Finally!!! Zebra Stripes :D

Ok. You remember that cake in the last post? The zebra peace sign with lime green and hot pink accents? Yeah... So it was the night before the cake was due. And my sister swore that over the week she had perfected the ever eluding red velvet cake. I went to her house and tasted a cupcake or two. Frankly, I don't care for red velvet. Never have. It tastes odd to me. But these tasted pretty good for a cake that I don't even like. After a well deserved high five, we got started on the cake.

We baked it off and made the cream cheese icing. 

After the cake was done, we took it out of the oven, let it cool, took it out of the pan, set it on a cooling rack, covered it with wax paper and towels. And we went to bed. It was late. The next morning, we got started right after breakfast. We shoved the cake in the freezer to let it set up so we could carve it while we made the butter-cream frosting for the pink and green accents. Butter-cream is pretty simple and easy to make. So while she was finishing that up, I pulled the cake back out and we dirty iced it. Then we remembered we had to carve it. So I got the little icing spatula out and got to cutting out the shape. Which ended up looking pretty nice, but when I was done the cake had softened again so we had to put it back in the freezer. This whole process took a lot of putting it in and taking it out of the freezer. A rather annoying addition to the already time consuming process. Anyways, I cut out some zebra stripes from store bought black fondant. I wasn't sure the stripes were going to turn out very well. But they ended up looking pretty good. I covered them with a damp paper towel to keep them pliable and not hard. My sister iced the cake with the cream cheese frosting and I strategically placed the zebra stripes (more like randomly). Then I used the butter-cream dyed hot pink and piped her name and 'happy 18th' on the cake, we filled the inside with lime green and piped around the cake in lime green as well. My friend loved it and said that the whole thing was gone within a day. (: It made me pretty happy. (:

-you know I'm sugarlaced-

If You're Going to Fail, Fail Epically

Ok. So my friend ordered a cake for her eighteenth birthday, September 25.She wanted a zebra peace sign red velvet cake with hot pink and lime green accents. Decorations? No problem. Red velvet? Big problem. 
My sister and I had never made red velvet before, so we were a bit nervous. We failed, let me count, 3 times. We practiced two weeks before. And we got a cake that tasted horrible. 

The next weekend, we tried it again. And got a big red biscuit. My sister had done everything right in baking it. Until she forgot the sugar.

So this is what happened to my sister. Just kidding but it made an awesome picture

So they say, when you fail, try again. And so we did. We went to Walmart and got some more of the ingredients and went back to her house to bake it off. Everything was going great. We used Crisco Oil instead of Veggie Oil. We put it in the oven. It smelled amazing. And then we failed. The cake was so greasy. The Crisco oil had gone bad somehow and it was terrible.

But we still used it to practice the sculpting. (:

It ended up looking pretty ok. (: But it tasted like oil. Well. You win some and you lose some. It's life. 

-you know I'm sugarlaced-

Friendship Friday :D

Ok. So for those that don't know what Friendship Friday is; Friendship Friday is when the Seniors in English Literature go down to the Special Ed classes and we take the challenged kids (our age) around and come up with fun things for them to do that get them out of that classroom and make them feel like they're normal. Now personally, I adore mentally challenged people. Oh. And old people. They're hilarious and they are such characters. Just not a lot of people want to give challenged people a chance because they don't know how to relate to them or what to say. Well, some of them, you just treat like you would a child and others, you can talk to like you would anyone. They're just a little bit slower in processing information than you. So anyways, I love Friendship Friday. And for our first one, I wanted to make a good impression. So I decided to try out  a recipe I found online. It's called Double Chocolate Marble. And lemme tell you, it tastes ah-mazing!  This is the recipe:


Ingredients: 
6 eggs
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup (8 oz tub) sour cream
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I use Hershey's)
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
Dowel sticks or tooth picks
--------
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup sugar


