Peanut Butter Cake Balls

Don't those look amazing?!

My cake ball craving has been satisfied. I made some peanut butter cake balls the other day! After consulting with my favorite picky eater (my sister Katie) to choose a flavor, we settled on peanut butter. The other contenders were strawberry limeade, chocolate/orange, pina colada, and raspberry. I still haven't ruled out those flavors, though, and I'll probably make them when I get back to school (lots of taste testers on a college campus!)

But let's get back to the peanut butter! It's a yellow cake with vanilla icing and peanut butter (and a little milk)-- super easy. I dunked them in semi-sweet chocolate, which was tempered of course. (I hate tempering chocolate. But I also hate confectionary coating, so I went with the lesser of two evils. The thing is, tempering chocolate is a Pain. In. The. Butt. I use the "Cooking for Engineers" method, but if you can think of an easier one, let me know!)

A picture of a basketball for reference. (Just in case somebody needed it.)

So next I'd like to make some kind of cute cake pops, but I haven't really settled on a design I like yet. However, I plan to flip through Bakerella's book tomorrow and get some good ideas. Right now all I can think of is basketballs (because they're round [unlike those awful easter eggs] and they're all one color [mostly]. I think I'm just being lazy, though).

Scones!

I made scones a few months ago, and they were so delicious, I'm still thinking about them. The best part? They're made with Bisquick, so the recipe is super easy. In fact, I'm thinking about making them again (my mom keeps asking me, too), but first, let me share the recipe with you!

Chocolate Chip Scones:

Ingredients:

• 2 cups Original Bisquick® mix
• 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 1/3 cup whipping (heavy) cream
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• Additional whipping (heavy) cream
• Additional sugar

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 425°F. Spray cookie sheet with cooking spray or grease with shortening. Stir Bisquick mix, chocolate chips, 1/3 cup whipping cream, 3 tablespoons sugar, the egg and vanilla in medium bowl until soft dough forms.
2. Pat into 8-inch circle on cookie sheet (if dough is sticky, dip fingers in Bisquick mix). Brush circle with additional whipping cream; sprinkle with additional sugar. Cut into 8 wedges, but do not separate.
3. Bake about 12 minutes or until golden brown; carefully separate. Serve warm.

Recipe from Betty Crocker. I also added raspberries in my scones. I don't remember exactly how much, but I think it was 1/2 cup of fresh raspberries, chopped up in kinda-sorta big chunks. I think I also added more chocolate chips than the recipe called for. I don't really remember. but I'll update you when I made this again.

They taste best warm, so feel free to microwave them for a few seconds to heat them back up if your scones are cold!

Porsche Cake

Just the logo for today's cake. Maybe I'll make a replica of Dad's car next year? We'll see!

20 years ago, for his very first Father's Day, as a gift to himself, my dad bought a Porsche. I'm not really sure why, or what that has to do with being a new dad, but he really wanted one, so he got it, and it's still sitting in our garage right this very second.

Bam! Do you see how smooth that buttercream is?

But let's get back to the exciting stuff: the cake. For Father's Day '11, I went with a chocolate cake. Surprised? Yeah, me too. I thought for sure that Dad would want a plain yellow cake, or maybe lemon, but he went for something totally different and asked for chocolate. Go figure.

So chocolate he got: chocolate cake, chocolate buttercream, chocolate chips, chocolate syrup, chocolate fondant.

The baking and the buttercream-ing of the cake was the easy part. It was when the fodant came in that I started having trouble. First of all, I used Fondarific, which is a terrific, tasty, and rather expensive fondant that we use (and sell) at work. The chocolate flavor tastes a little like tootsie rolls, so that's awesome. The problem, though, is that I'm used to using a dough sheeter to roll out the fondant, and today I had to do it by hand, with a wooden rolling pin, and a lot of elbow grease.

Smooth fondant! (mostly)

Anyway, after some sweat and tears (no literal tears, but I did feel like crying at one point when I still couldn't get the fondant thin enough and I was worried I'd have to start all over again), I got the cake covered. Is it as smooth and professional as you see on the TV shows? No. But was my Dad happy? You bet. It's all about pleasing the customer, right?

