Sacher Torte and kitchen disasters

 Christmas 2010 has come and gone with all the stress and sleepless nights that preceded it.  Yet all of that was worth it when I reflect on how lovely and happy Christmas actually was.  Many have bemoaned the chaos that all this snow has brought upon our lives, but come on, admit it; there's nothing like a white christmas!!!!  Granted when one has a 4 wheel drive Volvo tank, it's easy to dismiss icy conditions and unexpected snow drifts.  Those with  compact, 2 wheel drive cars really were in trouble and we did our fair share pushing our neighbours' cars when they got stuck.

Despite being extremely pressed for time, I did find time to bake cupcakes for the neighbours and a sacher torte for a friend of mine.  This was my first attempt at a Sacher torte and I probably spent more time researching the best recipe than was spent actually baking!  What surprised me was the range and variety of chocolate glazes that were used to cover the cake.  In the end I chose two different recipes; one for the actual cake and apricot glaze and the other for the chocolate glaze.  The cake recipe was Austrian, and I used a ganache-like glaze that had a higher proportion of chocolate to cream and incorporated butter as well.

All in all the cake came out very well, although I suspect the ganache had cooled a little too much by the time I got it on the cake.  At any rate I would have wished for a smoother finish on the cake!  Being a little tired of snowflakes I opted for christmas roses and holly for the decorations.  I discovered that by mixing burgundy and Christmas red, I was able to achieve that rich, deep red that holly berries really are.  A bit of gloss spray made leaves and berries look more authentic too.  At the last minute I added a red fondant band around the base to hide the slight irregularities.

Now I am on a forced baking hiatus for a week or so as our kitchen suffered several disasters over the holidays.  Namely on the evening of the 23rd, right after business hours, our dishwasher broke down.  That in itself is not an unsurmountable problem, merely annoying as heck!  On Christmas morning I managed to wreak havoc in the kitchen by omitting to remove the ceramic stove covers before heating up some mulled wine to take with us to the stables.  Sure enough the covers exploded, leaving the kitchen filled with acrid smoke, and the stove covered in shattered glass and melted plastic.  Again, once the glass had been cleaned up, the kitchen aired out and the plastic scraped off the stove, no apparent damage to the stove itself. Phew!

The crowning glory of all disasters occurred during Christmas dinner in the evening.  The oven had been left on low to keep the desserts warm.  No sooner had my daughter removed the  desserts and closed the oven door when the door, which was glass (of course!) literally shattered for no apparent reason.  My daughter got a fright but no one was hurt.  It will be well in to the first week of January before we can get that repaired.  In the meantime there will be no turkey pie, sausage rolls or cakes prepared in this house.  An awful prospect indeed!

Variations on a theme

 These are some of the christmas cakes that were ordered from me this year.  Knowing I would be swamped with work for the "Dickens by Candlelight" production, I tried to keep the design simple yet elegant.  None of my customers had any specific requests vis a vis design, so this is what I came up with.  I sprayed all the snowflakes with pearl glitter, but unfortunately my camera doesn't show that.  

                                 

This blue cake is a toned-down version of my original turquoise Christmas cake; and admittedly one of my favourites.  I can't help having a thing for anything blue!

I also liked the effect of these two-toned snowflakes.  This cake was for a male customer to be devoured in purely male company, so my intent was to make a more masculine cake.

Finally this snow-white cake pictured below was made for a customer who wanted as little artificial colouring as possible.  At first I was inclined to think that this one was a little too wedding cakeish, but on reflection it works well for christmas.  The customer was pleased, which is after all the most important issue!

All of these cakes have now gone to their new homes and after weeks of being surrounded by cakes of all sizes and shapes in various stages of assembly, I feel like I'm suffering from empty nest syndrome.  Surely there must be SOMETHING I can decorate!  So I have decided to try my hand at baking a Sacher Torte as a present for a dear friend of mine.  She hates fruit cake, so I have never considered giving one to her in the past.  See my next post for pictures!

Dickens by Candlelight cake

Last Sunday TLS had a little cast party for the cast and crew of "Dickens by Candlelight" and I was asked to provide the cake.  Since it was to be a carrot cake, I couldn't make the cake far in advance to save time, so last weekend was truly an incredibly busy weekend.  I baked the cake on Saturday and on Sunday I got to work decorating it.  Considering that I also had to bake cupcakes for the evening's performance, and that it took no less than 2 hours to get the right shade of maroon for the tablecloth I was understandably pressed for time.  In the end I had to take the unfinished cake with me to the theatre, and during the first act I managed to finish the decorations and put the whole thing together.