Ok, well, that's all you need. There is a line between those two parts so you don't get confused, even though I'm certain you already are. :P  The 1/3 cup cocoa and etcetera is for the marble effect. Don't add it into the other mixture. I'll explain how this works. I didn't take pictures of the actual making because my camera was dead. So I apologize but, I will be taking pictures when I make my friend's eighteenth birthday cake this weekend and I will take pictures when I make the Fall cupcakes. I hope that will make up for it. 
At first, pre-heat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease (I use cake release by Wilton) and flour a 10-inch round cake pan. Or in my case, a silicone cupcake tray. Then you can start making your marble effect mixture. Take everything that was listed under that line (cocoa, and sugar) and combine it. Separate the eggwhites from the yolks. The recipe says to go ahead and beat your eggwhites and then to set them aside and I did, but by the time I was done with everything else, they had started to get liquid-y again. So I suggest holding off on that. With the mixer, mainly because I don't know anyone that can do this by hand, cream your room-temperature butter with the 1 cup sugar and brown sugar. Beat in the egg yolks and add the vanilla and sour cream. In a different bowl, stir the flour, cocoa, salt and baking soda. Beat into the creamed butter mix. Then in a large bowl, beat the 6 egg whites until they are stiff (fluffy and not runny) and stir in about 1/3 of them into the batter to lighten it. and then fold in the rest gently. But make sure it's folded in well. Put a little in your pan of choice (cake or cupcake), maybe about a fourth of the way to the top. Then get a spoon and sprinkle some of your marble effect mixture on top of that. Add some of the batter, then the powder mix, and so on with the layers, ending with the batter. Get a dowel stick or a tooth pick and swirl the cupcakes or cake but DO NOT STIR. Bake at 325 F for 105 minutes (1 hour and 45 minutes) or until it's done. 


So that's how I made my cupcakes. Well the base anyways. I also made butter-cream frosting. Both regular and chocolate. It tasted pretty great. But I messed up and got my measurements confused and I put too much Crisco in it. So when they got warm from being  out of the fridge. The frosting started separating. Which looked funny. But they still tasted pretty epic. (: I think this is now my favorite cake type. (:

This is what the cupcakes looked like after the frosting decided to be mean. My camera had been dead so I didn't get a picture of the before.

This is my buddy from Friendship Friday. I had to blur out his face. But that's him. He's pretty awesome. He loved the cupcakes. He nommed on them pretty fast. We played soccer, visited teachers and ate cupcakes (:




-you know I'm sugarlaced-

Bundles of Stress and Loads of Cake

Ok. So I'm terribly and horribly sorry. I've been away for a rather long time. But I've still been baking. (: You see, I got extremely busy with cakes and school and trying to send in transcripts and studying for both the SAT and ACT. So I have a few posts coming up that are long overdue. I have made two cakes for munnies, one coming up this weekend, and one for munnies on the 30th. I plan on making Bakerella's little jack-o-lantern cake pops for Halloween. They're on that video, I think. I couldn't find them again on her site. And some cute little Turkey Cake Pops for Thanksgiving along with some cute little Double Chocolate Marble cupcakes with butter-cream icing and little fondant leaves covered in luster dust for pretty-ness. (: So I have a lot ahead of me and I'm looking forward to the cold weather, hot cocoa, and the holidays. The holidays = lots of baking for me! (: Yay! So here comes several posts that are over-due.

-you know I'm sugarlaced-

Race for the cupcakes!

August 21. 2010. I've already explained how the majority of my day went. But now it's time for the cupcakes. The little awkward things that I was most proud of out of everything I had done that day. Somehow, during the rushing around to make the birthday cake for my fabulous mother, I managed to make these adorable, awkward yet delicious cupcakes. You see, my boyfriend pays for everything and he's so good to me. I just wanted to do something special for him and since I don't have a job just yet, I couldn't buy him anything; besides aren't the best gifts the ones that are made with love and by your own two hands?
At first, I made them from scratch. I won't lie, it didn't work out. I must've missed something but instead of chocolatey goodness, we got these.
Now don't feel bad, I don't understand either. I'm certain you see the little yellow dots on them too? I'm terribly confused. But oh well. We taste tested them (what baker doesn't eat her goodies?) and they were ok. But come on, just ok? This is my anniversary; just ok wasn't going to cut it. So I grabbed a cake box mix (I curse myself) and went back to work.

Looks much better than the original batter. The other one had floaties. Bleh. 
And baking that got me this. Chocolatey goodness. So while waiting for those yummy concoctions to cool, I made some chocolate buttercream icing. I had originally wanted to make Swiss Meringue Buttercream, but when we tried to make it, it looked all watery; nothing like icing. So we went with buttercream.

