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!

 

 

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 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?