During act 2 I photographed the cake, using the materials that were being used on the foyer tables.  I do admit to having had much grander plans for the design of the cake, but as time went on and I realised how overworked I was, the design got simpler and simpler.  In the end it was probably a good thing, as there is definitely something to be said for simple elegance.   The cake ended up just as I had imagined it would, and Abigail was delighted.

However, what put the biggest smile on my face was the fact that the cake was big enough to feed 50 people at least, yet not a crumb was left after only 17 people had had their fill.  I guess they like my carrot cake!!!!  To me that is the biggest complement of all.

Piglets and flowers

Just a very short blog to show off my little piglets that I made for a rush order last Friday.  Originally I was just going to cover the cupcakes with fondant discs made to look like pig faces, but I couldn't resist making these little pigs.  They were a lot easier than I thought they would be and they do look cute, don't they?

Jimmy Choo and Chanukkah

It was with a satisfied sigh of relief that I put the final touches on a Jimmy Choo shoe cake late last night.  This creation was for my daughter's birthday today and I had been slightly worried that I wouldn't have time to finish it in time.  Luckily she had said that she didn't actually want a birthday cake since she was a) "caked out" with all my recent baking, and b) she was desperate to have pumpkin pie.  So pumpkin pie it is for tonight's celebrations.  Nevertheless, I needed something to make the shoebox, so I cut off a wedge off one of my mega Christmas cakes I have been serving at the theatre, re- marzipanned it and covered it with fresh fondant.  The whole shoebox is only 12 x 7 x 4cm.  The shoe is not perfect, but overall I was pretty pleased with the result. A great many hours, and countless failures along the way were all made worthwhile when I saw her smile this morning as she was presented with her little cake.

Last week I decorated this fruit cake as a Chanukkah cake for a wonderful lady to whom I am much indebted to.  Encouraged by my turquoise Christmas cake I had decorated earlier and knowing this lady also loves turquoise,  I experimented with turquoise, blue and silver for this cake.  I daresay I like it better than my original!!!!  Maybe I'll remove the silver border and change it to blue rope with silver balls as well......:D

"Dickens by Candlelight" has kept me inordinately busy with cupcakes and Christmas cake, but it has been an invaluable launch pad for me.  Much praise has been received for my cakes and my business cards have been snatched up eagerly.  Sales have been brisk, albeit the few times when the audience has been small, so there weren't many potential buyers to begin with.  Lessons have been learned, methods streamlined and this week it is already becoming routine work for me.  The first week I massively overestimated sales, or rather, was paranoid of running out and sadly had to throw a great many cupcakes away.  Last week I was left with less than a dozen extras on my hands.

Best of all, I now have four cake reservations for the coming year!  I also have a cupcake order for a teenage birthday this Friday.  Originally the client did want me to make a cake, but with so much going on there was no way I could foresee that I could fit in another cake.  So piggy cupcakes it is.

I am overworked and tired these days, but also very happy.  Decorating cakes and baking in general gives me great pleasure; especially when a new experiment is successful.  Watching people enjoy my cupcakes or christmas cake at the theatre fills me with a sense of satisfaction.  And who could resist the pleasure incurred from all the lavish praise!

Now it is time to roll up my sleeves and get to work on the TLS "Dickens by Candlelight" cast party cake for Sunday...............

Cupcakes and Christmas cakes galore!

Sunday evening and I am one pooped out cake baker!  Four nights of selling my cupcakes and Christmas cake for TLS have kept me very busy indeed.  As mentioned in my last post I have several orders for Christmas cakes and the opening night for TLS's "Dickens by Candlelight" was on Friday.  Last Wednesday  was "sneak preview" night at the theatre and naturally I brought my cupcakes along.  Not many people were there, but all who were, bought my cakes. :D  I brought along my Death by Chocolate, Bourbon Vanilla and a new flavour, Mincemeat and Brandy.  Those who are into raisins really liked the latter.  This was the first time I had gone public with my cupcakes, and it was a relief to see how well they were received.   And well received they continued to be, although being completely new to the game I wildly overestimated how many cupcakes would be needed.  Strangely the mincemeat and brandy cupcakes only sold well on the preview night.  Tonight I didn't sell any at all, which made me a little sad.  Perhaps I will withdraw that flavour and try lemon instead.  Death by Chocolate is definitely the most popular flavour, so I will definitely be making proportionally more of those in the future. My christmas cake was also very popular, especially with the English crowd that came.

