The Dummy Cake

For my entrepreneurship class, I'm doing a presentation of my business plan next week (and my business plan is obviously a bakery). I decided to make a fake cake for part of my presentation, and I've been working on that for the past week.

It's a 6 tier square cake covered in marshmallow fondant with royal icing decorations...

And let me tell you, this has been the most painful cake I've ever made.

I don't know if it's because I've had to roll out all that fondant by hand (in addition to actually making the fondant; there's a lot of kneading involved) or because I piped 6 tiers worth of decorations in one sitting, but my muscles are so sore! (I guess it could be because I'm trying to go the gym everyday too...)

Anyway, I'll keep you updated with my progress, but I decided to wait a few days so the muscles in my right arm have time to heal and stop cramping up on me. It seriously felt like I got a Charlie horse in my forearm. Yuck.

But, no pain, no gain. And this cake is going to be totally gorgeous and worth all the trouble :)

Marching Band Cookies & Cake

One of the band directors at my sister's school is leaving, and I was volunteered to make the going-away cake. It's a yellow cake with Italian buttercream frosting (seriously one of the best things ever), decorated with rosebuds (which I learned in my Wilton class!) swags and shells. There's also some cornelli lace going on, which makes the cake a little more interesting

It's not the Chris Brown you're thinking of...

And I also made 108 cookies for all of the band members, which took a lot of work, but they look nice. I designed them after the band's uniforms. Thankfully it was only 3 colors and I got them all done in one night.

Sometimes, I think I work too hard.

Cupcakes for Life

Cupcakes for Life is a once-a year-program (on October 9th) to promote awareness for pro-life issues, most specifically abortion. The website asks, "What's worse than being in 3rd grade and not having anyone celebrate your birthday? Not being allowed to be born!"

So the basic premise is that everyone bakes cupcakes, and gives them away for free, in honor and memory of the millions of children who will never be born. I made them with the Imago Dei club on campus and we put pro-life messages on the little cuppies like "YAY BABIES" and "Life is precious."

On Friday during lunch, we gave away 110 cupcakes, along with some flyers, to bring awareness on campus.

And guess what? It was a huge success! And even though 110 cupcake seems like a lot (4 box mixes, 4 cans of icing, a whole dozen eggs...), they were given out very quickly. So next year we gotta kick it up a notch!

Anyway, it was a lot of fun and it was a great cause. I'm so proud that I was able to help bring this nationwide program to my little corner of the world. Yay babies!

Aloha Summer!

 Yesterday marked the last day of school for my brothers and sisters, and of course, I had to make cupcakes to celebrate.

Originally I was just going to bake some cupcakes in cute party wrappers with icing and sprinkles... but then I thought, why make regular cupcakes when I can make AWESOME CUPCAKES.

So awesome cupcakes it was. I had a sea shell Wilton candy mold and attempted to make marbled chocolate sea shells. I also wanted to do cute little sea critters (like crabs or something) out of fondant, but I didn't have any time.

The sand is brown sugar. It was a little coarse, and hence didn't completely cover the frosting layer (which one little kindergarten exclaimed "it's so creamy!" so I guess he approved), but with a small addition of granulated sugar, the texture evened up a bit.

I found the parasols at Publix which was quite lucky... if it was any other time of the year, I'm sure they wouldn't be in stock. All the kids loved them, and they definitely added that extra bit of color I was looking for.

After the various class parties, I had teachers and students alike telling me how much they loved the cupcakes! Suh-weet! James told me one of his classmates wants me to make his wedding cake in 20 years (!!!!) and then Adam asked me if I would make his and Truth's (his girlfriend) wedding cake... for free. I said, "Yes, as a gift," to which he said, "So you'll make it for free??" Isn't that what a gift is?

Even after a frustrating time of job hunting on Wednesday, these kids and their big smiles and happy tummies just reinforced why I'm doing this whole baking thing in the first place. And I'm still on the job market, if anyone in the southside metro Atlanta area is hiring! ;)

More Christmas Goodies

I am well behind on my blogging, as I am quite aware.  I made these treats a whole year ago!

