Watercolor bridal shower cake with cardstock cake topper

For my lab mate’s bridal shower, I was so inspired by the beautiful cakes I’ve seen on instagram I decided to make one of my own. I decided to use the same colors as the theme of the party, pastel pinks and purples.

Using a rich french meringue buttercream and several layers of my favorite white cake recipe, the cake was a hit!

I cut a cake topper using my silhouette cameo and silhouette studio and attached long wooden foodsafe skewers to insert into the cake.

I have another bridal shower coming up soon and I need some good ideas on decorating so please comment below if you have any!

 

 

New Year’s sticky toffee pudding recipe

The only way to bring in the new year or the holiday season in general is sticky toffee pudding! I had my first taste of this sweet gooey goodness was at a craftfair where a burly Scottish brute of a man decked in full kilt attire shoved an enormous mouthful of the stuff in my face. When a big burly scotsman shoves pudding in your face, you don’t say no! But I fell in love instantly…with the pudding, not the scotsman haha!

So I rushed home to search for a recipe that would capture the intricate mix of flavours I tasted in that pudding for the satisfaction of my enjoyment all year round. But most of the recipes I found were brown sugar-based but I wanted the deep and intense flavour of molasses. Admittedly some recipes did have some molasses but only a tablespoon or 2 in the whole recipe which in my opinion…is just weak sauce.

So I made my own and adapted it from a few different recipes.

Sticky Toffee Pudding Recipe – Scrapaperdoll Edition

Cake

1 cup chopped dates

2/3 cup hot water

1/4 cup butter – softened

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 large egg – room temperature

4 tablespoons dark molasses

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup cake flour (very important to use cake flour, not all purpose flour)

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

Sauce

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 tbsp butter

2 tbsp dark molasses

pinch of salt

1/2 cup heavy cream – heated slightly so as not to be as cold as the fridge

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter 4 small baking cups. I recommend the Michaels ceramic baking dishes.

   

2. Add hot water to chopped dates to soften the dates. Set aside.
3. Cream butter and brown sugar using a spatula until well combined.
4. Beat the egg, add the molasses and vanilla. Combine with the butter mixture.
5. Sift Flour, baking powder, salt and baking soda in a separate bowl. Mix well. Gently fold the flour mixture with the butter/egg mixture until the batter is just combined.
6. Use a blender or food processor to purée the dates and hot water. It doesn’t have to be the consistency of butternut squash soup, just smaller pieces with a few chunks is fine. The chunks add a bit of texture differences in the cake but not too much so that it interferes with the normal chemistry of the cake-baking.
   Fold the dates into the cake batter.
7. Pour batter into the ceramic baking dishes and set the baking dishes onto a baking sheet. Pop into oven and bake for 25 minutes or until the a toothpick inserted in the top comes out clean.
8. While the cake is baking, make the sauce. Add the brown sugar, butter, salt and molasses to a sauce pan and cook the sugar mixture on medium heat with gentle stirring every 30 seconds until the mixture thickens. It’s difficult to tell when the sugar caramelizes because it’s already dark coloured but use your nose. You can smell when it begins to caramelize but be sure not to burn the sugar.
9. Once the mixture thickens to your liking, gently stir in 1/4 cup of the warmed cream. Reserve the other 1/4 cup. Don’t use cream directly from the fridge because it may cause the sugar to sieze. Heat the cream in a separate sauce pan slightly to bring it to room temperature.
   Gently add 2 more tablespoons of cream after a few minutes from the reserved 1/4 cup. Once the mixture has thickened, bring it off the heat and let it sit until the cake has finished baking.

   Troubleshooting: If the butter separates from the mixture, gently stir in more of the reserved cream on the stove one tbsp at a time until the butter incorporates into the sauce and it thickens again.

10. When the cake is done baking, invert while still hot onto a plate and generously pour the hot sauce over the cake. Serve with a piping mug of coffee…or spiced rum haha!

This cake is the softest moistest cake I’ve ever made, even without the toffee sauce, this is an amazing cake, the sauce just pushes it over the edge! I can definitely use the cake with a glaze or ganache. It is just so flexible! Instead of dates, I can even use figs or cranberries as well.

Enjoy and leave your comments below!

Blue Ombre Cake

I’ve seen lots of people create variations of this ombre cake and I’d been super excited to try it out because it didn’t seem very hard but you end up with fantastic results! I created this cake in celebration of my supervisor’s birthday. I actually used this cake pan:

I filled the cake with a mixture of Cool Whip and chocolate pudding which tasted amazing and was a cost effective way to fill a cake.

The outside is smeared bubbles was created using swiss meringue buttercream with vanilla flavouring. I have to say that swiss meringue buttercream is simply the best kind of buttercream for most birthday/wedding style cakes.

