A's First Birthday & "Easy" Petal Frosting - What they don't tell you!

Birthday cake will make you JUMP, JUMP! 

I haven't posted since May!  I'm a terrible blogger.  And I have done a few projects that were post-worthy (a small, two-tiered wedding cake, for example).  But I've been doing a poor job documenting my projects because I really haven't been trying new things.  Until this week!!!!

One of my very good friends who happens to be a photographer has a son that is turning one.  While she was in the hospital, a friend brought her a birthday cake with a "0" candle on top.  So cute!  So for each month of her sweet son's first year, she faithfully made a cake and took photos of him documenting his growth.  (I have a feeling grandparents will be getting the most adorable calendar for Christmas this year!)

So, of course, as we come up on him being a FULL YEAR old, she wanted to do something a little extra special to celebrate not just her son's birth, but to thank all the people that have supported her and her little one as they navigated the first year of being a family of three.  She asked me to make a round cake and said she didn't really want a theme and basically gave me full creative license.

After looking around Pinterest, I blended a couple of ideas, and a concept was born!  Since it was themeless, I wanted to stick to bright, primary colors, which I thought were appropriate for a little boy and would make a fun cake.

I saw this picture on Pinterest, and loved the idea of making the cake layers different colors.

And then I remembered seeing a tutorial on petal frosting, and though that would be a really cool icing effect since it used all buttercream frosting and didn't involve fondant at all (which I have a love/hate relationship with!)  

So, substitute the pastel colors for the primary colors, and an idea was born!  An idea that turned out really well, but that tempted me to cry more than once during the process!  :)

First of all, since I wanted to color the actual cake layers, I needed to use a lighter colored cake flavor.  This was a celebration, so I started out with my favorite "celebration" flavor - vanilla almond.  I used both the cake and frosting recipes.  Only differences were that I subbed in a cup of Crisco for butter just to make the frosting a little more durable, and then I used vanilla extract instead of the vanilla bean.  I would tell you how much, but I honestly just poured some in.  Probably about a tablespoon if I was a guessing kind of woman.  This is a recipe for cupcakes, but what I love about it is that it's basically a double recipe, so you're mixing up two cakes at one time.

I divided the batter into four equal parts (it ended up being about 3 1/4 cups each) and added the food coloring to each layer.  For the record, I added a LOT of red and blue food coloring, and still wasn't sure it would be the color I wanted when I baked the layers.

I used a 10" pan to bake the cake layers.  Unfortunately for me, I thought I had two pans, but I really had one.  I think I ended up baking each layer for about 32 minutes and then waited half an hour for it to cool to remove it from the pan.  And then I had to clean the pan out and put the other layer in.  But goshdarnit, After four hours of this, I got four beautiful layers!

I was really pleased that none of the layers broke while taking them out of the pan.  The secret of that success is to do a really good job greasing the pan with Crisco and then covering with flour.  Don't skip that part!  I was also happy with the vibrancy of the colors after they baked - particularly the red!  After they had cooled to room temperature, I used a bread knife to even off the tops just a little, and then put each layer on a 10" cake circle, wrapped them up really good with cling wrap, and put in the freezer because working with frozen cake is much less crumbly than working with room temperature cake.  

They were actually in my freezer for a couple days, but eventually I got around to frosting them!  The first step was to get the layers stacked with the frosting in between.  It's okay if individual layers are a little crooked, but you do want to try to make sure that at the end of the stacking process, the top layer is level.  To help with that, I always turn the top layer upside down, so the flattest side is on top.  

Then you get to crumb coat the whole outside of it, making sure to get frosting in all those crevices so you have a smooth surface to decorate on.  Full disclosure - this isn't a true crumb coat.  It's really just a thin layer of butter cream.  Since I was doing a buttercream design on the outside, I didn't have a strong desire to get the crumb coat really, really smooth.  Also full disclosure - I went through all the frosting I made (which is for a DOUBLE RECIPE of cupcakes) just on this part!  

So I stuck that sucker in the fridge to get the frosting nice and hard and cool, and then I made another round of frosting.  After probably 30 minutes, I had the icing made, divided, colored, and into the piping bags.  All I did was cut off the tips of the piping bags for this - I didn't use tips for this particular project.