The icing is just a normal buttercream recipe and some added cocoa. I eyeballed it. :P Then it was time to ice them, so I used a Ziploc bag, cut a corner, put a icing tip in it (I used the bigger simple circle), screwed it on, and made counter-clockwise swirls like DC Cupcakes does. I then took some strawberries, washed them, and dried them. I melted down a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips and dipped the strawberries in it and put the strawberries on the top. They sat in the fridge for a while to set and then we put them in a rectangle cake pan and put them in the freezer for me to come and get the next day.

So this is about how it went. My boyfriend knew nothing of these cupcakes the whole time, not even when we were all piled in my sister's kitchen for my mother's party. So the morning of the Anni, I got him to take me to my sister's to 'drop off some coffee' and I picked them up. I carried them to the car with a small kitchen towel covering them. He looked really confused but didn't try and peek when I told him he couldn't see until we got to his house. Instead, he bugged me with questions about what it could be the whole way. XP Once we got there, I set them on the counter in his kitchen and uncovered them. His face? Best look ever. He immediately kissed me in thanks and dove into the first cupcake. I think that's the best praise for a job well done. (: When you've worked so hard on something and you can see that the person it was for absolutely loves it. Random brainstorm? Sometimes the best thanks is unspoken, I think. His dad got one too. :P They were really good, and it's a simple recipe for such a classy look.  The rest of our day was amazing. (:

-you know I'm sugarlaced-

Happy Birthday

August 21, 2010. Ok. So this was how my morning started. 
Coffee and a poppy seed muffin. Which mind you, I had never tried before. Pretty good though. Lemon-y.
Anyways, I had to make my mother's birthday cake, pumpkin pies and my anniversary cupcakes within the course of like a few hours. Its ok though, I'll have to get used to it for my bakery. So we sat down to eat some breakfast and attempted to ignore little children as we plotted the cake's design. Checked the time, not much time left. Luckily we had baked the cakes off the night before. So we just had to stack them and dirty ice them. 

 The concept here was rather simple. Shove together two cakes, put a layer of buttercream on them, add the icing you really want, decorate and top with fondant lid. Yeah, easier said than done. But not too bad. Next we iced it in blue buttercream. Then we used lollipop sticks to make a argyle print in the icing. After that we used cupcake pearls for the apexes. I did it once and the argyle wasn't even so the pearls weren't either; so my sister re-did it. The argyle was still uneven but the pearls were straight. We made the lid out of home-made rice crispy treats. Then we worked some epic magic on the fondant. We used store bought fondant (tastes like ass) due to lack of time. It was just one of those random successes I guess. It doesn't look amazing but it looks decent for a kind of first try with fondant, I think. We put the lid on a cake board and cut the cake board so it wouldn't show. Then we stacked the lid on top of our blue cake thing. This would be the finished product. 

The lid ^ What I did was use white fondant to cover the rice crispy treats, cut dark brown into strips to make the ribbon, cut light brown into strips and then shaped it into this bow, rolled black into little balls to make a black pearl bracelet (I also put some confectioner's sugar on a little cylinder to make a clasp), and then I got an edible pen and cut some white fondant into a gift tag shape and wrote on it. That's pretty much it. Well, Mom liked it. 

-you know I'm sugarlaced-

-Phew-

Ok. This weekend has been uber hectic. I had to make my mother's birthday cake, cupcakes for my anniversary, pumpkin pies, and homework. On the plus side, all of it got done, and I had an amazing week, especially as far as my baking endeavors go. I have gotten several requests to make cakes, for birthdays and anniversaries. So I'm super excited. Getting my trademark and business licenses soon. That's more to be excited about. And I just found out that I will be able to go to the university that I want to go to. So everything is currently going great. Most of my requests are for November so that will be an extremely busy month. I don't think I'll be taking any requests over the Christmas holidays, my family gets me then. :P But with all the requests coming in, at least that gives me the opportunity to get used to how busy it will be when I have orders coming in. Only problem is, right now it's just me and my sister. We don't have any other help and we generally have little children under our feet and in the way. So this should be rather interesting, but it's good practice so it's ok.  My friend made me an order form. (: Its so pretty. But right now, it's just being used to keep track of what people wanted and then being thrown away. I'll use it as an actual order form once I get my business license. I'm so excited about what's to come. (: Anyways, I'll post my cupcakes and my mother's cake on separate blogs so that I have room for them without writing a novel on here. :P and that will have to be done tomorrow. It's my anniversary after all.

Happy Anniversary to me and my love. (:

-you know I'm sugarlaced-