Also, the director of the play and founder of TLS was delighted with the toppers I had made, which was good because I was a little nervous that they were too blah.  But they incorporated the group's colours, neon pink, yellow and green and thanks to an old-fashioned potato stamp, each colourful disc had the company logo on it.

So to date all my christmas cakes are all baked; nine round ones and three large sheetcake versions to be sold in slices at the theatre performances.  You should see my decorating "studio" a.k.a the basement; cakes, toppers, fondant on every available tabletop, counter and shelf.  Even the ironing board is doing double duty as a place to put the toppers until they have dried!  Right now I am a little concerned that my mail order for about 20 bags of marshmallows has not arrived and I am fast running out of fondant!!!!!

I also decorated this christmas cake for display purposes at the theatre in my colour; turquoise.  I'm otherwise very pleased with it except that it screams "Douglas GmbH" all over.  For all you non-German residents, Douglas is a chain-store specializing in cosmetics, perfumes and bath products.  Their signature colour is also turquoise.  Surprisingly, no-one at the theatre made the connection........

Father's Day Cake

Strange as it may sound,  in some parts of the world it is Father's Day today.  So to celebrate I made a cake for my husband.  Yes, my daughter should have been the one to do this, but she was swamped with homework and tests to study for.....and I wanted an excuse to bake!  Since hubby detests fondant and buttercream, I  went for something completely different.   This is a vanilla sponge cake filled and covered with fresh raspberries,  blueberries and unsweetened whipped cream.  Then I covered the sides with chocolate cigarillos and the most non-girly ribbon I could find.  the result was very pleasing and my husband loved it!

In the meantime it has been a busy time in the kitchen for me.  I have been fortunate enough to get several christmas cake orders;  you know, those yummy, rich English fruit cakes covered in marzipan and...you guessed it, fondant!  They need about a month or more to properly mature, so my cellar is getting crowded with all the cakes that are stored there.  Also,  I have been given a great opportunity to promote my cakes and cupcakes with TLS, a brand new theatre group.  Check out their website for more information at www.tlsfrankfurt.com.  They are putting on their first play, "Dickens by Candlelight", a modern interpretation of "A Christmas Carol" in Sindlingen.  Performances run for a month and I get to sell my cakes at the intervals!  Great opportunity, but lots and lots of hard work!  On top of all that I have been asked to make their cast party cake for the middle of December.

With all these orders my family is in serious danger of being neglected this Christmas.......but nevertheless I am very excited and full of all kinds of creative ideas at the moment.   I am also itching to practice making carnations and gerbera daisies; flowers that to date I have very little experience with, but would love to be able to make properly.  All in good time, all in good time!

Witch's Hat cake

Tonight I am a very happy blogger.  Since my last post I found a better tutorial on making marshmallow fondant; one that made extensive use of a KitchenAid mixer, and this time I hit the jackpot!  My fondant had the perfect consistency and with the addition of bourbon vanilla tasted devine.

About the same time I received an order for a Halloween-themed birthday cake, so naturally I was  keen to try out my new fondant.  The birthday girl had requested a Witch's hat, but could not decide on flavour or colour.  After a moment's thought and a twinkle in my eye I jokingly suggested a rainbow-coloured vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream filling covered with purple and orange fondant.  I figured this would cover all the bases, but she loved the idea!  And truth be told I loved every aspect of making this cake.

It was fun dividing up the batter and colouring each batch a different colour.  It's a pity I can't show you what a slice would look like......Anyway, since I didn't have the appropriate shaped cake pans to make this cake, I improvised with three different ceramic bowls, the smallest of which was a cereal bowl!  Once baked, cooled, torted, filled and stacked I had to trim the cake into shape.  To say I "sculpted" the cake would be a serious exaggeration.

