Mirror Mirror

Chris and Brandy came over yesterday to play! Brandy came over to see if she could help me make a decent looking mirror out of sugar. Chris came over to play with Des and spent some time playing with gum paste - she made some super pretty flowers.

The night before, I made some frames out of gum paste to pour the sugar into. The first mirror we made was poured directly on top of the tin foil. At first we thought it was great, but a few minutes later, Chris became rather fascinated with the crystallization that was occurring. Chris could be seen intently watching the sugar for the next 15 minutes or so...


We then decided to pour the sugar onto parchment paper, deciding that the crystallization (it only happened near the tin foil) was the tin foil's fault. We tinted the sugar with a little bit of violet to give it a less brassy colour. We were very thrilled with the results once we placed the pane onto tin foil after it cooled.



The final gum paste frame we had left for the night was the largest one. Unfortunately, we cooked the sugar too slowly and it started to caramelize just before it reached the required temp. We poured it anyway, but it's now living in the trash can.

Reactions to Purple Cashemere

I took the batch into work and here are some reactions... as I guessed, lavender is a rather particular flavour for people...

"Lovely!" *takes another*

"I like it.. but it's not my favorite.. I mean, it's a cupcake, of course I like it!"

"I like *this*" (me)'You mean it's not soapy?' "Yes, the first time I had lavender it was soapy, but this is good!" (she mentioned earlier in the week that her first experience with lavendar and chocolate was a soapy disaster)

"I don't dislike it - it's an interesting flavour though -it's not what you would expect. These would be excellent for a garden party!"

"I like it! But I think the chocolate on top (frosting) is unnecessary, maybe lemon instead?"

"I'm confused. My nose says I may have just eaten soap. But my tongue says, no you didn't."

"Oh wow! Surprisingly that was a really good balance."

"Hmm. Different. It's good! But different. Definitely taste the lavender." *has another* "These are good!"


I myself have eaten 5 (they're mini cupcakes.. so..) :-O

Purple Cashmere Cupcakes

I recently stumbled across *Quirky Cupcake* the home of Cupcake Hero, which I've seen mention of here and there.. well this month's Cupcake Hero ingredient is cocoa, and even though I'm not sure I've been officially entered into the Cupcake Hero ranks to participate, I went for it anyway, and here's my entry.


Purple Cashmere Cupcakes. These are lavender cupcakes using an adulterated recipe for Red Velvet (get the name now?) - with lavender chocolate buttercream. They actually taste like something of a spice cake all on their own - but with the frosting, they're quite heavenly (in fact, after eating the first one I did a little dance of joy around the kitchen).
Here's the obligatory "hey look! cute kid eating it!"

I was inspired to the lavender use with chocolate because of some chocolates Dan recently got me - Newtree's Rejoice. It was so lovely, I had to see if I could apply the same idea elsewhere.

So, on to the recipes..

Some prepwork -

Lavender butter -

Grind or rub 4 teaspoons lavender into a food processor, blender, whatnot along with a squeeze of lemon juice, and 2 cups unsalted, room temp butter. run till all well blended. again, let sit a few hours or overnight (in the fridge if it's overnight).

Lavender Oil -

Grind or rub between your hands 3 teaspoons of culinary lavender (i found some in the spice section at my local supermarket, actually) and immerse in 1 1/2 cups of cooking oil (I used canola). Peel half a lemon and drop the peels into the oil as well, shake up and let sit - i only let it sit for a few hours, but overnight would probably be better.

Purple Cashmere Cupcakes
(adapted from here)

2 1/2 cup cake flour
1 1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 teaspoons cocoa powder
1 1/2 cup lavender oil (lemon peels removed, but otherwise unstrained)
1 cup buttermilk
2 eggs
1/2 container liquid purple dye (blue and red make purple!)
4 teaspoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla

Heat oven to 350. Prepare either 3 8in round cake pans, or enough cupcake tins for 24 large cupcakes

Sift dry ingredients together

Whisk wet ingredients together

Combine wet and dry ingredients and mix until just combined.

Pour into pans.

Bake 15 - 30 minutes or until cake bounces back when touched.

Chocolate Lavender Frosting

4 egg whites
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup water
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups lavender butter at room temp.
3/4 cup cocoa powder

Combine water and sugar in heavy-bottomed saucepan, stir until all sugar is moistened. Heat on medium, careful not to burn, till candy thermometer reads 240.

