Various Winter Bakings

Here are some things that I've been baking this winter. No recipes here but I thought it might be nice to show you some photos. I really need a professional light for taking photos. Short days mean short time periods of when I can photograph, and in dark and rainy Vancouver, the light that is available isn't great. This winter, I didn't even bother trying to catch the light, thus these photos. Oh well.

Let's start with a birthday cake with blueberry jam. I just love those colours.

Next is a Winter Wonderland cake that I made for a potluck. A chocolate cake with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream. Pretty simple and it's all in the decor!

Next is the World's Best Cake, which was a disaster, but which I managed to salvage. The final product is layers of angel food cake, whipped cream, and meringues with slivered almonds.

Next is a dairy free birthday cake. Chocolate cake with meringue frosting. Fluufffyyyy!

And finally, a pretzel cake from Christina Tosi (Milk Bar). Interesting flavours for sure - pretzel, honey frosting, and ganache. A grown up cake for 3 grownups' birthdays.

That's all for now. I'll be here hoping for better weather and lighting.

Chocolate Raspberry Cakelets and Coffee Frosted Mini-Loaves

I was making cupcakes for a birthday party planned for a week later (I tend to bake ahead of time and freeze) and I had extra batter.  It was a great time to pull out my cute baking cups that had been sitting in my cupboard for maybe 2 years and bake off some treats.  I had some tall cupcake liners and mini-loaf cups that my sister had brought back from Japan.  They were super cute, but the opportunity to use them never really came up as I tend to bake for birthdays and other celebrations and they never really fit.  Well, the time finally came! I had a BBQ to go to that weekend so I decided to experiment with some decorating techniques that I’ve been eyeing for a while and pawning off my experiments to my friends.

Chocolate Raspberry Cakelets

The recipe for the chocolate cake can be found here.  For the cakelets, I filled 3 tall cupcake liners.  After baking, I peeled them off because the dark batter soaked through and turned the liners dark.  Hence the inspiration for frosting the entire cupcake = cakelet!

Raspberry Frosting

Ingredients

1 cup salted butter, softened

4 cups icing sugar

1 Tablespoon cream

1 teaspoon vanilla

½ cup fresh raspberries

Directions

Combine all ingredients and beat until smooth.  It doesn’t get any easier than that, folks!

Decorating

Peel off cupcake lining.  Level the top if it’s too domed.  I left mine as is and faked it with frosting!

Roses – I piped roses with Tip #21 and filled in gaps with the same tip.  Here’s a link to a tutorial: http://iambaker.net/patriotic-rose-cake-video-tutorial/

Petal cake – I piped dots in a vertical line using Tip # 12, then used a spoon to smear the dots to the right.  I piped another line of dots beside the smeared first line of dots and smeared them to the right.  Here’s a tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WASVWn4nN6w

Ombre – I coloured some frosting a darker pink than the natural pink from the raspberries.  After putting on a crumb coat and freezing the cake for 10 minutes, I put the dark frosting on the bottom half of the cake.  I frosted the top half with the lighter colour frosting, then blended them together in the middle.  I dipped my spatula in hot water to smooth out the finish.  Here’s a tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAMpdOcfzig

Coffee Frosted Mini-Loaves

I had enough batter to make three chocolate and three vanilla cakes in mini-loaf liners.  The chocolate cake recipe is the same as the above, and the vanilla is from here.

Coffee Frosting

Ingredients

½ cup salted butter, softened

2 cups icing sugar

1 Tablespoon cold coffee

1 teaspoon instant espresso powder

½ teaspoon vanilla

¼ teaspoon coffee flavoring (optional to bump up coffee flavor)

Directions

Combine all ingredients and beat until smooth.

Decorating

I used Tip #103 to pipe the ruffles by holding the piping bag perpendicular to the length of the loaf, with the narrow end of the tip facing me, and moving the piping bag slowly up the loaf.  I switched sides after each pipe.

Verdict: I think that these cakes turned out so cute!  It was fun to be able to try out a bunch of decorating techniques in one session on a small scale.  My friend definitely appreciated the experiments – they especially liked the raspberry frosting.  Feel free to add more or less raspberries depending on your taste – I like intense flavor!