Rosy Birthday Cake

I'm known to go a little overboard for Miss A's birthday. For birthday number seven we had a lovely girly pink afternoon tea party at the Tudor Place Historic House in Washington, D.C. This rosy pink birthday cake was what we enjoyed along with other treats at the tea party. 

I used the same chocolate cake batter to make this two layer cake as I did for the ice cream cone cupcakes. I a lighter pink buttercream to place between the layers and frosted a thin layer all around the cake. 

It's quite easy to make the rose buttercream decorations around the cake:

1) I used a round cookie cutter to place the round outline for where I wanted to place the roses around the cake.

2) I used a Wilton 1M tip to create the roses in each circle. I started in the middle and went around to create my messy yet pretty roses. 

It was a fairly easy cake and design, but it made for a very happy birthday girl.

Birthday Cake Pops

Wow...it's been more than two years since my last post. Much has happened in the past few years since my baking prime of 2010. I have lost and I have gained. I have grieved and I have loved. I have moved and moved on. I have grown. I have also been incredibly busy. That does not mean that I have not baked, but I certainly have not baked as much and I have not taken the time to share what I've baked.

So, here I am...finally getting around to sharing a few highlights of celebrating Miss A's birthday the past few years.

Here are the ice cream cone cake pops for celebrating birthday number 4 with her class. They were made using the bottom portion of sugar cones, filled with jelly beans, topped with a confetti cake ball, drizzled with two different colored candy melts and then topped with sprinkles and candy "cherry."

For birthday number 5, we had a Hello Kitty theme, so I tried to re-create the amazing Bakerella Hello Kitty pops. Some looked more like Hello Kitty than others, but overall they turned out great and were a hit with the birthday girl and her Kindergarten class. 

In addition to the Hello Kitty cake pops for her 5th birthday, we also made these tea cup cupcakes with the extra cake batter to have our very own birthday celebration - complete with a sparkling "A" - in the park.

Sesame Street Cupcakes

I've expanded upon the cupcake birthday party for my daughter's first birthday and focused on a particular theme.  She isn't really into many Disney or other characters, but definitely knows who Elmo and Cookie Monster are.  So, we had a Sesame Street birthday party complete with Elmo, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster (see below) as the sweet treats.

I ordered special cupcake papers for each one. I had the solid colors for all of them, but used the fun Elmo ones for him.

After a huge batch of buttercream and a few bottles of food coloring, I used the star tip to pipe each color on to make it look like "fur." This was the easy part...

I used white chocolate fondant and colored it black for the mouth, used white circles for the eyes, orange for Elmo's nose and yellow for Big Bird's beak.  This was the difficult part....now it was time for the assembly of a few dozen happy monsters.

They were almost fully assembled the evening prior and brought out for the finishing touches (eyes and oscars red tongue) on the day of the birthday about an hour before it started.  Here are all the monsters on display before they were gobbled up.

Big Bird's beak was a little tough to get just right.

Cookie Monster was my favorite.

Oscar's eyebrows were a little hard to get just right, but he's a little messy anyway, right?

Elmo has a huge nose! Those that liked the fondant definitely chose him!

All displayed and ready for the taking.

 

Can you tell which one the birthday girl picked out?  Yep...that would be Elmo!

Fun with Fondant

This is my first time even working with fondant and since I'm crazy, I also decided I needed to make the fondant from scratch as well. I had been talking to my friend in pastry school about all the blogs writing about different types of flavored fondants - mostly marshmallow and white chocolate. I researched recipes for white chocolate fondant and it's basically making a melted white chocolate add-in for plain rolled fondant. Instead of just buying rolled fondant, I thought I'd try to do it all from scratch and make that too. Yes, it took longer, but it wasn't necessarily difficult.

Fondant is basically a whole lot of powdered sugar that is pulled together and made pliable with gelatin, water, corn syrup and glycerin. Doesn't sound that tasty, right? That's why I wanted to try to make the white chocolate fondant. All the recipes I looked through indicated this as being very difficult to make and it wasn't easy, but I read through lots of tips and it didn't turn out too bad for my first try. I found a Food Network page with some great tips on working with fondant that I'll definitely refer to in the future.

For the rolled fondant, I used a recipe in my James Peterson "Baking" book as all the recipes I've tried from his book turn out great and it had a really handy step-by-step photo guide.

I first added the water to the gelatin and allowed it to "bloom." Then, it was dissolved over simmering water before adding in the corn syrup and glycerin. This mixture was kneaded into the 7+ cups of powdered sugar. It seemed VERY sticky at first, but I kneaded it in with even more powdered sugar and got it to come together nicely. This was wrapped in plastic, a damp towel and more plastic to let it rest.

Now for the white chocolate....

I used a recipe that I found on Martha Stewart Weddings. It called for using cocoa butter, which I didn't have on hand, so I used a little shortening to mix in with the white chocolate instead and it worked out just fine.

White chocolate was melted down with a little shortening and then stirred in with light corn syrup. That was poured into plastic wrap to stand a room temperature overnight. I kneaded the white chocolate mixture and then kneaded it in with the plain rolled fondant using some corn starch as it was sticky. It came together so nicely though and I ended up with a smooth and silken round of delicious white chocolate fondant.

It rested all day and I was able to roll it out very easy (again with a dusting of corn starch).

Now I got the cake ready. I made a small vanilla cake with two layers. To go with the white chocolate fondant, I made a white chocolate buttercream (see below for recipe) for in between the layers and the fondant to adhere to on the outside of the cake. It was a little tricky to roll out and I had to redo it a few times as part of it was a little thin when I tried to drape it on the cake. I used more corn starch to smooth the fondant on the cake over the buttercream and trimmed the bottom edge.

