Pillow Cake

How should a bridal cake look like? This special bride had specifically asked for a cake to go with the restaurant that she was going to celebrate at with her close girlfriends. This cake is vanilla cake with chestnut buttercream, with colours to match the wedding.

Is this a Cake?

Yes, this is a cake. Okay, I'll tell you the truth, this is not a real cake but it could be. The body of the bird is the cake portion and the whole bird is covered with modeling chocolate.

The head is made of modeling chocolate...

... and the butt and feathers are modeling chocolate.

I also made a shrimp friend for the flamingo in sugar paste. Flamingos eat red shrimps to make their feathers red. Not my flamingo. "She" makes friends with this special little shrimp. Look, Mr. Shrimp is resting on an edible rock to talk to Miss Flamingo!

Here Comes the Train

Couldn't believe time flew by so fast it seems like I just did Adrian's first birthday cake not too long ago.

Adrian loves Thomas the Train and here it is in cake form! Thomas is hand crafted with sugar paste. Do you like him?

The biggest challenge for this cake is actually the cake itself. Turns out that the little boy has quite a few allergies and had to stay away from eggs and dairy products. The cake needed to be made of natural sugar as well. If you know a little bit about baking you will know that eggs, butter and sugar gives structure, fluffiness and flavour to cakes. So yes this cakes contained none of those ingredients! I didn't have any experience in vegan baking and I was lucky to find a really nice vegan gluten-free chocolate cake recipe to start with and changed it to a vegan refine-sugarless version. Since most cake fillings and buttercreams has both butter/dairy and lots of sugar, I substituted with dairy-free chocolate soy ganache.

To recap, that is no butter, no eggs, no refined sugar, no vegan butter, no egg substitute and no splenda. The cake was surprisingly fluffy with subtle sweetness. I still prefer regular cakes but it's hard to tell the cake contained none of those ingredients if I didn't tell you before hand.

What will Adrian's third birthday cake look like next year?

Haute Couture

Earlier this week I took a 3 day cake decorating course at Icing Inspirations with James Rosselle and Marina Sousa. It was so much fun! I was a bit intimated when everybody introduced themselves and they are all professionals. It turns out that James and Marina explained each steps very clearly and they were always there to help. The 3 days were intense and exhausting but I made new friends and enjoyed every minute of it. (Okay, maybe not so much when there are so many flower petals to make. They look great awesome though!) I think I should let the photos speak for themselves.

Thank you Cyril Ma for taking these amazing photos for me.

Princess Ariel

Hi I am still here! I had just spent a wonderful week on the west coast with lots of good friends, great food and celebrated with lots of wine. It was maybe a bit too much fun which took me another week after to sync myself back to reality. Boo, that wasn't fun at all.

To lift my spirits, I have decided to tackle something that I have been wanted to try for quite a while - practicing fondant and make a doll cake.  I have learned and practiced fondant techniques on a few dummy cakes, and I wanted to try it on a real cake to get a feel of it.

And this is what it looked like.

"What did you mean I forgot to take pictures of the cake?" That was my reply to C when he downloaded the pictures and said he couldn't see pictures of the cake. But you are looking at the cake, hon!

The dress of Princess Ariel was made of a soft and dense dark chocolate cake, 5 layers in total, with vanilla buttercream and strawberry jam. It was then covered with marshmallow fondant. I also made the bodice with the same fondant too. You can find the recipe of the marshmallow fondant here.

This is my first time working with marshmallow fondant. I want to test with the basic recipe and therefore decided not to add colour to it. Now that I have worked with the consistency, next time around I can try adding colour and texture to take it to another level. Well next time!

It's Been A While

To my dear blog followers:

It's been a while since I made my last post here. I am still alive! This past 2 months I have been drowning in my day work and haven't have time to bake at all. In the worst week I had managed to eat out or take out every meal of the week. Argh, that was disgusting.

But those days were gone, and I would like to show you what I did in cake decorating class recently. We learned a lot about fondant and royal icing decoration in this course.

Brushed Embroidery

Crimping

Quilting

Fondant, royal icing collar, lace petals

Lace petals with raindrops

I am pretty happy with the results and am looking forward to the next level. To my disappointment, that class only opens once a year in May. Oh well, until next year!

Happy Birthday Grandma!

Last year, I almost forgot grandma's birthday and made a sadly looking cake for her. This year I marked it on my calender way ahead of time so I can make her a beautiful looking cake.

Gum paste flower decoration.

This is a green tea sponge cake with white sesame buttercream. A whole jar of Japanese white sesame paste has been added to the custard based buttercream. It was so nutty and velvety. The cake base is my regular sponge cake recipe with 2 teaspoon of match powder baked in a 6" ring. Lined the cake ring with parchment paper to extend the height of the ring. This cake has used the full recipe of sponge cake and was cut into 4 layers. Each layer was topped with a thin layer of buttercream, and more buttercream was used to cover the whole cake. The cake was then refrigerated until firm then applied a special treatment to smooth the surface.

A New Challenge

I have always wanted to have an opportunity to make a multi-tier cake. It's not that often to have such a big event that has enough people to consume a big cake. When a friend of mine asked me if I would like to make a cake for 60 people last Saturday, I was very excited.

This is a 3 tier cake. The bottom portion was actually 2 tiers of the same size. Each of the 3 tiers is a different flavour: the top is vanilla sponge cake with mango buttercream, the middle is green tea jaconde with yuzu buttercream, and the bottom is a chocolate cake with dark chocolate ganache.

Knowing how to make a cake and how to assemble is one thing, it's easy to learn nowadays with youtube. However, practicing is very important too. I have learned the hard way that my time management skills need to be polished, that a 3 tiered cake with 3 different flavours could not be done in 8 hours, let alone having enough time to set the buttercream in the fridge before traveling. I have learned that this size of cake takes 3 pounds of butter to make enough buttercream for masking the whole cake. I have learned that I should have prepare the cake board, tint all the icing for decoration in advance. I have also learned that it is pretty impossible to find a box big enough to encase the cake.

Lesson learned. Now I need another big event to put that into practice. Anybody volunteer?

Side order: what can you do with leftovers? Here's what I did: