Gluten and Dairy Free Almond Cake!

Hey! Someone had a birthday! It was my mom and, as the title of this post may lead you to believe, she can not have gluten or dairy. While a little more difficult, it's not impossible. In fact, I love baking for my mom because it gives me a challenge.

So I made an almond flavored cake with coffee flavored buttercream. Mmmmm. Delicious. I mixed the gluten free flour myself and it contained white rice flour, millet flour, tapioca flour, almond meal, and flax seed. I found the mixture recipe in a vegan cookie book I own. It worked very well as a cake flour. The cake itself was very delicate but I think that had to do more with the fact that there were no eggs in the cake. Mom can't eat eggs, either. 

Instead of eggs I used a combination of applesauce and baking powder. It works well enough, and makes it very moist, but does anyone have any other suggestions? I know that vegan egg substitutions are mixtures of starches but I'm not sure which ones and what the ratios are... help a girl out?

Coffee is not my favorite flavor, which surprises people because I'm a barista, but this frosting was amazing. I brewed some ridiculously strong instant coffee and used it for the liquid content of the buttercream. Seriously, this coffee smelt burnt and was undoubtedly disgusting but combined with enough sugar all was well. It's one of my favorite frosting flavors I've ever made.
As for the piping pattern I just thought it might be a fun challenge (it was) and something my mom would like (she did.) I wish the pictures were better but they were not taken with my camera so it's hard to see some of it. It's not perfect but I'm very happy with the colors, although I was having a little trouble with Wilton colors not blending well with the vegan buttercream. I've heard that Wilton does that with real buttercream too sometimes so I may start replacing my colors with other brands as they run out.

Oh, and see the cursive up there? I've never done much cursive piping before so I gave it a try. It's good to know and now that I'm decorating cakes for work I should learn how to do it right? What you see in the pictures was probably my 5th try. I had to wipe away buttercream so many times. But I got it eventually. At least enough to be legible. That has to count for something.

xoxo
Stephanie

First Time Fondant

Oh fondant. I already have a love/hate relationship with it. It makes a cake look so pretty but it tastes so awful. Those lovely gum paste daisies aren't so delicious, either.

This was the first full fondant cake I've ever made. It was for my cake decorating classes that I was taking the last few months. There were a couple of things I learned.

The first thing I discovered was that tinting your gum paste with fondant will drastically lighten the color. This really should not come as any surprise as that, like with paint, white + regular color = pastel color. I chose daisies in particular because they're kind of special to me. I also ran out of time to make the chrysanthemums and daisies are easy. They were supposed to be the same neon teal (my camera made them blue) and pink as the rope border.  Oh well, they were still cheery! 

Speaking of that rope border...

While not as bad as I was rolling clay in grade school, my rolling could use improvement. Thin areas here, thicker there. Note to self: work on that.

Those flowers look a little messy. Had this not been for a class and thus classified as "practice" I assure you they would have been cleaned up once the gum paste was dry. I rolled it out a little too thick I think and that may have caused the problem. The leaves turned out surprisingly clean and that could be because I rolled the green a lot thinner.

Biggest lesson: black is hard to make. Yes, I wanted a black cake because it would really make the bright colors pop! Plus, a black, pink, and teal cake is very Stephanie. I used a chocolate fondant as a base and after adding what seemed like way too much black gel icing color I stopped at the color you see there. The colors still popped but it wasn't as dramatic as I had envisioned. It is my goal to one day achieve true black.

Confession time: I used a box cake. When I made this cake I had less than a week before I moved and a lot of my good stuff was packed.  It was still enjoyable and it served it's purpose as a way to display butter cream and fondant.

This cake concluded my cake decorating courses. Hopefully I'll be getting more practice in and out of school this coming year. I'm already planning my next cake and it will certainly have fondant. I bought some fun silicone molds and I can't wait to play around with them. My plan for next time is to make my own fondant from marshmallows. I did that once before and the taste is so much more pleasant than anything store bought that I've tried.

xoxo

Stephanie

Blueberry Tree Cake

Hey. This cake looks familiar. A month and a half later, my life is out of moving boxes and it's time to show the world. Here is is: the blueberry tree cake. Complete with pine cones.

Blueberry seems like a funny cake flavor, doesn't it? That's what I thought too when my wonderful boyfriend said that's what he wanted for his birthday. The conversation went something like this:
Me: "What kind of cake would you like for your birthday? I'll make anything you want!"
Michael: "Hmm.... blueberry. With trees on it."

That, ladies and gentlemen, was what I had to work with. So I started brainstorming. How could I make a blueberry cake? It was during this brainstorm session that I remembered the strawberry cupcakes I had made last Valentine's day. Those were delicious! In theory I could easily swap the strawberries for blueberries and it would work. I was very confident about this.

Tell you what, it worked. Peek underneath the cut to see how I did it.