And then I started piping!  I followed the directions from the Rainbow Petal Cake that I got the inspiration from.  They said it was easy and that I could do it myself!  I piped a vertical row of dots, alternating the colors from blue to green to red to yellow.  I was constantly putting down one piping bag and picking up another.  And then when I finished ONE vertical row, I used the back of a spoon (each color had a different spoon) to pull the frosting dot out.  Then I would do it again, this time starting with green, then red, then yellow, then blue (to get the cool diagonal look), and so on.  Easy right?  

Except for a few things!  First of all, I'm pretty sure that they were working with a much smaller cake than I was.  Do you know how big 10" is???  I got about a fourth of the way through and almost quit.  The second thing is that the back of a spoon works just because you have one already, but the spoon width varies, and it's really not as narrow as the icing dot that you're trying to pull.  If I ever do this again, I will use offset spatulas instead.  

Two other challenges occurred.  The cake spinner thingy (I can't think of what it's called now), was sitting on my kitchen counter.  To do the bottom couple of layers, I had to squat down to be at the right level.  People... it took me probably 3 hours to decorate this cake.  That's THREE HOURS OF SQUATS!  My quads are killing me!  And also, the longer I worked, the softer and mushier the icing got, which meant that it started smearing into each other more.  Again, the offset spatulas instead of the spoons would've helped with that.  

Despite the challenges, I persevered.  Now to be honest, if I had done a better job frosting the top smoothly, I may just stopped on the sides and called it a day, but since I didn't, I needed to keep going and do the top, too.  

Eventually, through nothing but pure determination, I finished.  I'm pretty sure choirs of angels started singing "Hallelujah" and I may have collapsed on the floor in tears of joy.  Maybe... 

Not bad for a first time, right?  I mean, it's definitely not perfect, but the overall effect is really cool, and I'm overall happy with the results!

The only thing that was left was to make some kind of topper to go on top.  At first I was going to make white blocks that spelled out "Jump" (A's special nickname), but after seeing the cake, I thought I needed to come up with something else.

Flash back to one of my favorite decorating techniques, which is using candy melts to make personalized decorations for cakes/cupcakes.  So I wrote out JUMP on a piece of paper and then put that under a piece of wax paper.  This was mostly just to make sure the size of the letters was fairly even.

Then I followed the directions to melt the chocolate and quickly put it into a piping bag with a number 3 tip.  I loosely followed the guide I made and wrote out jump on the wax paper.  This is a really fun technique and you can do a ton with it, but you do have to work fast when working with the candy melts.  They harden fairly quickly!  For more ideas, visit the Bird on a Cake blog for more fun ideas of how to use melted chocolate for fun decorating ideas!  (And also, I don't know why this picture is sideways, but it doesn't seem to want to rotate, so I'm just going with it!)

Then, to make it colorful to go with the cake, I just dumped a ton of sprinkles on top to make sure the letters were well-covered.

I stuck all that in the freezer for about 20 minutes, and then pulled it out and shook off the letters, and there you go - ready to stick right on top of the cake!  

Finally, A's big day came and we got to put everything together for the photo shoot.  I wasn't there when the toppers went on, but I showed up to the party and I just loved how everything pulled together!

I didn't get a picture of the inside of the cake after it was cut, but thankfully A's mom is a photographer and it's well-documented.  I'll add more of the professional quality photos once she has a chance to go through them.

Overall, I would try this kind of technique again.  I would definitely do it on a smaller cake, though - 8" or less.  And I would also use an offset spatula to draw out the frosting instead of the back of the spoon.  Also, if you want to try this for a first time, I would stick to just using one color on the first attempt.  It's not a hard process, but the time increased significantly because I was constantly changing out piping bags and spoons.  Keep in mind that even though this was my first time doing this type of technique, I am pretty well-versed at using buttercream in other ways, so I would say my skill level is probably intermediate (at least in novice terms).  I would like to work on getting the petals a little smoother, though, so I'll have to find other opportunities to practice!

What do you think?  Ready to try this yourself???  :)  

Naked Quadruple Salted Caramel Cake

It's always a good idea to start a blog and then not post anything for months, right?  The truth is that I've just been busy, and although I've been baking, it hasn't been anything out of my normal baking routine.  I guess I should've still been documenting, but don't worry - I'm making up for it now!  And this cake is worth the wait!

