Cake for My Litttle Sister

 This past weekend, we happily celebrated my little sister's 21st birthday. She is on a gluten free diet, and her fiance was having a rough time finding a bakery that could make her a gluten free cake. We have a variety of places that make some great gluten free cupcakes, but sometimes a big cake just is better.

I did my best with trying to step up and make her a fun cake for her birthday. The bottom of the cake is an 8" cake with two layers, making it 4 inches tall. The middle, green part is a single 6 inch cake. The top was made by baking two cakes in thoroughly cleaned out tuna fish cans. I have used the tuna fish cans to make my kids little cakes that they could decorate and have all to themselves. They only require a small amount of baking time; I baked them for 15 minutes at 350 degrees. Of course, having such a small top layer gives the recipient their own personal cake, which is kind of fun.

I added a few personal touches, so it wasn't just a generic cake. The book is because my sister loves to read, the rock in the middle is a hearthstone from the game World of Warcraft that she plays, and the syringe on the bottom is because she does all sorts of labwork with blood at school. I realize a syringe is not used to draw blood....but it was the closest I could make and still have a recognizable object.

I also used a new technique on this cake by slightly steaming it before piping the frosting and adding the final decorations. I usually have a problem with cornstarch showing on the fondant, especially with brighter colors, and the steam really helped clear it up. Since I do not have a professional steamer, I was able to use my iron on a steam setting, holding it a few inches from the cake.

Steampunk Christmas Cake

I made this cake a few years ago for a family Christmas party. I really like the look of steampunk items, and wanted to combine that with a Christmas theme. As you can tell, my fondant smoothing skills are not perfect, but I really  liked the end result. Everything is edible except for the support system. Even the goggles are entirely edible. :)

A bit of updating....with cake

I completely skipped many months of writing on this blog. This period of time included my two youngest kiddos' birthdays, along with the birthday of my oldest daughter.

Princess wanted a Jasmine cake. Why a Jasmine cake? I have no idea, beyond the fact that Jasmine is a princess, she is not one of our Princess's favorites. However, my little girl was very sure that this is what she wanted, so I did my best. She blew out all five candles like a champ! The domes and the four pillars are made with gfcf rice crispy treats. I tried using cake, but it just flopped. Squirt thought they were delicious!

Squirt did not offer up much input for his cake, but since he loves Lightning McQueen and Mater, I was pretty sure he would be happy with a Cars cake, complete with toy cars (because there was no way I would be able to make those out of fondant). He needed a bit more help with the candles since he just seemed content to let them burn for a while.

 For Gizmo's birthday she wanted apple pie. The pictures are on my husband's camera, but there really is nothing that neat to see.....it is just apple pie.....with candles. Add to that the fact that she is getting older and I do try and respect that fact that me posting pictures of her blowing out birthday candles is not all that cool anymore. :) She is always complaining that I never make enough pie, so she was very happy with her birthday apple pie. I made three for her and everybody who helped us celebrate, served up with Rice Dream ice cream, and I do believe she almost finished off an entire one by herself.

Cake Friday

In case you didn't notice, I have skipped a few Cake Fridays. Getting back into real life after the cruise has not been so easy, especially when I got glutened soon after. As I have started feeling better, I got the crummy news that it looks like there is even more stuff wrong with me than having gluten and dairy issues. The high levels of homocysteine I have in my blood (which puts me at about double the risk of stroke, heart attack, and Alzheimer's disease) is looking bad, and I now need to get another test done to see if I have a gene mutation that is contributing. At least, that is what I understand of it now. Apparently it is bad enough that I need to go in for a 45-minute consultation with the doctor, for which she insisted that I need to go into the office, and not have a phone consultation that I had hoped for. Bah, Humbug!

So there is my new sob story. I suppose I have not been taking the news so well, and have been extra emotional lately, so I figured my loving family was in need of a Cake Friday.

I had planned out making a chocolate cake with caramel in the middle (yep, dairy free caramel), but the sweetened condensed coconut milk I had previously made never made its way into caramel, despite the fact that I boiled it for five hours. I will be trying again in the future though, as the promise of caramel is just too great to resist. I followed the instructions here. I just ended up filling the cake with regular frosting and sprinkled mini chocolate chips in it.

I am quite happy with my progress with fondant. Even though the fondant I was using was a bit dry, so prone to cracking, I still had a much easier time with it than I did, say, a year ago. That is worth a little happy dance right there.

 Why pink and purple? I have no idea. My only guess would be that Princess has been asking to watch Tangled all day, so maybe I had some inspiration there. I was going to make more realistic gum paste roses, but Squirt was really wanting to "help", so I settled for easy ones. Spike also helped me make them; his is one of the ones on the bottom. :) As I was too flippin' lazy to make better piping frosting, I just used the kind I did for the filling. It is a bit gloopy and messy looking. However, the cake was promptly cut into about 10 minutes after I finished it, and no one complained about the unsightly icing.

