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.

Mixer on Overdrive

Today I made stuff.

• Yellow Cakes
  

  For Chris and Brandy's wedding cake, they requested a yellow cake - so I'm testing out recipes as I find them. Conveniently, we are having many people over from my work this Friday to play Rockband, and one of my coworkers will be visiting from a long-haul TDY to D.C. - so in honor of him and his particularly large head, I will be making a cake to honor him - out of these test yellow cakes - two birds, one stone. So, each batch I'm making one round tin of cake, and one mini-bunt for Chris and Brandy to taste. I made the following today

  
  
  
  
  • One half batch of David's Yellow Cake
  
  
  • One half batch of Yellow Cake
  
  
  
  


• One batch of m.m. fondant
  

  This is for the next test humming bird, as well as to cover the Tribute to Ryan's Particularly Large Head (if I have enough left over after the hummingbird, might need to make more)
  Also, I used some (3 tbsp) meringue powder in this batch - I want to see how that effects the hardening of the fondant



• One batch of gum paste
  

  This is also for the hummingbird, I used gum-tex and glucose which I picked up recently from Michael's. Gum Paste is, from my understanding, a more versatile (yet less tasty) version of fondant which dries hard



• One batch of butter creme frosting (no chocolate or flavor yet this will be for the wedding cake testers, as well as the Tribute to Ryan's Particularly Large Head)

So yes. Lots of mixing, lots of baking.

butterflies

Had a few seconds to play with sugar today - but I burnt my finger so I stopped, all I got done was making a butterfly, and a very very failed flower.


This was supposed to be a fluted flower, but I had trouble getting the petal shapes right - and then I waited too long to shape it (just cupped in my hand, really) so the petals broke. it's a horribly ugly flower, if I do say so myself.

badum!

Check it out. Today, I made a practice humming bird. I spent the rest of the week making fondant and cakes and such - so today was just an assembly.

I started with the wings, a layer of fondant over the wire frame, and then many many feathers of various sizes to cover the top and bottom.

I recently purchased a Roul'Pat mat, and am loving it. It took a while to find the largest size possible at the cheapest price (some places sell it for 60 bucks!) - this mat combined with the rolling pin I use = no stick fondant! faboo fer sure.
The feathers were cut out again using my trusty leaf-shaped fondant cutters.

I didn't really want to do more than one wing, once I knew I could do it, but I needed to make both so that the wing apparatus would be balanced. This was very important, considering that the weight of the wings ended up being, I'm guessing, a little over two pounds.

Next was rather easy - I had shaved down the shape of the pound cake and the rice crispy head, and then attached the head with a dowel through it and the body.
I'd never lain fondant on a cake without butter cream, but now I totally understand why it's done - it really does give the fondant something to stick to - otherwise it ends up like a sort of lose sack over the cake, which is what happened with the bird's body.


I am hoping in the end for the bird to "fly" by resting atop these three upturned glasses - I balanced this and worried about it staying long enough to take photos - so I really need to figure out some sort of support for the whole cake, as well as the wings, since they are so very weighty. I'm thinking that the tail will be a part of this support, but haven't figured it out yet.

I also have some fabulous ideas for flowers, and know what I'm going to do with the sugar shapes I made earlier this week.

I need a blowtorch.

I'm not sure what I'm doing

Feathers? Leaves? Petals? Butterfly wings?
(The colour isn't dye, it's burning. It tastes like burning!)
Not quite sure yet.

About 1/4 cup light corn syrup, 2 cups sugar - bring slowly to boil, stirring just until the sugar is all moistened - cover (if you can, leave candy thermometer in and balance lid while the thermometer is still there). Check every minute or so with candy thermometer till it gets close to 300f - leave uncovered and watch until it does get to 300. take off heat. Let sit and cool till thickens - pour onto parchment paper, lifting paper edges to make sure it doesn't spill over.

Let cool until it doesn't move around if you lift the paper - grease the heck out of the edges of a metal cookie cutter, cut shapes quickly. Let cool completely. Lift entire candy sheet from parchment, just to loosen it. Put it back down - and then re-cut the shapes with the cookie cutter, they'll likely come out clean and stuck in the cutter - pop out and you haves shapes!!


The problem I'm having is burning the sugar. See the black blob? That was supposed to be purple - I think the colouring helps the sugar heat a lot faster somehow.

I'm making another pound cake duck as I type - also made a mini bunt cake, and will make some rice crispie treat heads tonight.
Oh did I post that? Genius Erin at work told me to try using rice crispie treats for the head (apparently the ace of cakes dude does that a lot), so it won't be so heavy! faboo!

And what does Des do while I bake?

She talks on her lid-phone.

Garden?

Now that I've caught this thing up with all of what I have done, I can post at a more realistic pace - more details on the trial and error, less lengthly babbly posts where I try to explain too much.

