Happy (Belated) Birthday, Dad!

Whew, this post just barely made it in before it's no longer even my dad's birth MONTH. As it is, it's 3 weeks since it passed and I made this cake, but better late than never, right?

One of my favorite things about baking is being able to create something special for the people I love - my friends and family. My parents are hands-down my biggest fans, and my dad lately has been known to start telling complete strangers about how his daughter is attending the French Culinary Institute. When it came time for his birthday, I was excited to make something extra special and new just for him. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of asking him what kind of cake he'd like, to which he replied he had been hoping for red velvet. I'm sort of sick of red velvet, and I had wanted to make something just for him.


Chef Cynthia had given our class the most awesome chocolate cake recipe that our class devoured the scraps of when they were set out. I knew I wanted to use this as my base, and decided to also use chocolate ganache and fresh raspberries as filling and chocolate Swiss buttercream to cover the cake. In short, this cake was awesome. My dad really liked it too, hopefully even more than the red velvet.


I haven't really shared a recipe in a while, but you MUST make this chocolate cake. I'm not a huge chocolate fan (although my classmates who have seen me eat pounds of chocolate might disagree), and this has become one of my absolute favorite cakes. It's so moist, so delicious, and so easy to make.

Chocolate Cake Recipe

Ingredients:
2 1/4 c cake flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 c butter (1 stick), room temperature
2 1/4 c light brown sugar
3 large eggs, room temperature
3 oz unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 c sour cream
1/2 c hot brewed coffee
1/2 c hot water

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour two 8" cake pans and line the bottom with a round of parchment paper.
2. Sift together flour, baking soda, and salt.
3. Beat butter at medium speed until creamy. Gradually add brown sugar, better well until pale and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add vanilla and mix well.
4. Add eggs one at a time, beating at low speed until blended after each addition.
5. Pour hot coffee and water over chocolate. Stir until all chocolate is melted. Whisk in sour cream until smooth.
6. Alternate adding the dry ingredients (3 additions) with the wet (2 additions), starting and ending with the dry mixture.
7. Pour in prepared pans. Bake at 350 until cake tests done (Cake should start to come away from sides of the pan and a skewer inserted should come out dry).

Memorial Day Weekend

The first official day of summer isn't until next week, but to me, the start of summer is always Memorial Day Weekend. I went home to the Jersey Shore for MDW and did a lot of baking. I had a couple free days, a few barbeques, and a lot of new recipes I wanted to try out.

First on my agenda was a fondant-covered cake. I've struggled with fondant for a long time now and felt this was a good opportunity to practice being as I had a birthday party barbeque to go to. The cake was a yellow cake (not a good enough recipe to repeat, so I won't include it here) with a chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream (my new favorite type of icing). I used a new fondant sold at Michaels by Duff of Ace of Cakes fame. I LOVE how Michael's is really beefing up their cake decorating aisle. Every time I go in there, there's more and more stuff I want to buy. Anyway, this new fondant tastes a lot better than the usual brand I use, but it's so much more expensive. $20 for 2 lbs whereas I usually pay about $15 for 5 lbs.


I made the bow loops out of sugar paste on floral wire. I'm slowly getting better at working with fondant, but have a longgggg way to go still, and not enough time to practice.

The cheating/bonus tart

I also made a strawberry cream cheese tart. The dough for the tart was a shortbread, which made it very difficult to work with. The recipe makes it sound like you can just roll it out and move it to the tart ring, but as soon as you picked it up, it broke. I found it worked best by pressing it into the tart mold. Once the shell was blind baked and cooled, it was filled with a cream cheese custard. If I made this again, I'd add a little bit of gelatin to the custard to give it a bit more stability. The strawberry compote was pretty straight forward. The recipe makes way more than 1 tart's worth of custard and compote, so my mom had a pre made (store-bought) Oreo pie shell that I just threw the extra custard and compote in that. Not my preferred method, but better than wasting the extra ingredients.

