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.
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, 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
So…my bears didn’t work out too well. My frosting wasn’t stiff enough, and they sort of drooped over and looked sad and gloppy. Well, who wants to eat a giant glob of frosting anyway? So. No bears. But, the marzipan bees are adorable. So, I just added flowers, and a shell border, and called it done.
I give you: Bees Cake.
1. bees_cake 003, 2. bees_cake 006, 3. bees_cake 009, 4. bees_cake 010, 5. bees_cake 008, 6. bees_cake 007
Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.
No, really…I give it to you. Please, come get the damn cake. 
So this week, I was practicing with star tips and pastry bags and I made a Curious George cake. (Because Igor loves both Curious George and cake.)
I’ve also been experimenting with different truffle recipes, trying to decide which of them I may enter in a candy contest.
This week; white chocolate, pistachio, and pomegranate cream centers. Some dipped in white chocolate, and some dipped in milk chocolate. White chocolate is significantly harder to work with as a dipping chocolate than I anticipated. I probably won’t be doing that again. But the cream center is amazingly good, and the milk chocolate enrobing I think gives a better flavor profile than the white chocolate anyway. I need to try it with a dark chocolate also. I think that may be really good.
I’m going to be doing an instructable on how to make these, with all the steps and the ingredients, because frankly, these are too good not to share.