Clever Cake Studio

We’ve added a new page to highlight my Current Special.  I will probably do one per month.

Right now till the end of March, it’s cupcakes and petit fours!

There’s something magical about these little treats.  Even people who say they don’t like cake often love these.  Cupcakes are homey and reminiscent of childhood, retro even.  Petit fours are sophisticated and artistic, yet also whimsical.

I’m hoping to really play around with the artistic possibilities of both of these delights.  I have a few cupcake artists that I admire whose work I’m going to be inspired by.

This was an especially sweet cake to do.  It was a Valentine’s cake for a couple friends of mine.  I had to build a custom box for it so the roses wouldn’t be damaged!  These are the client’s photographs, as I was running late that morning and forgot to take pictures.

The flavors in this cake are unusual and very worth noting.  The client chose a simple mint cake, with Frangelico’s buttercream.  This combination (which would probably be good as a mixed drink!) was both refreshing and rich at the same time.

The roses are made of sugarpaste and dusted with gold luster.  The heart is fondant.

This is the second of the two cakes shipped to New York.  These are the client’s photographs, so this is how they looked upon arrival.

This cake was a present for some friends of the client who were recently engaged.  The table and balls are inside jokes about how they had met.

The balls are sugarpaste, painted in edible gold.  The table was hand-painted, and was unfortunately a bit smudged in the travel.  It’s rich chocolate cake with Frangelico’s buttercream, covered in the fondant I made myself.

This was one of two small cakes shipped to New York.  You are seeing the client’s photographs, so this is how they looked when they arrived.

This one is in celebration of the birth of their first son.  Rich chocolate cake with Frangelico’s buttercream, covered in the fondant I made myself.  The pacifier and rattle are both made out of marzipan and painted with edible gold and some designs in black food dye.  Gumpaste/sugarpaste would dry harder and weather’s travel better, but marzipan is much tastier so the client preferred it.

I had done the WoW cake and the Poker Chip cake on the same evening.  I was very proud of accomplishing both before midnight.

For my Valentine’s Special, I have so far completed 3 of the 4 cakes, two of which have just arrived this morning to their new (and last) home in New York.  Shipping cakes is a tricky ordeal.

I also was honored to do some treats for the Sweet Petula Trunk Show that’s happening today and tomorrow at her store in Pioneer Square.  Sweet Petula offers handmade bath, body and home products.  They are also pairing with Sweet Anthem, handmade perfumes by a friend of mine.  Now they also have homemade lavender cookies, almond-anise biscotti, and sweet petit fours (chocolate mint, chai, and strawberry) for customers to snack as they browse.  Go venture out and get some great deals on lovely products!

So…  In the making of these cakes and treats I learned some valuable lessons.  One in particular stood out.

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This tough cookie is a warlock gnome in World of Warcraft, capable of kicking your ass with a single glance.  Or so I’m told.  All the gears and pipes are inspired by gnome engineering.

This was commissioned by an awesome coworker of mine for his friend’s birthday (they are both geeky homosexuals).  I was given a marvelous instruction for this cake:  “Make it really gay.”

Now that’s a fun license.  Now, besides the shimmery pinks and purples and cursive writing, this cake holds a very special surprise.  The vanilla-almond cake within is marbled in Mardi Gras rainbow colors!  Each layer is filled with raspberry preserves.

I’ll do a tutorial some time on doing marbled cakes like this.  It’s really a pretty straightforward manual process, but a fun one.  I need to do more of these.  The other ones I have here is the Dead Cow Cake and the Aerialist Cake.

The drawing on top is hand-painted.  If you want to do something like that, draw what you want (correct scale) on a piece of paper (I just use regular lined school paper, since it’s lightweight and somewhat see-through.  Tracing paper would be excellent).  Lay it on the fondant, then use a pin to poke little dots along the lines of the drawing, so you have a guide to use to ice/paint over.

I mentioned this in the Steampunk cake post, but the metallic paint is made used Luster Dust, which comes is a wide array of colors.  It’s a powder, which gives a nice shimmery look when applied dry, or you can mix it with a tiny bit of clear grain alcohol to make an edible metallic paint.  It’s fun to play with, though a bit pricey and rummaging through the binfuls at my local supply store is a horribly addictive and expensive pleasure.  There are a lot of gorgeous colors out there!  Not only the shiny stuff, but edible glitters and even matte colors.  I am starting to really like the possibilities with the color dusts - you can get a lot of that subtlety and depth that a really good airbrush artist can manage, without the airbrushing equipment and experience.  In this particular cake, obviously I didn’t utilize all that, but I will for a cake someday!

This cake is for a Bridal Shower before the couple are whisked away to Vegas.  It’s a three-layer chocolate cake with a rich Grand Marnier buttercream filling.  I fashioned it off a poker chip… kind of a fat one of my own design.  Perhaps I should have made it look like a couple stacked chips, that would have been good.

I made this cake and the WoW Gnome cake in the same evening, so I’m rather proud of myself.  I did the baking ahead, but the layering and covering and decorating was all in an evening, and I even got to bed before midnight.  I think I’m getting better at this!  My first posts are all about crying all the time in frusteration.  Knock on wood, but this seems to be getting easier.

Birthday cake for my boss (yes I have a day job).  Just something simple and delicious.  Vanilla cake with organic strawberry preserves, covered in almond buttercream.

One thing that comes to mind to talk about is the difference between scratch cakes and box mix cakes.  First of all, there’s really nothing wrong with using a box mix - it’s especially nicer if you can find a nice brand with a clean taste that doesn’t use any corn syrup.  It’s what most of us grew up on and are used to - something light and fluffy and generally very sweet.

Scratch mixes are generally more dense, heavier, with more flavor.  Our grandparents baked cakes that were a bit on the dry side (the buttercream was the moisture), but nowadays, the trend is towards very moist cakes that can last longer. Being scratch doesn’t mean it’s more high-end, as you can find mixes that use high quality, organic ingredients without any odd chemicals.  Also, many people, being brought up on box mix cake, don’t actually like a real scratch cake when they try it, because it’s not as fluffy and sweet.  It can sometimes even verge on breadlike, but with a finer crumb.

Here’s a trade secret - most bakeries use mixes, and have their own special recipe for doctoring them to improve the flavor and create a denser cake while retaining all the moisture and consistency that mixes offer.  It is, however, a faux pas to not make their own buttercream, which can make or break a cake no matter how good the inside is.  They also usually have scratch recipes that they will use on request.  Of course, some bakeries specialize in scratch cakes - as a customer, you need to try out both and decide what you want.

I have a few recipes I like to use now, but am still experimenting.  The recipe with the most consistant results with the highest approval rating by tasters is a doctored cake mix.  As one professional baker told me, “If someone else wants to mix some of the dry ingrediants for me, I have no problem with that.  I put in everything else and make it what it needs to be.”