Once the hat was covered in buttercream it was time for the best part, namely rolling out the fondant.  It was smooth, it was pliant.  There was not a crack or a crease to be seen.  This was bliss!  I felt like a professional!  It was also time to try my new imprinting mat, which worked a charm!  Positioning the fondant on the cake was somewhat tricky, as I really could have used an extra pair of hands to hold the fondant aloft while I shaped the very top of the hat.  However, both my kitchen elves are in England right now, and hubby was working late.  Nevertheless, I got the job done and all that remained were the hat band, star and moon decorations and the birthday message.  The letters and shapes I had made ahead of time, so that took no time at all.  On an impulse I decided to add pearl lustre to the whole thing.  Together with the patterned "fabric" of the hat, the lustre just made the whole thing better.

Tomorrow the Hat goes to it's new home and I hope it is well received.  Yet even without compliments this cake was truly a feelgood experience.  I get such a rush when things finally fall into place and work the way they're supposed to.  I've been doing cakes for friends and family for as long as I can remember, but working with fondant is a whole new area for me.  Every cake I make is a learning experience.  These days every free moment I have I am working on new techniques, or practicing the skills I already have.  I get an almost child-like sense of happiness when I'm up to my elbows in icing sugar creating flowers and figures out of fondant and icing.

halloween cake

This cake represents two firsts for me: The first time I have attempted a tiered cake and the first time I have used homemade marshmallow fondant.  The result isn't quite perfect, but much better than I had hoped.  The fondant proved to be quite the nightmare.  I had to work it for at least an hour before I could roll it out.  Even then it refused to relinquish it's foam rubber look; in other words it was springy to the touch, and had an uneven quality that was quite prone to tearing.  Once I got the fondant rolled out almost as thin as I wanted and positioned on the cakes, I quickly realized that it was virtually impossible to smooth out the inevitable folds and creases.  The fondant also ripped, and not having the will to spend another hour working with the fondant to re-cover the cake, I opted for some cleverly positioned snakes, bats, cats and trees to cover up the imperfections.

Despite the setbacks and flaws in this cake, it was received with plenty of oohs and aahs by my daughter's friends.  The cake was my tried and tested Devil's food cake with chocolate buttercream filling, so I know it tasted good!  Also, it can well be said that even if things didn't work out the way I had planned them to, there were some valuable lessons learned here so all was not in vain!

Now it's back to the drawing board to come up with a tasty fondant that has the perfect consistency to work with!  Either that or I go back to ordering the professional stuff and try to improve it's flavour.

Marshmallow fondant

It has been a while since I last blogged; one can blame one's day job interfering with the real joy in my life of cake decorating and cupcakes.  Last weekend was cold and wet, so I entertained myself by trying out a marshmallow fondant recipe which so many people wax lyrical about.  Everyone who has ever posted anything about marshmallow fondant has claimed it is easy, tasty and infinitely cheaper than the commercial stuff available.  I've been wanting to try this out for a while, but it took a bit of dedicated research to find white marshmallows in Germany.  They all seem to be pink and yellow.  Eventually I got hold of several bags of the stuff and so I eagerly set to work.  First I melted the marshmallows in the microwave, being careful to stir at regular intervals.  When they had all melted into a smooth, sticky, very, very sticky mass I stirred in some bourbon vanilla and food colouring before coating my hands and my work surface with lots of shortening.  Then I emptied a box of icing sugar on to said surface before pouring the marshmallow goo on top of the sugar.  Next step was to knead the sugar into the marshmallow mix until it had the consistency of play doh.  Eventually the impossibly sticky mass did morph into something that looked very much like fondant icing, but the process was so sticky and so messy that I cannot bring myself to post a picture of me kneading the goo, even if my daughter had great fun taking the pictures!  Suffice it to say that eventually these:

turned into these:


The dark grey turned black over night, which was the intention and these colours will be used to make a Halloween themed cake and cupcakes for this coming weekend.  The orange also turned a more vibrant shade when left overnight.  So far the taste is definitely better than the commercial stuff, but time will tell if it is as easy to work with.

I will poste pictures of the Halloween cakes once they are completed!

Birthday cupcakes

This has got to be the fastest cake project I have ever done.  My daughter comes to me after school all flustered because she has remembered too late that it is a good friend of her's birthday the very next day and there's no more time to shop.  So I suggested a box of personalized cupcakes.  She thought this was a great idea and after a short brainstorming session to determine the overall look and flavour, we came up with strawberry and vanilla cupcakes frosted in vanilla buttercream decorated in flowers and hearts.

