Strawberry Shortcake

I made a Strawberry Shortcake themed cake for my niece Michelle who turned 8 last week. Strawberry Shortcake herself and the miniature strawberry shortcake on a cake stand in front of her are made of gumpaste. (*phew* that's a lot of "cake" in one sentence!)

I really enjoyed making the miniature cake. I might just make some more for fun! :)

So anyway, the main cake is madeira cake, strawberry flavoured of course, with strawberry jam filling. I then crumb-coated it with buttercream, and covered it with fondant.


I found these oh-so-adorable, green-striped cupcake cases. So, I of course had to make some matching cupcakes to go with the cake. These are just madeira cupcakes with strawberry flavoured fresh cream topping.


I'm happy to report that Michelle loved the Strawberry Shortcake figurine. Only the kids are not so crazy about the cake. So far, American chocolate cake seems to be the most loved. So, I'm now going to work on finding yummier cake and frosting recipes which are also firm enough to hold the weight of fondant.

Forever Friends

I was surfing the net for cake ideas as usual, when I came across a Debbie Brown wedding design. It was a pair of Forever Friends bears, sitting on a sofa, holding a bunch of roses. It was just soooo adorable, I had to have a go at it.

The sofa is carved out of orange flavoured madeira cake and covered in fondant. I made the sofa a little too big though, so it's not a snuggly and comfy looking as the one in the original design.


The super cute bears are made from gumpaste. I love Forever Friends bears, they're so plush and cuddly. I only wish I had pink petal dust to give them rosy cheeks. This is the first time I've tried ribbon roses and they turned out to be very easy yet pretty!

I stuck on some heart sprinkles to make them look like scattered rose petals. I think it increased the romance level a notch. Hubby reckons it also helps fill up the empty space of the too big sofa.

We gave this creation to a couple of friends who tied the knot over the weekend. I hope they liked it! :)

Gift Box Cake

We celebrated Grandpa's birthday last Wednesday. I never seem to know what cakes to make for men. For children, there are plenty of cartoon characters or cute animals to choose from while flowers are pretty safe for women. A cake itself is so feminine, in my opinion. I think if men could have it their way, they'd prefer a birthday burger or birthday steak or something! :)

Anyway, after some thought, I decided to go with the classic bow cake, but with more 'manly' colours. I went with a square so that it would look more like a wrapped gift.

The cake consists of two 8" square American chocolate cakes. I leveled and torted the cakes and filled them with a mint flavoured fresh cream. I also crumb coated the whole cake with the mint cream before applying the fondant. The chocolate cake and the delicately minty and light fresh cream went very well together indeed. I might try this combination for cupcakes someday.


The chocolate fondant was made by using store bought fondant and adding plenty of good quality cocoa powder. I just kept kneading in more and more cocoa until it reached the right shade of brown. (It was quite a fair bit of cocoa powder!) When the fondant became too dry from the addition of the cocoa, I added a few drops of brown colouring. It turned out pretty yummy! Definitely nicer than ordinary plain fondant. It was like chewy chocolate candy!! :) Didn't I tell you chocolate makes everything yummier??!!

Anyway, the cocoa powder did not affect the texture of the fondant much. It was still very pliable and soft and I covered the square cake very easily, even though squares are so much more scarier than rounds!

I made the bow pieces from gumpaste around a week ahead so that they would have time to dry hard. Then I assembled everything on the day of the birthday dinner itself.

I think this classic bow cake is simple and impressive at the same time. It's not too hard to assemble, so I just might do some more of these in different colours in the future!

Chocolate Eclairs

Had a hankering for cream puffs the other day. Hubby and the kids also love cream puffs, so I decided to make a batch.

I've made puffs filled with fresh cream and also creme patisserie (vanilla pastry cream). I might try custard one day. This time however, I wanted to try making chocolate eclairs. There is a bakery near my shop which sells super delicious cream puffs filled with fresh cream. I decided to do the same but throw in a chocolate glaze to make them eclairs, since I adore chocolate and chocolate just makes everything even yummier dontcha think??!!

You can find the choux recipe for the buns here in my old post. Small round buns are called profiteroles and the larger ones are just choux buns. Eclairs traditionally come in finger shaped buns. Here are the recipes for the creme patisserie and chocolate glaze.

To make the cream patisserie:

1 1/4 cups whole milk
3 egg yolks
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/8 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoon cornstarch
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

In a small saucepan, warm the milk over low heat until it is just hot enough to steam. While the milk is warming, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, flour, and cornstarch until the mixture is completely smooth.

Once the milk is steaming, add half of it, whisking constantly, to the egg mixture. Add the milk and eggs back into the hot milk, continue stirring, and heat it for 1-2 minutes, until the custard is very thick. Remove from the heat, stir in the vanilla extract, and chill before filling pastry.

