Just for Fun 3-Tier

I made this cake because I was bored. Alright, and because I had a ton of batter and icing left over from a job I did for a friend of the family. But yeah, this is how I procrastinate...


After that animal figure cake with the spiral sides I became sort of obsessed with that aesthetic and decided to do this entire three-tiered cake in a similar way, although obviously simpler and cleaner than that baby shower single-tier.



I had two cake batter flavors left, devil's food and a vanilla butter cake, so I marbled them together (maybe over-marbled a little) and then, when baked, cut a notch into the side of each tier so that when layered with the peanut butter and chocolate buttercream on the inside the continuous pattern of the marble could be seen if the layering was scrutinized. I mean... I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who's noticed so far, but that sort of detail gives me all sorts of pleasure.


Nice shot of the whole thing once cut into; the entire cake was 28 layers altogether, excluding the layers of buttercream. Read: once out of the oven and refrigerated, I cut the top tier into eight separate pieces of cake, the middle into ten, and the bottom into ten. The layers of marble cake were re-assembled with alternating layers of peanut butter and chocolate buttercream, and then the entirety was iced and piped in a mixture of the two buttercreams. I used disposable chopsticks from the previous night's Thai dinner to stabilize the two bottom tiers, and cut out cake-boards from an old cereal box (recycle!!!). Again, this is what I do for fun. Sad?

Luckily, a few hours after I finished this behemoth a bunch of hungry (and sorta tipsy) academics came over unexpectedly after the English conference my dad organized and hosted at his university, Columbia, was through and they all got to sample my giant chocolate peanut butter cake. Hooraaay!

Yo Gabba Gabba

Yo Gabba Gabba cake, with all the characters chillin on their boom box. This cake was almost given to another decorator while I was gonna get stuck with that horrible purse cake and I was pretty upset, but the other decorator disappeared so I got to do all my cakes PLUS all hers at the last second... hooraaaaaaay...?

In any case, I secretly love that show and not so secretly love making little figures for cakes. Close-ups!!!


This dude's name is Plex, and he came out super well. I like his little antenna!


This is Muno, probs my favorite character.


Brobee, maybe actually my more favoriter character.


And Foofa, which is a hilarious but fitting name.

Apparently I didn't take a close-up of the blue cat, Toodee, but that's okay because I'm not a big fan.

The Accursed Purse Cake

Alright, not my favorite cake, but I suppose not bad for a first attempt at the purse shape. I wish we'd had equipment available so I didn't have to use a ruler to mark out the squares and then laboriously hand-paint them with gold luster dust. It was a LOT of work and apparently people liked it, but all I can see when I look at it are the flaws.



Hilariously, the day after I finished this beast was the day my manager decided to tell me that we actually have an airbrush for cake decorating in the shop; nobody had though that might be useful information for me to have. I didn't bother asking to use it for any subsequent cakes because it wasn't necessary, but it would have been SO GREAT to have had some sort of checkered template for this cake where I could have just airbrushed the pattern on. Sigh.


I did really like the pacifier though, in that super cute star shape. I figure you'd probably not go for such a shape with an actual pacifier what with all the sharp points, but for the purpose of this cake I thought it'd be okay.


And I made it super shiny, too. Yeah.

Lil Animals

My second animal figures cake differed stylistically from the first, less "fun" and cartoony and more cute with a little bit of elegance thrown in. It's for a baby shower after all, which is less about what the newborn is going to like and more about the involved adults I think! I really liked how the sides came out with that organic swirled texture in the peach-colored cream cheese icing. The design I based this cake on was given to my manager by the person who ordered the cake, but I don't know where she got it originally so unfortunately I can't reference it properly, but it turned out pretty differently, with different animals and the monkey character hanging off the side.


I love pearl dust. Put that stuff on EVERYTHING and it gets all shiny.


So here's a funny story: my manager was explaining the composition of the cake to me and told me it would feature three animals: an alligator, an elephant and a monkey. So I started with the alligator, worked my way through the elephant and was JUST finished up the monkey and placing it next to its fellows when he came to check up on my. He looked at the figures for a second and said, "A monkey? I thought it was supposed to be a lion." So I sadly mushed up my monkey and started working on a lion, making sure to ask him for the order sheet just so we could be sure he wasn't making things up again. I had finished all the figures and placed them on the cake when I went to the bakers to check on some cakes I needed for another piece I was working on, and when I got back my manager had left the original order sheet on my counter. I read it. It called for an alligator, an elephant and A MONKEY. I was pretty livid by that point, so I took a break, and when I came back to this cake I decided to make the setback into an opportunity and improve on the original cake design. Booyah! Supercute.

I like this shot because the alligator is my favorite, and you can also see the monkey's curly little tail. The family that ordered the cake called the warehouse to thank us when the received it... If that had happened before then nobody told me =P That's actually entirely possible (see above monkey/lion confusion anecdote).

