Cardamom spiced cupcakes with cream cheese frosting

I'm still in love with how beautiful these turned out.  I made them for the Indian friend who gave me the cupcake book, as he was also the reason I learned how to use raw cardamom in cooking.

The color was something I made up after making the cream cheese frosting, 

playing with colors, I settled on this gentle, vintage teal shade.  

This was my first attempt at both the frosting and making a really dense cupcake.  They were delicious, but I really am not a personal fan of cream cheese frosting.  

I recommend it for most cupcakes though, it works really well (surprisingly) with spiced cupcake though!

Date: Summer 2011 

Jazz up vanilla cupcakes with semi-sweet choc-chips!

Why not?  Vanilla is always an easy go-to cupcake flavor, but when you're making them from scratch why not add something special?   I added semi-sweet morsels to half the batch of cupcakes and did a half icing job on them to indicate they were slightly different than the plain vanilla that were totally iced.

 Vanilla with semi-sweet morsels inside in 1/2 fudge frosting (top) and plain with full chocolate-fudge frosting (bottom).

Date: Summer 2011

Practice icing with random cupcake designs!

French vanilla and spice cupcakes with basic blue icing for the volleyball team dinner party.

When you have no idea how to use an icing tip, I recommend making random cupcake designs as a good and useful way to practice.  The people enjoying these didn't care what they looked like, only that they were edible, so I used it as time to get good with the smaller star tip.  

You can tell by the different shapes which cupcakes were decorate first (i.e. the third one to the left with 5 stars) because the stars are sloppy.  The closest cupcake was done towards the end when I had a better idea of the pressure and angle with which to manipulate the icing tip.

Date: Summer 2011

The Rapture came and went and I got was to eat these cupcakes.

What better way to spend the Rapture than with all of your friends you know won't be beamed up to the great beyond, some drinks, and cupcakes.

These were spiced mini cupcakes with basic red frosting.  The cake itself was tasty enough to not need any frosting, so I just pipped the letters on and left it at that.

When using spices in cakes, always put more cinnamon than they call for (by 25%-50%) (and vanilla if you can 50%-100%) but watch out for nutmeg.  Nutmeg so easily overpowers that your mouth is left tasting like a floral shop mixed with a pumpkin pie for the next twenty minutes.

Date: Summer 2011

The book that started the revolution.

A very good friend of mine gave me this little book for my birthday.  I started flipping through it and in conjunction with another cupcake book I had been given a few months prior, I decided it was time to research, maneuver, and master all things cupcake. 

One of my first attempts was taking my skills with fondant and icing mini cupcakes.  These were for my students the high school where I was doing outreach for the past two years.  Pokie helped decorate and make the random designs, some of which we tried to make astronomy or science related for fun. 

These were done in a pouring (or dipping) fondant style.  You get the fondant to a liquid state (good recipe and techniques here) and then pour or dip the top of the cupcake into the fondant.

Dipping the mini cupcakes into the liquid fondant allows for a really smooth surface while also allowing time for mixing of colors, shapes, and changing the thickness.

I recommend this to anyone who wants a more elegant, but FAST, way to decorate cupcakes give this a try.  You could also add sprinkles while the fondant is still wet, or decorate on top of it once it's dried (which we did one a few of the ones above).

Date: Spring 2011

Cookie Code Cake!

Pokie wanted something special for Mike's birthday and since he's not crazy about cake, but LOVES cookies, a cookie cake was the natural choice.


Being both a nerd and having a great sense of humor, Mike's cake became a fun project for Pokie and me to brainstorm.


We decided to write a code that I would pipe on top of the cake. 

Pokie wrote the code in my office, debugged it by inspection and when we were finally satisfied that it made enough computer science sense, I started making the cake. 


My big addition was working out all of the binary that would actually spell out "Happy Birthday Mike!" with proper binary for both the capital letters, spaces, and exclamation mark. 

Chocolate chip cookie "terminal" cake covered in chocolate frosting with blue border and green pipped icing. 

Date: Fall 2010

Viking Fury Band cake

 If you make a cake out of a plastic mold, such as the castle cake --->
... be prepared to bake a second cake!

I do NOT recommend the plastic cake baking molds, they are touchy, need a lot of oil to get all of the little pieces out, and never cook the cake evenly.


This was for the 2010 Blue River Valley Viking Fury (band) end of year party.

                        I used extra parts from the first cake to make a drawbridge, and mixed the cake crumbles with colored icing to make a "moat" around the castle.  I also used extra from the broken cake to fill the inside hole and make it raised. 

Completed cake with icing drizzle decoration for snow, blue and red icing, sugar pearls, and free hand pipping to make the Viking horns.  


Overall a really fun cake to make.  The circular cake holder also added to the look.  I recommend this type of cake for parties too because you can soak the cake or inject it with different flavors or liquors.