Which heating sugar, in blender, whisk egg whites on high until just at soft peak. don't over-mix.

turn mixer on high and *slowly* pour sugar mixture into egg whites. leave mixer on high for about 25 minutes.

Add butter 1/4 cup at a time. at some point the mixture will get all lumpy and weird, just let it keep mixing. blend until smooth - continue to blend while adding vanilla and chocolate. again, blend till smooth. taste - add more chocolate to taste. you're going for a milk chocolaty flavour.

Fat and Thin

Ashley's birthday was today - and three days ago, we (Erin and I) decided to make a cake - Kim's suggestion.. A fat Ashley that we could cut away into a thin Ashley! (Ashley has been losing weight lately and has an odd sense of humor - it was rather perfect)

It didn't end up exactly like that.. but quite the same idea!

I photoshopped some images to use as templates, and printed them out. Erin and I made a 16" x 16" cake, arranged the cut-outs, and used them as guides. First we cut the "fat" silhouette.

We then cut pieces away from that to make a "thin" silhouette. We saved the pieces of "fat" for later.


The thin silhouette was then frosted with butter cream.

Then, a late night of fondanting created "thin Ashley" which was left uncovered to dry overnight.

The next day, I buttercreamed and fondanted (two new verbs there) the pieces of "fat", and placed them around the thin sillouette. And finally.. did another layer of fondant over everything - with a layer of parchment paper between the two.
For realism, Ashley's photo was used.

So in the end - we were able to undress the Fat cake to reveal the thin cake underneath!




Creepy? Quite.
A strech of my creative and technical abilities? Very much so.
I'm rather pleased with the final outcome, and the fact that the reveal of the Thin cake went as planned. I wish I'd had more time to plan this cake though, there's a lot of details I'm unhappy with.

Sneaky Bear

To make him I used the Wilton Teddy Bear pan to get the basic shape, pressing dyed rice crispie treats in with all my might to get a dense and strong shape, trying to pick up all of the details of the pan.

Turns out rice crispies really aren't that strong, so it was lucky I decided to paint this guy with chocolate rather than using butter cream or fondant - since the former two really don't add any structural integrity - chocolate however, dries hard and is great to work with.



First I coated him with a layer of melted white chocolate - tinted blue, to fill in the cracks and try to even the shape out. After which I painted him once more to get the texture I wanted.


Next some detailing with more tinted white choclate..



I used bittersweet chocolate clay for the button eyes, nose, and mask.
The sai and shuriken are from gumpaste (previous posts) painted black and then heavily dusted with silver shimmery goodness.



Last minute addition:
I used some of the leftover chocolate clay to make a pair of nunchaku. (the rest of the leftover clay will go towards making Annie a small town of stick figures which she has expressed desire in being able to eat each in one bite) Seems the oil-based nature of chocolate won't let me paint them with waterbased food colouring (maybe if i made a paste with powdered sugar?), or the chain would have been silver. oh well!

Silver Sai

Moroccan Wedding

The finished product!

Bottom layer was chocolate with a chocolate mint ganache
Second layer was white cake with a chocolate ganache
Third layer was white with funfetti icing
Top layer was chocolate with chocolate buttercream
All layers done up in chocolate buttercream, chocolate fondant, and chocolate paint. Decorations are white and milk chocolate, ropes and pearls are fondant.

And for comparison, here's the final design I had.

tidbits

Chocolate fondant painted with.. what else? chocolate! and some sparklies, because we all like shiny things.

Hummingbird Disaster

My Grandmother's birthday was this weekend, sadly, the hummingbird started out fairly doomed.
The colouring ended up far more like a parrot, the beak wouldn't stay on, the gum paste cracked every chance it got, and the whole bird had an unnatural sheen to it - because of the many repairs of the cracking.
So in a way - once I got it to the location, and had it ready to put on the cake - when I found that it had broken in half - I wasn't terribly sad.






So the cake was finished without the bird - a good thing.
Although, I'm rather displeased with the end result, I suppose I should be proud at my skill level, and with the amount of experience I have.



And since people have been asking how much time I spend on this stuff - overall, this cake took me - including the 10 hours of work on the hummingbird - probably 20 hours from the making of the cakes and frostings, the flowers, and then the overall decoration. Some of that mindless tv watching time as I created flowers.

Sugar sugar baby

Today was a day of sugar happiness. Brandy came over to play and we tested out blowing sugar with a copper pipe - it was fun and educational!
It's late and I am tired, I will leave you with some photos of the progress with the cake and wish you sweet dreams.