Archive for the ‘Cakes By Marissa’ Category
Drawing With Chocolate/Candy Melts
Remember During 30 Days and 30 Bites when I tried drawing with melted chocolate? Well, I was incredibly unsuccessful. Maybe not incredibly, but pretty darn close! I tried again, only this time took the easy route and used Wilton’s candy melts. Boy did that work a lot better!!!
Today is day two of working to create the cupcakes for J’s wedding anniversary. Last time I posted was to show you the homemade cupcake wrappers that will be going on the cakes. I am getting more and more excited as each day goes by! Today I worked on the toppings for the cupcakes. I used the candy melts to create intertwined hearts. I placed a small amount (a few wafers goes a long way when it comes to making candy outlines) into a freezer quality storage bag. I placed the bag in the microwave in ten second intervals, squeezing the bag in between to smooth the candy. When the candy was at piping consistency (30 – 40 seconds of melting total) I made sure there was no air in the bag and squeezed the melted candy to one corner. I snipped off a small piece of the corner of the bag, just enough to allow a steady stream. If you are looking for a thin outline, it is important that you cut off a very small amount of the plastic to keep the hole very small.
Now that the candy is ready, pipe your design! Place a piece of wax paper on a cookie sheet and pipe your pictures onto it. I drew freehand with the candy since all I was doing was hearts. If you are looking for something more intricate, print the picture out first and place it under the wax paper, as I did in the previous candy post. Before the candy has time to harden (the melts harden pretty quickly when you are piping them out this thin) tap the cookie sheet on the counter a few times so air bubbles can escape and to take away the rough edges of your outlines.
You should notice that the bottom heart in my design continues down pretty far. That will be the part of the candy that will stick into the cupcake, hidden away from the world.
Put the candies in the refrigerator until you are ready to use them but be careful…they’re fragile! I can’t wait to make the cupcakes and put all of it together!!!
Tags: Cake Decorating, Candy, Choc, Cupcake, Cupcake Toppers, Drawing, Hearts, Melt
Make Your Own Cupcake Wrappers/Liners
Oh. My. Gosh. I have had WAY too much fun crafting this evening! Just call me Martha! Why? Well, in the next couple of days I will be making cupcakes for a friend of mine. We are having a Girls’ Night Out to celebrate her 7thwe
dding anniversary. A fellow military wife, J suffers what we must deal with on a regular basis. Her hubby is out on the ship with mine and is not here to celebrate their anniversary together. Not only that, but she is VERY preggo and will be giving birth before her husband returns home.
Needless to say, I wanted to do my own little part to make this a special day for her even though she is celebrating it sans husband! After talking to her about making a cake, the hamster wheel in my head started turning and I decided I wanted to have a little more fun with it. I changed my mind from a cake to cupcakes and decided to go the full mile when it came to making them super cute. So tonight is the first post related to the anniversary cupcakes.
Okay, enough of the background…what did I do tonight, you’re asking? I made homemade cupcake liners, or wrappers, or whatever you would like to call them. I have seen the super cute wrappers in the store but just haven’t been able to bring myself to spend the money on them and really, none of them have been EXACTLY what I wanted. So I decided to take on the task of creating them myself. I did a little research online and found a few other ladies who have tried the same thing. Why reinvent the wheel?! This template that I found on Skip To My Lou is the one I used to begin my own. However, I extended the top of mine another centimeter or so because I wanted the wrappers that extended above the top of the cupcake. I also inserted a tab so I would not have to have tape on the outside of my wrapper. With the tab, I was able to put the tape inside. I also did not print the wrappers directly onto the colored paper. There are only two templates on the given paper. I cut one out and traced it four times on larger paper. This, of course, was a little bit of an added pain (multiply by 24), but saved paper and came out the way I wanted it to look.
***important suggestion – use paper that is colored on BOTH sides. It does not look nearly as nice
when you have white paper on the inside. Even if you are cutting the paper to normal size, the white will still most likely be seen.