Whilst I set to work making sugar paste flowers, hearts and cutouts for the message, Caitlin carefully went about baking the cupcakes.  After the decorations were completed and left to dry, I whipped up the vanilla frosting and covered the cakes.  Meanwhile I recruited my other daughter to cover a shoebox with wrapping paper, as I have yet to order boxes for my cupcakes.

Amazingly all this took only 2 hours!  The next morning I assembled the decorations on to the cupcakes and packed them carefully with tissue paper to prevent them sliding around in the box.  For a rush job we were pretty pleased with the result.  The birthday girl was both surprised and delighted.

With the summer holidays over, I am finding it hard to find time to work out a logo for my burgeoning cake business.  I have a couple of ideas in my head that I just need to try out on paper.  Once this is done I can go ahead and order business cards and labels to stick on delivery boxes.  On a more positive note I have located a dealer who can provide me with smaller numbers of cupcake boxes  at a reasonable price.
At this stage it would be slightly premature to order thousands of boxes!!!!

Test kitchen marathon

Rainbow cupcake

Is this an awesome looking cupcake or what?!  Full credit for this creation goes to Caitlin who asked if she could "play around" with some colours.  This is what one gets when one gives an adolescent free rein in the kitchen!  The cake itself is bourbon vanilla with vanilla buttercream icing and the flavour and consistency has been deemed "perfect" by my panel of trusty taste testers.

In the past couple of weeks I think we baked around 5 dozen cupcakes in various flavours in an attempt to perfect and finalize my repertoire.  Flavours and colours and styles of cupcakes are endless, but I wanted to limit myself to 8 or 9 different flavours with approximately the same number of icing choices.  As I said in the beginning, cakes are my speciality, with cupcakes acting as financial "filler" on the side.
So what did we accomplish?  We perfected the red velvet after a couple of batches and now have one that is a beautiful deep reddish brown that has a noticeable chocolate flavour.  I top that with a much improved upon cream cheese icing that is no longer quite as sweet as it used to be.

We discovered that papaya cupcakes are a disaster!  Papaya flavoured buttercream is ok, but I don't think I will make it a staple product.

Our Tiramisu is to die for!  No really, it tastes just like a real tiramisu cake and we even ice it with lemon flavoured mascarpone cream.  We used real Amaretto liqueur and strong coffee.  Amongst those who tested this cake it was a favourite with the majority.  The only problem we encountered was too much coffee.  This made the cupcakes far too moist, but that will be easy to fix.  We just need to make the coffee stronger and add less of it.

For our coffee lovers we also developed a chocolate mocca cupcake which combines a rich chocolate flavour with enough coffee to give it a bit of a punch.  This one was topped with coffee flavoured chocolate ganache.  My daughter accidentally got the proportions of cream and chocolate "wrong", but the result was devine!!!

Then with an eye for our "gluten free" customers, we came up with a nutella hazelnut cupcake that has no wheat in it.  Ground almonds were used to bind the cake together and it came out tasting almost like a brownie.  Since it was already so rich, we scratched our heads for quite a while before we decided to ice it with whipped cream which had a dash of vanilla and a tiny bit of sugar added.  The combination worked and got a lot of praise from our "guinea pigs".

Finally, having realised that we had an awful lot of chocolate based flavours we decided to try a blueberry cupcake.  I took my tried and tested vanilla recipe and added blueberry puree in swirls.  They came out great, but I could have used much more blueberry.  Then the icing:  At first I tried adding blueberry puree to buttercream, but the resulting colour was so unappetizing that I immediately abandoned that idea.  After a little thought I came up with the idea of using white chocolate ganache.  This proved to be a NIGHTMARE!!!!!   For some reason I kept getting it wrong and I would end up with a curdled, lumpy mess.  600g of white chocolate and a litre of heavy cream later I finally got it right just in time for our friends who had come to dinner to test.  I need to do one more batch to perfect the blueberry-vanilla ratio, but otherwise it's time for the test kitchen to take a break.

Next step;  packaging and logo.  We'll keep you posted!

Checking out the competition

The last week of my summer holiday has been a busy one with regard to Project Cupcake.  My elves helped me bake several batches of cupcakes in the "test kitchen" and  yesterday and today were spent doing a bit of industrial spying.

