Baking Tip of the Week: The Freezer is Your Friend

When making a custom cake that requires carving the layers, freeze them first.
Seriously.
Wrap them well in plastic wrap and put them in the freezer until they're frozen solid. Cake layers are much easier to carve when frozen. Plus, freezing shrinks the crumb, so your cake doesn't crumble when you slice it up and serve it to your guests.
No, freezing the layers in this manner does not dry out your cake if you wrap it well. You get a dried-out cake when the grocery store bakery freezes cakes already decorated.
Just don't leave the layers in your freezer for months on end and then expect them to still be good. I'd say two weeks, at most. Usually, I bake and freeze the day before I decorate.

Snow White Cake

Here's a Snow White cake I made for my mom's birthday.



The cake was lemon with lemon buttercream. The doll's clothing and headband are all fondant.

Red and White Cake

This cake was a gift for our homeschool co-op director at her retirement.


The roses are sugarpaste. The cake is french vanilla with buttercream icing, covered in fondant. The lettering and red damask on the white layers are royal icing. The red layer in the middle is quilted and adorned with sugar pearls.

Catching Up

Wow, it's been nearly a month since I last posted. Well, I've been busy. As a catch-up, here are a couple pictures of the cake that ended up being the final resting place of those little cherry blossoms I made in my previous post.


The blossoms took a while to make, but the end result was perfect.


This particular cake was for a baby shower, hence the nest. Bird, nest and eggs were all hand made of fondant.


Actually, I think the cake would also work nicely for a wedding. Just replace the nest with another bird to make a pair.


Under all that pink fondant, there's a red velvet cake with cream cheese icing.

Cherry Blossoms

Here are some of the fondant/sugarpaste cherry blossoms I made for an upcoming baby shower cake. These aren't simple cutter-stamped flowers. I molded and shaped each one by hand. They take a long time, but the end result is something special.

Tiered Daisy Cake

Here's that tiered daisy cake I mentioned in my previous post. I think it turned out well.

Fondant Daisies

I just love daisies. I do believe they're one of God's most cheerful flowers. I made these fondant daisies today for a friend's anniversary cake.

Mad Dentist

Here's the third installment of the dental/tooth cake series. That's a 12-inch ruler at the base of the cake, just to give it some perspective.



Everything is edible, except some strategically placed dowel rods and toothpicks.

Don't you just love the comb over?

Crown

Here's the second in the tooth series of cakes, a 3D crown of a tooth. Everything you see here is edible--it's all cake, buttercream, fondant and sugarpaste.

Mike the Molar

A friend who owns a dental lab has asked me to make some tooth-themed cakes for him. Here's the first one. My kids called him Mike the Molar.

Princess Cake

I was recently commissioned to create a princess cake for a little girl's birthday. She specifically asked for Princess Ariel (Little Mermaid) in a pink dress instead of green tail. This was the outcome.



The small details are what makes something like this so special.







And here she is.



Everything is edible except for the doll herself. The dress is fondant over buttercream.

Giant Cupcake

Here's a giant cupcake I was commissioned to make for a sweet little girl's third birthday.

The cake is french vanilla with buttercream icing. The pink cup is actually white chocolate candy melted and shaped. The flowers and butterflies are fondant and sugarpaste. Everything you see is edible.

I had feared that the candy cup would break or shatter when we sliced it, but it sliced beautifully, giving each person an equal portion of cake, icing and candy cup.

Ganache - Chocolate of the gods

It's true. The stuff is heavenly. Indulgent. Some might say sinful. Plus, it's one of the most addictive foods known to man...or at least, to my man.
I love to pour ganache over a cake iced with cream cheese icing. It cools as it slides down the sides, lending an elegent touch. It's delicious on strawberries and raspberries, too. And although I haven't tried it yet, I'm sure it would be divine on cheesecake. If you let it cool, then whip it with a hand mixer, it makes a decadent cake filling.
My husband's favorite way of eating it is by the spoonful, straight out of the fridge. With that in mind, I sometimes roll it into truffles and coat them in cocoa. They don't ship well, as my literary agent recently discovered, but they sure taste good.
The recipe I developed requires top-secret security clearance, but you can great recipes for ganache online.

Little Einsteins Rocket Cake

Just to mix things up a bit, here's the first cake I ever attempted for my kids' birthdays: Rocket from the Little Einsteins.

I made this cake before I learned how to use fondant, so everything you see—except, of course, the Leo, Annie, June and Quincy toys in front and the cherry lollypop on top—is buttercream. To get buttercream this smooth, I used a little trick from my mentor involving a water misting bottle and an icing blade. Took a long time, but for my first fun/character cake, it turned out okay.

Toy Story Cake

My little guy's birthday party was yesterday. I created a cake for him based on Toy Story, with Andy's room as the theme. If you've never seen Toy Story, this cake will look like a random, over-loaded hodgepodge of mismatched toys. But if you've seen any of the three movies, you'll understand just how essential the characters are.
My design isn't original (you can find other similar cakes online), but the execution and construction was unique.
The cake is two layers of 9x13 sheet cake, iced with buttercream (chocolate filling), and then covered in fondant. Most folks only use a crumb coat under fondant, but my family doesn't care much for how fondant tastes, so I ice with buttercream or cream cheese icing. That way my husband can just peel the fondant right off. It's the best of both worlds: a cake with the yumminess of buttercream or cream cheese icing combined with the design flexibility and wonders of fondant.
Aside from the toys, which were part of my son's birthday presents, every part of this cake's structure is edible...except a few strategically-placed toothpicks, used as anchors. That's one of the true challenges in cake decorating.
I constructed the headboard from a sheet of matzah, large pretzel sticks and gummy candy balls, all rolled in a fondant/gumpaste mixture. The pillow is a small sliver of cake, again rolled in fondant. The sheets, blanket, rug, and letters are also fondant.