After tracing the templates onto the paper I used an exacto knife to cut them out. This requires a steady hand, but it is important to know it does not have to be perfect. It is going to be wrapped around a cupcake for goodness sakes! The last thing people will be checking is i
f it is 100% symmetrical! The first couple were definitely rough around the edges, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly and started to breeze through the cutting process. Since the only two sided paper I had was plain, I decided I would use my stamping materials to embellish the paper. SO FUN! Put some paper down (or you can stamp prior to cutting) under the cutouts and make sure the stamp overlaps the borders of the paper and especially both ends where the tab and insert are. This helps hide the imperfections of the cutting job!
Insert the tabs, tape the inside and voila! Homemade cupcake wraps!
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Tags: Cupcake, Cupcake Liners, Homemade, Marissa, Paper Craft, Stamp, Wrappers
Super Mario Bros Cake
this would be a problem, but tried anyway. The result was a whole lotta fondant that was flat and stiff as a board. With the inability to flex around the curved edges of the cake, it went in the trash too. I am still a little worried that Mario might pass out and fall backwards on the cake. Heat exhaustion maybe! Really, he is definitely top heavy in the back of his head and I will be very happy to find out that he stays standing all day tomorrow! (see bottom of post for more pictures)Other than those minor things, it really was an enjoyable experience. I learned so much about my own abilities and different techniques working with fondant. I used two different types of fondant – rolled fondant to make the creatures and marshmallow fondant to actually cover the cakes. I have found that the rolled fondant works much better when it comes to molding things than the marshmallow. But the marshmallow tastes so much better (in all the opinions of the people I have polled) so I prefer to use it to do the covering. As usual, I made all of the fondant myself, which I still prefer doing as well. The extreme heat made it difficult to work with the fondant at times. I felt like the Cake Boss when the edges of his Empire State Building were falling off in the heat. My A/C is already working double time with it being 104 degrees outside though, so there was little I could do about it!
I would have to say that Mario was the most difficult to make (go figure, the one I wanted to have the most detail!) and I had the most fun making Yoshi and the mushroom head guys. My 8 year old was ready and willing at all times to tell me what creatures I should be making, what they should look like, and what I was doing wrong with them!!! :) Credit is also due to my husband who thought of making the warping pipe (the green thing off to the side). I had extra cake and didn’t want it to go to waste! It became a cute way to show that little E is turning 5!
So now that I have sufficiently de-Crisco-d my kitchen, I can officially say I am done! The cake is ready to go to its Super Mario home tomorrow and I am sure little E will love it. His mom came over today and she thinks he will too. That is the most important part and I cannot wait to find out.
Since I was covered in Crisco every step of the way, I wasn’t able to take pictures of the process. Probably a good thing since I tried to get the messy parts out of the way while my husband was gone! The last thing I need is proof of how the place looked! I will give you a quick run down of how it all went. We estimated the entire process took about 16 hours from start to finish. I used:
- 4.5 bags of powdered sugar
- 2 bags of marshmallows
- 1 container of glucose
- .5 containers glycerin
- A LOT of Crisco (makes everything not stick to everything else until you want it to!)
- The equivalent of 4 cake boxes (but I made mine from scratch)
- A lot of icing color
- 1 box of unflavored gelatin
- 12 eggs
- a few cups of oil
- I think that about covers it
I modeled the figures by their colors. I started with red and made the heads of the mushrooms and the backs of the turtles, etc. Then picked the next color that I would need on the most things that had red so I could build onto those pieces. So on, and so forth. Then I baked the cakes and let them chill before making the icing to top the cake. I put a crumb layer of buttercream icing on all the layers before putting them together and chilled them until the icing was set. I then colored and put the marshmallow fondant on top of each layer. Here is where I built the layers, putting measured and cut plastic dowel rods into the bottom layer which then supported the tiered plastic plate holding the top layer. After the layers were built I started placing the figures, really wherever they would sit! By the way, these were all dried by the time I did this. If I had ten people working for me, I would have tried to do this cake in a matter of hours, unfortunately that is not possible as a one-woman crew! After it was all done this evening, into the refrigerator it went!