While I had accomplished covering the cake with fondant, I did want to decorate it in some way. This cake is for my birthday, so I went with a few fun colors and split the leftover fondant to knead in some pink and green gel food coloring. I realized that I just have "electric" Americolor, so it turned out more bright that I had wanted, so I'll have to get some more muted colors to keep in stock as well. I just went simple and got my circle cutters out and went with dots for the cake. It was pretty easy to roll out and cut and I continued to use lots of corn starch to keep it from sticking to the counter. Throughout the decorating process, I was getting quite hungry and I sustained myself by sampling the white chocolate fondant.

I made a simple royal icing to use as the "glue" for the fondant circles to stick to the cake and stick on top of each other. It wasn't perfect, but I cut a ribbon of fondant as the bottom just didn't look finished enough.

I was so happy with the way my cake turned out and the experience of working with fondant. It is time consuming, but won't deter me from doing it again. In fact, I have some extra plain rolled fondant leftover and some extra pink and green white chocolate fondant. So, I'll have to come up with some ideas of how to use that soon.

I even had pink and green candles to put in my cake and Audrey helped me blow out the candles.

"Happy Birthday to me!" I know it's not normal to make your own birthday cake, but those who know me know that I'm a bit of a control freak and in this case I was able to create the flavor and look of my cake (even if I was made fun of for doing it). Plus, I was able to conquer making fondant.

Recipe for White Chocolate Buttercream

6 oz. white chocolate, chopped

1/4 cup whipping cream

1 cup unsalted butter, cut in pieces (cold)

1 cup powdered sugar

Microwave the white chocolate with the whipping cream in a bowl on high for about 1 1/2 minutes, stirring half way through, until almost completely melted. Stir until completely melted. Cool to room temperature.

Beat butter and sugar gradually into cooled white chocolate mixture on high speed until light and fluffy.

Sweets in Cincy

On my recent visit to Cincinnati to visit my sister, I had the time to take a side trip to O'Bryonville to the Bonbonerie Bakery. This is where I had my sister's bridal shower and I don't know that I had been back there since then. They have since added a cafe and I was interested in checking them out again.

The old tearoom was closed since they have the new cafe and we spent most of our time perusing the bakery cases and all the pretty treats.

Audrey had fun looking at all the pretty cookies and cupcakes and gravitated towards the brightly colored frosted sugar cookies.

Their displays are so pretty!

They had a lot of sample cake designs. They do gorgeous (and very delicious wedding cakes) and this is actually where my sister got her wedding cake.

They had a pretty outdoor seating area, so we ordered a sampling of pastries, got a latte and enjoyed our treats. We also got a loaf of brioche to go and made amazing brioche french toast the next morning!

The real reason we were visiting for the weekend was my niece's 2nd birthday. My sister also loves to bake and made some vanilla cupcakes for the birthday girl. She had some chocolate buttercream to use and made some vanilla buttercream, so we had some fun piping together. I had some Dora decorations to put on a few since she loves Dora. The others we piped with swirls and topped with a purple flower (although the purple was darker than I had originally intended). We used the same flower tip to pipe the chocolate buttercream and it turned out nicely.

Here are the ones with the pretty bright white buttercream and purple flowers.

The chocolate buttercream was made with real chocolate (not just cocoa) and was SO good (Audrey coco approved!). It was the first time I've tried the big flower tip and it was quite easy.

Birthday Souffle

When I recently visited a friend for her birthday, I wanted to make her a special treat. I simply asked her what her favorite flavor is. She mentioned caramel and I recalled a recent Martha Stewart show where they made caramel souffle that looked amazing. So, we went to pick up the ingredients and one kids nap time and part of an evening later, we had gorgeous and perfectly risen caramel souffle's to celebrate her birthday.

The first step was to coat the souffle dishes with butter and turbinado sugar. We used the raw Maui sugar that you can get at any grocery store. It's so pretty and we hadn't even put the souffle in the dishes yet!

For the souffle batter you had to first make the actual caramel. I have not done this before and I was a little scared to cook sugar with nothing else in a hot pan, but it indeed cooked down and I just folded it in after it started to brown until it was all dissolved.

After the sugar was completely dissolved and caramelized, we added heavy cream and whole milk and ended up with this creamy caramel sauce. It smelled SO good!

Then, you mixed the egg yolks and sugar together and added a little flour and cornstarch until it was thicker. This was added to the hot caramel sauce to temper it slowly and then completely incorporated.

The caramel sauce and egg yolk mixture was cooked on the stove top again until it was nice and thick like the consistency of homemade pudding.

We left the cooked caramel "pudding" and the egg whites out to get to room temperature and took a dinner break. When we returned to making our dessert, we whipped the egg whites and added more sugar to make a meringue to create the airiness in the souffle. This is where I knew it would be tricky like the macarons I made last week as I didn't want to over mix the batter. I folded all the meringue into the caramel "pudding" and tried to make sure it was a smooth as possible without over beating. In fact, I probably could have mixed it in a little more.

The souffle dishes were filled almost to the top and we put them in the microwave for a few seconds as recommended to set the top of the batter so it would rise better.

I put the light on in the oven several times and we were SO excited to see they were rising!

We just had the caramel souffles on their own which was fantastic, but we were going to whip the remaining heavy whipping cream to have on the side. Martha's guest made caramel ice cream to have on the side, which would be interesting to try. We enjoyed some sweet Moscato wine that evening though and switched to some cold milk to have with our souffle as they were quite rich.

And, while a hot souffle isn't particularly easy to hold a candle, we put one in for the birthday girl.