The cake was for my brother's class party; I made it the same week that I made the cookies, blueberry muffins, and the mentioned-later-on cupcakes. It was a busy week for me, to say the least, especially considering it was my first week on holiday.

Unfortunately, I waited until the night before to decorate or even come up with a design plan, so this is the best I could come up with on the spot. It's not bad, though.

Oh, and I LOVE the super red icing gel that I bought a few months back- making red icing is way easier now. :D

And with the leftover red and green icing, I made these cute little cupcakes, originally for another class party, but my brother didn't know I made them for him, and since I slept in that morning, we just had a miscommunication. However, I did give them to the office staff at Woodland Elementary, and I'm told they were delicious. :-)

I'm not so good at the 2-color swirl deal, but hopefully that will change with more practice. Some of the cupcakes really popped with the color and I like that effect a lot.

Also, I should probably make these goodies more photogenic-- you can totally see the mess I made in the background. Not very professional with sprinkles and cooing racks in the background. Just something else to improve on in the future!

The Graduation Cake

So, I finally made my graduation cake.  It is, thus far, the biggest cake that I have ever made, and I really liked it.  Well, I wasn't entirely happy with it, though.  I definitely procrastinated and I feel that shows with the piping work and in all the little details.  Everyone said they loved it, but I was much more critical.

I suppose that if I had actually made the little gumpaste pieces 2 to 3 days in advance, as per directed, instead of 12 hours before (or less), then this cake would've been a lot better.

For example, I wouldn't have rushed around putting the bottom boarder on (I am ashamed of how sloppy it is) and the calculator would actually have calculator buttons on it, like a "+" or "=" or even "0" and the gavel would've looked like a real gavel (and I even had one to model from!).  And I probably would've made a few more little pieces to better display the 13 years I spent in public school, instead of just 4 (calculator, gavel, book, medal).

But I am a procrastinator and I think it shows in my work.  So before my parents go rushing off to send my portfolio to Duff Goldman or Colette Peters (I'm seriously nowhere near that good; my parents are crazy), I'm going to need to learn better time management.  And not wait until the last minute to plan the cake; this fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants cake design thing is just too stressful and seriously cuts into my sleeping time.

The cake was overall a success, though, even if the first red velvet cake I made fell apart (cake balls!) and I basically covered the entire kitchen in red dye.  (My hands are still pink, to be honest.)

The recipes I used:

• Colette Peter's White Cake (I did not taste this cake, but I'm told it was tasty) and
  
• Grandmother Paula's (Deen) Southern Red Velvet Cake (which was super dense; I wonder if self-rising flour would be better than cake flour? But I'm scared to change the recipe...)  This was an amazingly delicious recipe, and everyone (myself included) thought it was awesome.
  
• My buttercream recipe-- the BIG batch.  I filled up a 2-quart tupperwear pitcher of icing! :-)  I still have some left over which is currently sitting in the freezer awaiting further use, of course.

I also made cupcakes with my previous school colors. :-)

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Golf Cake: Gone to the Dogs

I am crazy.

My father says that I have the "entrepreneurial spirit" but I think I just have a touch of insanity.

Allow me to explain.

My Spanish teacher (mi maestra de la clase de espanol) asked me if I wanted to make a cake for her husband's birthday (and she got a taste of my cakes, if you don't recall, at the Spanish Honor Society induction), and I said yes.

That was about a week ago, and I put it out of my mind because some extraneous things came up that I focused my time on.  Well, Wednesday night, I realized that I had a cake that needed to be baked.

Wednesday was a long day, if you didn't know.  Wednesdays are often referred to as "hump day" because its in the middle of the week, and I generally like Wednesdays.  It's all down hill from there.  But Wednesdays are also busy because my sister and I go to church, and we eat pizza, pray, and play volleyball with our fellow Catholic teens. :) It's a lot of fun.  But I'm getting off subject, we're talking about cake here not pizza...

