Two Birthday Cakes (and some cupcakes)

Summer’s here. I do enjoy summer but everyone who knows me knows that fall is my favourite time of year. So for me summer is never the main event; it’s merely a light interlude between one Halloween-Birthday-Christmas time and the next.

But I do have two chocolate birthday cakes to tell you about.

My cousin turned 18 in late April and he asked me to bake him a cake for his birthday party, a cake based on the one that appears in the video game Portal. The Portal cake that I made was an 8-inch round two-layer chocolate cake filled with vanilla buttercream icing between the layers and covered in chocolate buttercream mixed with a combination of both sweetened and unsweetened toasted coconut for texture.



I had to put down a crumb coat of plain chocolate buttercream on the cake first before the outer layer of coconut chocolate buttercream was applied as the latter wouldn’t have stuck to the bare cake on its own. The cake is decorated on top with swirls of white buttercream, large red gumballs, and a single white candle.

For my mother’s upcoming birthday, I made an 8” square chocolate cake filled with chocolate buttercream icing between the layers (I baked one layer but split it to make two thin layers) and covered it in white vanilla buttercream. When I was planning this cake, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to make a birthday gift cake with a fondant bow, or a candy and ice cream-themed birthday party cake. In the end, I combined the two and made a summer birthday gift and party cake.



It was my first time making a fondant bow and curlicues, which were both made from my homemade marshmallow fondant. I failed miserably at the bow, which is why I piped in some summery yellow buttercream flowers and green leaves to cover up the gaps and droopiness. Next time I’ll make the bow well ahead of time, maybe a couple days in advance, to let the loops dry thoroughly. I made this bow the day before but the loops would have benefited from a bit of extra drying time to really set up.


It was also my first time using the Wilton Script Message Press Set to create the words “Happy Birthday” on top of the cake, which I then piped over with dark lavender icing. The presses worked like a charm and it’s so much neater than my squiggly freehand piping.



The bottom border of the cake has a birthday party theme created with miniature ice cream cones, cupcakes, gifts, and candy. The little cupcakes are mini peanut butter cups from Bulk Barn that were unwrapped from their foil and topped with buttercream icing and sprinkles. For candles, I tinted some fondant yellow and formed small flame shapes and molded them to the top half of a Popeye candy stick. I made those candles the day before to let the fondant dry, and then I used an orange Wilton Food Writer marker to colour in the orange part of the flame. I only used the candy-and-fondant candles on the front cupcakes, and not on the cupcakes on the sides and back.


I used Compliments mini ice cream cones filled with a piece of store-bought Rice Krispies treat and topped that with swirls of chocolate and strawberry buttercream with a Smartie on the top. I didn’t want to fill the cones inside with buttercream because I wasn’t sure if the moisture from the icing would soften or soak through the thin, crisp cones, so I opted for the rice treat filling instead. The cones are delicate, though, so I had to form the pieces of Rice Krispies treats with my fingers first before gently pressing them down into the hollow of the cones so as not to break them.



The larger gifts are made from pieces of Rice Krispies treat covered in fondant with fondant bows, and the smaller gifts are just fondant molded into rectangular shapes. Finally, I put a row of rainbow Smarties around the perimeter of the cake just because I thought it would be pretty. And it sure is.

(P.S. I also made and decorated some mini chocolate cupcakes to bring in to work tomorrow.)

Nuts, Nuts, Nuts

I love unexpected snow days! I love snow mornings, too, even if this snow morning was capped on both ends by frustration. I got to stay home and relax most of the morning due to the weather, even though I had already driven in to work first thing this morning, taken off my coat and boots, and had started opening emails in my office when I got the call saying that the office was going to be closed for the rest of the morning due to the inclement weather, which resulted in me having to drive all the way back home again on the treacherous snow-covered roads, and then drive back to work again only a few hours later on still-treacherous roads when the office reopened. But that’s winter.

And according to some optimistic groundhogs, this winter might end early. I can’t believe it’s Groundhog Day already. Christmas seems like only a distant memory or a dream, something that never really happened. Seriously, though, where did January go? I’ve been so busy that I didn’t even notice it passing. Despite the occasional messy, blustery day, winter has been good so far, and I’ve been making and baking a lot of nutty things the past few weeks.

Like mixed nut butter. I didn’t follow a recipe to make nut butter but there are plenty online. I didn’t blanch the nuts to remove the skins beforehand, however, which is what most recipes seem to recommend. I wanted to keep the fibre in there. Plus, I was too lazy to fuss around with blanching. I used brazil nuts, pecans, and walnuts, all toasted in the oven, about 2.25 cups total, and then buzzed them in the food processor until they resembled a course, grainy flour, making sure to stop before they turned into nut butter. I also added some ground almond meal that I had bought at Bulk Barn.

I didn’t use all of the ground nuts that you see above, just a fraction. I then added a small amount of salt and icing sugar to taste to the ground nut mixture in the food processor and let it all whiz together until it turned creamy and smooth, scraping down the sides with a spatula occasionally. And here's what I got:

The nut butter was so good. I only made a small batch, enough to equal about 1 cup, because this sort of thing probably goes bad quickly.