Original Tart

I also made an orange glow chiffon cake. I love chiffon cakes. They sound so retro to me, but they're so moist and delicious. This one was a huge pain in the butt because it stuck in my bundt pan (lessons learned - I should have listened to my mom and sprayed the pan), but well-worth the effort being as I ate it for breakfast for the next 3 days. The recipe didn't have an icing, but I mixed up a really simple glaze with just orange juice and powdered sugar and poured it over the top of the cake. The glaze was pretty thin so you can't really see it in the picture.


I had planned on also making a key lime coconut cheesecake, but as usual, I didn't budget my time very well and being as I also wanted to sleep over that weekend, the cheesecake had to be nixed.

Mets Birthday Cake

It's been pretty hard for me to do any sort of baking outside class. When it comes to my free time, baking is low on the priority list after about 15-20 hours of class time a week. Last week, I had a friend's birthday party and knew I wanted to make a cake. I allotted myself 5 hours over 3 days to get it done. I must be getting better with sticking to a schedule because that's about all it took.

My friend Jeremy is a huge Mets fan (the type that goes down to watch them during Spring training), so I knew it had to be a Mets cake. I baked a vanilla bean cake on Wednesday and stored it in the freezer for the weekend. On Friday, I frosted the cake and started on the logo, which I made out of fondant. I ran out of powdered sugar, so I saved all the royal icing detail for Saturday.

After class Saturday, I made the royal icing and outlined the logo in white and did the lettering on the side of the cake in orange. The hardest part about making this cake was carrying it. After a week of class that had already left my arms dead, I had to carry this cake, which weighed about 20 pounds, from Hoboken to Brooklyn (albeit via subway). Jeremy was really surprised and seemed impressed though, so it was totally worth the shaky arms. I wish I had taken a better pic...the only one I remembered to snap was with my iPhone.

My 25th Birthday Party

Mini pumpkin cupcakes

On November 17, I turned the age that when I was much younger I considered to be officially "old" - twenty-five. I was not psyched to be passing this age milestone, so I decided to deal with it in my favorite way - plan a big party. With the party to look forward to, I happily started planning all of the details of the party - most notably the desserts.

Center of the top cake tier

I decided I really wanted a birthday cake - like a big birthday cake. I've been really wanting a Wall-E shaped cake, but decided it didn't really fit with the theme I was going for. The color scheme was purple - my favorite color, and I decided to go all out.

Top chocolate cake tier

From the outer space order I did, I used the remaining pumpkin spice batter to make two dozen mini cupcakes in bright purple liners. Once I topped them with cream cheese frosting, I sprinkled them with purple sugar.

Cakes chilling in the refrigerator with the party beverages

The next piece of this was the cake. I baked a 6 inch chocolate cake that I filled with chocolate frosting and chopped Reese's. I then covered it with more chocolate frosting. The 9 inch cake was vanilla bean, frosted and filled with vanilla frosting. After refrigerating both cakes, I covered them in a lavender fondant. The cakes were then refrigerated again. I stacked them using wooden dowels as support in the 9 inch cake. Then I painted the cakes with an edible sparkly paint and wrapped a darker purple ribbon around the bottoms of both cakes.

Sugar cookies set up on the table

I also made some sugar cookies cut into circles. These were iced with royal icing and covered in purple sugar. Everything came out really well and looked really nice set up. The party was as much of a success as the desserts were.

Side view of the table

These Cupcakes Were Out of This World

White chocolate spaceships

Really terrible subject line, I know, but the second order I had last week was for five dozen assorted flavors for a surprise 30th birthday party. The birthday boy is apparently a big fan of all things outerspace related, so I brainstormed with his fiance to come up with cupcakes to reflect this. She was able to find a chocolate mold online of tiny spaceships, and I used this to make white chocolate rockets.

Box of space cupcakes

The flavors of the cupcakes were red velvet, cookie dough, chocolate Oreo, vanilla, and pumpkin spice. On the pumpkin and vanilla, I piped a swirl of dark blue frosting and sprinkled some edible gold glitter and silver dragees over top before putting on the spaceships. I thought these looked pretty cool, although again I had the same issue with the edible glitter migrating all over my face when I accidentally touched it. I looked like Edward stepping into the sun (geeky Twilight reference there...).