OK. So. Wednesday.  I get home from church around 8:30 and I start to (finally) make this cake.  I got out all of the ingredients-- the big seven pound bag of powdered sugar, the four pounds of butter, the commeical sized bottle of vanilla extract... yes, we went to Costco last week.  And I proceeded to bake a cake, mix up a batch of buttercream, and make my own gumpaste (with some gum-tex and really sticky glucose).

And then our oven dies.  So two 9" cake layers, which normally take about 20 minutes to bake at 350 degrees, took almost an hour (if I'm exaggerating, it's really only a little bit), because the oven kept shutting off.  Sometimes the -F2- or -F3- alarm would sound, and sometimes it would just quietly shut off and I wouldn't even notice.  Argh.

Needless to say, I was quite annoyed at our oven (which you may have noticed if you ever check out my Tweets), but it gets worse.  Because when the cake finally came out of the oven, I got burned.  That's right: the oven gave me a second-degree burn.  It's not the first time, and I doubt it will be the last.  What's different is that this time, it was on my finger, when normal it's my forearm that gets scorched.  I currently have at least four noticable burn scars on my right arm from baking.

Thursday was not much better, as far as being busy goes.  I had a fieldtrip that day (to see Don Quijote and eat some tacos), and I was supposed to have a golf game, but it rained.  So I made a cake instead, or rather, I decorated it.

The little doggie, a Jack Russell Terrier, is all made from gumpaste. Which, by the way, I think is a lot of fun to play with, if not a little sticky.  (And now I really want this gumpaste tool set so I can have even more fun!)  The cake really didn't take that long to decorate, but I'm slow and lazy, so it took all afternoon and evening.  (And I had to take a break to eat Chinese food, too, of course!)  I did go to bed earlier last night than I did on Wednesday.

Finally, today, I delievered the cake.  And you would think, well that's that.  But no, I still had a busy day today:  a test in anatomy, a quiz in Spanish, a make-up test in English... and tonight I went to see my best friend in the play A Midsummer's Night Dream, which was amazing.

But this week is Spring Break (YAY!) so the plan is to sleep as much as possible so I can start all over again with my hectic life in 9 days. ;-)  I told you I'm crazy.

Felicidades!

 

This is the fastest rush job I've ever done.  From start to finish, the cake only took an hour.  OK, so it wasn't from the very beginning, but after I baked and iced the cake, creating the "blank canvas," the clock was on.

I had to get home from school, mix up some icing, decorate the cake, and take it back to school for the Sociedad Honoria Hispanica induction ceremony-- in an hour and a half!  I was going to decorate the night before but I was really tired, so I decided that I would have enough time Thursday afternoon.  It turns out that I did have enough time, but barely.

The red took the longest to mix up, of course, but I was pretty happy with the shade I got.  The roses, I think, turned out supurbly.  I'm definitely getting better at them. :-)  They didn't have enough time to freeze, unfortunately, so when I put them on the cake, I had to be really careful that I didn't smush them because they were so soft.  Thankfully, I didn't!

Oh, and the message says, translated, "Congratulations to the new members!"  It's not exactly centered; I could have put the message lower on the cake, but it still looks fine, I think.  The only probably I really had was that after I put the roses on, I realized the first exclamation point was covered up, so I repiped it.

In conclusion, I was able to decorate the cake, change clothes, and get back to school in time so that I wasn't late to the ceremony.  Afterwards, I had the pleasure of serving the cake (which might have been a disaster because I forgot to bring a serving knife, but someone had a plastic knife, so that was nice) and everyone told me that it looked (and tasted) really nice.  Which I was very happy about, because I'm always afraid that when I make a cake for someone I know, it will be a disaster.  Thankfully, it wasn't.  Also, one lady who ate the cake told me that I did a wonderful job on it, which was quite a compliment, because she used to be a caterer and she knows her cakes!

Despite the crazy afternoon, the induction ceremony, cake included, was definitely a success.  And all that craziness definitely keeps life from being boring!

Happy Valentine's Day

I don't really have too much to say about these cookies. Pictures say a thousand words, after all.

I made these cookies for a school bakesale, and made enough extras to give some to my BFF for her birthday, and to put some out at the hospitality table for today's winterguard competition.