The logo was a lot of fun to make (though not necessarily easy). I printed the logo from Google Images, used it to trace onto the fondant, and did the same for the center part and the red and black stripes. I don't have an X-acto knife but I realized today that it's going to be my next decorating investment. The lovely gold sheen was achieved with lemon extract and "old gold" luster dust (usually I use vodka, but we didn't have any of that and it's Sunday, plus I doubt my parents were going to buy me vodka anyway, even if it was only to paint a cake). I free-handed the horse and the writing, which turned out quite spiffy, if I do say so myself. (I can never draw horses, but it turns out I can paint a tiny silhouette of one!)

Oh, and Adam helped me put the ribbon around the cake. If you look at the back side of it, you can see his little thumb prints. Which is why it's on the back.

It's not exactly the neatest cake in the world, but I'm hoping that everyone else doesn't notice all my flaws, so I'll try not to point them all out. I'll keep my perfectionist comments to myself!

Happy Father's Day!

Airbrushing

I'm seriously considering getting Duff's airbrush machine at Michael's. And by "seriously considering," I mean waiting until it's not on sale and I have a 50% off coupon [Because you can't use 50% off coupons for sale items, and the airbrush is 25% off this week or something. It's silly].

I know it's not a top-of-the-line airbrush, and it's certainly not the industrial sized one at work (more about that later), but I'm thinking it would be nice for an at-home, hobbyist decorator such as myself (I guess you could call me a hobbyist decorator...I'm not exactly a pro yet but certainly not a beginner). I doubt I'll use it very much, but I really would like the practice. A well done airbrushed cake looks awesome. A poorly done air brushed cake ends up on Cake Wrecks. *shudder*

And I did play around with the airbrush machine at work, which like I said, is a heavy duty machine. Unlike the little light-weight, portable device that Duff endorses, the one I used is huge and heavy and comes in multiple parts. First you have the air compressor (?), then the air hose, then this thing  (maybe I should learn the terminology?) which might give you the ability to hook up multiple airbrushes but I couldn't figure that part out, so I just used one hose at a time. Then the air brush part has a little tub for you to fill with color, and that's where the fun comes in! I hope my explanation makes sense, but if not, I totally understand if you just skipped to the end of this paragraph while scratching your head and wondering why I ramble on so much.

My first airbrushing attempt. I made flowers and butterflies and cornelli lace on the top tier. The bottom tier is supposed to be tie-dyed, I think. ;)

Ok. So for the actual airbrushing I played around with 2 dummy cakes, and it took me a while to get the pressure right and get the right amount of color, but eventually I got into the groove and was able to make thin lines or thick lines. And I tried to do a tie-dye look on one of the tiers...it looked alright. But then I found a stencil and some pearl airbrush spray stuff and stenciled on a design. This is what it looked like:

Kind of... cool, right? I know the crappy camera phone picture doesn't look too hot, but I promise the pink/purple/orange combo looked better in person. Now all I need to do is figure out how to get the stencil to stay steady on the cake, because I only have 2 hands and can only do so much. I welcome your suggestions!!! :)

So that was my first experience with an airbrush machine. What do you think? Is it worth my $65 investment? Should I get one?

Father's Days from the Past

Father's Day is coming up, so I've reached back into my photo album to pull out these cake pictures from bygone years. This lovely star-shaped cake was probably from 2007 or so, and believe it or not, I actually whipped this one out pretty quickly. I don't really remember why, but I do remember thinking "Oh, a Father's Day cake? I need to make one of those... right now?!" Is it the most elaborate Father's Day cake ever? No. But was it sweet and well-received and delicious? Yes. And it was chocolate, so that's all my dad needs in a Father's Day cake. :)

I honestly have no idea what the date is on this cake, I just know I made it a really long time ago when my dad first started playing golf. I found this cake in a magazine (as I often did in my early decorating days, before I discovered Cake Central or even Wilton), and my grandma helped me put it together. There's coconut for the rough, brown sugar for the sand traps, blue piping gel for the water hazard, weird chewy mint leaves with pretzels for the tree, and tic tacs for the golf balls. How clever is that? And to think, I wasn't even serious about cake decorating back then. Oh, I've come a long way.

Now you're just going to have to check back in a few days to see my next chocolately masterpiece. I haven't exactly made it yet. You can't exactly blame me for waiting until the last minute, see, because my dad's a procrastinator too. And since he did give me half of my DNA, it's really his fault that I have such trouble with time management. So I can totally blame it on him...right? ;)

Pretty Little Flowers

So yesterday's Wilton class was awesome. I mean, just look at this gorgeous rose that I made! Having someone help me walk through all the steps was definitely a big help (especially compared with the roses I tried making on my own) and I remembered a lot of the advice Shelley gave during one of her demos last summer.