First the spying.  Elli, Caitlin and I paid a visit to Jenny's Cupcakes,  a cupcake cafe on Bergerstrasse in Bornheim, Frankfurt.  At first glance Caitlin was in love, while Elli recoiled in horror......but this was not due to the cupcakes, but the interior decor.  Picture this; fuchsia pink walls and white faux leather couches. But I digress.  The cupcakes themselves looked very nice, albeit the icing layer towered over the cupcake itself.  On closer observation we noticed that despite the variety of flavours, they only offered chocolate or vanilla flavoured cakes.  The icing came in all sorts of colours and flavours.  Elli chose a raspberry mint flavoured creation, Caitin the double chocolate and I chose the cookies and cream.  All three of us were unanimous in that the cakes themselves were dry and tasteless.  We were also unanimous over the icing, ie not too sweet, but waaaayyyyy too rich. My cookies and cream was unexciting, Caitlin's chocolate with chocolate sprinkles so rich that she couldn't finish her cake, although the best flavour of the three and Elli's was just downright weird.  Within minutes of leaving the cafe we all went into sugar shock and desperately went seeking water and something fresh and savoury to eat.  A chicken wrap never tasted so good!!!  All in all within a scale of 1 to 10, I would award Jenny's Cupcakes a 6.

Today I dragged my friend Maisa to "We Love Cupcakes" on Gartenstrasse in Sachsenhausen.  The first disappointment was that because of the Museumsufer Fest this weekend, it only opened at 13:00, a full hour after we arrived.  It was rainy and miserable weather, but this was only a minor inconvenience.  We  killed an hour having a healthy salad lunch nearby and catching up on the summer's gossip.  So with shining eyes and watering mouthes we returned to "We Love Cupcakes" for dessert.  I have to say, their cupcakes were truly beautiful, with just the right amount of icing perfectly swirled on dainty little cakes and topped with delicate little decorations.  Both of us chose Belgian Chocolate, a dark chocolate cake with a white icing.   They were delicious!  The chocolate was very similar to my own devil's food cake (Maisa wholeheartedly agreed) and the icing was light and fluffy and not too sweet.  It took me a little while to realise it was white chocolate ganache, but whatever, it worked!  Afterwards we regretted not taking different flavours, but somehow the others didn't seem attractive enough.  On closer inspection we realised that all but one flavour out of the nine options were chocolate based one way or another.  Still they were that good that they deserve a score of 9+.

As I have rambled on quite a bit about the competition, I'll report on the test kitchen results next time.  Ciao for now!

And so the adventure begins.....

Sometime last spring, when demands for my cakes made a sudden increase, I began to mull over the idea that maybe I could make a career out of my cakes with the ultimate goal of quitting my day job.  My speciality has always been custom designed cakes, but to broaden my horizons I began to research cupcakes as an alternate method to bring in the income.  I reasoned that cupcakes need far less preparation time than a custom cake, and they can be sold in volume, unlike custom cakes.

My first step was to trawl the internet to see what's out there, who's making them and how, and what is the going price for a cupcake.  The scope and scale was AMAZING!  So I quickly decided that since I still want my cakes to be my primary product, I needed to first define a finite selection of cupcake flavours that I would produce.  Secondly I needed to come up with a signature appearance for my cupcakes.

In the end the latter was the easiest to decide; my cupcakes would be covered with a traditional or a rose swirl of icing and adorned with a single rose or simple flower.

Deciding on the flavours has evolved into a whole summer long project.  My two kitchen elves, Elli and Caitlin have been instrumental in the process.  The first major project was to develop a strawberry cheesecake flavoured cupcake that had a real STRAWBERRY flavour to it.  After much internet surfing and several trial batches we finally came up with a version that has an intense natural strawberry flavour, backed up with a swirl of pure strawberry puree.  We top this cupcake with a strawberry flavoured cream cheese icing.  All of my loyal taste testers have agreed that it is awesome.  This picture is of the very first version we did.

Strawberry Cheesecake

Over the summer we also perfected the following flavours: Carrot Cake, Lemon, Vanilla, Chocolate Zucchini (which we have christened "Death by Chocolate").  In the process of being perfected are; Red Velvet, Tiramisu and Chocolate Moccha.  Red Velvet needs to be more chocolate flavoured and as I speak I have a fresh, newly tweaked batch in the oven. I'll let you know how they came out in the next post!  Tiramisu was fabulous, but far too moist.  That one should be easy to fix too.

That's all for now!