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-