Like cakes through the hourglass, so are the days of my life

I know that as you get older it's supposed to feel as if time is speeding up, but I can hardly believe that it's been over a month since I last posted here. This morning I spent about 15 minutes before I got out of bed just lying there groggily trying to figure out what day it was and if I was late for work even though it's Sunday. All the days seem to blend together, the passing of time marked only by the styles of the cakes that I make and plan to make.

In late June, I made a 6-inch birthday cake for my mom. It was a mixed berry cake with orange cream icing/filling and fondant decorations.







Last weekend, I made a 6-inch cake and mini cupcakes for my coworkers. They were chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream icing, and I used a couple different types of sprinkles, violet coloured sugar, and silver dragees for decoration. The lighting was poor when I took the following pictures, but you get the idea.











By the way, despite what the My Little Pony-esque colours and the precious wee cakes might suggest, my coworkers are not six-year-old girls. That didn't stop them from wolfing it all down, though.

I’m going to try to make a cake a month just to keep my icing and decorating skills fresh. You start to forget things after a while, which I discovered when I tried to make buttercream icing last weekend for the above cake and nearly messed up the order of the recipe. I picked up Wilton’s 2012 Yearbook yesterday at Bulk Barn and it’s given me some great inspiration for future cakes. Some of the cakes in the Yearbook look so fancy, fussy and time consuming that I'll have to modify and simplify things consideribly if I'm going to try and replicate any of them. My mother saw the Yearbook and told me that she wants the candy and ice cream themed cake on the cover for her next birthday but that's way out of my skill level at the moment. Good thing I have 11 months to practice.

I can’t believe August will be here tomorrow.  Late August to December is my favourite time of year, mainly because the anticipation of Halloween and Christmas--not to mention my birthday in late November--seem to infuse everything in life during those months with a bit of extra excitement. I woke up this morning and made a list of things I need to get to make Halloween cupcakes and cookies, and I picked out some Halloween cookie cutters to buy online (they're cheaper than in-store). I have a lot of my Christmas gift shopping done (yes, really), and I just ordered some different styles of How the Grinch Stole Christmas themed cotton fabric (this, this, and this) to make a Christmas tree skirt.  I need to get back to working on my Christmas decorations, too. My desk in my office/craft room is covered with little bird shaped pieces of felt that need to be decorated with tiny beads and assembled to make tree ornaments.

Finally, although this isn't making or baking related, my living room was repainted, as you can see from the painting-in-progress photo below that was taken on Friday.


I just wanted to document the big change from red to green! As much as I love my new Grinch-coloured living room, I miss the vibrant cherry red. After the tape was peeled off, I went around with a smaller brush and tried to cover up the bits of red still peeping through under the green around the baseboards and doorframes. Everywhere I looked there were hints of red, and just when I thought I’d covered over the last patch of red, I’d spot another one. You'd never know from looking at my living room now that it used to be painted red thanks to my obsessive touch-upping, which I can only liken to trying to find and clean away every last incriminating drop of blood at a crime scene. Not that I have any experience with that sort of thing. I'm just saying.

Harry Potter and the "dam" good cake

I've been busy but quiet the past few weeks since I last posted. I made the decision several months ago that I would read J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books straight through after finishing my master’s degree, and so since the end of May I’ve been initiated into and wholly absorbed by a much loved world of wizards and owls and Hogwarts and chocolate frogs and an evil villain Who Must Not Be Named. After each book, I’ve rented the corresponding Harry Potter movie on iTunes and watched it. I’m on the last book, The Deathly Hallows, now. In total, it will have taken me five weeks to read all 3,400 plus pages of the series, but it has been worth it. I’ll definitely be ready for the final movie which comes out in July 15th, whatever “ready” means. I missed Pottermania the first time around when Rowling was still releasing the books but I’m glad I decided to read the works from start to finish all in one go, especially now that Pottermore has been announced. I didn't understand the phenomenon before reading the books but I totally get now why children and adults alike are so in love with these stories and characters.

I do have a couple of bakey updates, though. I made two cakes last week. The first one was a summer inspired vanilla and raspberry cream filled cake that I made for a work function.







All of the flowers and bees are made from Wilton white fondant, which I tinted and formed myself. The silvery shimmer on the daisies and bees’ wings is Wilton’s white Pearl Dust. I love that stuff. I also love the edible ink pen that I used to doodle on the bees’ faces and stripes.

The second cake is the one that I made for my Dad for Father’s Day. It’s only a small 6-inch round vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream and it features a family of three fondant beavers relaxing outside their pretzel-covered dam and enjoying the longed-for summer weather, which we haven't had in St. John's yet this year.