One of my co-workers is getting married in August.  I mentioned making some Triple Salted Caramel cupcakes for a friend a few weeks ago, and she informed me that she would like me to make a Salted Caramel Cake for her wedding.  The cupcakes are amazing!  But I was nervous about trying to turn it into a cake.  These are decadent and rich, but the frosting is a little difficult to work with.  It involves making a homemade caramel and then mixing that with powdered sugar and spreading on the cupcakes while it's still warm.  The problem is that there's not a lot of fat in the frosting, and once it starts cooling, it becomes a crumbly and difficult to spread (it's really more of a layer of soft caramel candy).  So I suggested a naked cake.

Basically, a naked cake is a cake that just has the frosting between the layers and not along the sides.  It lends itself to a more rustic look, which is perfect for the wedding vibe the bride-to-be was going for.  The best part is that any imperfections just add to the feel of the cake, so it's a great way to make a beautiful cake that you don't need to spend a lot of time fussing over.

That said, I'd never made one before, and I wasn't sure how it would turn out with this recipe, so we needed to do a trial run!

I used the same recipe that I used for the cupcakes from Sally's Baking Addiction.  This was just a trial, so I just used the standard sized cake pans that come in a set.  I wrapped some plastic wrap around my fingers, took a big chunk of Crisco, and greased the pans.  Then I sprinkled flour in them and tapped the pans around so there was a light layer of flour.  Flip the pan over the sink and gently tap the bottom and sides to shake off the excess.  (I realize this might be basic, but a lot of people don't know about flouring pans.  This is the best way to get your cakes to release without sticking to the bottom or sides.)

I doubled the recipe, and poured it into the two pans.  For future reference, the double recipe made about six cups of battter.  This is important to help me plan on how much I'll need to make for the actual wedding cake.

Now, the recipe is for cupcakes and so the baking time listed was about 22 minutes.  I am paranoid about overbaking cakes, so I set the timer for 35 minutes.  And when I tested them with a toothpick they came out clean.  However, once they had cooled and I started cutting them, they were a touch underdone.  I'll bake them a little longer next time!


Once the cakes had cooled, I flipped them over and carefully cut the top off so it was nice and flat.  I use a big bread knife (pictured to the left) and very carefully keep my left hand on top of the cake while I start at one side and work across.  Applying pressure from the top keeps the cake from tearing along the edges, and also helps keep the cut as even as possible.  You can then throw the thin top layer away, save it to crumble up as part of the cake presentation, or do what I do and use it for "quality control" purposes.  (Have to make sure you're serving a high-quality product to your guests!)

The key to making the naked cakes beautiful is for the layers of cake and frosting to be similar in thickness.  Since the frosting is VERY rich, I knew that I would just be using a thin layer, so the cake layers needed to be thin as well.  So using the same technique as before with the bread knife, I very carefully cut the two cakes in half, so I had four layers.  I chose the bottom piece that turned out best and used that for the top (placed cut side down so the top is nice and smooth and you don't have to worry about crumbs), the other bottom piece was used for the base, and then I only ended up using one of the middle layers since I didn't quite have enough frosting for a four-layer cake!  (Again, this is why it's important to experiment!)  

The layer on the right became the top of the cake.  The little spots are just a couple spots where the brown sugar didn't get mixed in as well as it should have.  

I desperately need more counter space for my projects!

With this particular recipe, you need to work fast once the caramel is made, so I got my cake layers ready, and then went to work on the frosting.  I doubled the recipe to make the caramel, and then mixed about three-fourths of that with four cups of powdered sugar, reserving the rest of the caramel to pour on top at the end.  I quickly spread the caramel between the cake layers.  By the time I got to the top (seriously, this probably took less than 5 minutes), the frosting was beginning to cool to the point where it wasn't spreading easily with my off-set spreader.  However, it worked pretty well for me to just press it out with my hands.  I knew I was going to be pouring the caramel over the top and putting the candies on top, so I wasn't concerned about getting the layer perfectly smooth, but I did want it to be level.  I also wanted to make sure that you could see the caramel frosting layer between the cake layers.  You can see that I did a better job of that between the second and third layers than between the first and second layers.  Good thing I practiced!

 I let the reserved caramel cool a little longer until it had thickened up, and then carefully poured that over the top of the cake, making sure I poured from center out so that I could make sure the caramel would drip down the side of the cake.  Looking at the amount of pooling that occured at the bottom of the cake, I could've cut back on the amount of caramel I poured on top, and I'm definitely making a note of that for when I make the final wedding version. 

