Personalizing makes all the difference

After the scrabble cake, I’ll admit that I was feeling a little “decorated out” and I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to pull things together for the second cake I needed to make this past week.  I knew when I volunteered to make it that the two were going to be back to back, but there was no way I was going to miss out on making a cake to celebrate another of my work colleagues and friends moving on to a new job. 

I knew that I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on prep work and we’d already decided on a castle theme since Pam’s new job is working in the ivory tower of policy.  Thankfully, about three years ago, I bought Wilton’s Romantic Castle Cake Set when it was on sale cheap at Walmart.  I browsed the ideas on the Wilton website and found their Friendly Fortress Castle Cake idea.  It wasn’t quite what I was looking for but it gave me some great ideas, especially using sugar cubes for the battlements around the top.   The biggest source of inspiration it gave though was how simple the basic design could be as long as I personalized a couple of critical items. 

A little “grass” around the bottom to finish the fondant that I had hand scored to give the effect of stone walls, the Policy banner flying high, and, a princess in her tower, wearing a purple princess dress with matching detailing on the turret peaks. 

I picked the colour and style of the princess dress based on the Halloween costume that made an appearance from Pam’s closet a few weeks ago.  I’ve only made fondant people a couple of times before … oddly one of those was for another castle cake for one of my nieces … and they looked more like the wooden Fisher Price Little People from my childhood.  I wanted to make sure that this figure was a closer reflection of my colleague.  A toothpick in the centre provided some structural stability to allow a narrower shape and I made the hair in several pieces that I scored using the backside of a shell fondant tool to give a texture that looked a lot like hair. One of the back pieces of hair even got a haircut after she was on the cake and I realized that it was much longer then the other sections.

The end result was a cake I could be proud of and one that drew lots of laughter when we presented it at the office to celebrate the our policy princess.

The Little Details Are Worth the Extra Time

I can remember watching an Ace of Cakes episode where Anna made a full Scrabble board for a cake and I thought it was a crazy idea given all of the tiny details.  This week’s cake adventure was all about the tiny details, because my friend Lynn from work asked me to make a cake for surprise 60th birthday party she was helping to plan for her friend.  Guess what game was the inspiration behind the cake … yup, that’s the one!  Scrabble.  Thankfully, I only had space for about a quarter of the board on this cake.

I pulled out some of the fondant tools that I really haven’t needed to use since I took the Wilton class, checked those same class materials to make sure I remembered how to make fondant roses and bought some edible food markers.  The cake underneath is a white chocolate cake that I modified a bit from a cupcake recipe, with a strawberry-lime filling. 

I made my own marshmallow fondant for the main cake covering since I really like how it drapes and I wanted it to be like a tablecloth.  For the other fondant work, I purchased Duff fondant because I wanted something that dried a little firmer.  I loved working with it to make the fondant roses.  It didn’t stick to the sponge mat when I was working with the petals, it held its shape well and it dried with a nice sheen for the  rose petals.  Did I mention it also tastes good … unlike some purchased fondant.  The chocolate fondant really does smell and taste like chocolate, though it was harder to knead when I first started working with it.

To make the cake even more fun, and to make sure the tile usage was following Scrabble rules, the game is already under way and it appears both players can expand some existing words to complete the cake’s message.  The rose colours were requested, yellow for their sorority and red for love.  There was a lot of time that went into this cake, but it made the adventure more fun for me … even if I’m feeling a little short on sleep.  A good adventure is worth a little sleep deprivation. =)

This cake was really all about the details, from making sure the tiles had the right point value on them, to making the tile holders. to painting the bonus point squares, to making the fondant covering look like a tablecloth by cutting the fondant with a ripple edge with an embossed detail, and adding luster dust to the red roses. Those are the things that really made this work. 

Happy Birthday Pat!

Baking with a purpose

I like baking for family and friends, but in the last few weeks I’ve also been enjoying baking for a larger purpose.  Around the office where I work, it’s fundraising time for the Provincial Employees Community Services Fund.  PECSF supports a large variety of charities and during the annual campaign there are fundraising events every time you turn around, from 50/50 draws, basket raffles, book sales, and the sale of lots of baked goods.
I don’t have pictures of the Breakfast Cookies I made for the Cookies for a Cause event.  They weren’t particularly pretty but they did make for yummy breakfast eating. 