Once again, I owe a lot to the fantastic helpful hints in Cookie Craft. I used their sugar cookie recipe, and all their tips about flooding and decorating. The feathered cookies came from an idea in that book too. I wish I could share all I know about cookie decorating with you, but it would definitely be more helpful for you if you get your hands on that awesome book! :)

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

Ta-Da! Cupcakes!

I actually made these cupcakes for Halloween.  Our school was hosting a blood drive (get it? Blood? On Halloween?  Anyway...) and we also had a bake sale.  So I made two dozen cupcakes.  I also made a dozen cupcakes for my Spanish class's Dia de los Muertos fiesta.  They were so yummy :-)

Here they are! (And despite- or because of- their simplicity, I do think they look darling.)

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

 And right now I've got some brownies in the oven, and I think I should follow my nose to that deliciously chocolately smell...

Play My Music

 

If you can't tell, the cake is supposed to be a guitar.  Actually, it's supposed to be an acoustic guitar but the pick guard looked weird so I took it off, and according to the directions, it's just a guitar without the pick guard.

This cake was destined for greatness from the beginning.  Don't believe me?  Just look at the picture!  I took it out of the pan, and it didn't fall apart!  That's always a good sign.  (Thanks, Ruthie, for showing me how to flatten the bottom of the cake!) I used the cake mix extended recipe with a Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix.  However, I didn't use all the batter, so I make a little 8" cake with the leftovers and stuck it in the freezer.  More cake balls, perhaps?

I made a batch of regular white buttercream and half a batch of chocolate buttercream.  I crumb coated the entire cake:  white at the top; chocolate at the bottom.  Then I carefully did a second coat along the sides of the cake and smoothed them out nicely.  The entire top of the cake is made out of marshmallow fondant.  To get the different shades of brown, I used MMF with chocolate MMF and a bit of yellow food coloring.  I also used CMMF and black colored CMMF.

Actually, I lied.  The entire top is not exclusively made of fondant.  The guitar strings (#5 tip) and "Congratulations" (#2 tip) were buttercream. 

Why does the cake say "Congratulations" anyway?  Well, because I am congratulation my little brother's 4th grade teacher because he is getting married next week!  I was asked to make a cake because the class was throwing a little surprise party today during lunch.  I was told by a very good source that everyone loved the cake and said it was delicious and awesome, etc.  So I'm glad that everyone liked it, because, critical cake decorator that I am, I couldn't help but notice the little imperfections with my piping.

So that's my guitar cake.  I'm not done yet, though.  Today is my other brother's 5th birthday and I'm making him a cake this weekend.  He can't decide if he wants a Yoda cake, Lego Starwars cake, Rintoo cake, or an orange electric guitar cake.  He needs to decide pretty soon though.

Oh, and by the way, Cakes by Kelsie now has a Facebook Page!  So please join, if only because I have seven nine friends. ;-)

GO Dawgs! =]

The bulldog cake is done! I am so proud :) Mom says this is my best cake yet, as far as the detail goes. I'm not sure I agree; I made a cake once with a fondant leprechaun and a candy rainbow that was a lot of work. However, this is my most detailed FBCT.
Can you tell that the dog is faced the opposite direction of the picture I used to trace it? I will never forget to make a reversed image to trace, though!

The icing (red and black) was bought pre-colored. I could've made my own red icing (I bought 2 more tubes of it) and black, but that was a lot of work, and I'm lazy. I mean, it *is* the first day of summer.

The tube I used for the border was #16 star tip, and I made little shell alternating with the red and black. The alternating was made easier by the fact that I have 2 star tips (yay!). The FBCT was made with a #1 tip (of which I only have 1) with a #5 or 7 (I can't remember, but I think it was the 7) for the white icing backing. By the way, the white buttercream is homemade.

Can you tell that the dog is a different 'shade' of white than the rest of the cake? I added a little ity bity dot of black icing to make it a little more gray.