Even with the beautiful caramel poured over, it just needed something else on top to make it feel completed.  And since there wasn't enough sugar already, I unwrapped a bag of Rolos and piled those on top in the center.  As a finishing touch, I found some salt flakes at our local Fresh Market and sprinkled a generous amount over top of the Rolos to give it a little sparkle.  

Since this was coming to work with me, I didn't display on a cake stand, but I'm sure you can imagine how beautiful it could be as the centerpiece on a dessert table at a wedding.

Final product!

I think for the wedding we'll end up doing a tier of this cake and a tier of an apple spice cake with cream cheese frosting with the caramel poured over the whole thing.  This is just too rich for an entire wedding cake!  To help cut the sweetness, you could also top with salted nuts.  I refrigerated this overnight and it wasn't completely warmed to room temperature when we cut into it at work the next morning.  But you will want to try to make sure it's at room temperature before serving.  

What do you think?  Ready to attempt this one on your own?  Let me know if you have any questions!  

An evolution of cookie decorating

I guess I really started investing in making fancy baked goods with decorated sugar cookies.  It started off as just one project, and then I started learning more about it, and thought I'd be able to develop my skills at it.  I would say at this point, I'm probably at an intermediate level.  I wish I had pictures of the very first cookies I ever made, but I didn't know that it would be a "thing" back then.  But these below are some of my very first cookies:

They looked pretty cute for the occasion, but they weren't anything fancy or complicated.  

Since my humble beginnings, I've learned quite a bit about sugar-cookie decorating.  A lot of people ask me how I get the icing so smooth, and to be honest, it's much easier to just refer those people to this online tutorial to watch the video.  It makes more sense to watch a video than try to explain it in words.  

I use a super simple recipe to make the royal icing, which is what this smooth kind of icing is called.  It takes just three ingredients: 

3 ounces tempered egg whites (the egg whites you buy in the cartons next to the regular eggs are just fine)

4 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon of your favorite extract (I usually use almond extract, but lemon and vanilla are my other standbys)

Put the eggs in a clean, completely dry mixing bowl.  Using the whisk attachment, beat the egg whites until they're stuff enough to hold a peak when you stop the mixer - about 4 to 5 minutes.  Change to the paddle attachment and add powdered sugar and extract. Beat at a high speed until the icing turns glossy (this usually takes around 10 minutes).  From there, add water teeny tiny amounts at a time until you get the consistency you want.  Divide up and add your colors.  

For outlining and detail work, you want the frosting to be thicker so it doesn't seep.  You may need to add a little more water if it's stiff, but only do it a drop or two at a time.  I always add my colors first, then make sure the consistency is right for outlining and add about half of the color to a piping bag fitted with a 1 (for very fine details) or 2 sized piping tip.  Then I add more water, a drop or two at a time, until it reaches the "flooding" consistency.  I fit a piping bag with a size 3 piping tip and then add the frosting to that.  One tip is to stand your piping bags in a cup or bowl so that you don't get colored icing all over your counter or table.  (I'm sure you can guess how I may have learned that trick!)

Watch the online tutorial on the Wilton web site to see how to outline your cookies and fill them in with the flood icing.  

Once you have the base color down, let that dry, and then you can go back and add other details.  I don't usually wait overnight to add details, but if you are adding a darker color on top of a lighter color (black on anything, for example), the darker colors have a tendency to seep into the lighter colors if the lighter color isn't completely dry yet.  So you'll want to give the lighter colors a longer time to dry if you're adding darker details.  

And here are a couple of my most recent cookie projects.  One was for a baby shower this past fall, and the other are little Christmas light cookies from the past holidays.  As you can see, I'm still not great at getting an even surface, but as I've gotten more experience, my cookies do turn out a lot closer to what I envision when I start them!  :)  

Early Cake Decorating!

This is a throwback post to some of my first cakes that I made when I started.  You can see that I've come a little ways since then.

First off, is this UVA basketball-inspired cake.  This was made at the request of a friend as the groom's cake for her wedding.  It was also my first actual cake that I decorated, and I was pretty nervous.  I had some ambitious plans that didn't quite materialize the way I had hoped.  I tried baking a round cake THREE times before I gave up at midnight and went to the grocery store to buy ingredients to make Rice Krispy treats which is what I ended up using for the ball shape.  (But on the plus side, who doesn't love Rice Krispy treats?!)