Sacha

I made templates for this cake and then laid them on the top and pricked through them with a pin to give my icing bag a little guidance. The fondant is entirely covered in gold luster dust (hand-painted on) and the embellishments are all painted silver. When the cake was in the light, it shone beautifully!


This one was for my manager's friend, and he checked up on it CONSTANTLY. It was infuriating, but I was gratified when it came out so well.

Monkey Cake (to be continued?)

My first cake with little figures on it! I had some help on this one from a co-decorator. She made those awesome bananas and balloons, while I worked on the monkeys and the polka dots. I took more pictures with her camera, and will add them to this post when she resurfaces and I can get in touch with her (I'm not really sure where she disappeared to...). The top monkey is really cute up close, and you can sort of see that the monkey in the back (to the far left) has a peeled banana and is getting ready to dig in. There was another monkey on the opposite side, that one dangling upside down on the side of the cake, a banana in its tail. Sweeet.

Cakeman Raven, Ella's Birthday and that Chocolate Plastique Skull I Said I'd Post About

So this past Saturday I get a phone call from a number I'd labeled "Cakeman" way back when I auditioned for a position as decorator at Cakeman Raven's bakery warehouse. I had long given up hope of hearing back from that bakery since in my experience it doesn't usually take several months to get a call-back for bakeshop jobs. But they needed somebody to fill in for their regular decorator who's on vacation now, and I've been asked to stay on until I leave for New Mexico at the end of June!

Kiara's Oscar cake is my first confection completed for Cakeman Raven, and I gotta be honest, as much as I liked working on it and how it turned out, I kinda feel like a tool. I'm not into incorporating popular culture (like cartoon characters, designer fashion, or AHEM the Oscar Awards) in my cake designs AT ALL. Buuuuut it's completely out of my hands at Cakeville! Ugh. I've sold my soul.

What really killed me on this cake was the stairs; they came out well, but were the source of a substantial amount of hair-loss. They had to be carved into the cake (with the excess pieces used to create the bottom step), augmented with the bakery's RIDICULOUSLY soft cream cheese icing, and then very carefully covered in fondant and poked and prodded into shape. The red carpet had to be cut to measured specifications out of red fondant that I colored myself, then laid over the first layer of fondant and fixed in place with royal icing. It took so long! Thank god it came out, and while I'm at it, THANK GOD FOR ROYAL ICING. Fluffy gold.


Here's the sign, looking a little washed out (thanks flash), but it still looks good! Okay, a little rough, but I'd never made a sign like this before. The base is a piece of cardboard with two skewers taped to it. I coated the board in royal icing (seriously... so useful) and then red fondant. It held perfectly even though I put together just hours before it was delivered to the Cakeman Raven storefront to be picked up by Kiara's fam. That's cutting things a little close for me, but hey, it got done.


I'ma give a shout-out to the Cakeville crew for being so supportive while I toiled for three days over this beast of a layered confection. You guys are awesome! Go team!

Ummmm..... yeah.

Okay, I figured I should probably knock this other cake out while I'm in a bloggy mood. This is a cake I made last week for the birthday of the little girl I babysit. Ella wanted a Dora the Explorer cake. Mmhm. We all know how I feel about that kind of thing (ugh, brand loyalty. ugh, marketing to children!!!). So she got a weird sky-cake covered in 3D butterflies on top of which I sort of unceremoniously propped a plastic Dora doll (NOT pictured). On the plus side, the detrimental effects of this exposure to corporate advertising were blunted by the fact that the doll remained in place on the cake for a scant four seconds before it was whisked away by some kid (who was not Ella), who had also just blown out most of the candles. In fact, I believe Dora hardly registered as Ella spent the moments between the birthday song and the cutting of the cake struggling to secure a candle for herself before they all disappeared into the outstretched hands of her cluster of friends. MAN, kids are brats! One little fella didn't even wait for the candles to be blown out before he started picking butterflies off the cake and shoving them into his mouth! But Ella was an absolute angel, and not a tear was shed! Good for her, because I would have thrown a sh•t fit if my friends wrecked on my cake like that. Happy Birthday Lola!!!

All piping including the 3D butterflies done in royal icing! Seriously, is there anything it can't do???

And finally, I present to you that chocolate plastique skull that I said I would post about back in January. It's kinda metal in that cakey/candy sorta way I like.



Because the skull itself was not metal enough, I added horns. Rams' horns.


THERE it is. Metal. Also, that selfsame skull is still sitting in my room at this very moment. As a matter of fact, I am contemplating it as I type. I wanna see how long it'll last. Right now it's dry as a bone (haha) but how will it fare in humid weather? I guess I'll find out! Science! (That one's for you, PKC)

Coming up next time: cakes shaped like dice? Apparently, according to my manager at Cakeville. Better start googling stuff like... how to make cake shaped like dice...

