Bulldog Cake - Nashville Birthday Cake

Happy Sunday!  And happy holidays to all my readers!

I got to make my first yule log cake this week!  The kitchen looked so festive as I was decorating it.  I got a little crazy with the edible glitter, so it looked like it had snowed all over the floor too......oops. 

The yule log was made with a delicate vanilla sponge cake, filled with a fresh raspberry mousse, and frosted with dark chocolate ganache.  I had to...ahem..."taste test" one of the ends I cut off and it was delicious!  The berries, holly leaves, and pine boughs were handmade out of white modeling chocolate, and the white buttercream was dusted with edible glitter so it sparkled like real snow!

"What does all that have to do with a bulldog cake?" you are probably asking yourself...well nothing really.  I just love the Christmas holiday and wanted to share a little of my Christmas joy with you!!

So, now back to the regularly scheduled programming.  As the blog title would suggest, this week's actual featured cake is not the yule log, but a sports cake featuring an awesome bulldog!

One of my favorite parts of creating cakes is working with the client to design the cakes....and this cake was no different.  Debbie wanted a football themed cake that was a real guy's cake.....a growling bulldog, a football and helmet, and sports logos from all the teams for which "Mr. All-American" had played.  

The football, helmet, and bulldog started out as blobs (very technical terms here) of rice crispie treats which I carved into the basic shapes, and then covered with a thin layer of white modeling chocolate to make them smooth.  I covered them with a second layer of colored modeling chocolate and then added all the details.....so each piece is 100% edible!  

The football and helmet were fairly straightforward, but the bulldog took hours to get right.  I keep tweaking a little bit here and there, adding some here, carving away some there, but finally he looked just the way I wanted: mean and fierce.  The teeth and spiked collar were the finishing touches!

The field is the actual cake part, frosted with green buttercream to look like grass.  The "grass tip" is one of my favorite cake decorating tools.  It is very versatile and adds a great texture.

On the sides of the cake were logos from several local and professional teams.

Happy Birthday to "Mr. All-American"!  I hope it was great!

I also delivered my last wedding cake of the year yesterday.  Creative Crumbs has grown so much in the last year, I can't wait to see what more 2013 will hold!  I'll be putting the finishing touches on my new kitchen space over the next few weeks and then the grand opening will be in January!

Very Hungry Caterpillar Birthday Cake

Happy Sunday!  It’s a beautiful fall day here is Nashville!  I’m so excited about some new things happening here at Creative Crumbs…it’s truly amazing to see my dreams grow and blossom almost every day!  

I’m really looking forward to checking out some new kitchen spaces this week as I’m rapidly outgrowing my current one!  I’ll definitely keep you updated with stories and pictures along the way…. 

This week’s featured cake was a fun, nostalgic one for me.  I loved The Very Hungry Caterpillar when I was little…actually I loved all of Eric Carle’s books!

It’s so much fun to do kid’s cake as an adult….it’s almost like getting to play with finger paints all over again!

This cake was for a 1-year-old’s birthday.  I drew out two ideas based off the book, and mom picked the first one.

I started by coloring all my fondant….I mixed up a base color (like blue), then added some other colors (a little bit of light blue, purple, and green for exanple) and swirled them together without mixing them in completely.  You can see the mottled color of the dots here:

And then all my dots:

I made Mr. Caterpillar out of the same colored fondant and placed him top of the cake with a number 1.

So cute!  One of my friends even said she wanted a cake like this for her birthday!  Ha!

Happy baking!

Rockstar Drum Set

Happy Sunday!  For living in Nashville my whole life, I’ve actually done a surprisingly few musically-themed cakes.  Aside from the very popular “Grammy Cake” as everyone calls it now and a groom’s cake, this week’s featured cake is the only other one I’ve made.

I created this cake for a little girl turning 8-years-old who thinks she’s a rockstar!  Her mom wanted to get her a drum cake for her birthday.  So, I sketched some ideas for her, and she picked the full drum set!   (I found out after I sent the sketches that the birthday girl HATES pink!  Oops!  So, we went teal for the actually cakes)

I made four 6” cakes and covered each one with fondant.  To really make the drums look dramatic, I painted some of the details with edible silver dust so they would really shine! 

The base drum in the middle is actually made out of rice crispy treats.  Cake would be much too soft to stand up like that, but the rice crispy treats are firm enough to hold up.

The cymbals are made from gumpaste, a sugar paste similar to fondant, but it dries rock hard.  The drum sticks are made from gumpaste too.  So everything is edible!

The cakes were a huge hit, but we ran into a little trouble on delivery….   I make sure all my cakes will fit in a standard residential refrigerator, but this family had a custom fridge built into their cabinets, and, unfortunately, the size was different.  So, it took a little, uh, rearranging (and some removing of the shelves in the door) to get it to fit.  There's never a dull moment!