The beavers, fish and flowers are all handmade from Wilton white fondant, which I tinted and formed into the figures. I made some dirt rubble for the river bank by whizzing toffee chips and milk chocolate chips together in my mini food processor, and the water is blue-tinted piping gel. The trees are store-bought rice krispie treats molded into cone shapes and covered in green buttercream icing. The beaver dam is a mound of chocolate buttercream mixed with cake crumbs that was molded in a plastic wrap lined small round bowl (I put it in the fridge then for a while to let it get firm enough to hold its shape), turned upside down onto the cake, and finally covered with broken pretzel “logs” to resemble a beaver dam. I used chocolate rocks to decorate around the bottom border of the cake.

I dreamt last night that I entered a Wilton contest only ten minutes before it closed. Then I was at some event or other, a conference of sorts although I can't remember what the theme was, and my mother called to tell me that I had won $25,000 from Wilton for best something-or-other. I can't remember what that something-or-other was, although I assume it was cake related. Seeing as how I’ve probably spent about $25,000 in my waking life on Wilton products since I’ve started this whole cake decorating knack I’ve been on these past few months, I figure I'm due for a bit of a payback. $25,000 is a big exaggeration, of course, but starting any new craft or hobby can be expensive when you're first buying all the new tools and decorating products. The upside is that I'll have my tools forever and can make many, many cakes long into the future with them. The downside is trying to come up with an idea that's as good as or better than my goofy beaver dam cake! But I've never shied away from a good challenge.

A Touch of Class

I made a Mother’s Day cake for my mother and grandmother.






Gee, do you think I put enough flowers on there?

When I first started decorating this cake, I didn’t intend for it to look as it Mother Nature had vomited all over it. Yes, I went a bit overboard with the flowers, I admit. I’ve probably broken every rule of cake design with this thing, but icing flowers are so fun to make that I just couldn’t help myself.

The orange, white, and yellow flowers and the roses I made ahead a few days ago and let dry until they hardened, and the others I piped directly onto the cake, which is vanilla with raspberry cream filling and vanilla buttercream icing. I used some little silver dragees just for fun, too.





When it came time to cut and eat the cake, I realized that it didn’t look quite real and was more like a fantasy cake from a children’s story book, much like the look of my last cake. Regardless of how it looked, it sure tasted good.

I decided after watching William and Kate’s royal wedding last week that I had to make a cake the same colour as Queen Elizabeth’s beautiful primrose outfit and hat, and so that colour was the original inspiration for the Mother's Day cake. However, I covered the cake in bright flowers so you can barely see the pretty primrose, but I promise you there’s a touch of regal class hiding in there amidst my rainbow of gaudy blooms.

My father says that he wants a chocolate cake with chocolate flowers on it for Father’s Day. Maybe this will be my chance to make a more simple and modest cake, a serious masculine cake without all the girly flowers, like that McVities Chocolate Biscuit Cake that Prince William had as his groom’s cake. The recipe seems simple enough, but I think for Dad I'll make a traditional chocolate cake. I'm going to try and sneak a few coloured flowers on there, though, if I can manage to rein my icing flower-piping compulsion in a bit.

Eat Me

Well, here it is, my final cake which I decorated last night:









As I mentioned in my last post, it’s Devil’s Food chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling and chocolate icing. All those flowers on top are made from icing. I’m especially proud of those big pink roses because I had such trouble making them initially. Thankfully the Decorating Basics instructor helped me thin out the consistency of my icing, which made the roses so much easier to pipe.

If you’re thinking that I wrote “Eat Me” on the cake as a helpful yet tongue-in-cheek instructional guide for potential dull-witted eaters, you’re partly right.  I really just wanted to fill in the empty space on the cake with as little effort as possible after dealing with my too stiff, muscle-straining rose icing, hence the wimpy looking squiggly writing.  The text was inspired by the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in which Alice finds a small cake with the same words written on it after tumbling down the rabbit hole. When she bites into the cake, Alice begins to grow larger and larger until her head hits the ceiling of the hall of doors.

Luckily I haven’t grown any taller or bigger after all these cakes, not to mention all the spoons and mixer beaters covered in icing that I’ve licked over the past month. I think my digestive system and I need to take a break from cakes for a while. But even after getting to the end of the course, after all the mixing and beating and tinting  and piping and offset spatula-ing these past four weeks, I’d be lying if I told you that I haven’t been thinking about and planning my next cake. Because I have. It's just that addictive.