Marshmallows!

Chocolate Orange Hazelnut Marshmallows, to be exact. I used fresh orange juice and chopped dark chocolate which melted into the marshmallow batter creating swirly fluffy delicious.

The recipe I was riffing off of said to wet your hands and flatten the top of the marshmallow so it would set up flat, but I really liked how weird the batter looked after I got both my hands working to scrape as much sticky fluff as I could out of the mixing bowl.

In the pans, starting to set up


The first set marshmallow brick, unmolded

You can see the swirls a little better on the bottom

... went a little crazy on the second one...

Second swirly bottom

I love how these look. Why flatten the top? Seriously.

This was a super fun project! And my whole family really likes them, more I think for the texture than the flavor. The OJ made the marshmallows kind of sour, so maybe I'll ease up next time. Also, I'll have to work on stirring less if I want more pronounced ribbons of color. Still, a success all told, particularly in light of my last attempt at homemade marshmallows which, as my dear friend Chris Krovatin can tell you, didn't turn out so great. Probably because I substituted agar for half of the gelatin. Hmm. Chris, I'm sorry I hadn't found this base recipe by the time I was prepping for your birthday! Next time for realz, awesome marshmallows.

Next post: sculpting with chocolate plastique!

Clarence's Birthday Cake

There it is ladies and gentlemen, seven layers of noisette-syrup soaked devil's food cake, seven layers of dark chocolate ganache and one massive stretch of milk chocolate and coffee mousse sandwiched between two textured slabs of chocolate butter cake; all covered with chocolate ganache and adorned with noisette flavored Swiss meringue rosettes. I have to say, in terms of flavor and texture composition, this is quite possibly the most successful piece I've ever done: not too busy or incoherent, but complex enough to be engaging and totally delicious. That bit of mousse was pretty tough to get in there. I knew it was too soft to hold its shape unless I built that part separately and let it set in the refrigerator. I put one layer of butter cake in each waxpaper-lined pan in which it had been baked and then spread ganache on the sides, creating a frame to keep the mousse in place once the cakes were stacked. I piped in the mousse and pressed another appropriately sized butter cake layer on the top to seal it in. I half expected this not to work at all because the mousse was really just so soft and in such a thick layer. Well, now I know, and I'll be employing this new technique in the future!

In terms of presentation, I went with a... homier look?

Tall, dark and chocolatey, just like Clarence (uh oh, I think he follows my blog... I'll apologize on the phone). I'd promised him about five years ago that I would make him his own cake and was finally able to fulfill my promise this past Monday the fourth, a week or so after his 22nd birthday. He requested chocolate and coffee, and I obliged.

I dunno, looks pretty good from the top...

Ah, the obligatory psychotic cake-stabbing picture. You're a natural, Clarence =)

I'm fascinated by how every friend-with-cake photoshoot I've ever done inevitably includes a shot of somebody poised to perpetrate some sort of violent fantasy on the as of yet undefiled pastry. Honestly, I fully support and even encourage these expressions of what I think lies at the heart of our appreciation of intricately decorated sweets: the desire to completely eviscerate it, to destroy something delicate and beautiful with our hands and devour it, consuming all that careful construction and reducing it to human filth. Maybe that's why I spend hours and days working on a piece that can be entirely dismantled and ingested in a matter of hours or even minutes, manifesting some sort of masochistic desire to watch my labors of love suddenly brutalized and literally turned to shit.

Huh. Maybe I shouldn't listen to Behemoth while I blog. I think the metal is seeping into my narrative. Speaking of which, I swear I'm going to start including weirder cakes soon. All this cuteness is really unusual for me. Maybe I should listen to more Behemoth while I blog. And bake. Good plan.

The composition of the bottom tier was exactly the same as that of the top, with one layer fewer of the devil's food cake. The whole bottom was taken home by Clarence to be enjoyed by his family, and from what I hear it was a success! Hooray!

On a side-note, the recipe for the butter cake gave me this beautiful crack down the middle of the smaller top tier. Some cookbook authors talk about all the fancy things you can do with baking temperature to keep cakes from cracking and to keep the top of the cake as level as possible so as to minimize waste. However, going back to the rather visceral central theme of this post, I absolutely love those beautiful, rough valleys that form in the smooth cake-top while in the oven.

The texture is so appealing that tactile people such as myself could never be expected not to secretly hope for the blossoming of a crack that could by pried apart with fingers, the cake releasing clouds of chocolate steam as little pieces of crust find their way into mouths... how is that waste? Who in their right mind would try to keep cracks from appearing on top of every cake he or she bakes?

Who wouldn't want to do this to a cake right out of the oven?

Just look at that beautiful texture... Mmm, I should go bake something. I think I will. Right now.