2 hours until deliver. This is my last post for today. :) Actually, it'll be my last post until Friday; I'm going on vacation! =]

The letters were piped with #3 (red) and #1 (black) tip. Originally, I was just going to do the red, but it looks good with the black. I realized today why whenever I wrote on cake previous to this one, the handwriting was messy. Well, my icing was thin enough. I had thinned the buttercream for the FBCT and used that same icing for the lettering. Because it was thinner, it came out of the piping bag easier, and my handwriting actually looked nice!! Dad wanted to know whose daughter I was; my handwriting is far more superior than his for us to be related. ;-)

Always Have A Plan B

I made this cake as practice for the birthday cake that I'm delivering this weekend. And by practice I mean practice using the new pan I bought and exercising my creativity to make a cake however I wanted to.

So, don't expect the picture of the cake to look anything like a Georgia Bulldog :)

The 9" x13" cake pan that I bought on Saturday ($5 with coupon!) turned out nicely, although the cake did break, so Dad suggests that I use parchment paper next time. Other than that, the pan didn't warp or do anything crazy like that.

I made some icing (a double batch with 4 pounds of icing! Good thing Mom went to Costco!!), but ran out of Almond Extract!! And if you've ever had buttercream with just vanilla extract, then you wouldn't eat buttercream again. At least, I wouldn't.

So, I pulled out my other extracts: mint, brandy, strawberry, and orange. Of the four, orange was my favorite, so I put a tad bit of orange extract in the icing. The icing is still pretty sweet, but the orange adds a nice aftertaste that I think (I hope!) will taste good with the chocolate cake.

Now to the decorating part. I iced the cake in white, then added a 2nd layer of icing. I think I waited too long after I put on the 2nd layer before smoothing the icing with a Viva paper towel. However, when I did the Cornelli lace, you really can't tell.

Speaking of Cornelli lace (inspired by this cake), it's pretty painful. And by painful I mean I got a hand cramp from squeezing so much icing out of a little tiny #2 tip. I had lots of breaks during that part of the decorating. I think I may have made the lace too tight in some places, but I'll do better next time.

When I did the centerpiece of the cake, i wanted roses. But the icing was too soft. So I tried drop flowers. And promptly decided that I wanted roses. What is a decorator to do? Use fondant!!

That's right, I got out the MMF and colored some pieces and actually made roses! And they turned out waaaaay better than I thought I could make. All free-handed, too! :) What I did was make little cone shapes, then I flattened out the bottoms. I flatted out a long (in comparison) piece of fondant and wrapped it around the cone to form a little peak. I took little pieces of fondant, flattened them into oval shapes, and pressed them against the cone to make petals: 3 petals in the first row, then 5, then 7. A few of the roses only have 1 or 2, not 3 roses, and the little bud only has the little peak, and then some leaves.

Okay, now that I've described the cake, I think it's still to end the suspense and reveal the "practice" cake that I made today:

Hola de Puerto Rico

The Puerto Rico project is complete, and my little brother turns it in today. I hope everything goes well with the delivery!

James was such a blast to make this cake with! I am usually a "fly by the seat of my pants" kind of cake baker/decorator. Even if I have an idea about the cake, it's almost always a vague one that I end up changing in the end. Usually I just have a theme, and I set out to create a cake in this theme, adding elements as I go along and as my brain comes up with them.

James, on the other hand, is very methodical. From the order in which to put the cake ingredients before baking, to planning out the order of events for construction, he was the man with the plan. (You know you're disorganized when a third grader is a better planer than you are!)

Not that there's anything wrong with having a plan of action and being organized and everything. That's just not normally how I roll. So it was a challenge for me to not get all crazy on him because of his planning. This was his cake after all. I was just there for moral support. (and to teach and show him what to do when he didn't know.)

He pretty much did the whole thing by himself. I did the piping (the forests) and the sand and the construction of the cake (with the big slotted, er, serrated knife). He make the Rice Krispie mountains and little islands, and did the crumb coat. Oh, and he told me where to put the "trees" and everything. The palm trees, which are gumpaste, are made by Kelsie, strategically placed on the cake by James. :)

It was a lot of fun.