Moving Madness!

My life is chaos.

Okay, maybe it's not quite to the chaos level, but it's positively stressful. I'm in the process of moving to a place seven hours away and we don't have a place to actually live yet. My house is full of boxes. Some of those boxes are filled, most are not.

The point I'm trying to make is that my blog posts are suffering for it. My apologies. For an example of how behind I am here's a cake I made almost two weeks ago and have yet to post:

In the next few days there will be a large post about it that I'm pretty excited about. This cake was SO much fun to make.

I also have some t-shirt revamps coming up. With all the packing and cleaning, it's hard to find time to blog. Thanks for the understanding.

xoxo
Stephanie

Buttercream, Royal Icing, and Gum Paste, Oh My!

It has been awhile since I've talked about my cake decorating classes. I'd like to first apologize for that; life has been a wee bit insane lately. So much to do and so little time to do it.

The second class of three is flower decorating. I am thoroughly enjoying this class. The first lesson we got a little taste of fondant and gum paste, but we'll be using much more of that in the third class. Right now we're working with royal icing, which is super easy to work with and dries hard. This allows for the flowers to keep their shape. Examples of both this and the gum paste are at the end of this post.  

Moving right along... I finished up the last of the beginning class a few weeks ago with this cake:

 

Before anyone thinks I was being snarky with the "Eat Me" written on there, it's actually an "Alice in Wonderland" reference. I just adore those books and when given the assignment to write something on there I couldn't help myself.

Also, please ignore the not-so-great photos. I was having one of those days if you know what I mean.

The cake itself was a lavender flavor, with lemon curd filling and lavender frosting. It was good, but not great. Lavender is hard to work with I've found. Not enough means you can't taste it but too much makes it soapy. Yuk.

So those ribbon roses up there aren't so great for two reasons. The first is that my frosting was a little dry; oops. The second was that my instructor admitted that they never, ever look as nice as the photoshopped ones in the book.

You see, the roses are supposed to look, as the name suggests, like they are made from ribbon. Well, when using the #104 tip the edges come out ruffled. That's great for real looking roses (coming up in my next post) but makes it impossible for these ones to look smooth. One of my classmates put a little piping gel into her buttercream and that helped smooth out the petals a bit so if I ever want to make these again, I'll try that.

 

Hmm... no idea what I did to that leaf, there. My poor, lovely leaf.
Just for fun, this is what the cake looked like inside. It wasn't as moist as I usually like my cakes, but it was still pretty good. Like with those lemon cupcakes, the lemon curd may have been one of my favorite parts.

The first lesson in the second class introduced us students to gum paste and fondant. It doesn't taste great, but it's really enjoyable to work with. Check out these gum paste flowers we all made.

Precious, right? The first flowers, the button flowers, were made by sticking the gum paste (colored with fondant) into a mold that we pressed together to cut out the shapes. You can see the little raged-edges on some of the petals. That can be cleaned up once the gum paste is fully dry.

Also, you can see that I didn't quite press hard enough on the large purple flower. It was my first time and I didn't realize how much pressure you really have to put into that mold.

Next were the pansies. I felt pretty good about these. They're rolled out really thin, cut out with a cookie cutter, then placed on foam. When on the foam we used this little ball-roller to give the edges that wave.

Lastly, the second lesson of this class was our first introduction to royal icing. Well, I'd worked with it the weekend before when I tried out real roses on some cupcakes, but I'll show you all those later. As far as classwork goes, it was the first time using royal icing.

I did a better job with the flowers at home.

When I got to class it was discovered that my icing was a little on the runny side. I made some apple-blossoms and primroses with it anyway. I had the motion down but they were not exactly pretty enough to take pictures of. Sorry.

I did take pictures of my rosebuds! I finally had to borrow some powdered sugar from a classmate to thicken up the icing.

These are the oddest little things. They really don't look like much of anything until you add the greenery (see what I was talking about? Runny icing for those.) Until you add that they just look like lumps. I've seen them look beautiful so I'm going to keep working on them.

xoxo

Stephanie

Bringing the May Flowers

Cupcakes!

I had mentioned awhile back in this post that I was going to start taking Wilton cake decorating classes at my local Michael's craft store. It has been great fun so far and I've already signed up for the next class.

These cupcakes were our third lesson and the most intense. There were three different flowers to make (four if you consider star drop flowers and swirls drop flowers vastly different), along with leaves. May I just mention how much I love making leaves? Seriously, I could decorate a cupcake with just leaves. It would look a little funny, I suppose, but it could be great. They're so easy and can really finish a look. If I had another super villain party it could work... Poison Ivy cupcakes. Oh, the leafy possibilities.