The rest of the ground nuts were used to make cookies.

I decided to pipe the batter onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet using a Wilton disposable plastic piping bag because it was kind of gloopy. I added raisins to some cookies. I modified this ground almond pie crust recipe  (which I made into a pie crust, as well, but I forgot to take pictures!) to make the cookie batter by adding cinnamon, nutmeg, approximately 1/4 cup of brown sugar instead of sweetener, an extra tablespoon of margarine, one beaten egg, and 1 tsp of vanilla. They were delicious and chewy.

Speaking of delicious and chewy, I also made some coconut macaroons.

My favourite coconut macaroon recipe is one from AllRecipes.com, but I can't seem to find the exact one that I always use as I didn't bookmark it and only have the printed version. These are addictive, though.

And finally I made baked doughnuts!



Ha, I tricked you. Doughnuts aren't made from nuts or coconuts. I made them using my new Wilton doughnut pans (one regular sized pan and one mini pan) that I got for Christmas, and the recipe for the doughnuts was on the pan's package. The trick with using the doughnut pans is not to fill the round cavities too full so that you can get the hole in the middle once the doughnut is baked. Naturally, I filled the cavities in the mini doughnut pan too full and ended up with little one-bite cupcakey things rather than little doughnuts, but they tasted like doughnuts. Some doughnuts I topped with pink royal icing glaze, and the rest were topped with melted chocolate. And lots and lots of sprinkles, of course.

Anyway, I have plans to spend the rest of the winter (which could be six weeks long or six months depending on which groundhog you follow) planning and baking cakes and sewing some little things. Or maybe sewing cakes and baking little things. Either or.

Good thing my birthday only comes once a year

I made two cakes last week. The first one was to celebrate my and a coworker's birthdays, which are only one day apart.





It’s a vanilla cake with raspberry cream filling and vanilla buttercream. I made all of the flowers myself from royal icing. It was my first time using royal icing to make cake decorations but the results were beautiful, and it was surprisingly easy to work with. My writing-with-icing skills need some work, though.

It was also my first time making lilies, but I made some roses and drop flowers, too, which in the past I've always made with buttercream icing.



I made the lilies, drop flowers and roses about 11 days in advance to let them dry out before putting them on the cake. The royal icing dries hard as a rock so it’s great for making decorations in advance.

To go with that cake, I made some mini chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and pink tinted coconut.




The other cake that I made was made for my family birthday dinner.


It’s chocolate cake covered and filled with chocolate buttercream, and it's decorated with KitKat bars cut into their individual segments (each bar has 4), assorted candies, and gingerbread people, which were part of the batch of gingerbread cookies that I showed you the last time I posted. It’s also known as a candy barrel cake and it’s pretty simple to make. Mine has the look of a family of gingerbread people taking a dip in a candy-filled hot tub or swimming pool as opposed to a barrel. The rainbow hued ribbon wrapped in a big bow around the cake helps to keep the KitKats in place.

I tried to use leftover pink buttercream to pipe on a bathing suit and cap on the gingerbread baby, and a bikini on the gingerbread mother as last-minute additions before adding them to the cake, but their swimming outfits look a little rough.




I used gummy bears, Whoppers, cookies ‘n’ creme Hershey’s Kisses, and Peanut M&Ms to decorate the top of the cake, and Smarties to decorate around the bottom, but you can use any candy you like.

I also made some Gingerbread Stuffing to go with chicken for my birthday dinner using a modified version of Nigella Lawson’s original recipe. Rather than buying the gingerbread pre-made, I made the gingerbread myself from this highly rated Old Fashioned Gingerbread recipe that I found on AllRecipes.com. I made the full gingerbread recipe but only used half of the finished baked gingerbread for the stuffing recipe as half weighed about 500g, slightly more than the amount indicated in Nigella’s recipe. I also changed Nigella’s recipe by using only half a pound of bacon, adding cranberries (soaked in hot water first to plump them), and toasted chopped walnuts. It was so good. It's like cake with bacon in it that you eat with gravy! Ridiculous.

I made mini raisin buns last week, too.




My buns never, ever look like buns. They start out in their raw doughy forms looking like buns, and no doubt they genuinely aspire to be buns, but they seem to settle into sturdy little lumps after they come out of the oven.

My autumn induced baking frenzy now appears to be over for this year. I hope. It's a good thing my birthday only comes once a year but I suppose it's my own fault for deciding to bake and decorate two cakes at the same time. I still have two more cakes to make in December, not to mention the 38,972 cookies that I have to decorate. After that I'll need a break from baking. I've earned it.

Luckily, I have good company in my kitchen. Oh, I forgot to tell you that I never bake alone! Here’s a picture of my constant kitchen companion, the Swedish Chef of The Muppets fame.


He just sits there on top of a recipe box on my kitchen table muttering jibberish and saying, “Bork! Bork! Bork!” occasionally. At least, I like to pretend he does.