Chocolate Delight for Leanne!!!

This special cake was for my cousin Leanne's birthday!  I was inspired to do this cake from a picture I saw in a magazine.  The first step in making this cake was to make the chocolate squares that surround the outside of the cake, which can get a little tricky.  I melted milk chocolate and white chocolate in a double broiler until it was completely melted and smooth.  Then I spread it onto a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper.  I spread it just thin enough that it would still be able to cut once solid.  So then I set the chocolate in the fridge to harden.  Once hardened I then cut the squares with a knife.  But the trick is to dip your knife in hot water before cutting to help the chocolate from breaking.

Then the rest of the cake was three layers of chocolate cake with chocolate chips in it.  I used a fudge pudding filling for one layer, and then a hazelnut buttercream for the next layer of filling.  Then I topped it with alternating hazelnut and vanilla buttercream. YUMMY!!

Lemon Fresh

This is a brand new recipe....Lemon Cupcakes! If you are a fan of lemon, then you will love these cupcakes.  They are sweet, but also have a slight lemonly tart flavour to them. To create the lemon flavour in the cake and the icing, I use grated lemon zest.  I also used a small amount of yellow food colouring to tint the icing a soft yellow.  Then to perfect them I used yellow sprinkles and little pearl white sugar candies.  You could also use little candy lemon wedges to decorate them, which would go along with the lemon theme.  I just got a little lazy and settled for sprinkles and sugar candies.  If you wanted to spice things up and add more flavour besides just lemon, I thought you could add blueberries.  You would then have a lemon blueberry cake, with a lemon icing!

My very first wedding cake....thanks Michelle and Raymond!

Well here it is.....my very first wedding cake!  Now let me tell y'all, making a wedding cake takes a long time......and A LOT of fondant!  No lie,  I actually got a work out rolling out all that fondant. Just a nice helpful hint that I learnt the hard way.....don't use shortening to grease your counter before rolling out fondant, please use sifted icing sugar, and continue to apply more sugar after a couple rolls to make sure it doesn't stick to the counter.  The little white daises you see on the corners of the cake and down below are such an easy and elegant way to accent a wedding cake, especially using white on white.  Once each flower is made I put them on flower formers to dry over night and this way they don't lay flat on the cake, but curl up and form a more real life flower structure.  They are time consuming but definitely worth the added touch.  I simply used white pearl dust to make them have a shiny and glittering affect.  Then I used fresh gerber daises and ribbon to complete the cake!

Thanks Michelle and Raymond so much to allowing to me to make your wedding cake, because I know it was my first and there was no guarantee....lol!

More Cupcakes.......

 Well this was my first time using chocolate ganache, and it is very easy to do with cupcakes, but not so easy to cover a cake in ganache.  To make ganache all you need is dark chocolate and heavy/whipped cream.  Once you have prepared the ganache and have let it cool, then all you do is take the cupcake and dip it in the ganache and then let the excess drip off and once it has stopped dripping then place on the counter to set.  The flowers I added to both cupcakes are made out of white and dark modeling chocolate!  You could also use fondant, but modeling chocolate tastes much better than fondant!

Sunflower Cupcakes

For these cute cupcakes all you need are a few simply ingredients.  You need OREOS for the center of the sunflowers, and then I bought GREEN WINE GUMS  and sliced them very thin to use as the leaves. You could also use fruit leather as well.  And then for the petals, you simple get a ziploc bag and cut the corner like a top of a triangle.  Fill the bag with you icing and when you pipe it out of the bag, it will give you a perfect pedal look!  I used chocolate cupcakes, with a new Peanut Butter frosting which was to die for!!!  But make sure to use a icing that had a good consistency because if you icing is too soft the pedals will not hold its shape on the oreo

What's better than Jewelry and Cake put together????

Well this cake was inspire by a friend.  My friend's Mom was having a surprise 50th birthday, and her husband was actually getting her something from Tiffany's, so they wanted a cake that looked like a Tiffany's Box.
This was my first time using fondant, but the only part of the cake that is fondant is the white ribbon and bow, and also the jewelry on the cake board.  The rest of the cake is just covered and smooth with a buttercream icing, and I used a turquoise gel food colouring to tint the icing.  Turquoise is a very bold color, so you don't need much to colour the icing.
To make a fondant bow it is actually quite easy.  You cut out four strips, two a little big bigger if you want the bow to be bigger than the ribbons( which I did) and a smaller strip for the middle of the bow.  To attach the bow together you can use water or clear vanilla extract.  Make sure to attach the bow together and let it dry before placing on the cake.  There are also many videos on youtube on how to make a fondant bow, which are very helpful!  Gotta love youtube!!!!

Mastering the BASKETWEAVE!!!!

The basketweave definitely looks harder than it actually is!  It is just quite time consuming and if your icing is too stiff (which mine was) your hand gets very sore! But ANYONE can learn how to do the basketweave!
 So this cake I made for my second cake class, and it is chocolate cake with chocolate chips.  It is three layers with chocolate fudge pudding in between the layers, and a buttercream icing which I colored yellow with gel food coloring.  Helpful hint: try to always use GEL food colouring because the gel food colouring will not change your consistency of the icing. For all the flowers I used royal icing.  Royal icing is simply made out if icing sugar, water, and meringue powder.  This type of icing dries very hard and is perfect for making flowers that hold their shape and look great, and they are also edible.