March Madness

My sincerest apologies to my three followers!  It seems I have really dropped the ball with this whole blogging thing.  I mean, what respectable blogger goes almost a month without a single post?!  I have to blame it on the fact that March has been an unusually busy month for me.  There was spring break, SXSW here in Austin, two new babies for two good friends and a ton of birthdays. During all of this busy-ness, I can't believe I even had time to bake, but I made it work and produced some of my best work to date!

At the beginning of the month my brother in-law Jeramy asked me to make another batch of app cupcakes to bring in to his office during SXSW interactive week.  He sent me a list of 15 apps to choose from.  It was a hard choice, so I decided to make all 15 times 2 (he needed 30).  This time around I opted to color my own fondant which ended up being less expensive than buying the pre-colored variety and there was a broader range of color (the colors looked so much more vibrant too.  From now on I am always dying my own fondant, even if it takes twice as long!)  The whole process from drawing everything out on paper to baking the cupcakes to decorating took me an entire week of working here and there around the kids.  I am very pleased with the end result and would welcome the opprtunity to do it again.

Here is the finished product.  Chocolate and vanilla cupcakes with chocolate and vanilla buttercream.

Fondant and royal icing apps from left to right/top to bottom (sorry for the sideways picture...I can't figure out how to rotate it):  Flickr, StumbleUpon, ipod, Gowalla, Skype, Youtube, MMS, Mail, Phone, Facebook

Fondant and royal icing apps clockwise from top: Twitter, Pandora, API logo (Academic Programs International, Wordpress, Hoot Suite (my favorite).

Next up, my husband's 30th birthday cake.  I had really high hopes for this cake.  I brainstormed for several weeks about different themes that I could do and how I would go about implementing them.  When it was all said and done, I just ran out of time and energy and opted to do something simpler.  Sometimes simpler is better, if it means saving your sanity!

Chocolate cake with chocolate filling and peanut butter frosting topped with chocolate buttercream border and Justin's peanut butter cups.  My son is responsible for the dinosaur on top.  I think it was the perfect touch!

One thing I learned while making this cake is to ALWAYS level your cake layers.  Even if you think you can get away without leveling them, do it anyway.  I managed to fill in the gaps with frosting pretty well, but it took an inordinate amount of time and I feared that this would surely end up on cake wrecks.  Not quite a cake wreck, but not my best work either.  At least the birthday boy was happy!

Finally, I was asked to do another Iron Man cake.  I wanted to change things up a bit, so I made Iron Man's face a little larger and added some more detail.  I had some left over batter when I made the cake, which I used for accompanying cupcakes.  I am incredibly pleased with the end result.  My best cake to date maybe.

Vanilla butter cake with vanilla buttercream.

Fondant detail on cupcakes.

Happy birthday Hutton!

And so concludes my March Madness.  Stay tuned for April.  I have my sister's birthday, a cupcakes and cocktails party and possibly a wedding cake...yikes!

Fun with Fondant

Two weeks ago, my friend Jennifer and I threw a baby shower for our good friend Brandie.  I really wanted to make a fondant-covered cake for the shower, but since neither Jennifer nor I had ever covered a cake in fondant, we thought it would be a good idea to do a test run a few weeks out.  Although I have used store-bought fondant in the past for decoration, we wanted to try to make our own marshmallow fondant from scratch to avoid some of the unsavory ingredients lurking in the store-bought variety since we were covering the whole cake with it.  Jennifer found a pretty simple recipe on the Wilton website.  Basically all you need to do is melt the marshmallows with a little bit of water, mix in confectioners sugar and then knead the mixture until it becomes a dough-like consistency.  It was a bit of a messy process, but the result was fabulous!  Once you have the right consistency, roll out the fondant to a scant 1/4" thick and lay it over the cake.  We dyed some of the left over fondant pink and purple and used the backs of different sized piping tips to cut out circles.  Then we topped it all off with a pink bow and purple ribbon.

Not bad for our first try...and we got it done pretty quickly considering we had three unruly children tearing around the house while we were working.  Okay, two unruly children.  Jennifer's daughter Taylor is always very good.

Did I mention it was delicious?  Chocolate cake made by me, vanilla cream cheese frosting made by Jennifer and the marshmallow fondant on top, which was incredibly tasty.  Much tastier than the store-bought variety and much cheaper!

Two weeks later it was time for the real deal.  Fortunately, I had enough fondant left over to cover the 6" layer cake for Brandie's shower.  Apparently marshmallow fondant can keep for up to two months in an airtight container!  I used store-bought fondant to make my first ever fondant loop bow.  It was actually much easier than I had anticipated (cakeboss.com has a great tutorial).  After covering the cake, I used the left over fondant dyed blue and brown to make the dots.

The cake is my go-to vanilla buttermilk cake from smittenkitchen.com with lemon curd filling and raspberry buttercream frosting. 

I made vanilla cupcakes with vanilla cream cheese frosting and Jennifer made chocolate cupcakes with chocolate cream cheese frosting as accompaniments to the cake.  I was very pleased with the finished product.  I must say though, it wouldn't have been possible without Martha Stewart and her fabulous selection of housewares at Macy's.  I had been looking high and low for some white cake stands with clean lines and she had exactly what I was looking for. Is there anything that woman can't do? I love you Martha!