The week before Halloween, our office was decorated with more ghosts and skeletons and bats and spiders and cobwebs and … well, you get the idea … oh, and a talking headless woman, and flying ghosts and … I could go on and probably not cover all the decorations.  We opened up the office for tours and had goodie bags and Halloween cookies for sale.

Did I mention, it was also a great excuse to buy some new cookie cutter.  My seasonal options were remarkably limited. My grandma’s sugar cookie recipe, royal icing and some seasonally coloured sprinkles made for some fun decorating late one night. Best part:  we raised over $170.00 dollars! 

Oh, I almost forgot, there were also lots of costumes on the Thursday.  I’m not much for dressing up but a friend did make sure I knew where I could find the perfect hat which was definitely more in character than the black cat ears I’d picked up on the cookie cutter shopping trip to Michaels.

When the call went out for cupcakes for the annual book and cupcake sale, I couldn’t resist.  I haven’t heard the fundraising total yet, but my Christmas Dreamin’ Cupcakes were among the first to sell out.

My other contribution didn’t last a lot longer on the table.  Who can resist Clearly Coconut?
One of the reasons I haven’t pursued cake decorating as a job is that mainly I enjoy investing the time making something special for people I know, but baking to help raise funds for a great cause, that’s a different thing all together.  That’s using the skills I’ve learned and the things I enjoy doing to make difference. 
In my world, that’s a hard combination to resist.

Daycare Birthday Fun

  

That was a lot of red food colouring
 to make Elmo the right colour!



A few years ago, I had a lot of fun making birthday cakes and treats for a friend's son.  That little boy is now 6 ... soon to be 7, his birthday is in November ... and he just had some minor surgery today.  It seemed a good reason to add another story to the cake adventures.

 For his second birthday, his mom asked me to make a cake that they could take to his daycare.  I don't use character cake pans very often anymore (making too many stars can make a person a little crazy), but sometimes it's the right choice.  Elmo for a bunch of daycare kids seemed practically perfect.  The cake underneath was my favourite apple spice cake. Since my friend's son is lactose intolerant, I made the icing using vanilla flavoured soy milk.

The next year, the daycare had decided that only Rice Krispie squares were allowed as cakes were apparently too much mess.  Plain Rice Krispie squares seemed like not nearly enough fun to celebrate such a cute little guy's third birthday, so I decided to get a little inventive.  Take some Rice Krispie squares, and some royal icing to act as glue.  Add some brightly coloured fondant to make tires and headlights and a little imagination. I'll let the picture speak for itself... 

I only took pictures so I'd remember how I made them,
hence the fondant mat and icing bag

Since his dad was away serving in the military that year and their only other family lives on another continent, we decided it would be fun to have a big cake to celebrate his birthday with his church family.
  

Did I mention that this was the fall after I took
the 3rd Wilton course and was having a lot of fun
with fondant?

By the time birthday number four came around, the daycare had decided that cupcakes were allowed for birthday treats.  That's the first time I made the cupcake pizza.  I delivered the pizza to their house the night before they were taking it to daycare.  His response when I opened the lid of the pizza box, three simple words:

 

I was so amazed when the local pizza shop
let me have a box for free and didn't think I was
totally crazy when I asked if I could buy one!

"I like that."

The wide eyes of wonder and a few softly spoken words from a normally taciturn child made that pizza one of my favourite decorated cakes ever.

Oh, in case you're wondering what happened to five and six, his dad was transferred to a different base and now they live in another province.  It's a little expensive for daycare treats to figure out how to send them across the country =

Sometimes baking doesn't go so smoothly

While I remember anticipating the opportunity to decorate sugar cookies at Christmas, it's actually rather surprising that cake decorating has become one of my favourite hobbies.  I learned to love baking from both my mom and grandma.  Childhood memories abound that include making dozens of cookies with my mom (she didn't believe in making single batches or even only one kind of cookie at a time!) or baking rolls and other goodies with my grandma when I was stuck at home with the chicken pox.  But, my first attempt at baking and decorating a cake on my own was less than successful.  I was maybe eight years old when I decided I was going to bake my mom's birthday cake.  It was going to be a white cake and it was going to have blue frosting because that was her favourite colour.