The important lesson that I learned here?  Make sure you both grease and FLOUR your cake pans before you fill them with your cake batter.  Thankfully, the bride was satisfied with the way the cake turned out.  She knew she was sacrificing some cake-decorating expertise in order to get the cake-flavors that she wanted.  Apparently, none of the local bakeries were willing to make a Guiness-flavored cake!

Next up is this cute little snowman cake.  Again, this was an experiment with using melted chocolate candies to make the little snowmen.  I had another very gracious friend who let me experiment with this technique on a birthday cake for her mother, who just happened to love snowmen.  This was a direct rip-off of a cake from the Bird on a Cake blog.  If you compare the two, I'm sure you'll see who the expert on this is.  ;)  But not too shabby for a first-attempt!  I will say that in order for this to work well for you, you need to be able to move pretty quickly.  The chocolate hardens pretty quickly as it cools!  Definitely check out the Bird on a Cake blog, though - she's got lots of great ideas and tutorials on how to make them happen! 

And finally, here's a sweet owl cake that I made for a different baby shower last year.  My original plan was NOT to put fondant around the sides, just to put it on the top as a background for the owls, but the frosting I made did not come out to the consistency that I wanted, and my fondant circle covering the top of the cake was a little lopsided, so I needed to improvise.  These little strips of alternating colors did the trick!  Add in a white boundary of buttercream to hide how uneven the edges were, and you're set! 

So there you go.  Some of my earlier work.  For those of you that maybe are just starting out, maybe this will help you set realistic expectations?  The real key to making these projects successful is a combination of patience and an ability to improvise when things don't go according to plan.  Hopefully, you'll have gracious friends that won't hold it against you!  And my philosophy is that even if it doesn't look the best, as long as it tastes good, you're in good shape!  

Easy Chocolate Truffles

Anyone else love fancy chocolate candies but have a heart attack every time you actually think about buying them because they're so expensive?  It COULD just be me, but I think most DIYers like to save money.  Lucky for us, you can actually custom-make your own truffles for a fraction of the cost it would take to purchase them.  And it's SUPER easy once you know what you're doing! 

First of all, these are the materials you will need: 

• Wax paper
• Shallow bowl or dish
• Pan for simmering water
• Double boiler (or a small bowl that will nestle into the pan you're using to simmer the water)
• Small steel scoop (if you care about keeping the size uniform)
• Food chopper or processor
• 12 oz. chocolate chips (any flavor, but use a high quality chocolate)
• 1/3 cup heavy whipping cream (use a little less if you're using white chocolate)
• 1 tsp. of your favorite flavored extract
• Your favorite coating (nuts, sprinkles, powdered sugar, cocoa powder, etc.)

A couple of things to keep in mind when working with chocolate.  First, start with a high-quality chocolate base.  All we're really going to be doing is changing the texture and adding some flavor to the chocolate, so start with something that is worthy of the enhancements.  The second important thing to remember is that you want to heat chocolate up very slowly so it stays nice and creamy.  If you overheat chocolate, it starts breaking up and getting crumbly (there's a technical word for this that I can't remember), and then it's basically useless.  So keep the heat low, and be patient and you're good to go! 

The first step is to put a small amount of water in the pan and heat the water until it's simmering (the surface of the water is moving, but it's not hot enough to actually be boiling).  Make sure that when you place the double boiler in the pan, the bottom is not touching the water.  If it does, you'll need to remove some of the water before proceeding to the next step. 

Once the water is simmering, put the chocolate and the heavy whipping cream in the double boiler and place in the pan.  It'll look a little weird, but don't worry!  Stir continuously with a small rubber scraper while the chocolate melts.  Eventually, it will go from looking like a weird, clumpy mess, to becoming smooth like this: 

Once it hits this consistency, you can mix in your extract.  Just to give you some ideas, I've made these with coffee, raspberry, orange, and peppermint extracts so far, and they've all been delicious.

Once you reach this point, remove the double boiler from the pan, and put the chocolate in the refrigerator for approximately 1 to 1.5 hours.  You want the chocolate to set, but not to be hard. 

Once the chocolate sets, remove it from the fridge and you can begin the process of shaping the truffles.  This gets a little messy!

