30 Days and 30 Bites – Day 3

For a mathematician, my symmetrical shaping ability has a long way to go!!! 

Boy, what a learning experience tonight!  I learned I have two options: 1) I may have to hire an artist to make the pretty pictures on my cakes, etc. or 2) I should look more closely at an actual picture before I try to recreate things! 

 Today’s labor of love was sugar cookies that were supposed to look like soccer balls.  Usually, I find a good picture to copy when I am piping cakes with buttercream icing.  To ice my soccer balls though, I decided I knew how a soccer ball should look and I should be capable of making one myself.  Eeeerrrrnnnnngh.  Wrong.

I do NOT know how to draw a soccer ball.  Well, I didn’t.  I do now!  After icing all 14 of my cookies I sat down to write my entry this evening and thought I would look to see what went wrong.  For those of you who ALSO don’t know: a soccer ball is made using a series of black pentagons and white hexagons all connected together.  I created all of the shapes as pentagons!!!  I could not, for the life of me, figure out why I was having such issues making all of the pentagons the right size.  It’s because they weren’t all suppose to be pentagons!!!  Grrrr.  Not only that, but the icing was a MESS!  A black, staining, gooey mess.

I used glacé icing.  I wanted the cookies to be nice and classy and shiny looking.  The recipe for this is very simple and the same every where you look.  I first covered the entire cookie with the basic white icing by placing a small spoonful in the middle of the cookie and spreading it around to the edges.  This part was super easy and even fun!  Then, of course, the trouble came! 

I made my first mistake when I tried to immediately pipe the black glacé on to make the details of my (uneven!) balls.  Yes, I went there.  The first layer of icing definitely needed some time to set before piping on another layer.  The colors totally ran together since this icing is so liquidy!  So, I put them in the fridge and it didn’t take too long before I was able to do the next layer.  Of course, mistake number two came in when I piped the soccer balls as a collection of all pentagons!  Mistake number three: yes, I actually made one of my soccer balls inverted.  I don’t even know how to describe what the big ball of black looked like.  Okay, I guess I just described it.  At least it was just one though!

In the end I am very happy I did these.  I couldn’t possibly go this entire month without making something for all of my World Cup fan friends!  My husband is such a trooper and had no problem eating the ugly ones with me for our own test taste.  We weren’t incredibly impressed with the sugar cookie and are still on a hunt for a recipe that comes out softer and chewier.  In the cookie’s defense though, neither of us really cares for sugar cookies because of how crunchy they usually are.  The icing tasted very good also.  It is incredibly sweet and I probably couldn’t eat more than two cookies if I wanted to.  I know, this is a good thing!

I am also happy to report that even though I did not have a clue what I was doing, there was definitely marked improvement in the way the cookies looked from beginning to end.  To prove this, I am including the picture of the first cookie I piped, and the last one!  Hopefully you can tell the difference too!

30 Days and 30 Bites – Day 2

4 words for you…Peanut Butter Cup Cakes

Day 2 of my cakery quest was a success!  My peanut butter cup cakes turned out fantastic!  I used the recipe for the Peanut Butter Cupcakes from allrecipes.com and didn’t change a thing.  I usually follow the advice given by other people who have commented on the recipe, and today was no different.  However, the only thing I changed was replacing one cup of the flour with whole wheat flower.  The rest I used unbleached flour.  The cake on its own was scrumptious!  The batter tasted incredibly peanut buttery, but this faded slightly after they were baked.  To top the cupcakes I decided to go for a Chocolate Ganache topping instead of a chocolate icing.  I think it would have been great either way.  Of course, I didn’t have 8 oz of bittersweet chocolate so I had to use half bitter and half semisweet.  I am sure it changed the taste, but next time I might even do it with all semisweet instead of bittersweet as the recipe calls for.  I tried both spreading the ganache to the very edge of the cupcakes and also did it leaving a little border around the edge to still see the cake.  It was definitely better the latter rather than the former – for both looks and not getting chocalte all over the cake cups.  I sprinkled chopped peanut butter cups on top.  Small hint – freezing the cups makes them much easier to chop, which of course makes the cupcakes much prettier.

We had a couple of our neighbors, S and T, over for our own taste test and the ratings were fantastic all the way around (even S who doesn’t really like sweet stuff).  My husband ate three in less than ten minutes.  So I think I would consider this one a keeper!  I have a few ideas for how I would like to use the cake next time.  Of course, there is the option of strictly using chocolate icing on top.  S came up with the idea of using crunchy peanut butter instead of regular and we ALL agreed that would be wonderful!  I would like to make a layered round cake using the crunchy peanut butter, chocolate icing in between the two layers with peanut butter cups and the ganache on top with peanut butter cups on the entire cake.  Needless to say, intense is a great word to describe this cake!  YUM!

