Showing posts with label welcome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label welcome. Show all posts

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Welcome!

Well hello there my fellow humans! I am truly sorry that i have not posted in a while. Well this post is about the two welcomes i have made since last posting. 1. I welcomed, along with the rest of my family, Miss Julie from a land far far away, to our home and i welcomed her with a new recipe i had learned, which can be found on the recipe page. 2. Using the same new recipe I welcomed, to my city, nearly two months later, my new pastor.
For both cakes i uses a whipped ganache filling, which is basically a chocolate whipped cream, and very delicious. It makes it all nice and moist and delectable. I used a box mix cake and put the whipped ganache in between the layers and had multiple people tell me, "This cake is really good! And I don't even like cake!" It's a crowd pleaser, that's for sure! Time to talk about the individual cakes:
Well the first one, the one I made for Julie, it was chocolate through and through. Chocolate cake, chocolate whipped ganache, chocolate buttercream icing (all made available on the recipe page.)
 (Chocolate cake with chocolate whipped ganache filling.)
So this cake was rather simple. I baked, I put the filling in the middle, I iced it, then decorated it in a very simple manner. When putting the ganache in the middle, I had the problem with the weight of the cake squeezing the ganache out. I will go into detail on how i fixed this problem in just a minute. So for Julie's cake I did a simple shell border around the bottom in pink icing and then wrote Julie's name in more pink icing (pink was her favorite color.) After that the cake still looked a little plain so i took out of my freezer, some modeling chocolate roses i has used on my birthday cake. Since they don't taste very good anyway, its a good idea to freeze your modeling chocolate creations for re-use, however my recipe was no good so i will not post it. Using some of the leftover icing i glued the roses to the cake and voila! I had a quick and simple cake that was gorgeous and delicious!
(Julie's welcome cake. Quick,simple, and delicious!)

So now for my new Pastor's cake. Pastor Angela had been preaching at our church for several weeks before i was able to give her the cake due to the fact that i was out of town on a mission trip. This cake, as far as the baking went, was very similar to the previous one. It was a box mix cake and it had a whipped ganache filling and buttercream icing. You have all heard of how i said the cake weight was pushing the ganache out, well with this one i solved it. After making the ganache and was ready to use it, i put it in the fridge until it was firmer, then quickly filled the cake. You can put the filling in either by piping it or by spreading it with a spoon or icing knife, i use and icing knife. After filling it i put it back in the fridge to firm up, after that i pulled it back out and iced it and then put it into the fridge once more. This repeated cooling system keeps everything from loosing its shape and pushing out. After I was done with the repeated refrigerating, i pulled it out one more time to decorate. Unsure of her favorite color i chose more feminine colors, pink and yellow.
(Pastor Angela's cake from top.)
Unsure how to decorate it, I started out basic. I Put columns down the side every few inches, then repeated the shell border at the bottom in yellow. Around the top I put also in yellow i put dots around the top edge. Feeling it was too much yellow, I put tiny pink dots on top of the yellow ones and around the shell base. Noticing it was still incomplete, I tried a technique i learned from watching "Cake Boss." I piped the icing out of a small round tip and let gravity pull it down until i came to the point where it looked some what like drapes. To cover the ugly spots where the drapes came together I put little pink flower. And then of course i piped "Welcome Pastor Angela" on top, and enunciated it by putting yellow lines around it, evening the colors once more.
(Pastor Angela's cake from the side-ish.)

Saturday, June 18, 2011

First

This is my first post. I've never blogged before so please excuse me for any amateurishness that appears on here. Well I have to catch you guys up on a year. A year and a month ago I began my baking career. The most i had ever baked was chocolate chip cookies. I had been watching an anime called "Yumeiro Patissiere" Yumeiro meaning dream-colored. It really inspired me and i learned a lot, surprisingly, from the show. Anyway, it was the end of the school year and my teacher, who had been out on maternity leave, was coming back for the last week of school. I decided i would make her a "Welcome Back" cake. I couldn't decide whether to do chocolate or yellow cake though, so finally i settled on both. I started the cakes on the Sunday that would signal the last week of school. I was in the kitchen for 9 hours of non-stop baking and decorating. Add on top of that, it was 90 degrees outside, our air conditioning was off and all doors and windows open plus i had the oven going. i was so worn out when i finally went to bed. Now the cakes didn't turn out very good. The candy flowers melted in the heat, the recipe i used made the cakes really dense, but for my first try they were really good. For the one cake i did a simple, but beautiful, basket weave on the side that is really quite simple. For the second I did lines to look like ribbons coming up to the top of the cake with candy roses on top. The second cake was terrible.

How to Make a Basket Weave:
          All you have to do is pipe lines vertically on the cake with a good amount of space in between them. Then you just pipe lines horizontally over the vertical lines to the crease between the two bordering lines and you continue to do this in an alternating pattern to create the illusion that the icing was woven.


cake 1cake 2
Basket Weave