Lay out your wax paper and get your coatings ready to roll your truffles into after you shape them.  I used a few different coatings as shown below including chopped hazelnuts, cocoa powder, and powdered sugar.  The hazelnuts were my favorite, though!  

Use the steel scoop to scoop out a portion of chocolate and then shape the chocolate into a ball with your hands.  Roll the ball into the coating of your choice and place it on the wax paper to harden.  Continue until you're done with all the truffles.  Once I finish coating each of my truffles once, I go back and do a second coating.  I find that this creates a more even coating since a lot of the chocolate will come off on your hands the first go round. 

Let them sit out on the counter for about half an hour until they set, and then you can put them in an airtight container and store in the fridge.  

These are delicious, and look beautiful set out on a platter for any sort of special occasion.  And don't worry, I won't tell anyone how easy they were to make!  :) 

What do you think?  Ready to make your own?  

Corsette Cake

Last month, a friend asked me if I could make a corsette cake for a Bachelorette Party she was helping organize.  After a little bit of research, I thought I could figure it out, so I agreed to take on the challenge.  She sent me this picture from Pinterest, but asked if I could make it in brighter colors like teal and hot pink.  Sounded awesome!

www.craftsy.com

My first step was, of course, to figure out how to get the cake the shape I needed it.  I baked a large rectangular cake in the biggest pan I had, and found some pyrex bowls that were the right size for the bosoms at Bed Bath and Beyond.  I used those to bake two bowl-shaped cakes, and then when they had cooled, I leveled everything off.

To get the right shape on the bottom, I just used a ruler to measure the center of the bottom of the cake, measured an inch and a half on each side, and then measured approximately three inches up the side of each cake.  I placed toothpicks at each of those points, and just made two solid diagonal cuts on each side to shape the bottom.

I placed the round cakes so that the edges of the round cakes touched both the top and outer edges of the rectangular cake.  As you can see, there was a little gap between the round cakes, but that's how you want it!  I then cut the corners of the rectangular cake and rounded up the top to follow the general curves of the round cake.  I was terrified about cutting out the waist, but in a flash of brilliance, I grabbed a large paper place and used the side of that to cut around.  I then flipped the piece of cake I had cut off over and used that as a templace on the opposite side so that both sides were event.  And then, everything got a nice, thick layer of buttercream. 

Now, I used a buttercream recipe that was supposed to crust so that I could go back and smooth it out after I got the base layer down.  But alas, my frosting never crusted.  It ended up being okay, though.  Even though my buttercream wasn't perfectly smooth, I was careful to get large lumps out, so it worked out okay.  

After regrigerating over night, the next step was to get the fondant base layer down.  I'm definitely not a fondant expert, but I do make my own marshmallow fondant using this recipe.  I do this just because I think it tastes better than store-bought fondant.  That said, I tend to have much better luck actually working with pre-made fondant, so it's really a personal choice based on your preferences for taste and your ability to be patient and and not get frustrated.  

After mixing the fondant, I set some aside to color for the details, and then tinted most of it with the teal food coloring.  I then started working the fondant with my hands, adding a lot more powdered sugar to try to reduce the stickiness factor.  I completely covered my entire counter with powdered sugar, and rolled out what I hoped was a thick enough piece to cover the entire cake.  And I immediately started having problems with the fondant sticking to the surface on which I was rolling it out.  

After a few attempts, I findally managed to get a big enough piece rolled out and covered the cake.  I made it smoothly over about 90%, and then disaster struck on the left bosom!  My first instinct was to try to cut around just that piece of fondant, roll out another piece of fondant, and then attempt to just recover that one spot.  But after a couple of failed attempts to roll out another piece of fondant the right size, I thought I'd be able to decorate over it to cover up the worst of it.  

The last part is the decorating.  This is the part that offers the most pop, but it actually took the least amount of time.  I colored some of the fondant black and used a Wilton Fondant Mold to create the black zig zags for the bodice.  I then colored some buttercream with the hot pink and used the large open-star tip in a pastry bag to make the roses around the bosom and the bottom.  I conveniently chose the crack in the left bosom as the placement for the roses and just approximated that line on the right side as well.  As you can see, once all the decorating was done, you couldn't really tell that there were any issues with the fondant.  

As a last step, I colored the last portion of the buttercream teal and used that to create a border around the bottom of the cake to hide all the little cracks and imperfections where the cake meets the board.