 Happy eating!  Stay tuned next week for a from-scratch strawberry cake recipe that is AMAZING!  

Snoopy Birthday Cake

Happy Sunday!  A couple of years ago, I made a Peter Pan cake….well the birthday girl is apparently over Peter Pan, but she likes Snoopy now!  So, this year the challenge was to make a Snoopy cake.

I sketched out a couple of ideas since I wasn’t sure exactly what they wanted.  (Sketching is actually one of my favorite parts of the cake process.  Its gets my creativity flowing and makes sure the client and I are talking about the same thing!  No surprises on delivery that way!)

Mom selected the middle sketch, and only needed it to feed about 10 -12 people.  Since everything I do is custom-made, I don’t use shaped cake pans or anything like that.  I bake larger cakes then cut out and carve away the extra cake to reach the shape I want.

For this one, I baked a 10-inch square cake, then printed a picture of Snoopy’s head that was about the size I needed.  I used that as my guide for cutting the cake.  (Those extra cake scraps help with quality control....at least that's what I tell myself as I'm snacking on extra cake!)

The shaped cake first got a coat of chocolate buttercream, then a covering of white marshmallow fondant.

I tried to paint the black lines a little rough and jagged to make the cake look more like Charles Schulz’s iconic drawings.

In other news….drum roll please……I now have a Facebook page!  Check it out and “like” my page for updates and even more cake/catering/class pictures.   If you’re on Twitter, you can follow my Twitter page too!

Turning the big 1-0!

Happy Sunday!  I made this week's cake for a little girl I used to teach....well she might not want to me to refer to her as a "little girl"...she just turned 10 years old!  

The birthday girl asked for a pony cake, a pink pony cake to be precise.  Her mom sent me a picture of her pony, Timmy, 

so I thought I'd decorate the sides of the cake with ponies made out of white chocolate modeling chocolate, and write with pink buttercream.

I started with a simple, but delicious vanilla cake. 

While the cake baked, I shaped the ponies out of white chocolate.  

Then I trimmed the cake in pink buttercream, and added the white chocolate ponies to the sides of the cake. 

  

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth!

Coconut Cake with Sour Cream Buttercream

Happy Sunday!  Many of you may remember the Rubik's Cube cake I made for my sister's birthday last year.  Well this year, she requested a coconut cake.  A quick Google search revealed a gazillion coconut cake recipes, but most were made with cake mix and coconut cream..... neither of which was a I very keen on using. 

So I did some more searching to find from-scratch recipe that didn't use sweetened coconut cream.  Finally I stumbled upon this recipe on Tender Crumb and it didn't disappoint!  I made a few adjustments and frosted it with a sour cream buttercream instead.

I also really liked this recipe because it was easier to mix up than a traditional cake made by creaming the butter and sugar together.

You start by combining the dry ingrediants.  Then add the butter in chunks.

Mix on low speed.....

.... until the butter is almost blended in.  There should still be a few small bits of butter, no larger than a small pea.

Then, with the mixer running, adde part of the coconut milk...

And beat until fluffy.

Then slowly add in the egg white and coconut milk mixture....

Evenly divide it between two 9" cake pans.  

On a side note: I absolutely LOVE Pam Baking Spray!  Obviously I bake a lot of cakes, and it works better than greasing and flouring, lining with parchment paper, or traditional Pam.  I have never had a cake stick to a pan using Pam Baking Spray.

After the cakes were baked and cooled, I frosted them with Sour Cream Buttercream.  The great thing about a coconut cake is that the frosting doesn't have to be smooth at all.

because it's just going to get toasted coconut pressed on the outside, so there's no need to worry about it.

I hope you can see the amazing texture of the cake.  It was soft and moist with a fine crumb, but it held together beautifully.  The sour cream buttercream added a slightly tangy element that really complemented the toasted coconut and it kept the frosting from tasting too sweet.

Coconut Cake

5 egg whites

½ cup of coconut milk (unsweetened)

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

2 teaspoons coconut extract

3 cups of cake flour

2 1/3 cup sugar

4 ½ teaspoons of baking powder

½ teaspoon of salt

2 sticks of unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 cup coconut milk (unsweetened)

2 ½ cups of sweetened flaked coconut, for pressing on the outside of the cake

Preheat the oven to 350F degrees. Grease and flour two 9" cake pans.

Put the egg whites in a bowl and whisk slightly. Add the ½ cup of coconut milk, vanilla, and coconut extract and whisk thoroughly; set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.  Add the butter and mix on low speed until crumbly.  The mixture should look sandy with a tiny flecks of butter. 