Close up of the space cupcakes

7th Birthday Cupcakes

When I was a kid, one of my favorite people in the whole world was my cousin Laura. She and my Aunt Jeanne Marie (whose wedding cake I just did last month) always let me hang out with them, even though I was 13 years younger than them.


A few weeks ago, Laura contacted me to see if I could make cupcakes for her daughter's 7th birthday. I can't believe she has a 7 year old already!!! I feel like I was just 7, hanging out with her and my aunt.


For her birthday, she wanted chocolate cake with frosting and "girly" decorations in her favorite colors - purple, green and blue. When I went to get started on the fondant decorations, I realized that all of my flower cutters were at my parent's house. Fortunately, I had just bought a set of butterfly cutters that I had at my apartment. I cut out butterflies from the purple fondant I rolled and also hand cut 7's. To add a little extra shine, I painted them with a purple luster dust paint (luster dust mixed with lemon extract).


I dyed the vanilla buttercream green and blue and piped it into a swirl on the cupcakes. I sprinkled on some tiny silver dragees and placed the butterflies and 7's on them. Considering I had almost no tools to work with, I was really pleased with the way these turned out.

Happy Birthday, Kate!

Yesterday was one of my best friends' birthdays, and in honor of it, I made her a cake disguised as a giant margarita. After seeing this cake on Frosted Garden a couple months ago, I knew immediately that I would be making it for Kate's birthday.

Before adding the final layer of frosting

I had seen these giant margarita glasses before at Michael's (craft store) and picked one up a couple weeks ago to prepare for the cake. I had meant to bring my smallest Pyrex bowl home with me from Hoboken to Toms River, but completely forgot it. Fortunately, after rummaging through my grandmother's cabinets, I found a glass bowl that seemed to be the right size.


After deciding on funfetti cake with vanilla frosting (seemed to be an appropriate "birthday flavor"), I baked the cake for what felt like forever. I'm so used to cupcakes and their short baking time that a deep cake like this tested my patience. Especially since I couldn't wait for this to come out of the oven so I could take a nap.

No Kate, you can't drink that

After the cake baked and cooled, I made some vanilla frosting, tinted it light green, and frosted the bottom and sides of the glass. This part was the trickiest because I had to make sure that you didn't see any spatula lines through the glass. I cut the rounded-bottom cake in half, placed the bottom half in the glass, filled in a layer of frosting on top of it, and then topped it off with the other cake half and another layer of frosting to complete the cake. I added a hot pink straw and a slice of lime to complete the look.

Happy Birthday, Eric!

Last week it was my brother Eric's 23rd birthday. If you read the comments on this blog, he's the one always talking about the calorie content of cupcakes or making fun of our little sister, Melissa, for eating too many. See, Melissa and I are normal, cupcake-loving people, but Eric's strange and doesn't eat really anything that's bad for you. His ideal cupcake would probably be a mix of chicken, tuna, and protein powder.

Workspace around 1:00 am

Having decided that was not going to be my ingredient list, I went for a banana cupcake with peanut butter frosting. And I used no butter. Which is no small feat for me being as I use that stuff by the pounds. I also reduced the sugar in the cake. This was just about the "healthiest" cupcake I've baked yet. I also made a dozen regular vanilla for the people who wouldn't prefer the protein cupcakes.

Finished cupcakes

I really don't like bananas, but the banana cupcake wasn't bad at all. It definitely had more of a muffin texture, but that's probably due to the absence of butter. The combo of peanut butter and banana was good; each flavor held its own nicely.

Close-up of the suits cupcakes

Because Eric was having his birthday celebration down in Atlantic City, I went with a poker theme for the cupcakes. I covered the peanut butter banana cupcakes in rolled green fondant to look like a poker table and topped them with edible fondant poker chips I hand made and painted with gold luster dust. The vanilla cupcakes were covered in white fondant and topped with a card suit cut out of red and black fondant. I actually bought those fondant cutters about two months ago in preparation for these cupcakes. I also found tiny suit sprinkles at NY Cake and used those on the white cupcakes as well.