Cake Friday

Just one week! That is all we have left before we leave to start our cruise on the Disney Fantasy. The advent chain I set up for the kids is looking extremely short. I am beyond myself excited. It will be a bit of a hectic week with all of the packing and getting things ready that needs to be done, so I am sure it will go by quickly.

The kids really liked the cake I made today. The ship on top was made by baking a small cake in one of my mini loaf pans and then doing a bit of carving. It is a very simplified version of a Disney cruise boat, and not all that accurate, but I did not want to spend hours on it. And in the end, it brought smiles to my hubby and kids' faces, so I am happy.

FYI, it is chocolate cake. :)

Cake Friday

Can you guess what type of cake it is? Hopefully, it is fairly obvious that it is carrot cake.

I have never been a fan of carrot cake, which is probably why I have never made one, gluten-free or otherwise, before today.  In fact, today I came pretty close to never making a finished carrot cake at all. Not one batch of cake, but TWO, completely flopped. I am not sure what went wrong, since the recipe I first used had good reviews. Sometimes cakes just don't work out though. I wish I had taken a picture of the sad mess just so you could feel my pain. They puffed up, overflowed into a big mess, burnt on the bottom of the oven (which had to be cleaned up after each attempt), and then slumped into a nasty looking bit of cake-sludge in the pans. 

For the third try, I tried a slightly different recipe which I found here. It sunk slightly, so I may want to fudge around with the amounts of baking soda and baking powder, or perhaps I just overbeat it. Taste-wise, I thought it was marvelous. The cream cheese frosting was the perfect complement. Since we eat casein-free here, it was tofutti cream cheese, which is actually pretty dandy stuff.

Although this was my first time baking carrot cake, it was not the first time I have made fondant carrots. Just for fun, I thought I would throw in some pictures of a cake I made for Thanksgiving a few years back.

It's a turkey cake, complete with fondant carrots, potatoes, greenery, and white leg poof things (I have no idea what they are called). Since I am nerd, the breast portion of the cake was white chocolate, and the dark meat portions were pumpkin. I suppose this isn't really the correct season to post this, but working on today's cake just reminded me what fun it was.

Cake Friday

Yep...I know....St. Patrick's Day is tomorrow. It was just too close to resist making a themed cake though, especially since tomorrow I will most likely be too busy. The shamrocks are a bit pathetic looking, I admit, but I did have a lot of fun piping them. It is almost meditative to sit and draw with frosting. I have to remind myself to stop before the cake looks ridiculous. There is always a bit of piping that never shows up on a cake. A while back, I started giving the kids what we have come to call Frosting Tattoos. With a little bit of leftover icing, I pipe a design on the back of one of their hands. Squirt has already started holding his hand out when he sees me with a piping bag.

But wait....there is more....

Ta da! My first successful attempt at marbling a cake! I have tried the more common way of marbling that involves putting half the batter, that is normally colored, into the pan first and then covering it with the colored half of batter and swirling it around with a knife. That has never worked for me, so I tried to think of something that would. In the end, I just had two bowls of batter, one colored and one regular, and alternated them with plops of batter into the center of the pan. Afterwards, I just gave the pan a little jiggle, and it was good to go. Unfortunately, my first batch of cakes this morning sunk. I tried to color and flavor the colored portion with lime jello. I guess the cake spirits decided in was getting too cocky because it has been a while since I have had a cake fell and decided to teach me a lesson. Lime juice and green gel food coloring worked much better.

Dr. Seuss Birthday Cake Friday!

In honor of Dr. Seuss's Birthday today, I made a Green Eggs and Ham cake! Well....a cake decorated like green eggs and ham, the inside is chocolate with chocolate chips buttercream filling. The kids all liked the wonky shape of the cake before I even got the fondant put on, so I guess this one is a winner. Since I really wanted it to look like the illustrations in a Dr. Seuss book, I tried a new technique and painted the blue coloring on the bottom and the big black lines. I am pretty pleased how it turned out, especially since it will just be devoured in a couple of hours anyway.

A close up of the decorations.

I tried to get another picture just so the crookedness showed a bit better.

Cake Friday

I thought seriously about not making cake today. I mean, I just made a cake on Tuesday for Valentine's Day. A household can have too much cake after all. Add to that the fact that I am going a little bonkers trying to get the big kids ready for the Young Entrepreneur Fair that they will be participating in tomorrow. But then Spike asked me what kind I would be making, and when I hemmed and hawed about not making one at all, he said, "But, it's Cake Friday." "Yeah, Cake Friday," Princess piped in. So.....I gave in. I did make it easy though and just made some rum cakes. I made mini cakes so that the kid version did not have a rum glaze, but the parent version did. They were very well received and the first batch of 12 disappeared in a matter of minutes. I may put the recipe on here if there is any interest, but as for now I am stinkin' tired and just want to snuggle up next to my hubby and watch something on Netflix. Happy weekend, everyone!

