Cooking with Alison

Archive for January, 2010|Monthly archive page

Mice in a Boot Cake

In Cake Decorating, Desserts on January 18, 2010 at pm

After watching many cake decorating shows and competitions on the Food Network, I made my first attempt at a 3 dimensional cake.  In August 2009, when I moved my little sister into her first home, I gave her this cake.  I designed the “mice living in a boot” cake based on her favourite childhood toy that was lost years ago in a move.  It was an orange and brown plastic boot that had plastic mice and furniture that you could hide in the toe of the boot.  When she saw the cake, she knew exactly what it was and was just speechless  🙂  See below for details on how I did it.

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Valentine’s Day Cookies

In Cookie Decorating, Cookies on January 16, 2010 at am

Shortly after I completed my cake decorating course (link here), I applied the techniques that I learned to decorate cookies.  I made royal icing (recipe from Joy of Baking) for the first time and bought a good paint brush to flood sugar cookies.

I’ve never liked the taste of iced sugar cookies, but I would consider these to be good recipes, because the texture and taste are very similar to the store-bought ones.  They were very popular when I brought them into work.  Also, if you like the taste of almond extract, you’ll probably like these.

I use the recipe for sugar cookies from Joy of Baking when I’m decorating with icing.  See here for my favourite plain sugar cookies recipe.

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Favourite Yellow Cake Recipe

In Cakes on January 16, 2010 at am

When I took a cake decorating course (link here), homework included baking a cake for each class.  So I used this as an opportunity to search for my favourite yellow cake recipe.  I tested three cake recipes that were already rated “the best”, and the one I liked the most was Restaurant Eve’s Cake, posted in The Washington Post on April 23, 2006.  I especially like it because it uses melted butter which means you don’t have to worry about remembering to soften the butter ahead of time.  Also, you don’t have to worry about overbeating this batter as you actually want to incorporate air into this one.  For cupcakes, however, I prefer the texture of this yellow cake recipe here.

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Pink Rose Cake

In Cake Decorating on January 15, 2010 at pm

This is the third cake that I decorated after completing the course.  Here’s a link to my favourite yellow cake recipe.  I tried a new leaf tip that I bought to replace the one that came with the Wilson student kit and I was very happy to see that it worked beautifully – much better than the first one I had.  The icing wasn’t stiff enough so the roses turned out a bit flat.

If you want to know how I did any of the decorations (ie. tip number, icing consistency, etc.), feel free to ask me in a comment and I’ll post the details in a reply.

Hello Kitty Cake

In Cake Decorating on January 15, 2010 at pm

This is the second cake that I decorated after completing the cake decorating course.  Here’s the link to my favourite yellow cake recipe.  I realized too late that I got the colours wrong.  I made it for a friend of mine who finds the character, “Hello Kitty” amusing.

If you want to know how I did any of the decorations (ie. tip number, icing consistency, etc.), feel free to ask me in a comment and I’ll post the details in a reply.

Monkey Cake

In Cake Decorating on January 15, 2010 at pm

This is the first cake that I decorated after completing the cake decorating course.  It was also the first time I used piping gel to transfer an outlined pattern onto the cake.  I made this monkey cake for my dad’s birthday because monkeys always make him smile (and because he’s kind of a baboon himself)  😉  Here’s the link to my favourite yellow cake recipe.  The dark frosting is simply chocolate buttercream.

If you want to know how I did any of the decorations (ie. tip number, icing consistency, etc.), feel free to ask me in a comment and I’ll post the details in a reply.

Cake Decorating Course

In Cake Decorating on January 15, 2010 at pm

In January of 2009, I took a beginners’ cake decorating course at Michael’s Craft Store.  I highly recommend it and in my experience, you really only need to take the first course.  Any new techniques after that can easily be self-taught.  You can use these techniques to decorate cookies and cupcakes too.  Class was only once a week for a month but there was surprisingly a lot of homework.  I [half] joked every week about being really stressed out about my cake decorating class.  🙂  Each week you had to go to class with a cake and batches of differently textured and coloured icing.  So I took this opportunity to test 3 different yellow cake recipes.  The link to the yellow cake recipe that I liked the most is here. Note that the Wilton buttercream frosting recipe does not taste good, because it was designed for the purpose of practicing techniques in any climate (ie. to hold up in humidity).

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