With the mixer on low, slowly add the 1 cup coconut milk.  Increase speed to medium and beat until fluffy. 

Add the egg white mixture in 2 or 3 additions, scraping the sides of the bowl after each addition. Divide the batter among the pans.

Bake for 25-30 minutes or until a cake taster inserted in the middle comes out clean. Allow the cakes to cool in their pans for 10 minutes. Then turn the cakes out and place on a wire rack to cool completely.

To assemble the cake, place one layer on a cake plate. Cover this layer with about 1 cup of frosting. Then sprinkle about ½ cup of coconut on top. Add the second cake layer and frost the top and sides of the cake.

Place the remaining 1 ½ cups shredded coconut on a large baking tray. Pick up the cake and hold it on the palm of one hand over the tray. Using the other hand scoop up the coconut and press it to the sides of the cake. Continue with this process until the sides and top of the cake are covered. 

Happy Baking!

Roller Skate Cake II

Happy Sunday!  This week, I'm sharing another roller skate cake that I made recently.  It was inspired by the one I did about a year ago....maybe I'll do one next February too!


Since I don't have a cake pan or mold or anything that I use, each one of my cakes turns out a little differently, even when I copying a former design.  So, my cakes are truly one-of-a-kind!


I carved the basic shape of the shoe and the base out of a sheet cake.  Then I frosted it with chocolate buttercream, and covered it with fondant.


All the details of the skate, like "stitches", patterns in the "fabric", and laces were then pressed in by hand...and there were a lot!
.  

I painted parts of the skate with edible food coloring to give them some extra dimension.   

Lastly, I added the wheels and stopper....all shaped out of colored fondant.  So everything you see is completely edible and made by hand!

Even the laces and the "wood" board!

The birthday girl was the cutest six year old!  She was so excited when she saw the cake and said, "it was the best birthday cake ever!"  

Tune in next week for photos and recipes from a recent wedding I catered!

Football ... and music?

Happy Sunday!  This week’s feature cake was made for my friend’s husband, Adam, for his birthday.  He is man of few interests: family, music, and Notre Dame football!  This presented a challenge – how to combine music and football into one cake!

His wife, Stefanie, came up with the coolest idea!  A football-shaped cake with a musical score on the laces, and a set of piano keys and a guitar fret instead of the usually white lines on the ends of the football.  I thought it was a fantastic idea…just wish I had thought of it :)

I started by carving the basic shape of the football…very basic at this point!  

Then I went back and trimmed it until I got the shape just right.  Next, I frosted it with chocolate buttercream….oh so yummy!  It takes a little while to get the frosting so smooth.  But, if there are any imperfections in the buttercream, they will show through the fondant.

  

I covered the cake with a reddish-brownish colored fondant.  I usually use crumbled aluminum foil to add texture to the fondant so it looks more like a football.  Unfortunately, I was completely out of aluminum foil, so I searched around the kitchen for something to add texture.  In the back of my cooking utensil drawer, I found my meat tenderizer…it created the perfect look!  Necessity is the mother of invention :)

Next, I cut out a guitar fret and piano keys from white fondant... 

 Then laid them on cake...

 After painting on some details, the cake was done!

The notes on the laces are actually from the Notre Dame fight song! 

Adam and Stefanie were both thrilled with the cake!  It is always so much fun making cakes for my friends!

I've been baking cookies like crazy this week, so next week I'll share several recipes...Molasses cookies, Raspberry almond thumbprints, Chocolate-dipped butter cookies with toasted coconut, and Chocolate peppermint crackle cookies.  Happy baking!

Blue Polka Dot Birthday Cake

Happy Sunday!  This week, I worked on a cute cake for my boyfriend’s niece.  She just turned 13!  She loves blue so the only request was “make it blue”…..everything else was up to me :)

I love polka dots, so I decided to do blue dots in several shades of blue.   The birthday girl loves chocolate (I mean really, what girl doesn’t?), so I had to make it a chocolate cake.  And wow, is that chocolate cake good.  It’s such a simple recipe, but so moist and chocolately!  I couldn’t stop snacking on the cake trimmings!

Even though I would have loved to do chocolate frosting or even ganache (yum!), I wanted the blue to really pop so I settled for vanilla buttercream so it would be white.

After frosting the cake, I cut out a bunch of circles in four shades of blue.  A little tip: you can use a #10 piping tip to cut out circles too.  The small piping end makes really great small circles and the larger end can be used to make slightly larger circles too.  No need to buy more small cutters!

After I laid on all the dots, I mixed up some blue buttercream to write on the cake.

And ta-da!  The finished product!

 The birthday girl absolutely loved the cake!  Happy Birthday, Emma!