The key to realistic looking flowers, it turns out, is super thin gumpaste...

Maybe don't look at the carnation. The example our instructor showed us was much prettier/more life like. Mine just looks like wadded up tissues...

I just need more practice!

But the calla lilly is cute!

I love these flowers because they're so unusual :)

So that's what I did last night. I also talked myself out of buying a $130 airbrush machine that Duff offers... I'll wait until I have a 50% off coupon! Has anyone else bought this particular version before? Or even used an airbrush machine? I'd like to play around with the one at work, but I currently have zero experience airbrushing cakes. Any suggestions/anecdotes are welcome! :)

Ninjabread Cookies

I made ninja cookies! These sneaky little guys have been on my to-do list since I bought the cookie cutters back in March. But this week I finally got around to making them.

I'm so excited about them, probably because I'm a nerd and I think ninjas are cool. And also cute. And delicious. In fact, I'm about to make a second batch right now. These guys have this wily habit of disappearing...

These cookies won't last very long...

But as my little brother said, "You can't be sneaky when eating ninja cookies!" Unfortunately using all the black icing gel to make the royal icing has the adverse effect of turning your teeth black too. :( But just wash the cookies down with a tall glass of milk!

You can't be sneaky when making ninja cookies, either.

Wilton's Fondant Class

I started taking the fondant/gumpaste Wilton class. This week, we made fondant bows for the tops of our cakes, and started to make flowers (which will continue in next week's class). So far, it's been quite fun. And now, I know how to really make the fondant* bows, because the one time I tried to make them before, it was quite a disaster. (It was a 50/50 gumpaste/fondant mix, not just straight up fondant)

Ironically, I watched my boss make a gumpaste bow the next day at work, but I also wasn't paying very close attention because I was also detailing a '72 Chevelle cake. ;)

Definitely liking this class better than the "beginner" course, although I'm sure I could learn all this stuff at work, too. I just wish someone could teach me how to make pregnant lady cake toppers who don't look, well, fat. I'll sign up for that class in a heartbeat. (Unless it's in Vancouver.)

(PS, I've started my list of cake contests here. Please comment/email/facebook/twitter me if you have anything to add!!)

Cake Contests

Does anyone know of any good cake decorating contests going on? I always seem to just miss the deadline on them, unfortunately. I know a few months back there was a contest for Charm City Cakes, Her Interactive, and last year there was Threadcakes (are they doing that again this year?) but I don't know if there are any current competitions out there floating around on the Internet.

So if you hear about any contests on a cake forum, or in a magazine, or on a website, please let me know! I'd like to compile a list of current cake contests (I'm talking about the "send in your photograph" kind not the "you've got 6 hours to make the cake in front of a live studio audience" kind of competition...I don't think I'm ready for that quite yet!) and keep a running list up on my blog. I'm sure we could all benefit from that! :)

So expect a post in the next few days with whatever information I've come up with, and if you know of any contents, let me know in the comments section! :)

Ribbon Roses

Something Youtube was never able to teach me: Ribbon roses

I finished my cake decorating course!

And you know what? I did learn something from it.

I learned how to make roses.

And ok, not the 'traditional' buttercream roses that you see everywhere, and the kind that I've been trying to master for 4 or 5 years. But they're still roses none-the-less. And I still made them! :)

And yes, my co-workers did tease me a lot for spending money on the class. (Thank you, Mom & Dad!!!) And yes, they can (and have) teach me so much more about decorating (and the cool thing is that I get paid to learn it and I'm having fun and I work with amazing and talented people and I'm basically just living the dream right now...) I'm just trying to diversify my portfolio of skills, and sometimes you have to take a refresher course before you can learn the advanced stuff. I have a feeling I won't be so good at the fondant/gumpaste class I'm taking next.

So, overall, I'd say the Wilton class was fun. Kind of a pain to get all the icing and tips and everything ready before class. But once I was there, it was a good way to spend 2 hours a week.

Am I crazy for voluntarily decorating cakes after spending 40 hours a week doing that as my job? Probably.

But no one said following your passion would keep you sane. ;)