooden skewers. Again - not terrible stable, but they worked for the little time the cake needed to stay together.


Everyone loved the cake - The graduate was happy - and really that is all that counted. Although maybe it is my vanity that makes me think the cake is what made her happy that day. Perhaps it truly was the fact that she was GRADUATED from High School and moving on toward the next big challenge in her life........College!!

The cake was 1 layer White Vanilla - 1 layer Chocolate Chocolate Chip - 1 layer Banana. Vanilla Butter cream and Vanilla fondant for the extras and the name.

Cheer On!!!

After many months of playing it "safe" and doing cakes with Buttercream only........I thought it might be time to try another fondant cake. And this seemed the perfect cake to do. Although I did decide to ice the cake with a blue buttercream leaving the center white.....I added elements of fondant with the cheerleader, the stars and the banner.

At first I was a bit nervous about cutting things out. I currently had zero tools. So it was a wooden rolling pin and some knives that did this handy work. Oh, I did however have a star cookie cutter. There was a bit of self induced aggravation at first ..... I had not figured out how to keep the porous rolling pin from sticking to the fondant once it was worked a bit. However, after figuring out that dusting the pin with powdered sugar helped (duh) things went a bit more smoothly.


The cake is for a friends daughters party. She is in 7th grade so I was a smidge worried that this would be too "cutesy" for her. Until I delivered it. Although I have seen her very cute smile several times - for the most part she is a typical preteen - a smidge too collected to be giddy in front of adults. She took a look at the cake and got a giddy giggle in her eyes and clapped her hands. Then of course she quickly composed herself and said, "Oh that is very nice."

Bonus - I got a moment of girlish giggle glint!! I love delivering!!

Cupcake Break

Time to take a cupcake break. See if you hadn't noticed a lot of the cakes that I do are for my own family and friends. Which of course makes the process much less stressful. Friends of friends are people that I am not as familiar with and I would worry a good deal more about making things perfect. Not a big deal. Easy enough to worry about. Honestly I am kinda of looking forward to worrying about that - because with worry comes the feeling of accomplishment when the person LOVES the cake in the end.

So why a Cupcake Break? Well because you may also have noticed a theme in flavors. Chocolate Chocolate Chip, Banana, White, Yellow and a few Marbles sprinkled in. With Butter cream icing. Totally yummy........but if I ever consider having a bakery I need to have some flavors besides these three. If I am going to offer flavors besides these three I need to start perfecting them. So hence the Cupcake Break. Baking an entire cake and then eating it - well that would make for one big Dave and a nice chunky Patti and a few rolly polly kiddo's. To keep from having to eat a bunch of slices of cake - I am baking individual cupcakes.........and then farming them out for taste tests.

Smart? Brilliant? Maybe. I do know that now when people see me coming with a brown paper bag they smile BIG!!

This set of cupcakes was a from scratch Yellow cake that I was testing. Topped with a Chocolate Cinnamon Butter cream icing. The cinnamon was easy to taste - which surprised me - I thought the chocolate would overwhelm the cinnamon flavor.

Sent them with Andersen to a friends house for a taping of the Yesterday Show she and her friends produce.