Cake #1 turned out rather, well, flat.  Baking powder is apparently a critical ingredient and I'd left it out.  My dad encouraged me to start again and my brother happily helped eat the evidence of the tasty but flat cake.  Cake # 2 had all the right ingredients but things didn't go smoothly with the decorating part.  I'd used my mom's butter frosting recipe, but substituted margarine instead of butter. At eight, I clearly didn't have a great understanding of how colours mixed together and my theory that adding more blue would eventually make the icing, well, more blue was flawed by the rather yellow base that I was working with thanks to the margarine.  Bright turquoise might be a better description of the end colour.  I was heartbroken as I iced the cake, because it just wasn't right.  My dad suggested we could add coconut to the outside of the cake.  A great idea when the frosting is white, and it did definitely help cover some of the blue.  Only one problem, if you imagine the cake (I don't know if pictures of that one exist), the picture you can see in your mind of a greeny-blue and fuzzy cake is probably just about right.  That's not a description that food should ever have!  My mom is a gracious woman and she ate her birthday cake without any hesitation.  Along the way, I learned some important lessons about paying attention to the recipe and that more isn't always better. 

Even now though, sometimes Murphy's Law can take over in the kitchen.  When making a birthday cake for a friend a few years ago, I wasn't sure the cake would ever be finished.  The day had started out with making fudge for a church bake sale.  In the close to 25 years I've been making that recipe, I've only messed up it up twice.  That was the second time. Strike 1.  When it was time to bake the cake, I managed to drop the flour canister on the floor.  Flour creates a rather beautiful volcano effect when it hits the floor in a hard plastic container.  Strike 2.  To top off the day of kitchen disasters, I managed to drop the Corning Ware baking dish and cake when I was turning the cake onto the cooling rack.  Glass fragments are not a good addition to a cake.  Strike 3. 



If I ever find pictures of either of the fuzzy blue cakes,
I'll be sure to add them.  For now your imaginations
will have to provide those pictures. =)

 After I bought a new cake pan (which is now one of my favourites to use), I restarted the cake baking the next day, and thankfully, with the help of Murphy staying home and having some leftover royal icing morning glories and trilliums from the Wilton class I'd recently finished, the cake was finished just in time and no further disasters happened on the way! 

Best lesson learned, even the disasters can be really funny later on.  Not that long ago, we actually decided it would be funny to recreate the crazy fuzzy blue cake for my mom's birthday ... just because we could.  It's part of our family stories, but I have to wonder if we'd still remember that specific birthday celebration if the cake had turned out perfectly. 

Piping Gel might not taste great but...

... it's a life saver when you want to add some detailed graphics to a cake.

Since there aren't any new cakes planned for at least the next couple of weeks, I thought I'd add some old ones that are favourites using the same technique that allowed me to get a reasonbly accurate map of British Columbia highways onto a cake a few weeks ago.

When I took the Level 1 Wilton class, I thought the idea of using piping gel to transfer a pattern was a little bit silly.  The pattern they suggested using it for was a very simple rainbow on a round cake, not exactly rocket science or even much of a challenge.  Of course, it's normally considered a good idea to try learning a new technique on something simple but I've never been good at that as far as crafty things are considered.  When your first project cross-stitching on linen is a large Paula Vaughan design stitched for a friend's wedding, or learning hardanger while making a christening gown for another friend, or making my first real sweater knitted in the round with a pattern around the yoke, I guess you could say I get bored easily, or that I like a challenge. 

Given all the dragon books, she'd been reading,
the book cake pan was the obvious choice. 