I really do hope little E thinks it is the best cake ever and I hope to get many more opportunities to make such awesome cakes!
I should also say my husband is happy the cake is done because he has felt neglected this week when it comes to my baking. Apparently, the 36 scones I made him the other day have not been enough to put an end to his baked goods hunger. Sheesh!
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Tags: Baking, birthday, buttercream, Cakes, fondant, icing, Mario, Marissa, Super Mario Bros
30 Days and 30 Bites – Day 16
HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!
I hope everyone is having a terrific day celebrating the independence of our wonderful country! I would like to take a minute to thank all of the service men and women who work so hard to maintain that independence for us and afford us the liberties we often take for granted each day. A special thanks to those who are away from their families while we celebrate such times. You are always in our thoughts!
We have coordinated a block party on our street to celebrate the holiday. We’re setting up tents and grilling, putting the sprinklers and games out for the kids, and waving glow sticks and setting off fireworks. I am expecting it to be a blast! Since it is a block party we told everyone to bring their own meat to grill and drinks to drink and a side or dessert to share with the group. Naturally, I will be bringing a dessert! Yay! I don’t have to know on people’s doors to hand out my baked goods for the day! I can just bring it to the party!
Cake before baking it
I thought a lot about what to do for this fun event and decided on a watermelon shaped cake. I also chose to try to make the inside watermelon flavor too. I made a watermelon pound cake that I adapted from another fruit flavored poundcake. The recipe calls for the actual fruit, not an artificial flavor. The hardest part was the fact that watermelon is SO juicy. I tried to take account for that in advance by draining the watermelon and then letting paper towels soak up some more of the liquid before putting them into the recipe. This certainly seemed to help, but the cake was still INCREDIBLY moist. I was a little bummed about this because I was hoping to stand the cake up on its side so it would look like a slice of watermelon standing on its rind. Unfortunately, I think the integrity of the structure was too comprimised!
"Red" icing for the middle of the watermelon
I decided to keep the watermelon laying flat on its side. Here I have started with the fondant icing. First I covered the cake with a crumb layer of buttercream icing that I dyed with red food coloring. I always use the rolled marshmallow fondant because people continue to tell me time and time again how much better it tastes. It is definitely more work because of how sticky the marshmallows are, but worth it! I didn’t want to waste fondant, so I only laid the “red” part of the watermelon exactly where it would be showing, rather than covering the whole cake. It also drapes down in the front of the cake.
I rolled the green fondant out into a straight line about four inchese thick and covered the edge of the cake with it. I did all of the rolling and measuring on my AWESOME new “gadget” that I got for my birthday…a Pampered Chef pastry mat! Thanks Jen! It has changed my world of rolling out fondant!!! I didn’t have to use any cornstarch or even crisco to keep the fondant from sticking to the surface I was working on. Usually I am fighting with the dang icing the entire time and using everything I can to keep it from sticking! It made it so easy to measure how much I need to roll out and to cut the circle to do the red part of the watermelon. I will never be able to go back to working with fondant without it again. Since its Pampered Chef, I am also sure it will last forever. I am so THRILLED!
To finish the cake off, I used chocolate chips as the seeds on the watermelon. Just stuck them in the cake in a few places and TA-DA! Fourth of July Watermelon Cake! Have a great one!
30 Days and 30 Bites – Day 6
Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear Marissa! Happy birthday to ME!!!
What better way to spend your birthday than BAKING?! Go figure though, it wasn’t a cake for me. This weekend one of my sweet little neighbors is turning five. Though her mother is also a fantastic baker, she, for some reason, requested I make her daughter’s cake! Little M requested a princess cake so this is what I came up with. I searched online for a while looking for inspiration but didn’t find too many things. I did, however find the idea to use the ice cream cones as spires, so that was a big bonus.
