Unicorn Cake

I started planning to make a nice red velvet cake for a birthday girl and it turned into THIS.  Well, she really loves horses and unicorns too, so I thought I would try to make it a little fancier than just a typical layer cake.  We have all seen all kinds of these unicorn cakes and they are sprinkled all over Instagram if you follow some of the bakers out there. I was not too sure how this would turn out, but was quite pleased for my first try as an amateur.

I was not sure where to start, so I researched different cakes on Instagram and online and came across this YouTube tutorial that was both entertaining and helpful. In the tutorial they made a funfetti cake, but I stuck with red velvet and followed other recipes for my cake, buttercream and made my typical marshmallow white chocolate fondant.

I made three layers of red velvet cake and a simple vanilla buttercream to put in between and then spread on top and the sides to get the fondant to stick. 

I made the white chocolate marshmallow fondant and cut out the ears, horn and used the rest to cover.  For the horn, I wrapped a piece of fondant around a plastic chopstick to hold it in place and affix to the top of the cake. 

After the cake was wrapped in fondant, it was time for the fun part - the flowers to shape the unicorn's mane. I also used little sugar pearls to put on the center of the flowers and the detail around the base of the cake. 

She looks like she's closing her eyes to avoid the sparks.  What a fun birthday cake! 

First Communion Three Tier Cake

My little girl's First Eucharist was approaching and we were planning a small celebration at home. I emphasize "small."  We discussed what kind of cake she may want and she talked about three layers.  I thought "no problem!" I usually do a two layer cake, but three layers wouldn't be a big deal.  Until I realized that she actually meant three TIERS.

Ok, so this was another challenge on its own. Was it necessary or needed for what we were planning? Of course not.  But, I wanted to meet the challenge and I also wanted a happy little girl to be proud of her cake at her celebration after all the time and hard work leading up to her First Eucharist. 

We sat down one night to plan it out and here is the drawing we decided on. We talked about doing a few different types of cake and buttercream and landed on it being strawberry and vanilla flavors with buttercream and covered in fondant with crosses on the sides. 

I started working on it a few days in advance with baking the different cakes and wrapping them to keep until we assembled everything. 

Here is lovies helping with frosting as we put the layers together. The turntable for frosting that I got several years back really came in handy for this! The strawberry was so much more moist from the fruit so it proved more difficult with the fondant, but we made it work!

The topper of the little girl kneeling is the same exact topper that was on top of my First Communion cake in the 1980s.

She was SO excited about it and loved her cake. 

I want to work on getting the fondant even more smooth for each layer, but it wasn't too bad. 

The fondant recipe I used is my favorite thus far.  Previously, I've made a white chocolate fondant.  This was a white chocolate and marshmallow fondant with making it completely from scratch and without using the marshmallow fluff. 

White Chocolate Marshmallow Fondant

Ingredients:

3 C. mini marshmallows

1/2 oz. white chocolate, finely chopped

1 T. butter, cut into pieces

1 1/2 t. cream or milk

1 t. clear vanilla

3 C. powdered sugar

Directions:

Place marshmallows, white chocolate, butter and milk into a microwave safe bowl. Heat for one minute and stir until melted and smooth.

Stir in vanilla and add in half of the powdered sugar. Stir as much as you can and scrape down the edges. The mixture will be very sticky.

Lay down a large plastic mat covered with Crisco and sprinkle it with powdered sugar. Place the marshmallow mixture onto the surface and knead it continuing to add more powdered sugar. Knead until it's no longer sticky and it won't take anymore sugar.

Wrap the fondant in a flat disk in plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator until you need to use it.

If you want to color it, take a small amount and add a few drops to a small piece that you can then knead into a larger piece until a consistent color of your liking is developed. 

Complete and on display, ready for cutting and serving with homemade vanilla ice cream. 

Mummy Cupcakes

I haven't done many fun baking projects lately and it had been a while since I had whipped together some buttercream and played with fondant. So, I became a bit inspired over the pre-Halloween weekend.  Last year, I made ghost cupcakes for a friend's halloween party. This year, I thought I'd try these mummy cupcakes.