Here's a better picture of the finished cake.  Not too shabby for a first attempt!  

Cupcake Bouquet

As I have time, I'll go back and add posts about previous projects.  However, I'm going to start with my most recent projects and work backwards until I'm caught up.  And then you can have fun looking at how awful my first projects were in comparison!  :)

First off, I'm not a professional food-preparer.  I started doing this because I had a lot of friends getting married/having babies and was a part of throwing a lot of showers.  Of course, we live in a world of Facebook and Pinterest, so there's a lot of pressure to make everything beautiful.  But having meals catered and purchasing cakes/cupcakes gets expensive.  So that's one of the reasons I started teaching myself how to decorate cakes.

This past weekend, I was part of throwing a baby shower for a friend, and was asked to make some lemon cupcakes with raspberry frosting (one of my faves)!  I'd seen photos of a cupcake bouquets, and I suggested that we try to make one for this shower.  What happened majorly exceeded my expectations!

I started off by generally following the guidelines from the Midwest Living blog.  I purchased a small metal pail at the local craft store, and a friend decorated it with the flowers and ribbon (so cute!).  We used a 7" styrofoam ball and ended up being able to fit about 34-36 cupcakes on that ball.  A couple of tips that I'll mention that weren't covered in the original instructions we followed:

1. Keep the plastic covering on the styrofoam ball.  If you remove it, the styrofoam starts flaking off and that will get all over your cupcakes.
2. We added some decorative rocks to the bottom of the pail to give it some weight.  I was worried it was going to topple over otherwise. 
3. I largely delegated the task of assembling the bouquet to another friend that is very crafty.  She constructed the supportive pieces, placed the cupcakes on the styrofoam ball, and filled in the gaps with the green tissue paper leaves.  She did not actually read the instructions off the blog - I was instructing her on each step.  So when she secured the cupcakes onto the styrofoam ball, she actually held the unfrosted cupcake against the ball and then pushed the toothpicks through the top of the cupcake.  The reason this is important is because the cupcakes ended up being much more secure that way than when I did the trial the way it is shown in the original blog.
4. I made homemade cupcakes and buttercream frosting.  If you're making your own, just make sure that you don't add too much liquid to the frosting - you want to make sure the frosting will not slide off or lose it's shape once you pipe it onto the cupcakes.  
5. If possible, refrigerate the bouquet after it's assembled.  We did not have space in the fridge to do this, but as the frosting warmed up (and it was sitting in front of a window with the sun streaming in), the frosting did slide off two of the lower cupcakes.  Thankfully, they were in the back of the bouquet and it didn't slide off until after everyone had gotten a good look at it! 

Here's our final product!  How'd we do?  I was pretty excited about how it turned out!  

Click here for the lemon cupcake recipe I used.  

And here is the raspberry buttercream recipe I used, only I used seedless raspberry jam instead of fresh raspberries and added a little pink food coloring to get the color I wanted.

Since I knew we were going to be putting toothpicks through these, I skipped the raspberry filling.  

And so it begins

I've kept a few blogs before. But they were all related to specific goals that never seemed to really get accomplished. Largely running related. Since I have a tendency to injure myself, I figured I should probably just give up on those kinds of blogs since it's a little bit of a let down to invite others to "follow you on your journey" and then not be able to make it.

 But don't worry! I'm starting a new blog. And the best part is that this is about individual, discrete PROJECTS! That's right, I don't post anything until I finish the project, so there's no anticipation and no let down!

 I have a couple of things that I really invest a lot of time into thinking about and doing. One of them is running, so I may talk about that some. The other one, which is mostly what I hope to use this blog to document, is kitchen-related projects - baking, cooking, and amateur catering.

My goal is to use this blog to post photos, share recipes, and mostly, remember what I did right or what I should do differently if I ever need to repeat a project. Since I wasn't planning on starting a blog until now, a lot of my initial projects aren't going to be as well documented as you'd normally see on a blog, but hopefully that will improve as I get used to this process.

 Finally, a little about me... I am completely self-taught. Google, Youtube, and Pinterest have been completely responsible for my ability to do any of the things I do. My mother did not like cooking or baking, so this is all through my personal trial and error.

 My motto is to just say yes to pretty much anything someone asks me to do, and then pray that I'll be able to figure it out!