To assemble my cake I used two cake mix boxes (chocolate) and with those I filled a 9×13 pan, an 8 inch round pan, a 6 inch round pan and 6 cupcake holes. I stacked them, naturally, large to small and then used the cupcakes to support my ice cream cone spires. I used some inexpensive $1 bag spiced gum drops from Walmart for the edging and then also added some piped stars in purple for another accent. The cupcake part was hubby’s idea. He’s so clever. He even volunteered and did a little icing this evening to help me out since I was decorating, cleaning, mowing the lawn, etc. Gotta love him!
I put the all important crumb layer on the entire cake and let it set in the fridge before frosting, but for some reason it didn’t do all that great of a job keeping the crumbs away. Also, since my crumb layer was white I definitely had some issues with it come through the pink. It’s not a perfect cake, but hopefully little M won’t care about the imperfections and she will be so happy to have a castle.
I made my husband use our Blockbuster free movie coupon to get Julie and Julia. I thought it was appropriate given our new endeavor here. He told me I better never talk to him the way Julie spoke to her husband when she got frustrated! He said that would be the end of 30D30B. Guess I better watch my manners!!! :)
So here we go. Happy birthday M!!!
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:
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various sized onesies
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iron on letters and patches
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fabric markers
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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)
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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.
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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
Basenji Cakes
I have reached a new whole new level in my cake decorating and I am SO excited! For the first time ever, today, I had a go at fondant icing. Yes, FONDANT! That dreadful, scary, it will take you over and win the battle, icing, that everyone talks about in hushed tones in the corner of the room. I have always wanted to try it and never been daring enough to take on the daunting task. This was not my first rodeo when it comes to cake decorating. I can star any cake like there is no tomorrow. But fondant, now that was a whole new world I have not been willing to enter until today! First I would like to start by saying that it is midnight and I put the crumb layer (the thin first layer of icing) on both cakes at 7:00 pm. So, five hours on two cakes, I don’t think that is TOO bad when I was also dealing with two kids, two puppy dogs, and new fondant territory.
The rumors are true. Fondant icing is horribly messy. If you are not willing to deal with this, don’t even bother trying! There was cornstarch and grease all over me and my counters by the time I finished. It is a wonderful game of getting the fondant to the right consistency. More water, more powdered sugar, more water…aagh! Luckily, I had the perfect non stick rolling pin. Other than that, I did not have ANY of those fancy fondant tools. I doubt I will buy any either. I have many similar tools in my drawers already. I learned, as with many other crafty things, it is all about what feels right to you.
A skill that I will definitely have to work on is moving the fondant from the counter where I rolled it out, ON TO the cake. I am sure it was a consistency problem, but the icing drooped, pulled, and stretched immediately after I picked it up. I was still able to work with it, but the result is a cake where the patchwork is not perfectly hidden. I am going to chalk this up to something I will learn in time.
Of course, despite all of my messiness, drooping, and the TIME I put into this, I am so excited to try again! Maybe I’ll find an excuse to make a cake next weekend!
The cakes I made tonight are for a friend’s birthday tomorrow night. She and her husband are the proud owner of two Basenji dogs…their babies. The fondant cake was made using a Wilton dinosaur (partysaurus) pan. I had to cut some cake off to add to the tail and create the pointy ears. The starred cake, just the Basenji face, I used a Wilton Santa head pan. I only had to cut off the part that was suppose to be the fuzzy tip of Santa’s hat (which I added to the fondant cake). I used the basic Wilton buttercream recipe and two batches provided more than enough icing for the crumb layers on both cakes and all the piping on the head. I could not have done it with only one batch though. For the fondant, I taught myself using this website, on Peggy’s Baking Corner. It was AWESOME! I followed her advice to the T! I also used her recipe for Marshmallow Fondant, but you can find the same recipe on the Wilton website too.
My recommendation? Take a whole day and have some fun!
