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!