To make the chocolate glaze:

4 oz semisweet chocolate, chopped
1/2 cup heavy cream

Place the chopped chocolate in a heat safe bowl and set aside. Heat the heavy cream just to boiling over low-medium heat and remove from the heat immediately. Pour the hot cream over the chopped chocolate and stir until it forms a thin, smooth consistency. Set the chocolate glaze aside at room temperature for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Ladybird, ladybird

I made a ladybird cake for Eva to bring to school for her birthday. I baked a plain madeira cake in my stainless steel mixing bowl to get a dome shape. The dome turned out a bit too flat though, so I will be keeping my eyes out for a smaller mixing bowl, to produce more defined dome shaped cakes for future ladybirds!

I leveled and torted the cake and filled and crumb coated it with strawberry jam. Then I covered a third in black fondant, and another two thirds in red. I used pre-dyed fondant, because black and red are the hardest colours to tint. Then I added the spots and the eyes. I think I should have added a mouth, but had no idea how a ladybird's mouth is supposed to look like!

I covered the board with green fondant and used two balls of black fondant and curled wires for the antennae. Since I couldn't decide where to write Eva's name, I used some cupcakes instead for writing her name and also for sticking in the candles.

Ben 10 again

I forgot to add in this post. It was my nephew Ethan's birthday in June and he is another fan of Ben 10! :)

We bought the cake, a yummy chocolate cheesecake and I added gumpaste decorations. I made a 'Four arms', which was supposed to be standing on the centre of the cake. However, his many arms kept dropping off when I stood him up! So in the end I had no choice but to place him lying down.

*sigh*

I think I need to make some glue from Gum tex and water, or at least make royal icing to adhere body parts next time. I've been too lazy and only use water so far.

I hope Ethan liked the cake despite the floored Four Arms! :)

Care Bears and Safari cake

On Sunday we celebrated 3 out of my 4 kids' birthdays together! This meant that there was to be 3 cakes! I didn't think I would have enough time to make all the cakes because on the day itself I was going to have to cook as well.

So, I bought one of them, a Barbie doll one which Eva wanted. Barbie doll cakes are much better iced with buttercream, which is not my forte, so I got my cousin's wife to make one for me. She makes really pretty doll cakes and I asked for purple, which is Eva's favourite colour. All that buttercream piping is amazing! Look closely at the icing 'necklace', it says "Eva"!


For the other two kids, I made a Care Bear cake for Claire, and a safari cake for Solomon. The bottom tier for both cakes are fake (polystyrene), because mainly I was worried that there would be way too much cake for everyone eat and it would end up going to waste. Also, since the base was polystyrene, I was able to work on them way ahead of time. Unlike real cake, you have to decorate it as close to the actual day as possible, to keep it fresh. For these dummy cakes, I was able to complete the bottom tiers days ahead and then work on the top tiers the day before the party. This meant better time management and more sleep!! :)


The Care Bear cake has a gumpaste Sunshine bear on top and also a gumpaste rainbow. I had to make them a week ahead to make sure the rainbow would harden enough to stand. Even then, when I stuck the rainbow into the cake, with some satay sticks for support, it cracked a bit and was threatening to break in half and collapse! Luckily it was okay for the cake-cutting 'ceremony'.

There were also three gumpaste stars which I inserted into the cake with wires. I realise now that wires are more stable if you bend them into spirals (which I didn't, so they were leaning all over the place!). I also drew on the stars' faces when the gumpaste was still wet, so the ink became blotchy. That's another lesson, be patient and wait till it dries first!


As for Solomon's cake, I was initially planning to have more animals, like an elephant, a giraffe and a monkey. However, I prefer cakes which are not too 'busy'; I think there is better effect when there is only one main centrepiece for one to focus on. (Okay.. I was also lazy...)


The lion and the green bushes are made from gumpaste and were also made a week ahead so that they could dry up nice and hard. I really love the lion; he's such a cutie pie isn't he? I'm so proud that he's my very own original design.

I also love these gumpaste bushes...

So there you have it; three cute cakes for three cute kids! :)

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!

Absorbent and yellow and porous is he.

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!


Don't you just love Spongebob and Patrick and all that nautical nonsense? I know I do! :) I made this cake for my daughter Claire's 5th birthday, for her to bring to school. There will be another one for her this Sunday when we have a party to celebrate the birthdays of kids nos.2, 3, and 4! So there will actually be 3 cakes, but I'm only making two, as one of them will be store-bought.

The cake is plain madeira with strawberry filling and a butter cream crumb coat. It is covered with fondant and Spongebob's nose, limbs and shoes are made of gumpaste.

