More red velvet

I found a different recipe for red velvet cake on Pioneer Woman's website that I've been meaning to get around to. And since I've been putting the baking off for days now, I thought tonight would be the night (for real this time).

I thought there would be a ton more cocoa, but just one tablespoon...



But what we lacked in cocoa we made up for in red dye. TWO ounces. I only had one bottle at one ounce so queue music as we wait for another bottle to arrive...



OK, added the wet to the dry and manage to make huge red mess. It was akin to a murder scene. My hands had 'blood' spatters all over them. I'm such a klutz!



30 minutes later, 350 degree oven....



I 'broke' two as I was taking them out of the tins... yeah, that's what I did! I broke it.. :) Well, they tasted pretty good, but I want more cocoa. Good to know for next go-round, but I LOVE how red they are...



I think this would be a good cake for a skull topper. Something you could slice into and see blood. Yeah? I like it... And now to work on the baby shower cake.. Which got split into TWO baby showers and now I have multiple cakes to make. More practice I guess...

Little Lamb

Here is my first attempt at an 'animated' cake topper. Completely unlike the bow, this one actually required some sculpting and playing.
Moment of honesty- I stole the idea from someone on Vimeo. I had no idea what to do for the baby shower cakes. Actually that's not true either- I had a TON of ideas but nothing they would like or that would be work appropriate. Most people want warm and fuzzy... I was thinking along the lines of a punked out diaper w/ a huge safety pin. :)
Anyhow while I was searching for tips on how to fondant cover a square cake (after the disaster of the beer cooler cake) I came across a woman who had all these handy dandy how-to videos related to sugar sculpting/decorating. She made this sweet little lamb and I thought it would be perfect for a baby shower.

I apologize because I forgot to snap pictures during the whole process. But here is the end result:





I cant help but giggle every time I look at it. The legs look so similar to a part of the male anatomy, especially when they were sitting on their own drying. :D
OH, and I made royal icing for the first time- that's what the white fluffy stuff is.
Everything I'm afraid of trying ends up being super easy and all the things I imagine are easy end up being difficult.
Now the little lamb will dry over night and I'll assemble the cake tomorrow night for Friday delivery.
G'night!

The "Little Cheetah"

I just got some wonderful, WONDERFUl news. My college roommate just told me today that she is expecting some goodness in her life; a "little cheetah" will join her life in early September.

Check out this super active 13 week old baby:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZbRvUnwxBo

My ovaries jumped when I saw the video. In typical Sandy B. girlie fashion, I cried. It is such a beautiful thing to witness a baby move around on an ultrasound and even more so when it's your great friends baby.
It made me reflect upon the years I have known her, and our crazy times in college and all the laughs we shared. I will never forget the first time I met her, this tall leggy GORGEOUS blonde walking into my dorm room to confidently introduce herself while I thought to myself "shoot me now, I have the prettiest girl in the world as a roommate, she is gonna be a b*tch". Um, yeah... NO! I couldn't have been more wrong. She is Far FAR from it. She was and is quite possibly the sweetest, most kind hearted, FUNNY and yes, beautiful girl I have ever met in the world.

To say it simply, she is now One Hot Mama!
Congrats my friend! and welcome to the club :)

nonsense

Kym really likes her cake! :) She wasn't too excited about her birthday today but she curled her hair, so she has to be somewhat excited!! lol, I love how almost every single person gets a little gussied up on their birthday.

Worked at the bakery on Saturday and did a bunch of random things:
1) cut fruit for fruit tarts
2) arranged fruit on tarts
3) dipped strawberries in chocolate (oh the memories)
4) arranged fruit on cheesecakes
5) scooped out cookie dough (mind numbing by all accounts)
6) made the cookie crust for mini cheesecakes....
Now, THIS made me laugh. Look at my little tool to tamp down the crumbs!




In a word- Phallic. I dubbed it the "muno". :D

After work I rushed home to make some rice krispy treats for Moochie's play date. I had originally planned on some cupcakes- but whatever long story short we had electric glow in the dark green star r.k.t.'s and chocolate peanut butter squares. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of either of them, but trust me- they were glow in the dark. SO so bright they hurt your eyes. But tasted pretty darn good because they were dunzo by day end.

The play date was awesome. Four kiddies, 5 friends, some Manischewitz (!!), cheese puffs and Yo Gabba Gabba. It was shenanigans on a Saturday afternoon.

