White Chocolate Grand Marnier Cake

First made for Chris' birthday, 29-Jan-2011, inspiration provided by Hunter1

For the story behind this cake adventure, check out It's all about flavour ... Yum!

White Chocolate Cake

Beat until fluffy
	1 pkg (8 oz) cream cheese
	1 c sugar
Beat in
	2 eggs
	1 tsp vanilla
Stir until blended
	1 1/2 c all-purpose flour
	2 tsp baking powder
	1/2 c grated white chocolate

Bake at 350 F for approximately 45 minutes.  The top should be lightly golden and pick inserted in the centre should come out clean.  The bake time is approximate.  For the cake pictured in the "It's all about flavour" post, we made a double batch, filled 6 cupcakes and baked the rest of the batter in a 9 x 3 inch round pan.

Orange Mango Grand Marnier Filling

Combine in a saucepan
	2 1/2 c mandarin orange segments (3 small tins, packed in juice, drain and reserve juice)
	1/2 c frozen mango, medium diced
	3/4 c sugar
	3 tbsp cornstarch
	2 tbsp reserved juice
	1 tbsp Grand Marnier

Bring to a boil; boil for 2 minutes, stirring constantly.  Mixture will thicken.  Set aside to cool.

Grand Marnier Buttercream

Cream
	1/2 c shortening
	1/2 c margarine
	1 tsp pure vanilla extract
Gradually add	4 c icing sugar
	2 tbsp milk
	1 tbsp Grand Marnier

Beat until fluffy.

To assemble cake:

Once cooled, slice cake in half and scoop out a thin layer from the centre of the top and bottom of the cake to allow extra filling without it spilling out.  For the cupcakes, I cut in to them like I was coring a tomato and then scooped out a bit of the bottom of the cupcake to give space for filling.

Add filling and replace the cake top.

Ice the cake with the Grand Marnier Buttercream.  If you want to ensure a clean circle of filling on top of the cake, you should probably pipe an outside ring.  I didn’t and there was a small issue with the filling running down the side of the frosting.

Distribute a thin layer of the filling in the centre of the frosted cake.  Sprinkle more grated white chocolate around the outside edge.  For the cupcakes, we sprinkled grated white chocolate on the icing and then added a tiny dollop of the filling to tie things all together.

It’s all about the flavour … Yum!

Surprise birthday parties can be a lot of fun and this cake adventures included a great one.  Not only did we manage to pull off a perfect surprise without giving anything away, but my friend and I managed to come up with an amazing flavour combination for the birthday cake.

The idea started out knowing two things about the type of cake the birthday guy liked, white cake and jelly filling.  My friend who was throwing the party suggested we could make something with an orange, Grand Marnier filling.  I immediately thought of the White Chocolate cake recipe that has become one of my favourites and we were pretty sure we had a winning idea.

The end result was our White Chocolate Grand Marnier Cake.  We made our own orange filling with mandarin oranges, a little frozen mango and about a tablespoon of Grand Marnier.  We also substituted one tablespoon of Grand Marnier for some of the milk in the butter cream frosting.  With some of the filling spread on top of the icing and grated white chocolate around the edge, we had a lovely outside to go with the fabulous flavours inside.

Since our story to have time for baking was that we were trying out cupcake recipes that I might use for their wedding next spring, we made matching cupcakes.  I pretended I was coring a tomato and then scooped out a bit of the cupcake so there was extra space for the orange filling.  There were more of them but I forgot to take a picture until after we eaten the first round. =)

Because we had some extra time,  I  tried out a new recipe for Cookies ‘n’ Cream Cupcakes that I couldn’t resist.  The recipe was easy as could be and really just added some crushed Oreo cookies to a vanilla cupcake and the buttercream. While they might not be quite as pretty, the taste and texture was just right and they have a great chance of making the final cut for wedding cupcakes.

If you want to try it for yourself, you can find my recipe for the White Chocolate Grand Marnier Cake here.  It was yummy enough to deserve it’s own post for the recipe =)

Lions, tigers, and bears, oh my!

As might be obvious from my recent cake adventures, there has been a lot of staff changes in the office where I work.  This month is no exception.  There are two more staff leaving at the end of the month.  With the cakes so far, I’ve managed to come up with something personalized for each one, but these two people are so different.  Their jobs in our office are really different, the jobs they’re going to are really different, and their personalities are also really different.  It was easy to come up with ideas for one of them, but I was completely stuck for the other.  I really didn’t want the cake to feel like the one was an afterthought so I went with something completely unrelated to either one.

Our office can be a bit of a zoo at times.  The workflow is always busy and the office is full of people with big personalities who like to have a lot of fun while they work hard.  It’s a good place to work but it can be a little crazy at times.  I got inspired by Wilton’s Silly Critters baking cups and decided to go with a zoo idea.  The thing was I didn’t want animals that large.  I thought about making fondant animals to stand on the cake, but decided I really only wanted animal faces. 

The challenge was how to make animal faces that I liked.  I looked online to find some generic cartoon animals that I could use as a pattern, but didn’t find any that seemed to be the right fit.  My options were getting limited and the time was passing on, so I decided to try drawing my own. My pencil drawing skills are really best for stick figures, so I made the animal face equivalent to give me at least the right shape to work with.

Some piping and a little painting with food colouring for some extra details and I had royal icing animal faces ready to go.  That sort of thing really should have more time to dry, so I left them overnight with a fan blowing on them, with my fingers crossed that they’d be dry enough to put on the cake in the morning without falling apart.  I couldn’t resist taking a picture of them still on their wax paper, just in case they didn’t make it.

Some careful use of an offset spatula while peeling the wax paper and the animals made it safely to the background of leaves and vines that I’d piped the night before.

Drawing with a pencil may not be my thing, but drawing with icing, that’s a lot more fun in my books! 

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!