The Last of the Bad photos

My husband got me a new camera for Hanukkah! So this is the last of the pics that had to be taken with a phone.

My husband usually works from home, but is going in to the office for the Christmas party. I asked if I could bake a cake to send in for his co-workers, mainly because I wanted to show off, but I have also been a bit bored and wanted to try ganaching a full cake before having to do it for my mother-in-law for Christmas.

So I got started by deciding that I wanted to use the seasonal Andes Peppermints to make the ganache, that the cake would be chocolate and it would have a vanilla buttercream crumb coat. After reading up on the internet and finding at least 15 different suggestions on ganache coatings, I decided to head to the local grocer to ask their bakery for opinions. I was told to freeze the cake, use heavy whipping cream, butter for shine and some light corn syrup to cut down on crystallisation. The only thing she was really adamant about was to not let the ganache boil.

I added the mints first, 3 boxes worth per application, coated with about 1/4 cup of heavy whipping cream. I probably added a few more splashes, but I was mostly eye-balling it. After everything started to melt together, I added about 1 tbsp each of butter and corn syrup. It didn't take too long, maybe 5-10 minutes over medium-low heat. Once melted, I had to let it cool since it was over 105 degrees. I couldn't pour it until it was no longer hot to the touch or it would have melted my buttercream crumb coat.

I cut a cake board to the size of the cake to allow dripping, and placed it on a wide can over a cooling rack that was over a cookie shhet lined with wax paper. I started in the middle, poured about half and then spot poured where it wasn't going to cover the side. It came out amazingly smooth.

After the first pour, I could still see cake lines, so I decided to do a second coat after the first was solid. I put it in the freezer to firm up. Freezing is better than refrigerating because a defrosted cake will retain more moisture, the fridge will make your cake more dry.

After the second coating, I put it back in the freezer and started to think about decorating. I couldn't send in a plain, bright red cake. After thinking all night, I decided to put 3 strings of lights on it, with lights in the Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa colors. I didn't want to miss anyone! I began with regular decorator's icing and made my strings and lights, however one thing I didn't anticipate was how fast the frosting would solidify.

I ended up dabbing food coloring on the lights since I really couldn't do anything else with it to get them colored. Not exactly as I had pictured, but it wasn't entirely awful either. I also used some gold dust, which again, not as I imagined, but not terrible.

Anyway, in my opinion, the taste is more important, and if the leftover drippings are anything to go by, that ganache is awesome. I'll update with management reviews once I get them.

Bad pics of Good cakes, part 2

After my Halloween successes, I started getting asked (or promised) to do birthday cakes. The first one was for my best friend, Faith, who is a bit of a flower-child type. I had promised her earlier in the year that I would figure out how to make her a tye-dye cake. Which I did. No good photos were taken of the inside, curse restaurant lighting, but it was layered red, yellow and blue and had multi-colored sprinkles inside that melted during cooking, giving neat little star bursts inside. The outside decorations took the form of sunflowers. It didn't take me too long to figure out how to make them, but they turned out fantastically. I hid a very badly drawn ferret in the grass near the bottom as well.

Next of the agenda was my mother's birthday. She enjoys Native American decor and philosophy, so I made her a cake themed on that. The bear, and the kokopelli were all hand drawn and came out better than I had hoped for. There were a couple other symbols around the cake as well, but the kokopelli were the best recognised. She was very happy with it. In addition, the cake was chocolate and I made a ganache filling made of Andes mints that made the cake taste like a Girl Scout cookie. The top frosting was made with cocoa powder and mint extract as well. It was amazingly delish.

Bad pics of Good cakes, part 1

I have always enjoyed making and trying to decorate cakes. However it is only recently that I started to take it seriously. The cake that got me thinking was a cake my best friend asked me to make for her father's birthday. And yes, it was a humorous birthday, not a funeral, or post-mortem. The skull and crossbones at the tiop is a clay piece that my friend made for it.

So I went off in search of a Wilton class. While there, I picked up the basics, which in my opinion, is all you really need to make a nice looking cake ... well, imagination is pretty essential as well. However I really have no desire to make the huge and insane flower baskets, and most of the rest of the 'advanced' stuff can be done using skills from other baking projects. If you have ever covered a pie with a crust, you can roll fondant and cover a cake with it. I can make other sorts of decorations with Candy Clay, which you can do if you have ever played with Play-Doh. The final cake of the class was done around Halloween, and I submitted the following train wreck. And it was a wreck on purpose, it was Halloween! I couldn't make some flowery happy cake on Halloween! Yes, the clown rolled over the mime with a lawnmower ... the rose was on there only because it was required to show we could do it.

I also made a cake, just for the heck of it, for my husbands weekly geek gathering of Dungeons and Dragons. I had the idea all in my head, and it came out surprisingly close. I made brownie pop ghosts and pumpkins first, they are dipped in melted candy. It was my first time trying to do dips, so while they came out rough, I wasn't overly disappointed. The skull and headstone were sugar cookies with royal icing, and the rest was just regular icing with different tips. The boys really loved it, and with the exception of the popsicle stick on the left, everything was edible. The bones and spider legs were just candy coated pretzel sticks.

First Entry

Hi, my name is Lisa Smith, and this will be my online diary about my cake decorating. I am not a professional, and I don't make multiple cakes a week. However I really do enjoy baking (yes, from a box), and I really enjoy decorating. I took the first Wilton course to learn a few techniques to help me out, and from there I just like to improvise.

I like baking from a box instead of scratch because scratch cakes never seem to come out as moist. However my main excuse is that if I am about to spend a number of hours on a cake, I'd have a lot more fun focussing on the decorating than on the baking.

For a while, I tried using the Wilton 'class buttercream', but in my opinion, it really tasted awful and didn't have a very good texture either. I think it was all the shortening, but what do I know? However, I will use their huge tubs of premade buttercream. It is soft and spreads great, and is nice and tasty to boot.

So there you have it. I'll be posting pictures soon of cakes I have done in the past couple months, most are final products as I wasn't thinking blog at the time. While I do welcome feedback, I do want to point out again that I am not a professional, and ridiculing my cakes show more about who you are than my ability.

Thank you for reading!