Eggshell Green

Wedding cookies

A friend asked me to make some wedding favours for her – either cupcakes or cookies. Cupcakes would have been great but we had to fly from Wellington to Auckland, and then they’d have to get transported via ferry to the venue on Waiheke Island. Auckland is also notorious for its humid summers so I ruled out making frosted cupcakes pretty quickly. So cookies it was.

The original plan was to make gingerbread ones because I know the gingerbread recipe I have is delicious. However, we experienced a bit of humidity ourselves here in Wellington and my trial cookies turned into cake. They became so soft that they fell apart if you tried to pick them up! So we went for a simple sugar cookie by Alton Brown which proved hardier and still yummy.

100-something cookies

After several test runs of different icing colours and patterns, the final product was a heart flooded with light pink icing, and piped with blue and dark pink criss crossing. I have to say the hardest thing about all this was the piping. I almost gave myself carpal tunnel syndrome again from the hours of piping to achieve the stripes – my hands ached and started tingling that night.

The iced wedding cookies - not bad for a novice

But it was worth it. They looked really nice on the tables and tasted pretty good too.

The table layout

Tags: baking, Cakes

Domo-kun keeki

I asked the husband what cake he wanted for his birthday, and we went through the usual “Ummm, I dunno… uhhh”. (It’s kind of like trying to get him to choose baby names, or make any decisions that require creative thought actually. He says that’s my forté.) He’s a geek, so we thought about doing a robot, ipad, motherboard, and other various typical geek things. He had bought me some Ninjabread men cutters because he wanted them at the party, and I said if he wasn’t going to choose something then I’d make a harpooned whale with ninjas doing scientific research on it.

He must’ve had an epiphany or something, and said “Ooh! I know what we could have – you know that furry monster thing on the motivational poster about God killing kittens whenever someone masturbates?” – ok, maybe not an epiphany but he decided that’s what he wanted (because of the Internet meme association, not because of the fate of kittens). We’re talking about Domo-kun (we weren’t geeky enough and had to Google for that).

The Domo cake

He also wanted a red velvet cake and ended up baking the cake himself (yay) and I decorated. Things worked out really well because the cross section of the cake looked as if we had given Domo an autopsy.

Mmmm meaty

And the cake was delicious. I hadn’t tried red velvet before, only heard about it, usually in the form of cupcakes. We tried the Waldorf Astoria Red Velvet recipe – it’s a perfect density for decorating and the bonus is that it tastes good and isn’t dry (and pretty easy to make).

Will definitely make red velvet cake again – just got to remember to get lots of red food colouring each time!

Tags: baking, birthday, cake, decorating, geek

My first cupcake order

Two of my friends had a joint birthday celebration of Cocktails, Cupcakes and Canapes – three fabulous things that I would normally indulge in but being pregnant I could really only enjoy two of those things. I was asked to make some cupcakes for the occasion, which I was more than happy to do because I love making cupcakes – and I also got to eat these ones.

The three cupcake flavours

I made three flavours which I was told were all delicious. I was too full by the time I had any, and could only handle a taste of the chocolate ones (I blame the bump taking up all of my valuable food space).

The first was Chocolate Cherry with chocolate fudge cream spiked with cherry liquer, and sprinkled with real chocolate hail. I would normally make them as Black Forest cupcakes with fresh cream but it was a bit too hot to do that in advance.

Chocolate cherry cupcakes

Then there was a Lemon Vanilla with a lemon buttercream and fruit jube on top. The little lemon wedges were candy I bought from the UK – so yummy and perfect as decoration.

Vanilla lemon cupcakes

Last was Lime and Coconut – though I completely forgot to put lime juice in it (just used zest), whoops! These were topped with Malibu buttercream, toasted coconut and a giant marshmallow

Lime and coconut cupcakes

The girls froze the leftovers and I’ve been told they defrotsed fine. I made myself some chocolate cupcakes yesterday and having them cold from the fridge today was not bad at all. Good to know I can keep iced cupcakes for when I have a random cupcake craving!

Tags: baking, Cakes, Cupcakes

A Slice of Wonderland

I was asked to make a cake that could be raffled off for the Greenacres School gala. I wanted something whimsical and not too boyish or too girly and it had to appeal to school kids, or at least kids at heart. I chose Alice in Wonderland – oh the options!

In the end I decided I wanted a cake shaped like the Mad Hatter’s hat, with a tea party happening on top. This is the result:

My Mad Hatter cake in all its glory

This beast is made of three 8 inch chocolate cakes split into six layers to make the hat, then a smaller madeira cake to make the table and pedestal, also layered. I used lemon buttercream as the filling because it’s easy and delicious.

It’s hard to tell from the pictures but it’s quite a large cake, and damn heavy! Should feed around 60 I say, depending on how big you like your slices.

Some details close up

Our good camera is being fixed which annoys me because I couldn’t take proper photos showing the details. The flash on our backup seems to bring out some of the shine and smaller details, but ruins the colour.

Stitching and some shine

The hat has stitching details around it, some fan patterns pressed into it, and painted with golden lustre for a shine. The ribbon’s also got some pink lustre on it but it’s quite subtle.

Topsy table caused the tea to spill

I created some pastillage mushrooms, teacups and miniature roses to decorate the table tier. I still hate working with pastillage in that it dries so quickly and cracks. The mushrooms were easy but the others were hard. My teacups ended up looking rustic, but hey, anything goes in Wonderland!

Tea and cake anyone?

I tried quite a few things on this cake, including piping patterns with royal icing. That was fun, but I really need more practice with piping on vertical surfaces – the numbers on the hat ticket were a bit squiggly as I didn’t know how to keep my hands stable at that angle.

Anyway, it was great practice for Abby’s first birthday cake – something that I haven’t decided on yet and the party’s next week!!

By the way, the gala’s on tomorrow Saturday 20 November 2011, 11am to 2pm at the Greenacres School at 60 Raroa Terrace, Tawa. If you’re in Wellington, drop on by. You can buy raffle tickets to win this cake there :D

Tags: baking, cake, decorating