While I didn't actually try doing the rainbow transfer, Wilton does have a straightforward explanation of the technique that might be helpful if you haven't seen this before.  The first time I decided to use the technique was for my niece's birthday cake.  She was turning 11 and had fallen in love with dragons through a variety of dragon-related books.  After hunting far and wide for an image that could form the basis of her cake, I actually ended up using Herald, a dragon from a Teresa Wentzler cross-stitch pattern. 



Piping gel and some edible glitter
worked pretty well for his crystal ball.

The combination of the pattern being designed to allow the stitcher to pick their own colours and a dragon searching out the future seemed the perfect combination.  One of these days, I should actually send in a picture of my dragon to add to the stitcher submitted versions on the website.  I suppose I could have "cross-stitched" the dragon onto the cake, but that's a story for another day.  This blog entry is about fun with piping gel transfers.

One my other favourites experiences using this technique was a cake for the team I worked with at a call center.  For eight hours a day, our team, known as the Devil Ducks, answered calls from business customers for an American cell phone company.  Definitely not the best job in the world, but thanks to a great team lead and a good bunch people to work with, we managed to have a lot of fun.  

 

Devil Ducks still rock!



One of our team members loved to draw and he created a super hero version of our team mascot (a little red rubber duck with black horns that sometimes rode around on top of our team lead's head).  When it was time for a celebration for our team, I volunteered to make a cake and we decided our Devil Duck had to be front and center.  I don't know what I would have done without the piping gel transfer!

Some things take practice ... and patience ...

Over the years I've done several cakes where I created parts of the design using what is sometimes called floodwork, or run-outs or Color-Flow (if you're following current Wilton method).  The first ones I did were back in high school when I taught myself using the information I found in an old Wilton Yearbook that my mom had sitting on the recipe book shelf.  They were pretty simple, using patterns that came from a colouring book if I recall correctly.  I'm sure there are pictures somewhere around and if I ever find them, I'll add them in, 'cause I was pretty proud of myself.



My next attempt at using the technique was, well... let's call it less successful, though bordering on disaster might be more accurate.  For my mom's retirement party, I thought it would be great idea to create the same design that was on her nursing class grad ring to put in the centre of the cake.  It's was a good plan, but the plan was way more difficult than my experience level and I didn't now how critical it was to make sure you had more than enough time to let it dry.  Suffice it to say, it fell apart into approximately a billion pieces (okay, I'm exaggerating, but 30 or 40 is probably not far off) as I attempted to add it to the cake about 2 hours before the party was to begin.  I'll admit I didn't take well to my five year old niece's suggestion to "Just puzzle it back together Aunt Karen."  Truth is, after my sister-in-law quietly took her out of the kitchen while her Aunt had a little meltdown, that's pretty much exactly what I did. What other choice was there when you didn't make an extra one and you've got no other ideas for the cake!

My final cake from the Wilton
Level 2 Class with my bluebird run-out.



Thankfully, since then, I've taken a Wilton class or two and learned about their Color-Flow product that helps make run-outs stronger ... oh and I learned the lesson about making an extra just in case and about letting it dry extra long if in doubt. One other trick our instructor suggested was that rather than using wax paper or parchment to create the run-out, Look oven bags work really well.  You can see your pattern clearly and it peels off perfectly.


It was worth the practice and the patience in order to make a cake for the most recent departure from our office.  When we decided we wanted a CVSE enforcement vehicle on the cake, a run-out for the car and fondant for the road were obvious choices.  Kneading in a little black decorating sugar added the right texture for the asphalt pavement. 

If only I'd thought about making the lights actually flash when there was time to make it happen!

The look on my colleague's face made the Saturday night, when I spent the evening piping all the tiny details to get the SUV just right, well worth it. That's exactly why I love doing this for family and friends.  It's that look of surpise and joy that's the best payment in the world!

One thing led to another ...

Before there's another cake to make next week (our office does find lots of reasons to celebrate), it seems the next stop on the adventure is the story of one cake that became two.