Grandma's birthday is coming up. 80, and she's throwing a big 'ol bash for the occasion. I believe the expected count is around 30. And I've thrown my hat in to make a cake - this makes me very nervous, and I haven't *officially* said I'd do it yet, since so many people will be there, and I want to be happy with what I end up brining. So.. I'm practicing the grand idea I've come up with.

Oh, by the way - if your name is "Grandma" and you happen to be my Grandma - and you want the final cake to be a surprise, you should stop visiting this blog until your birthday!
Otherwise, read on!












A humming bird visiting a flower - or flowers, on top of a large cake.
Here I shall include an artist's rendition, care of MS Paint.

Quite fabulous, don't you think? Yes, I have mad skills.

How to do this, you may ask? Ah, well first, to start with the bird! I baked a duck shaped pound cake* last night (2 batches = one duck), and then proceeded to chop it up and reassemble it to vaguely look like a hummingbird.


I am quite pleased with the results.

I then spent some painful** tv-watching time cutting and bending coat hangers and mesh baskets from the dollar store to produce a frame*** for the wings. I plan on this being the support for the fondant - as there's no way it can support itself in such a large format without help.

Now to make a frame for the tail, and figure out some support for the head (it fell off after sitting upright for a little while. oops!)



*Sour Cream Pound Cake - The New Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book

1/2 c. butter
3 eggs
1/2 c. dairy sour cream (i used plain yogurt)
1 1/2 c. all purpose flour
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1/8 tsp. baking soda
1 c. sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla

• Allow butter, eggs and sour cream to stand at room temp for 30 min. Grease and flour cake pan (makes standard loaf pan). Stir together flour, baking soda, baking powder. Set aside.


• In mixing bowl beat butter high speed for 30 seconds. Add sugar - beat for 10 mins or until quite fluffy. Beat in vanilla. Add eggs one at a time, beating 1 minute after each addition. Alternatly add flour and sour cream beating until just combined.


• Pour into pan. bake at 325 for about an hour.

**No, really, painful. I have little cuts all over my hands :(
***"But they aren't allowed to do such things in the cake contests! A non-edible frame is cheating!" you say? Yeah, well get over it. It'll be totally sweetawesome when I'm done with it.

Test Fondant - A Quilt

So, my mother's birthday was coming up, and my husband unwittingly made the absurd suggestion that I create a quilt cake. I didn't think it was a joke, however, I loved the idea! So, I had to find out if it was something I'd be able to pull off.

My mom has has had one of her quilt designs published, it's called Asilomar Sunset - so I thought this would be the perfect design to use for her quilt.

Lucky for me, the book layed out all the instructions - piece sizes, number of fabrics... I figured the best way to go about this would be to make a single fondant fabric for each fabric in the design. This turned out to be 11 different designs. (Erk!)

I marbled, I kneaded, I squished and rolled out fondant for a good few hours, and in the end had 11 different rolled out pieces of fondant. Two of the fabrics in the quilt were florals - so I pulled out a paint brush and dye and painted right on the fondant!

After the fabric was complete - then came the cutting and piecing. This took far less time than I thought it would, however I only had a straight edge and a knife, so many pieces were not quite the right sizes to fit.

After laying all these pieces out on wax paper, I realized I would need some way to place it all on the cake - so I rolled out a large piece of leftover fondant, layed it on top of the pieces, and rolled it all together, to stick the pieces to the fondant.

Not the best idea. in the end the pieces became misshapen and the yellow fondant backing mooshed out between the pieces. It worked, but it was ugly.

Anyway.. in the end I knew that although the technique would need some adjustment - the idea was plausible.

First Cake - the Lumpy Duck

My mommy said that my last cake was the kind of thing you needed a blog for. So - hey.. here is a blog.
I recently started to play with cake decoration - and since starting, have been totally hooked. It's only been 3 months now, but I've spent so much time and money already... Anyway.. the next few posts will be about cakes I've done already, and how. Just to catch things up.. and then I'll use this place to muse, post projects etc etc....





This is the first "creative" cake I have ever made. It was a test cake for my daughter's first birthday - to see if I could do such a thing as make a fancy pants cake like those on Ace of Cakes.

As you can see, the results were.. questionable.















This was the first cake made in the duck mold (one big mold you fill half full and cook) I used a carrot cake mix, and it did not at all finish cooking in the middle.














The next time, I baked the duck with a pound cake mix - much more sturdy, and it cooked much better. However, much of my problems ended up being with me learning how to work with and make the marshmallow fondant recipe that I had found online (fabulous site, learned a lot here). I used *way* too much Crisco, and it was slippery and shiny - also the fondant cracked like crazy when I placed it on the cake - so i smoothed it out with a wet finger, and that made the texture really slick.



For some reason, I thought that the aerosol food colouring (Micheal's and my local Upermarket carry this) would soften the shine - sadly, it just made things far, far worse.

I took this cake to work to be consumed. It was a very tasty pound cake.