SpiderFarmer

I’m about to start baking a doghouse cake (carrot cake with cream cheese icing…which should make decorating all kinds of fun), and make chocolate dog and bone for Igor’s birthday. And like any impossible task, I have to try and get the whole thing done before he gets out of school. I’m apparently quite insane.

So, in prep for Halloween, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the little figures that are going to go with the haunted house cake I’m going to bake.

I could use fondant, but it dries really hard, and it doesn’t taste all that great…where as chocolate…well, everything tastes better with chocolate.

I know how to make modeling chocolate with real chocolate, but I was wondering if it was possible to make it with the candy melt disks. Mostly because I have a ton of them, and they come in a wide variety of colors, so that’s a step already eliminated. As it turns out; it works pretty well.

Modeling Chocolate from Candy Melts:

• 7 ounces (200 grams) Candy Melts
• 3 tablespoons light corn syrup

1. Melt the candy in a large pyrex measuring cup in the microwave, 1 minute /half power, then 2 more bursts of 30 secs at half power, stirring at the end of each heating cycle.
2. Grease your measuring spoon with veggie oil or shortening, so the corn syrup will easily slide off.
3. Stir the candy until smooth and lump free, then add the corn syrup. The candy will start to seize almost instantly, but keep stirring until you’ve incorporated all the syrup. You’ll end up with a big blob of warm candy. It’ll have the texture of a tootsie roll. (Well, a warm tootsie roll.)
4. Put your blob in a freezer safe resealable bag and pop it in the fridge. Once your dough is cold, you can take it out, cut off a piece that you want to work with, and knead it until it’s a workable mass.

It’ll be really hard when you first take it out of the fridge. If you have time to let it warm up a bit, it will be easier to work. You can mold it like it were fondant or marzipan. Here’s some pictures at google on the groovy stuff people are doing with modeling chocolate. Wrapped well, you can store this stuff in the fridge for darn near forever.

If you’d rather use real chocolate; here are the ratios for doing that: (keep in mind that for melting chocolate, you may have better results using a double boiler, bain marie, or chocolate pot…although I’ve done it successfully in the microwave; the idea of nuking chocolate tends to make chocolatiers get the vapors.)

Dark Chocolate Modeling Paste:
7 ounces (200 grams) bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1/4 cup (60 ml) light corn syrup

Semi-Sweet Chocolate Modeling Paste:
7 ounces (200 grams) semi-sweet chocolate, chopped
3 1/2 – 4 tablespoons light corn syrup

White Chocolate Modeling Paste:
7 ounces (200 grams) white chocolate, chopped
1 1/2 – 2 tablespoons light corn syrup

Milk Chocolate Modeling Paste:
7 ounces (200 grams) Milk Chocolate
2 1/2 – 3 tablespoons light corn syrup.

Well, I didn’t get a picture of the absolutely finished cake, because of cake vandals but here’s pictures of the BeeDay cake as it neared completion:

1. cake_ bee_ party 012-tweaked, 2. cake_ bee_ party 006, 3. cake_ bee_ party 010, 4. cake_ bee_ party 012

The recipe was a butter chai spice cake with vanilla cream cheese/butter cream icing. It tasted amazing. The flying bees are fondant, the side bees are pressed and painted sugar. The flowers are vanilla royal icing, which dries very hard and so can be transported and put on at the last minute. The butterfly that you can see is a technique called “flow-in sugar”. The butterflies and flowers that you *can’t* see were fondant butterflies that Boy made because he loves his Aunt Debbie. They were final touches and plate decorations. As well, there was a ginourmous fondant rose that was in the center. Seriously huge, it took almost a week to dry, with cotton balls propping up all the petals so that it wasn’t droopy. I’d brushed it with with some edible gold mica. It looked really cool, I wish I’d gotten a picture.

About the cake massacre and cake vandals, it’s best to just remember that some people don’t appreciate anything, and those people will destroy other people’s presents because they think they’re being funny. The HiveMind at MetaFilter had some interesting things to say about it.

So, in prep for the Bee-Day cake, I was practicing basketweave and grass techniques with buttercream icing.

Well, you can’t frost nothingness (sorry sweet-toothed existentialists), so I made cupcakes.  Amaretto spice cupcakes with hazelnut creamcheese icing, to be exact.  Yum.  The groovy thing about making cupcakes to practice is that it’s easy to give away cupcakes.  The bad thing is that the techniques don’t really transfer as well as I’d hoped…in that doing the grass and basketweave on a cupcake gives your wrist plenty of time to unkink before you move to the next one.  Doing the cake, I found myself having to stop a lot and shake out my hand.  I think a less-stiff frosting may be easier, but the cream cheese really gunks up the pastry bag and tips.  Still, I’m in love with the grass, and the little mini baskets turned out to be tres cute.

So, here are the practice cupcakes:

1. cupcakes 007, 2. cupcakes 006, 3. cupcakes 005, 4. cupcakes 003, 5. cupcakes 002, 6. cupcakes 001

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

So, today’s cake was an orange spice cake with buttercream roses and rosettes.

The roses looked way better before I stupidly put the cake cover on the top without realizing that the cake was tall enough that the roses would hit the cover.  So…I had to sort of poof the roses up a little with a paintbrush to stand the petals back up for the photo.  Sigh.  Measurements, I r doing it wrong.

Still, even with that, it’s a pretty cake.

1. roses_cake 02, 2. roses_cake01