Poker chip cupcakes

All of this baking and decorating went down around midnight last Thursday. By the time I finished, I was exhausted and covered in corn starch (you roll the fondant on it).

About to sing Happy Birthday

Fortunately, when Eric and his friends returned from Atlantic City, most of them had won. It would not have been good to have a cupcake reminder of the big losses suffered at the poker tables.

Cupcakes for Birthdays

These liners even say they're for parties on the packaging

I just got done with the poker-themed cupcakes I made for my brother's birthday this weekend. I'll post those later, but for now I have pictures of cupcakes I made for a birthday party last weekend. I hate showing up to any kind of occasion with empty hands, and this party was for a birthday, so I definitely needed to bake cupcakes.

Purple cookie dough

I've had these fun cupcake liners from Reynold's that I picked up in the grocery store near me a while ago. They're good to use in my parents' oven because they're not greaseproof, so they don't slip away from the cupcake, but are still more fun than basic white. There was some purple ones, and I baked cookie dough cupcakes in them and dyed the chocolate chip frosting light purple to match the liner. I also baked a dozen margarita cupcakes into the pink & green argyle wrappers.

Margarita cupcake - Matches the liner!

These cupcakes were a pretty big hit at the party. I'm excited to see if Reynold's or any other supermarket brand puts out more decorative liners in the future.

Box of cupcakes, ready to go to the party

Happy Birthday Jackie!

Today was one of my favorite coworkers' birthdays, and I knew I wanted to make her cupcakes for it. After unsuccessfully trying to stealthily figure out her favorite flavor, I decided to go with just plain vanilla cupcakes. For some reason, when I think birthday cake (or cupcakes), vanilla immediately pops to mind. Probably because it's my favorite flavor. I feel like birthday cupcakes need sprinkles too.

Standard cupcakes on my desk shot

Having no sprinkles in my apartment (yes, I know, it's shocking), I decided to decorate with some of the new tiny silver dragees I bought a while back. Dragees are balls of sugar covered with a metallic coating. There was some confusion with me for a while whether these were safe to eat because on the bottle I first bought it said "For decoration purposes only." After some intense research (aka Wikipedia), I discovered that while the FDA does not consider these edible, they are perfectly safe for you to eat. I have tested this personally myself. Apparently they used to be made with mercury finishing, which is not safe to eat, but they no longer contain mercury. Despite this, they are still banned in California.

The piping tip I used kind of made them look like roses

Have I mentioned my apartment kitchen does not have air conditioning? Halfway through this baking process, I was dying and sure that the frosting was just going to melt clear off the cupcake.

Jackie with the cupcakes!

I then made it to work today with my dozen pink birthday cupcakes with edible silver sprinkles despite also juggling my backpack (yay - my weekend starts today!) and purse and attempting to feed money into the bus machine. I would have sworn I was going to drop the cupcakes upon getting on the bus.

Jackie looked pretty surprised when I handed these over this morning. Hopefully it was a look of good surprise, not a look of "wow, pink is my LEAST favorite color" surprise.

60th Birthday Golf Cupcakes

In addition to the baby shower this weekend, I was also asked to make three dozen cupcakes for a golf lover's 60th birthday party. Half were vanilla, half were chocolate. I started out by making white chocolate golf balls using a chocolate mold I found.

Close-up

I baked the 18 vanilla and 18 chocolate cupcakes (well, I first baked 24 vanilla cupcakes and threw a dozen of them out, but I'll save that for a separate post). Once they cooled, I mixed the vanilla icing and tinted it green so it would eventually look like grass. Using Wilton tip 233 (it has multiple openings that create the grass effect), I piped the icing onto the cake. Then I set the golf ball onto the center of the cupcake.

Boxed up and ready to go!

After finishing the cupcakes, I decided they needed something more. After thinking about it for a little while, I decided to make tiny golf flags (clearly not in proportion to the giant golf ball!) that spelled out "Happy Birthday Gary". My handwriting even looked surprisingly nice.