The Biggest Fattest Cake I've ever made

I made a cake for the LIFE Houston luncheon.

Red velvet.
Raspberry Filling.
Whipped chocolate ganache with raspberry liqueur.
White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting.

No big snags on this one. Just learned not to listen to Wilton and just bake at 350 and not 325 - even for a 12 x 18 cake. Also, used EIGHT boxes of cream cheese for the frosting!! I love that frosting but it is temperamental for decorating - it's either too cold or too warm to do anything really detailed with it, but at least it tastes good!!!

OTherwise, I'd say this cake experience was a success ; ) Woohoo!!

Chocolate Cake heaven

I just have to post this recipe because it is so awesome and easy....
Raelene's Flourless Chocolate Espresso Cake

1/2 pound unsalted butter
4 ounces freshly brewed espresso coffee
2/3 cup light brown sugar
6 ounces semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, coarsely chopped
4 large eggs, at room temperature
1/2 pint fresh raspberries, for garnish

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and line bottom of 1 loaf or 9-inch round pan with parchment paper.

Place the butter, espresso, and sugar in a medium saucepan over medium heat and bring to a low boil. Stir in until sugar is dissolved. Add the chocolates and whisk until smooth. Set aside to cool.

Separate 2 of the eggs. Place two whole eggs and 2 egg yolks in a bowl and whisk together. Whisk the egg yolk mixture into the cooled chocolate.

Place 2 egg whites in a small mixing bowl and whisk until medium peaks forms. lace about one third of the egg whites in the chocolate mixture and gently mix. Fold in the remaining egg whites, making sure there are no large lumps.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and place in a 9 x 13 inch pan. Pour enough cold water in the pan so that it comes up halfway. Smooth out the top.

Transfer to the oven and bake until the top starts to crack and the center is no longer liquid, about 30-40 minutes. Remove the pan from the water bath and let cool. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Cut around the sides to loosen cake. Turn into plate and serve at room temperature.

Taken from Todd English's The Figs Table.

Twilight Cake

So, I wanted to make a cake that wouldn't be like your traditional Twilight cake...Most of them took the themes that were on the front of the books and played up on them. I decided to take one of my favorite scenes and recreate it.

In the last book, they go on their honeymoon and the morning after their first night there, they wake up surrounded by feathers. This cake is a tribute to that moment. The cake is red velvet filled with white chocolate cream cheese frosting and fondant on the outside.

My learnings for this cake:
-Never put fondant in the fridge. It has a tendency to sweat and makes everything slippery

-I LOVE the white chocolate cream cheese frosting recipe from Levibaum's book, but it doesn't pipe very well in the heat (http://www.recipezaar.com/White-Chocolate-Cream-Cheese-Frosting-18360)

-As always, less is more. I started out with a ton of red dots circling the bottom and top of the cake and, since I had to remove the sides due to the fondant and frosting oozing downward on me over night, I redid the frosting with red flowers here and there and it was much better.

- You can make a checkerboard pattern and then use it on the side of the cake without backing. I didn't have enough fondant to make a backing, but it didn't end up mattering. I just used my trusting silicone mat and a piece of a flexible plastic cutting board to lay it onto the side.

-You cannot make royal icing with a Magic Bullet. It does nearly everything else, but I don't think it incorporates enough air...I still wonder if my immersion blender might work. The reason I struggle is I never need too much royal icing, but my stand mixer is a 6 cup mixer and a little big for such a small job.

- Floral wire is AWESOME!! I twisted two strands together to make each part of the canopy and then I coated them with fondant and it worked perfectly.

-I love Paula Deen's Red Velvet cake recipe, but I need to be careful with my shortcut for buttermilk. It calls for buttermilk and I usually just use the shortcut of making it by using milk and vinegar from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. Well, I put the milk in the microwave to get it to room temp and then added the vinegar and the milk curdled the milk almsot too much so I had globa in the buttermilk. I don't know if I would need to make the buttermilk first and then nuke it or maybe I just used too much vinegar. Maybe it's time to start measuring on this one. Or just let the milk cook back down a tad. Either way, you could see the milk curdles in the texture of the cake - yuck.

Overall, it was a blast to make this cake ; )

Nick's Construction Cake

This cake for a friend's baby's brithday at the Houston Children's Museum. She had a construction theme and was planning to have about 50 people there.

I decided to to use 2 - 12 inch rounds for the bottom layer and then 2 - 6 inch rounds for the top so that we could remove it and nick could have his own smash cake. I made the cake using Ina Garten's recipe (http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/birthday-cake-with-hot-pink-butter-icing-recipe/index.html). I've found it to be similar to a pound cake with sour cream, so it is very stable and very moist. I put apricot filling between the layers and them used a chocolate buttercream recipe from Rose's book (http://www.starchefs.com/chefs/RBeranbaum/html/neoclassic_r_beranbaum.shtml). OVerall, the cake tasted great ; )

Learnings:

- Using Central Market Organics Apricot Jam makes for a great filling. I just put it between the layers directly and it adds great flavor without being ridiculously sweet. I realize it is a huge shortcut, but it's tasty and super stable - no slipping layers!!

- For some unknown reason, this was the first time I realized that I could just separate out some buttercream ahead of time, to color it, BEFORE adding the chocolate...yeah, I know - common sense. I also doubled the original recipe and it still worked like a dream - phew

- It was my husband's idea to carve the cake so that the ramp came in the from the side and didn't go straight up the cake. It allowed us to have an intact 6 inch cake as a smash cake and also add a great visual effect. We used the remnants of the cake - from trimming the cakes so they'd be flat and from cutting into the bottom layer, to create the ramps to the top. We just used more apricot jam as the glue and it worked out perfectly.

- I used royal icing on Wasa crackers to make the signs. I made them ahead of time and probably should have made them closer to the date so that they wouldn't dry out so much - the black looked a little gray

- We separated Oroes and food processed the cookie parts to make the dirt...yummy, huh?

The beautiful thing about this cake was that it was great not having to use fondant and it was OK if it looked a little messy ; )

- I used a 6 inch round of plastic cake board to separate the top tier from the bottom. In order to stabilize it, I used plastic straws. They worked perfectly well and were MUCH easier than wooden dowels!!

The Boost - My Self-Confidence- Birthday Cake

After the Baby Shower cake fiasco, I decided it was time to prove to myself that I could make a cake that could stand on its own. In order to do so, I decided to make a nice little 9 inch, 6 inch, 3 inch tier cake. Each tier had only one layer, but I sliced each layer in half in order to fill it with Apricot-Fig filling. I used a chocolate-espresso buttercream to frost the whole thing. When I was done, I felt much better about my own ability to make a cake.

-It is never a good idea to tlak on teh phone while baking. This recipe take butter and I put too much in on accident. Urgh!! From now on, I think I will only take out as much butter as needed to bring to room temperature, instead of measuring sticks after they've warmed up. That's just better food handling practices anyway

-The yellow cake recipe I used was Ina Garten's (see construction cake blog). It takes sour cream and it's easy to forget that it, too must be at room temperature!!!

- If you are going to color your frosting, think about it before you start flavoring it with chocolate!!!

-I used dry espresso to make the frosting and it was super tasty - maybe a tad strong but it definitely got the point across

-I used my Magic Bullet to blend the remainders of fig and apricot jam from my fridge with Amaretto to come up with the filling

-After baking the cakes, I put them in the microwave overnight. It worked out well - especially since our microwave actually has a middle rack in it so I was able to put a lot of cake in there.

-I didn't need anything to separate the cakes (cardboard) since this cake was rather low...