A few weeks ago, we found out that the director of our branch was going to be moving to a new position in the Ministry.  He's a good guy and definitely one of the reasons that I decided I wanted to stay in this office when I started working here as an auxiliary.  When I was asked if I'd make a cake, I jumped at the opportunity.  It seemed a good way to say thanks for how much I'd appreciated his leadership and how he'd made me feel like part of the team when I was just working one day a week as the "data entry monkey". 

We came up with the idea of the cake saying "It's been a slice!"  Then I remembered a cupcake creation that I'd made for a friend's son to take to daycare ... a pizza made of cupcakes.  That's the one of the challenges sometimes with cake decorating, coming up with just the right idea to fit the person and the occasion.  When we remembered that it had only been a couple of months before that our director decided to buy us all pizza for lunch, we knew we'd found the perfect combination. 

Take chocolate cupcakes for the base, stiff buttercream frosting for the crust, a little cocoa powder to make it look baked, strawberry jam for the pizza sauce, circles of strawberry Fruit-by-the Foot for the pepperoni, and choco-graham crunches for the sausage, topped with grated white chocolate for the cheese. Put it all together ... along with a box provided by the nice guy at the pizza shop ... and you've got a pizza!

The look on the his face made the slight lack of sleep from the night before all worth it.  After the cupcakes had all been devoured and enjoyed, our director asked me if I'd be willing to make a cake for the small retirement dinner he was having for our ADM. I'll admit the idea of that was a little intimidating.  That's pushing well out of my comfort zone of family, friends and work colleagues who normally get to see my cake creations. But when he'd been so thrilled with his cake and wanted one for his boss, how could I say no?

I'm so glad Wilton cake decorating classes include the piping gel
transfer method. I would not have wanted to freehand
the province or highways!

So one cake became two.  Highways play a pretty large part in the government ministry where I work so we decided on a map of the province highlighting some of the places and projects that had been part of our ADM's career.  Making little highway signs was such a laugh.  There was a little squealing when I realized exactly how close to the original they were turning out.  My brother was the one who pointed out that highway signs often have curved corners and that was the finishing touch needed to make them just right ... okay, it's true more squealing ensued =) 

Oh, if you're looking closely, you might  notice that I included the new program that I'm working on as one of the signs.  It's come in under our ADM's leadership, and I think it's a good program ... so I decided it could make the cut.  Creative discretion and all that. 

In case you're wondering, the little piped swirly things on the sides ... purely a good way of distracting anyone from noticing that I really can't get buttercream frosting super smooth. 

And that's the story of how one cake became two.

Let the adventure begin!

Thanks Lynn for thinking it was
worth taking a picture of them!

It all started out innocently enough.  I volunteered to make cookies to celebrate one of my colleagues becoming a Canadian citizen.  It was just sugar cookies, cut out with a maple leaf cookie cutter and iced with red or white royal icing with red sprinkles or coconut to add some texture.

But then, someone discovered I like to bake and more importantly that I like to decorate ... cakes, cookies, cupcakes, whatever suited the occasion.  Next thing I knew, when we decided we needed an excuse for an office celebration, Groundhog Day was handy and I was asked if I'd be willing to make a cake. 

Oreo Cookie Crumbs make great dirt!

One thing led to another and our family favourite Apple Spice Cake (from Mom's old Purity Cookbook) was filled with lemon cream cheese filling (my creation of the moment) and sporting a homemade chocolate fudge groundhog bravely looking for his shadow.

Rave reviews from the office followed and thus began my adventures in cake decorating for CVSE.

Thankfully, February is a cool time of the year for sculpting
from homemade chocolate fudge!

I've been accumulating the pictures on my facebook page and I think I'll continue to add them there as well, but there are stories to tell with each one and that doesn't seem to be the place for those.

So here begins Karen's Cake Adventures.  It's been a summer of cakes almost one every two weeks, plus the others that have been created since February, so there's definitely some catching up to do.  New cakes will definitely take priority ... there's another one to be made next week =) ... but the older ones will find their way here as time and storytelling inspiration permits.  Who knows, I may even eventually find time and inclination to dredge up various birthdays for nieces and maybe even some real "oldies" from when I was in high school.  If you're interested, you'll just have to wait and see what appears.