30 Days and 30 Bites – Day 1

Today I begin an adventure in baking that will hopefully bring me to some astounding new level of confectionary masterism.  Okay, maybe I’ll just be able to pipe a pretty rose on a cake at the end of this project, but hey!  that will be more than I can do now!  As I said, I am able to do a few basic things when it comes to decorating cakes.  What that means is I can do some elementary fondant and I can star the heck out of any cake design.  But I have no idea how to do any of the fun stuff.  Flowers, animals, pour fondant, bugs, etc.  I am going to spend the next 30 days baking cupcakes, cakes, and the like and I am going to do my best to teach myself a few decorating techniques.  Though I come from a not so long line of wonderful cake creators (my mother could certainly hold her own in cake designing and my grandmother use to sell cakes out of her home), I only inherited a few of their natural talents.  I was not smart enough to spend days on end watching and learning what they did.  I played in the sprinkler out back and waiting for the cakes to be done!

So for my first day in the world of mixing up trouble I decided to keep it simple.  My mother, sister, and her whole family were in town so I used a box of yellow cake mix to make a batch of 23 cupcakes.  (too much bowl licking maybe???)  There really isn’t too much to report except I definitely learned I have, well, a lot to learn!  I used three different colors of Buttercream icing - pink, purple, and green.  Why?  No particular reason except I thought the girls would love pink and purple and figure I better be a good mom/aunt and give the 8 year old and 5 year old boy a color too.  I loaded up the icing bags and just started using a whole bunch of tips.  At the time, I hadn’t planned on blogging about it so I couldn’t tell you which ones I used, etc.  I made a few flowers and a butterfly (the antennae were very sad looking) and a few initials (the J did NOT look like a J!).  I was, however, excited that I was capable of doing a very basic swirl around the top of the cupcake.  Next time I may even be bold enough to make it more 3D like an ice cream cone look!  Ha!  The important part was that I had a lot of fun, got a little messy, and EVERYONE was excited to have cupcakes for dessert!

Helicopter Baby Shower

Today I threw a baby shower for a great friend of mine.  The dad of the baby is a helicopter pilot and many of the baby’s things are related to planes and helos.  I decided to stick with it and made the baby shower helicopter themed (well, I didn’t do much “theme-ing”, but what I DID do was helos).  I thought I would have no trouble finding things to aid in my party planning, but it was quite difficult!  Time to get to work!  I made the invitation from scratch.  Here it is below where I have, of course, replaced the personal information:

I used the same helicopter to design the cake as well and used basic buttercream icing:

I did not feel like doing the typical baby shower games like Smell the Baby Poop or Guess that Baby Food.  Instead I opted for a craftier avenue to travel down.  I bought various sizes of white onesies from 0 months to 18 months.  I had the guests make their own onesies for the new baby-to-be.  It took a little encouragement for some of the guests and I probably could have used more than two irons to iron letters on, but I was still pretty happy with the outcome.  Also, one set of letters – all of the black ones – DID NOT work.  I managed to buy a bum package and we all found it out the hard way.  A few words of advice: Test it out in advance.  I had intended to do this by making a shirt for the mom, but only managed to try it about 5 minutes before the shower began!  Find out how long it will take to iron the letters on, etc.  My materials for this project were:

1. various sized onesies
2. iron on letters and patches
3. fabric markers
4. cardboard to stick between the onesie so markers will not bleed through to the back (make sure the cardboard is free of all markings and colors, we also had issues with that bleeding onto the onesie if using the cardboard while ironing)
5. youth t-shirts.  My baby shower was kid friendly, so I also had white shirts for all of the kid guests to use the fabric markers and decorate.  We kept them away from the iron on items.
6. ironing board and iron (have at least one iron for every two to three people).

Some of the sayings we used were BYOB (bring your own bottle).  Navy Baby.  The baby’s last name.  ”Mini (name of dad)”. A picture of a chick then the words “dig me”.  Other ideas – Naps Are For Sissies.  Bootie Kicker.  Little Prince(ss).  Drooling Zone.

 Finally, the treat for the guests was a bag of candy with a ribbon tied around it.  Attached to the ribbon were two cookie cutters – a helicopter and an airplane.  I didn’t get a picture of them, unfortunately, but if you look hard enough you can see them in the back corner of the table here:

I had tons of fun planning and celebrating the future birth of my friend’s son.  It is such a great way to welcome a new baby to the world!

Tags: Baby, Cake Decorating, Cakes, Entertaining, Homemade, invitation, iron on letters