So I'm glad that we were able to come together, despite our complete opposite-ness, and make a cool cake. I helped, but mostly he made it.

And he did great. :-D

Cookie Pack!

Let me tell you: the cookies were amazing!

Alright, so maybe I'm a little biased, but I really did think that they turned out well.

Someone asked in my last blog post how I made the wolfpack logo on the cookies. Well, it wasn't easy. First, I had to make red icing.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Making red icing is sooooo difficult. Almost as difficult as making black icing. I shudder to think of it...

Alright back to the cookies. For the wolfpack logo, I printed off the image from the school's website, shrunk the picture down to 66% of the original size (so it would fit on the cookie) and cut out 50 60 pieces of wax and parchment paper.

Don't use parchment paper. When I trace the images on the parchment paper, it was all good. And once the images dried, they came off very easily. Too easily. The paper did not dry flat, so the royal icing image (oh, yeah, by the way, I used royal icing) was uneven on the cookie. I fixed that by putting extra RI under the image so that it looked more even.

The wax paper imaged turned out great. Too bad we ran out of wax paper, though! Speaking of running out of things, we also ran out of powdered sugar. Another AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! moment. Thankfully, my grandpa had a pound that I could use, and that was all I needed.

Let me specifically explain how I made the wolfpack images, since I got offtrack. I taped down the computer copy on the table, then got out my piping bag (disposable), put in my coupler and #1 tip, filled the bag up with thick RI and piped all of the outlines (all 60 of 'em). Then they dried, and I used thin RI (add some more water) and the #2 tip, and filled all of the imaged. Then I let them dry again.

I peeled off the RI wolves from the paper, put more RI on the backs of them and CAREFULLY put them on the cookies (I had a couple of broken noses that I had to "glue" back together).

I bagged 'em up, put ribbons on them, and I was done!! Three days of hard work completed. It's very satisfying, if you didn't know, to see that everyone appreciates your work as much as you do, and to feel like you did a good job on something. The counselors at the middle school liked the cookies (they even showed them to the principal! And took my picture!) and thanked me for helping out on career day. I, in returned, told them that they were very welcome, and I was happy to make these cute little cookies.

Yay cookies!

Happy Birthday, Ms. Reese!

So I finally finished those cupcakes on Wednesday night. Chocolate chip cupcakes with purple fluffy buttercream icing. My inspiration was an iris (purple and yellow), but I was told that these are her favorite flowers. I wish I could've made some out of gumpaste, or fondant, but I don't have any instruction books for that type of flower.

Despite that, I think that the colors turned out really nice. It's hard to tell in my picture, but the yellow sprinkles make the icing sparkle goldenly.

I delivered the cupcakes yesterday morning, and they were given to Ms. Reese later that afternoon for her surprise party. From the accounts that I heard, it was a really nice party and a happy birthday for Ms. Reese! I'm honored that I was asked to be included on this special day! :)

Eireann go Brach

This is the cake I spend Saturday (and a bit of Sunday) making. I am quite pleased with the result! I need to work on the icing consistency, as I would sometimes have icing that was too thin, or too thick, which isn't good for piping. I unfortunately had a bit of cracking on the icing but I covered that up with some shamrocks. Also, the cake slanted slightly.

Despite these flaws, I really think that this is one of the most beautiful cakes I've made. I just love daffodils! (Wouldn't it be cool if I could make these?) Last year I made an awesome St. Patrick's Day-type cake for Katie's birthday. I don't have any digital pictures of it, but it was better than this one, I think. (A fondant leprechaun and a candy rainbow adorned that cake.)

I am just so glad that this cake turned out as well as I had hoped. Especially since all I knew going into it was that I wanted daffodils, and the base icing was going to be light green. I just came up with everything as I went along.

The transport to school went well, and I safely carried the cake to its recipient. I think she liked it. ;) One of the assistance principals at school also commented on it. How awesome?! That really buoyed my spirits before math class! :)

No cakes for a while after this one. Just kidding! I still have Katie's cake and some cupcakes for this week, so stay tuned, and happy St. Patrick's Day to everyone!