Happy Valentine's Day

Today has been not quite an ideal Valentine's Day. Squirt has been a raging maniac, the big kids have a case of the lazies, and I won't even see my sweetheart until it is dark outside. Since I consider the holiday to be mostly ridiculous though, I suppose I doesn't matter. I did make a cake, however, because for some reason I feel inclined to at least celebrate a little. After all, I have one big Valentine and four little ones. :)

Hope you are having a fantastic day with plenty of love in your life.

Very Late Stuff

Blogging has taken a back burner for a while now, although that is bound to happen from time to time. I thought tonight would be a good night to catch up a little and post some pictures from Spike's birthday (which was all the way before Christmas, so therefore very late). It was pretty low-key, as per his instructions. We invited family over, ate pizza and cake, and just had fun.

He got plenty of awesome presents.

 See how cute his cake is? This was completely his idea. He helped me with the baking and icing, but the decorating was all his doing. The "coal" is fondant balls that he painted with black food coloring. They looked really neat.

 He blew them all out in one breath!

 It worked out really nice that my brother, his wife, and their three cute kiddos had just arrived in town to stay for the holidays. Spike was happy to have his cousin Lincoln there for his birthday. In case you are wondering about the pink leggings, that is Princess attempting a photobomb.

 Spike did not find her attempts as amusing as she did. Haha...

Cake Friday

 Perhaps it is the yearning for warmer weather, but I have had coconut on the brain this week. Our cruise is quickly approaching, but for the time being, I will have to settle for pictures of tropical beaches and coconut cake. I guess that is alright.

I used this recipe from Gluten Free Goddess for this cake. It is a bit different than many cake recipes; there is no need to whip the (vegan or otherwise) butter and sugar first, and the batter is so thick that it requires you to pat it down into the pan to get it flat. But for all the weirdness of preparation, the cake turned out quite nicely. The only change I made was adding a small amount of coconut extract to the cake batter instead of vanilla. My kids kept telling me how good it smelled while it was baking. It does not have a strong coconut flavor, but Brady said that it was just perfect.

The frosting is pretty nice too. It is also from Gluten Free Goddess. My only change to that is that I would probably make 1 1/2 batches of it next time since there was just barely not enough to get the piping done around the bottom of the cake. 

I bought the pretty organic coconut flakes from the health food store, poured them into a glass pie pan, and popped them into the oven at 400 degrees to toast them. I believe it took about 13 minutes, but I could be off since I was not really paying attention. I did make sure to check them every four minutes or so, and give them a little stir. When you can smell them, they are probably done.

Cake Friday!

My husband issued something of a challenge to me, saying that I should bake a cake every Friday....a decorated cake, mind you. I had laughed and thought it was a joke, but he was insistent. I could use the practice anyway, so I accepted the challenge....almost. Instead of making a cake every week, I am shooting for every other week. That should give me plenty of practice without being too overwhelming. Hopefully they do not all end up on Cake Wrecks. :)

 Today's cake was inspired by the snowfall that we got on Wednesday. It was beautiful. Unfortunately, after my children went to bed with visions of going sledding in their heads, it began raining and melted all the snow. Sigh. Now we once again have the brown and muddy look going on outside. Since the winter wonderland outside is not really working out, I tried to conjure up some inside. I have decided to call this my icicle cake.

In trying to make the hard candy, I burnt the mixture twice. My mind was just not in the mood to stay focused today I suppose. I am not super happy about the blue color. I was shooting for something lighter, but by that point I was tired of boiling sugar.

It is a vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream. Nothing fancy, but plenty yummy.

Belated Pictures of Cake

Even though Princess's and Squirt's birthdays were a few weeks ago, I never got around to posting the pictures. We had a small weekend celebration for them both for them to eat their cake and ice cream and open presents from their grandparents. I ended up making a small cake for each of them and one larger cake for everyone else. I made them all with an ocean theme and topped Princess's cake with a mermaid and Squirt's cake with an octopus.

Squirt was a little hesitant at first...

But soon got the octopus's head off and started enjoying the cake. The funniest part was when he poked a hole in the cake with his finger, ripped off an octopus leg, and tried to shove it into the hole he made. I guess he wanted to redesign it. The aftermath...

Princess was quite a bit more dainty with her cake, although she did decapitate the mermaid at one point.They both really liked their presents, too. Squirt got new clothes and a talking Mater that is squishy like a stuffed toy, yet moves it's mouth when it talks. He has giggled at that quite a bit.

Of course, our little Princess had to try on all of the new Princess clothes she got. She is such a girly girl.