Date: Spring 2010

Valentine's Day funny cookies

Pokie and I decided to make cookies for a group Valentine's party.  We took all of our collective cookie cutters and made bones for the boys and hearts (decorated to look like lady-lumps) for the girls.
In general Valentine's day stuff these days just looks like someone vomited red/pink/white hearts and teddybears everywhere. For us, hearts and flowers are pretty boring cookies.

THUS! We also put our strange cookie cutter shapes together and creatively made valentine's "themed" things.  I.e., above is our shark making out and thrusting with a mermaid.
With enough icing and creativity, any typical holiday can turn into a great baking adventure!

Marbled Fondant for NDeRC, an experience in dye darkening.

 This was my first attempt to make a marbled fondant, which I saw on one of the Food Network shows.  


I took the fondant and mixed in blue and yellow until I got enough of a spread that it looked green(ish) and then stopped mixing it.  

The coolest thing about this very easy process is that the dye always darkens over time, so what starts out as "light" ends up being very colorful by the end of the day.

I still hadn't really figured out how to make the fondant smooth on the edges, thus they are still puckered.  But, I decided to invest a fondant molding tool and started researching methods for manipulating it!

Date: Fall 2010

13 X 9 cake with almond flavored marble colored fondant and white fondant letters.

When in doubt, just make it up!

I made this cake for some event for some thing and that's about how important it was to me that I can't even remember what it was for....

SO when you make a cake need to decorate it to look spiffy, but don't really have a theme, I recommend RANDOM lines.  I think this looks "woven" and pretty cool, but has no general purpose in its decorations, which sometimes is just fine.

It's still cake, people will still eat it, even if it's not perfect.

Date: Spring 2010

Birthday cake #3, learning to control fondant.

Fondant can be tricky, especially when you want to dye it a certain color, like RED or Black, or both.

I dyed, rolled, and free-hand cut the letters and used bottle caps and biscuit cutters for the circles.

This cake was made for Steph's b-day.












 French Vanilla cake with red fondant, black fondant letters, circles, and sugar pearls for decoration.

Tips:
1.) Buy gel dyes, not just food coloring because it doesn't work well.
2.) Putting a little oil on your hands to work the edges of the fondant will allow you to work it to be smooth.
3.) White contrast on red and black is awesome.

Date: Fall 2009

"Favorite Things" B-day Cake

 The next birthday cake was for Tessa.

For some reason, likely due to the crazy cake show challenges I'd been watching, I decided to try to stack some cakes on top of each other.

This was all of Tessa's "Favorite" things at the time.

~ Splenda Cake (Chocolate)
~ Teal & Pink
~ Softball Bat
~ A can of Diet Coke

I also made some cupcakes with the left over batter and put random designs on those. 

How I decided on any of that, I don't remember. But, for my 2nd cake, I think it came out pretty well.

Tips:
1.) You can cut a cake into ANY shape you want, if you use enough tooth picks to secure it.
2.) Gravity doesn't help cakes; the Diet Coke can eventually started to lean over since the softball bat wasn't even.
3.) Sometimes the crazier a cake the better when you're not particularly good at decorating any ONE thing, if you do a bunch of smaller things, you might get away with it looking pretty complicated and awesome.
4.) Make your own icing colors!  I needed grey... so I just worked on it until I got  a good color. Left over icing became stuff for decorations!

Date: Fall of 2009

It all started with Fondant.

 It all started with fondant for Pokie's birthday.  She was out of town and I knew I was going to surprise her by leaving a cake in her house for when she got home.
I didn't know what fondant was until I started watching cake challenge shows on the Food Network.
When I found out how much Pokie loved fondant, it was set that I would try it for the first time.

These cakes were made in little bread pans (3x4) and then the larger cake is one of the bread pans cut in half and molded together.  The fondant isn't flat because the cakes weren't flat and I hadn't learned how to fix those issues yet.  This was a first attempt that went really well... but I spent about 3 days making these.

                       









Cream colored fondant with purple flowers, green leaves and while pearls with grass painted on the bottom in food coloring.

           Cream colored fondant with red roses and petals, little roses surrounding the bottom.

 

 Teal and chocolate colored fondant with brown spirals. 

Purple fondant with a handmade seahorse, flowers, bat, and painting of a Kindle, spirals, and BW3's buffalo sauce.

Tips:

1.) Fondant is a lot more fun to make than buy and cheaper for the most part. 

(Here's a pretty basic recipe : http://whatscookingamerica.net/PegW/Fondant.htm)

2.) Always flavor your fondant with an extract.  I prefer almond.

3.) You can't kill fondant, but it can harden into an unbreakable item.

4.) Dyed fondant will get darker with time

5.) When in doubt, use more flour.

Date: August 2009