Filling the cupcakes was something else we learned during this lesson and that was really easy too. These particular cupcakes were lemon flavored filled with lemon curd. The cupcakes themselves were not spectacular, in my opinion. I tried a new recipe and was not impressed with it. Everyone else who ate them enjoyed the cake; the cupcakes were dense yet moist and tasted like lemon so I shouldn't complain considering that's what they were supposed to taste like. They didn't satisfy me, though, so I won't be sharing that recipe here.

Adventures in Gluten-Free Baking

I love having company over. It's a lot of fun and I make a lot of food. One of the greatest joys I get from baking is the happiness it brings to other people. Unfortunately, some of these people can't eat what most others can. Namely: gluten, eggs, or dairy.

As I mentioned in my last post, I had a house guest last weekend that needed her own specialty cake. It was interesting for me to bake this way; very different. There were some challenges (guar gum is harder to find than the much more expensive xanthan gum) and uncertain moments (don't know how I feel about those fake butter sticks...) but overall, it turned out great.

 For the cake I used the same chocolate cake recipe from Martha Stewart that I used before in this post, but changed it up a bit.

Instead of regular butter I used Earth Balance vegan buttery sticks, almond milk instead of cows milk, applesauce and baking powder took the place of eggs, and I found some gluten free flour and guar gum. I'm glad I found the guar gum in bulk because I only needed a little bit.

Just a little note: I used 1/4 cup of applesauce plus 1 tsp of baking powder per egg. It worked really well.

The Girl Wonder | Cake and Cookies

Du-du-du-du-du-du-du-du-Batman! This may be the best cake I've ever baked for myself to date. Oh, and others. That sounds presumptuous but it may be a little bit true. Luck was on my side this time.

You see, I have this funny little habit of trying out new recipes when I'm going to be feeding other people. I always need a reason to try something new but this can be a little frightening because I won't know how it tastes until everyone already has a piece. If it's terrible then that's it. No back up plan.

I knew this couldn't fail, though. I chose my recipes from Martha Stewart (genius) and Rosie from Sweetapolita (love this blog), both of which I've tried recipes from before.

I'm a chocolate lover and the words "Ultimate Chocolate Cake" from Martha kind of sold me. The inclusion of coffee was great because I always have good coffee in my home and from what I understood it would really bring out the chocolaty flavor. It did not disappoint. It was moist and dense and all those wonderful things a cake should be.

To tone it down a bit I decided to go with vanilla frosting. Going back to that whole "trying new things without a test run" I decided to give Swiss Meringue Buttercream a try. Rosie always makes it look so beautiful and delicious. She recently put up a blog post all about it, how could I fail with perfect step by step directions? I may not go back to powdered sugar buttercream for a while because this stuff is delicious. It has a way more subtlety sweet flavor than regular buttercream and it is so easy to work with!

Once the base was made up I added some yellow dye and two vanilla beans and I had what you see here. I made those little ruffles with a 104 decorating tip, to make it as feminine as a Batman cake can be, and I am very happy with the results. They're not perfect, but again it was a first, and the buttercream was very forgiving.

I love those little vanilla seeds. I couldn't tell you exactly why, but they're great.

The Batman logo I made out of marshmallow fondant. Surprisingly, not a first, but I'm still not sure about the consistency of the stuff. It held it's shape well enough, but I can't help but think it should have been a little firmer. I've never worked with fondant that I haven't made myself so hopefully after those decorating classes I'll have a better idea about it.

Oh, and speaking of fondant. I made party favors. 

Simple pink roses

I'll just be giving a quick post today, but I have something more exciting coming up tomorrow! Promise.

I love cake decorating, but I've only just begun and haven't got the hang of anything particularly difficult yet. I haven't, for example, made successful flowers. I kind of made daises once but they weren't anything to brag about. I didn't even use them on the cake. Sad, but it's true.

While not giving up hope but still wanting to do something lovely I was super excited when I saw this rose cake over at "i am baker." So adorable! So easy! I wish I had thought of this.

Want to see how to do it?

The luck of the Irish

I am super excited about this cake I'm showing today. Bailey's Irish Cream Cake. 

You are interested, yes? I had first tried it a couple of years ago during a family gathering at Michael's parent's house and it was delicious. Oh, and the glaze. It is amazing and now that I know the recipe it's no wonder. There's butter involved.
I'd been wanting to eat this cake again (and again and again) and I finally asked for the recipe so I could bake it up for St. Patrick's Day. It's ridiculously simple. So much in fact, that I felt I needed to add a challenge.

Inspired by the Bake it in a Cake method I decided that I should put little shamrocks in the cake. Could I do this, was it worth the effort? Um, of course.

Bailey's Irish Cream Cake
1 pkg. (18 oz.) white cake mix
3.4 oz. pkg. instant vanilla pudding mix
4 eggs
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup oil
3/4 cup Bailey's

Bailey's Irish Cream Glaze
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1/4 cup water
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup Bailey's