 I made white chocolate fondant again. While it was pretty simple to knead it together and roll it out, the time intensive part was in cutting all the "bandage" strips and making the mummy faces. 

I made devil's food chocolate cupcakes, vanilla buttercream for the base, some candy eyes and then all the cute little white chocolate bandage strips to make the mummy faces.

They don't look very scary at all, but they're fun to unravel and eat.

Halloween Cupcakes

There were a few pre-Halloween occasions that called for a treat so I made a few different Halloween inspired cupcakes, but my favorites were these friendly ghosts.

For my daughter's Montessori Fall Festival cakewalk I did a simple vanilla cupcake with vanilla buttercream and a sprinkling of candy corns.  I even bought some special window top cupcake boxes this year so people at the cakewalk could easily view the treats inside. 

My friend hosted her annual Halloween party in her amazing barn and asked me to bring some cupcakes.  I made several fondant ghosts to top the remaining vanilla cupcakes.  It was too much work to make 20+ ghosts, so I colored the rest of the buttercream orange and decorated them with brown sprinkles and candy corn.

To make the fondant ghosts, I started out by cutting giant marshmallows in a cone shape and made sure it was a little rounded on top.  By cutting the marshmallow, I was able to get it the shape I wanted and it also made the marshmallow nice and sticky for the fondant to adhere.  I referenced my marzipan book and it had a guide for ghosts using a cone shaped and round piece of marzipan under the circle, but you needed to hold them together with a toothpick and I didn't want to have a sharp toothpick in the cupcakes that little kids would be eating.  So, I tried out the marshmallow idea. What kid doesn't like marshmallows!?

Next I rolled out my white chocolate fondant and cut out large circles that were draped on top of the marshmallow and then crimped a little at the bottom.

When I was in England recently, I bought a package of caramel and chocolate decorating tubes and used the milk chocolate one to make the eyes and mouth.  This was much better to use than the gel decorating tubes as they are quite gooey.  The chocolate was easy to put on and hardened nicely.  Plus, the chocolate color matched the dark brown cupcake papers I baked them in.

Our neighborhood has our Halloween party this coming weekend and my family is visiting, so I'm sure I'll be inspired to create some other fun fall goodies.

Cake Decorating Class

I've frosted a lot of cakes in my lifetime, but I've decorated very few (aside from a dash of sprinkles).  I recently took a cake decorating class where I learned a lot of good techniques, how to use certain tips and got a little practice.  I'm still no pro, but I definitely feel more comfortable with a piping bag. 

For the class, we needed to bake, fill and crumb coat a layer cake. I decided not to use springform pans, but buttered and dusted these cake pans and they came out just fine. 

I made the vanilla butter cake recipe from my James Peterson "Baking" cookbook, filled my pans and leveled them an offset spatula. The cake was frosted with buttercream (really butter-cream) and filled with lemon curd.

We decorated in class and I didn't take any photos of the process.  I like how my pretty feminine cake turned out, but I actually didn't do a lot of fancy piping work.  This was officially the last of my pink and green white chocolate fondant that I had put in my bag to take to class and decided to use it.  I piped some pretty little leaves as the border on the bottom - I love the leaf tip!  Then, I used a flower and a leaf cutter to make the fondant shapes that I arranged on the top and sides of the cake. 

This would make a very nice little girls' birthday cake!

Instead of eating this whole thing with my little girl, I spread some sunshine with the teachers at her Monstessori and donated it to their teacher lounge for a special treat.



Fondant Topped Cupcakes

If you have seen previous posts on this blog, these cupcakes might remind you of something...my birthday cake, which is when I had initially made the fondant and attempted wrapping a cake and decorating it with fondant. Since I had extra leftover, I decided to use it to decorate the tops of cupcakes and made them to take to our neighborhood picnic.

I found these adorable bright green cupcake papers with white polka dots from Bake It Pretty that were perfect for this.

Using lots of cornstarch to keep it from sticking, I rolled out the fondant and cut out different sized circles of each color.

White chocolate buttercream was spread on the vanilla cupcakes and topped with circles of white chocolate fondant.

They look like those hard candy discs that some cupcake shops put on their cupcakes, but these fondant circles are SO much better.

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.