Kym's Cake 2

I found a few recipes for chocolate ganache, and in the end I just went with the easiest recipe- chocolate and heavy cream. Yeah, that easy. Well I used a dark dark chocolate and after it set up it wasn't very sweet. So I whipped it and added about TWO cups of p. sugar. Yeah... but it finally got sweet enough, turned a nice lovely milk chocolate brown and is now a perfect piping chocolate. I made a lot so I have some to play with this week... and enough to mix with peanut butter to eat out of the bowl. :)
Here is what it looked like on the beaters:



And then the blue fondant....


The stripes w/ the blue polka dots...



Her initial on top...



Final cake

Kym's Cake

It's my assistant's birthday on Monday... I knew I wanted to make her something special and all week I've been trying to ask her in a "subtle way" what she would like. I should have just out right asked her, but I wanted to surprise her. If I recall she doesn't like bananas... and yeah, I put a chocolate banana layer in there.. Oops! But she did say she likes yellow cake w/ chocolate frosting and the blue and brown color combo.... Not sure how that came up in conversation but I worked it into the cake theme. So, I made some dark chocolate ganache and got to work on the cake:



mmmmm look at that ganache! it tastes way way good... if I could whip in some peanut butter I might just sit with a bowl of it and finish watching the Oscars... I digress



4 layers because I won't be using a topper



And, I'm FINALLY getting better at frosting the cake smooth. I think it's just a confidence issue. Plus, I made the best batch of Swiss Buttercream to date tonight!



Covered in baby blue fondant



And then added the chocolate brown fondant stripes. I was pretty much just making this up as I went. Thought I'd try something new. I bought the chocolate fondant pre-made at the cake store. I didn't want to color fondant brown and I wanted to see what it tasted like.

Coming up next- the FINAL cake. lol

"Ice Cubes"

Here are the "ice cubes" and the cake close up:






I like how they ice cubes turned out- probably my favorite part of the cake. You can see the spots I got on the white fondant in these pictures. :( But, live and learn... I need to practice covering a square cake in fondant.

So, as I had anticipated, I'm not too proud of this cake. It was boring looking, I should have made more ice cubes to jazz it up and it just didn't look 'clean' or professional. It truly looked like a cake a novice made. sigh...
But I heard it tasted good!

It's Miller time!

As soon as I got home from work I had to put the cake together. Dinner party was at 6:30 and the cake was being picked up at 5:30... For some STUPID reason I forgot to ask Nanny J to take the cake out of the freezer at 4:30. So when I pulled it out, the fondant was hard as a rock. Had to force the beer bottles in... But, in they went!



Then I added the "ice cubes"!



I should have made more... or at least played with the placement before I 'glued' them down w/ water.



The ones that look 'precarious' are actually toothpick-ed in to the fondant so they wouldn't fall off in transit



These pictures don't do the 'ice cubes' justice, so I'll take some close ups... hold on...

Igloo Beer Cooler cake take THREE

Ran a couple of miles, watched a little Homeward Bound with kiddies, searched for "Sally" the car from Cars (#1 knew exactly where she was... it's almost creepy how he can pretty much GPS locate any one of his cars at any given moment. Not like he has 5 of them. He has WELL over 200 cars and he can identify and locate any of them. Total Rainman moment we had tonight), bed time tuck-ins and then more cake work.

I added some blue fondant to the white fondant, nuked it for about 15 seconds in the microwave and then made little ice cubes. Not gonna lie, stole that idea from another beer cooler cake. I set some on tooth picks to harden up and stuck them on foam to dry over night:



And here you can see I added the 'handles' to the cooler and the brand name



That's it for tonight, I"ll assemble tomorrow for delivery. Thus far, I'm not entirely impressed with this cake. I just don't like it too much- and I don't feel like it really advanced my skills much- especially because I couldn't lay the red fondant well. I'm not too proud of it... Maybe it will look better when I put it all together.

Igloo Cooler cake continues

More work on the Cooler Cake after dinner tonight. I thought I could get it wrapped in fondant between dinner and the gym in no time flat. Turns out, not so much. I guess I've never fondant covered a square cake and I didn't think it would be hard. It's a cube for goodness sake. Yeah, it was harder than I thought. The corners just sucked, the fondant kept cracking... You know what it looks like? Like elephant wrinkles. You know how they get those wrinkles around their ankles? That's what it looks like. :)
SO, I had to Crisco it up and spent a ridiculous amount of time working out the wrinkles and cracks. and made a giant mess... check it out....



Then I had to decide where the beer bottles would sit and if I should use 2, 3 or 4. I thought 3 looked best



Cut out 3 holes for the beer bottles to sit in (I used a round cookie cutter and it worked perfectly)



And covered the top and the holes with white fondant



can you see how SHINY the red looks? It's because of all the rubbing down I did to get the wrinkles out! Are coolers that shiny? yeah, didn't think so... Anyhow, I'm off to the gym, more later...