Cupcakes, Just Because

Recently, a friend from work asked me to make a cake for her grandson's 3rd birthday.  Little Dakota's favorite flavor is carrot cake, it's not a flavor I have regularly, nor is it one I know a whole lot about.  I couldn't honestly tell you what a good carrot cake tastes like, so it's time to experiment!


Most of my recipes, tips and ideas come from cakecentral.com.  It is a wonderful site with cake decorators who have just made their first cake to those who are published in magazines and are on tv.  And to make things even better, it is a totally free site!


So, my first carrot cake recipe, I made for the family.  It had ok flavor (again, who am I to judge) but it also had quite a bit of texture.  While I am far from a picky eater, I don't like that many chunks in my cakes.  The second recipe tasted much better (to me) and I pulled out the dreaded food processor to make all the bits smaller.  It turned out quite scrumptious, and topped with home made cream cheese icing.  The recipe I went with was from Subee on Cakecentral.com, but with a few tweaks

• 3 cups of shredded carrots
  4 eggs
  1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
  1/2 cup brown sugar (light or dark)
  3/4 cup orange juice
  1 cup sour cream
  1 cup vegtable oil
  1 tsp. vanilla
  3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  1 tsp. cinnomon
  1/2 tsp. nutmeg
  2 tsp. baking soda
  1 tsp. baking powder
  3/4 cup coconut
  3/4 cup chopped walnuts
  1/2 cup crushed drained pineapple, plus 1/4 cup pineapple juice

Instructions

Preheat oven at 325 degrees.

Add wet ingredients mix well, add dry ingredients mix well.
Use food processor to finely chop walnuts, then add carrots, pineapple, and coconut and pulse until mixture becomes a soft mash.
Add mash to wet and dry ingredients and mix gently.
Pour into prepared pans and bake until knife comes out of center of cake clean.

Although I decided this recipe was scrumptious enough to call mine, we just couldn't eat any more cake (who would have thought any one could get tired of cake).  But if I was going to pawn them off on someone, it just didn't feel right unless I made them pretty.

The picture doesn't quite do it justice, but they were pretty, and gathering there were no left overs at the family I took them to.

A New Twist on an Old Cake

After Anabel's horse cake and everything I learned with it, I suddenly gained some confidence in my cakes.  My next cake was for one of my Husband's co-workers, (well actually it was his boss) so it had to look good.  My husband takes most of the extras and rejects in to work to share with his buddies, and even the ugly ones are still scrumptious, so it was just a matter of time before someone asked for a specific cake.


This one was for Kameron who was turning 2 and was another Disney Cars fan - it seems I'll get my money's worth out of that Wilton pan after all.  This time I wanted to do something a little different and chose to cover the cake in fondant.  I found pictures of 3 or 4 other cakes that I liked and made my own version of the combination.  Here's what I came up with:

This is also a 2 layer cake, white with vanilla butter cream.  From what I hear, the birthday boy loved it.  I think I'm going to have to start delivering my cakes so I can see the faces of the recipient.  

Since this is my learning blog, I learned that it's ok to think out of the box and that I see way more of the imperfections than the others.  If someone doesn't regularly make cakes themselves chances are, they don't notice most of the imperfections.

Eventually as my confidence builds, I will start sharing what I learned with you.  I am 100% self taught.  I'm too cheap to take classes, so I spend a great deal of time researching how-to's.  Eventually my goal is to get everything in to one place for other beginners out there.

A Cake of Firsts

With each cake I finish, I wind up with a new request.  After my kid's party, my niece asked if I would make her a horse cake for her 7th birthday.  Hers was the first of many things for me.  First tiered cake, first cake fully covered in fondant, first attempt with gum paste and first figure on a cake.


We used the same flavors as with Gracie and Brian's cakes and home made marshmallow fondant to cover the cake.  Even as a newbie I can see plenty of errors in Anabel's horse cake, but I had a lot of fun making it and learned quite a bit.  I now understand why many people who use fondant have some sort of decoration on it as well - to hide imperfections!

I love the little horse on this cake, I found a video on Youtube with step by step instructions on how to make him.  Much better than the first one I made, LOL!

Finally,Cake for my own Kids

For those of you who know me, my attention span is VERY short. After doing two cakes out of butter cream, I decided to move on to bigger and better things even though my icing technique was far from perfect.  Break out the fondant (btw either pronunciation is correct - FON-dent or fon-DANT)!


My adorable 3 year old wanted Disney's Toy Story for his party, but he doesn't have a favorite character. After searching for days for a style that I wanted to try, I settled on this:

Buzz on the front

Woody on the back

Brian's cake was chocolate with peanut butter filling, SCRUMPTIOUS!!!  I iced his cake and added fondant decorations (can you tell I forgot to smooth the icing first?).  Most importantly, I learned that fondant  does not dry hard as you can see Buzz's wing falling apart after just a few minutes from the back of the cake (I will tell you all about Gum paste later).

We decided to combine my daughter and son's birthday parties for the first time, and a 6 year little girl wants nothing to do with Toy Story, for her, it was all about mermaids.  Gracie always picks some random idea for her birthdays and they are usually very difficult to find and decorate for.  She would have nothing to do with Ariel, she wanted a regular mermaid.  Here's what I came up with:

The little circles are meant to resemble the scales of a mermaid's tail.  Lesson learned for this one - don't try two brand new cakes at the same time, you (and by you, I mean I) will become bored and rush through to get the cake done.  My lack of attention span got the better of me.  I rushed out to get a mermaid Barbie to finish off the cake, fortunately Gracie thought that was the greatest thing ever.  Her cake was white cake with strawberry cream cheese filling, also SCRUMPTIOUS!

Butter Cream and Piping

So, the pretty little stars and flowers on cakes aren't as easy as they look.  Not for me anyway.  My second cake was for another nephew who likes Disney's Cars.

The car on top is a Wilton pan with detailed instructions to decorate.  I don't remember what the flavor of the cake was, but the icing was homemade vanilla butter cream.  I learned lots of things with this cake:

• Color the icing the night before, most colors will deepen over time
• Too much color changes the texture of the butter cream
• When the icing gets too warm it doesn't hold shape of any kind.  It IS ok to put it in the fridge for a bit to set back up.
• Just because the pan you baked the cake in is straight, doesn't mean the edges will be perfectly straight.  When piping edges, eyeball a straight line, don't follow the edge of the cake.

How It All Started

Until I had kids, making cakes never crossed my mind.  It wasn't until I started planning birthday parties that I really started paying attention to the cake.  It is, after all, one of the main attractions for a kids party, and my obsessive compulsive attitude toward a few certain things, meant that the cake had to match the party theme.


The first few parties went well, I found a chain store that would make a cupcake cake the way I had pictured.  Then suddenly, they stopped; the cakes started looking bad and only got worse.  I made a few attempts at making cakes my way, and while they were cute, they definitely looked home made and tasted like a box mix.  So, back to the chain stores I went.  After a soccer ball cake gone bad, and frantically searching the entire city for an iCarly cake that couldn't have taken more than 5 minutes from start to finish, I vowed never to buy a cake again.


I found a great starter kit from Wilton and started scouring the web for how-tos.  My sister was gracious enough to let my first real attempt at a cake be for my nephew's 8th birthday.

Aiden's cake was chocolate cake with homemade chocolate butter cream.  The character is a Lego Obi Wan done with a frozen butter cream transfer.  If you know Legos or Star Wars you may recognize what I attempted.  I learned a lot with this cake and while it didn't look as perfect as I had envisioned, it was definitely SCRUMPTIOUS!