I wanted big googly, innocent, eyes, so I gave him big irises and made sure to add in the reflections, i.e.: the white dots. Also as I'm a stickler for detail, I even put on the stripes for his socks!


I love this cake, one of my favourite to date. The only minor detail that bugs me is that the legs are a bit too small. I had no choice because I was running out of space! :)

Oh well, on to the next two cakes for this Sunday! Will keep you updated!

Fondant fun

Hidey ho! I'm Henrietta the Hippo!

My niece Amelie specifically requested for a pink hippo for her 3rd birthday! I didn't have time to make her a whole cake because her birthday was the day after my huge wedding cake project. It was also her sister, Amanda's birthday!


So I just made her a pink hippo to put on top of her bought cake and let Amanda make her own fondant teddy bear. The other kids also joined in the fun and helped create this one of a kind masterpiece!


We also celebrated Father's Day a week earlier since Big Sis. was home. I made a simple fondant cake from the extra orange madeira cake I had leftover from the wedding cake project. We then topped it with an octopus Annie made and jammed on some gumpaste decorations leftover from previous projects.


Happy Falker Satherhood everyone! :)

(If that didn't make sense... go here!)

My First Wedding Cake!!

Phew! I'm so proud to have completed my very first wedding cake last Saturday!

I must thank my friend Michelle for having such confidence in me that she let me make her wedding cake! I mean it's not like a birthday cake, which one has annually... it's a once-in-a-lifetime wedding cake!!

Fortunately this was her second wedding dinner, which was held at our hometown. The main dinner was the more lavish affair and was held in KL. So that took a bit of pressure off me; at least she already had a nice professionally-made cake in the first event, so if mine didn't turn out too good, it wouldn't matter as much! Well, that was my reasoning anyway...

When Hubby and I came back from our diving holiday to Sipadan, I had only one week left to complete the huge (on my scale; mammoth!) project.

Over the week, I baked many cakes and made plenty of chocolate buttercream. The cake baking was the most time consuming, because I only have one wee oven, and had to bake them one at a time. The 12" cake tray almost couldn't fit into my oven!


So anyway, the bottom tier was two 12" round American chocolate cakes. The second tier was a 10" round American chocolate cake. The third, extra-wide tier, was three 8" round orange madeira cakes. The final top tier was made of styrofoam because I did not want my nightmares of the wedding cake crashing down to come true! I seriously doubted my engineering skills, so even though I always prefer my whole creation to be edible, I had to compromise this time. There was too much at stake!

The two separators were also made from styrofoam and covered in yellow gumpaste. I cut all the styrofoam used by hand, with the aid of a craft knife. It was a lot of hard, messy work, and if I ever do this professionally, I am definitely getting a styrofoam cutter machine thingy!!

So over the week, I cut the styrofoam parts and covered them in gumpaste first, then baked the cakes whenever I had some free time and lastly covered the cakes in fondant. I was doing the fondant decorating right up to a couple of hours before the wedding dinner. Then Hubby and I went early to set up the tiers and to put the finishing touches, i.e.: the real orchids.


I did try making a gumpaste orchid, but it was so much work and too time-consuming that I decided to use real ones. I figured mother nature was a better artist and since we have orchids in abundance here, it would actually be a shame to use fake ones!

During the dinner that night, I was still struggling to push thoughts of wedding cake avalanches out of my mind. Boy was I so totally relieved when the couple finally cut the cake without any untoward incidents!! The cake was then safely disassembled and served to guests.

I must also say here that I couldn't have done it without Hubby's help! He came back one night after a World Cup session to find me frantically fussing over the extra-wide tier! I had covered it in fondant and it cracked and tore at the edges! I was in despair! I did not have the energy nor the extra fondant to redo it and neither could I leave it as it was! Thank goodness Hubby came up with a solution which saved the cake and did not use up too much more fondant!

He also helped me lug the pieces to the car and to the banquet hall. They were quite big and surprisingly heavy! Also not forgetting the words of encouragement which helped prevent me from going insane! :)

*muaks* Thanks Darling!

This design was inspired by one done by The Pink Cake Box. I love the colours and the extra-wide tiers and the floating tiers effect caused by the styrofoam separators. I went through so many designs and in the end, even though this one was tougher to make due to the wide tier, I knew it was extra special. I checked with Michelle and sure enough, she loved it too.

So here it is, my very first (and also very likely my last!) wedding cake!!

In the end I don't think a lot of people even noticed the cake, because it was sitting on the side of the stage in the dim romantic lighting.

But I don't mind. I loved it and the bride loved it, so, "Mission accomplished!!"