There are plenty of youtube videos online that demonstrate how to do this but I used the tutorial by The Boy Who Bakes.

3D Star Wars Darth Vader bear cake

As the year is drawing to a close, it’s time to update all the projects I’ve been working on this year.

This post has been waiting to be uploaded for a long time but I finally remembered to make it. I made this 3D darth vader bear cake for my boyfriend earlier this year for his birthday and surprised him with it at the mall of all places. I was deathly ill while making this cake but I really really wanted to surprise him with it so I spent the day making this cake and covering it american buttercream, then black fondant. It’s my first time covering an oddly shaped cake with fondant and my shapes/patterns.

In some areas the buttercream softened the fondant so much that the fondant broke which gave me a couple of heart attacks…but I somehow managed to either cover it up or just push it back together. I still have a lot to learn about working with fondant and 3D cakes. I probably should have used a stiffer consistency of icing…

But this is certainly one of my favorite cake pans and a go to for many different shapes. I’ve seen online people who use this cake pan to make rabbits, owls and other animal shapes so I’m excited to try those out!

3D bear cake

This is the 3D bear cake that I made for my friends Maggie and Joseph for their baby shower back in March. It was my first attempt at making a 3D cake and at first, I didn’t think it was going to work, I didn’t think I was going to come out of this alive!

I used the Wilton Stand-up Cuddly Bear Cake pan which can be found here: http://www.wilton.com/idea/Stand-Up-Cuddly-Bear-Cake

I suggest buying it from Michaels with a 50% off coupon, it’s probably cheapest there, at least locally.

First, I had no clue how  much batter to use for a Wilton 3D cake pan. They had the recommended amount but others online were saying it’s not enough etc. etc. etc. I think I ended up making 3 batches of batter and then I just poured it all in.

within the first 15 minutes I could tell that I’d put too much batter in my cake and it was like a volcano erupting and spilling all over my poor oven! So quickly I had to go and put a baking sheet under the pan covered with foil to catch the lava (exploding batter hahaha).

So that was fine, I lost some batter but it wasn’t too bad, it finished baking and everything. I let it cool before I attempted to pry apart the apparatus. I had heard that the cake really sticks to the pan. And I mean REALLY sticks! I used almost 5 tablespoons of shortening to grease the inside of the cake pan but it still didn’t do that trick. My cake ended up looking like this:

It was quite horrifying…MY BEAR HAD NO FACE!!!

After hyperventilating into a paper bag for a few minutes, I finally calmed down enough to figure out what to do next. After all, Maggie and Joseph were depending on me!

I figured, okay, american buttercream is like…whipped gold! It will make anything stick! So I pieced my poor amputated bear back together with buttercream.

Then I decorated the bear using probably one of my favorite tips, Tip#233

http://www.wilton.com/store/site/product.cfm?sku=418-233

I made fur with this tip with brown/chocolate buttercream icing.

Then using a star tip Tip#16 I decorated the bear’s Canucks uniform because the happy expecting couple are big hockey/Canucks fans!

http://www.wilton.com/store/site/product.cfm?sku=418-16

For the eyes and nose, I colored some piping gel with black gel food coloring and made blobbly circles. So what if my bear looks like he has a wet nose? It’s shiny! that’s all that matters! Yes…shiny things attract me.

So all in all, things turned out okay, I pieced back my bear, hid the bandaging with american buttercream (seriously, whipped gold!) and delivered an adorable, super moist and delicious cake.

For 3D cakes like these, you have to use a 3D cake mix. Usually you just add 1 box of pudding to 1 batch of batter and upscale as needed. I guess it would be kind of hard to downscale…unless you had a kitchen scale? Then you could measure out say, half or 1/3 of the package if you’re only making 1/3 the batter?

So bottomline: when at first you don’t succeed, don’t give up, buttercream will solve everything!

Hope you enjoyed my near disaster, would love to hear how you’ve fixed your cake miseries as well!

Halloween Fun

 

After finishing up in the lab at midnight, I rushed home to bake a bunch of treats for halloween! I’ve actually never baked for halloween before and I must say it takes a lot of creativity, time and tutorial-watching to come up with something ghouly AND delicious.

The googly eye cake was a huge hit at the halloween party I attended over the weekend. I used the 1 bowl chocolate cake mix from allrecipes and a wilton american buttercream for the frosting.
For the cake balls, instead of buttercream, I read that using ganache would make a rich truffle-like texture and maintain the cakeball shape better. So ganache it was, also a huge hit!

And my cupcakes as usual, a crowd pleaser! Our new postdoc in the lab ate 3 and blames me for his belly flab (which is really non-existent btw).

Can’t wait to try something even more gruesome next year, maybe some strawberry jelly blood-filled treats?