A non-baked item post

All my posts so far have been of things I've made. I had a couple of things that I wanted to share that are baking related, but are not things that I've baked. First, the best item I've found in quite some time. It's called a beater blade. They make them for most major mixer models and this thing is awesome. I stumbled across it one day and decided I had to try it. This thing is cool because it has rubber fins on the sides of the beater attachment so it scrapes the bowl as it mixes. It works amazingly well. The only part of the bowl that you may have to scrape down is the part above wherever the beater blade comes into contact with the bowl. When you have to make a lot of icing, cookies or whatever, this thing is a major time saver. I have no affiliation with the company, nor am I sure who they even are, but I can't recommend this thing highly enough.

Next, I had a pouring shield for my mixer, which never worked quite as well as I would have liked. It kept in maybe 25-50% more of the stuff that tended to fly out of the bowl when you mixed, but it still allowed a lot to fly out. The inevitable mushroom cloud from when you make icing was still terrible. That, and the stupid little plastic clips that connect the two halves of the pouring shield break really easy. I did like being able to pour things in slowly down the little ramp, but it still made a bit of a mess.

Note: I took a quick picture without cleaning up the mixer. Note the massive layer of powdered sugar on it?

When I was making the wedding cake, I knew I would be making a LOT of icing and I didn't want to make a huge mess of the kitchen from the powdered sugar cloud, and I didn't want to inhale that much sugar either. (I could get all graphic and describe what it does to your nose after you breathe near a mixer while making about 10 batches of icing, but I won't. I think you can figure it out.)

After I make icing, bread, or whatever, I usually put a nifty bowl cover on the bowl to keep it from drying out. These are made by the company, and they work moderately well. They slip off rather easily because the lip just doesn't go down the sides quite far enough. They do stay on most of the time though. They have a little well in the middle so that you can put the bowl cover on, and still put it on the mixer's stand since the drive mechanism sticks down a bit below the bowl's sides.

When I was going to be making a whole bunch of icing, I needed a better solution than that terrible pouring shield, so I got an idea. I took a utility knife to one of my two bowl covers. I didn't know if it would work, but I needed to try. I cut off about half an inch from the middle well of one of the bowl covers, opening it up. I figured that if I cut up just high enough that the beater blade mounting post would just clear the bowl cover and I could leave the bowl cover on while I mixed, limiting the mess. I had to put the bowl cover on, then attach the beater blade to the post afterwards since the blade will obviously not fit through the hole from the top.

This was a HUGE success. After trying different means of mixing everything in the bowl by pouring some sugar in and mixing before adding the rest, I realized I could just dump it all in and go in one shot. The little bit of powder that came up through the center hole was negligible and I just let it run until it looks like everything mixed. I did have to scrape the top of the bowl sides since it is obviously going to throw powdered sugar everywhere in the enclosed space, but one scrape of that little area and the icing is done. Subsequently, on the baby shower cake, I had to make a icing and a whole bunch of fondant too. It worked equally as well for fondant with the bread hook. (I don't usually knead the fondant by hand if I can help it.) I may need to buy another set of bowl covers so I can have two again, but this was well worth scrapping out one bowl cover for a mixing shield that actually works. Granted, adding ingredients now means popping off the cover and adding it, but that is a trade off that I gladly make to keep the mess to a minimum. If there are not a lot of powdered ingredients in a recipe, I can still use the pouring shield, but for ones that tend to throw dust out everywhere, my new mixing shield is the only way to go.

1st Baby Shower

This one was interesting. My friend and neighbor called to ask if I could do a baby shower cake not long after I was asked if I could do the wedding cake. Luckily, they weren't on the same weekend. The mom to be had some ideas about what she wanted for her cake. She wanted three tiers, one with sports, one with the baby's name, and one with musical instruments. Since we had a few weeks, there were some other requests that came up as they had time to look at some other cakes for ideas. They liked the idea of having baby feet on the top instead of little booties, like some other people do. Also, they liked a cake they saw that had blocks in the middle of the cake. However, they figured that spelling the baby's name would look cool since the name is only four letters. They gave me lots of pictures for inspiration.



The cake itself is white and chocolate marble. There was butter cream icing under the fondant. There were two additional blocks left over since I used an 8 inch square for the blocks, so I left the two spare blocks (without detail decoration), in the event they needed more cake. The bottom tier is a 10 inch round, and the top tier is 8 inch. To hold each tier up, I put plastic drinking straws through the layer below. The trick was balancing the top tier over the blocks so it would be stable.



Note that the top tier is not centered over the bottom one. There was one thing that I did not account for when picking the sizes for my layers. I made the bottom 10 inch, when it would have been better for me to make it 12 inch instead. The reason is that I used the 8 inch square for the middle and cut it into four quadrants. That made each block 4" square. Now, originally I planned to use three blocks on the cake. Unless I positioned them just right, that wouldn't have worked out too well unless I cut off the back of the blocks and just made it look like they were whole. I already had them mostly decorated, so that wasn't going to happen. Consider for a moment if you have a 4" square and you want to put two inside a 10" circle. It's easy if you put the flat sides together, but if you turn them you have a problem. If you look at the positioning of the two blocks, they overlap each other a bit to get them to fit on the cake. Not exactly what I had planned, but it worked in the end. It did make offsetting the top necessary though. It makes it look a little more whimsical though, so I didn't really mind, and nobody at the party was complaining about it.



If you look around the cake views, you can see all of the items added. For sports, there was a basketball, soccer ball, goal posts, and a football. For music, there were musical notes, a guitar, and a drum. I realized as I was writing this that I forgot to put on drumsticks, which I meant to add. Too late now.



Above is a top view so you can see the feet. The little wrinkles in the feet don't really show up in that view though. You can see them in some of the other pictures.

I'm told that every bit of the cake was consumed, except for the blocks. The parents to be wanted to take them back to their military base to everyone could see them. I'm guessing they'll get eaten there.

1st Wedding Cake

I've done a groom's cake, but not a wedding cake so far. I finally had a couple in the office ask if I would do their wedding cake. She sent me some pictures to get an idea of what she wanted and to price it. I gave her the price and she later came back and said that she wanted me to do it. Over the couple of weeks after that, we talked more about it and the design changed a bit over time. It got a little more complicated, but it was balanced out by not having to do detail work on every tier. They weren't sure if they were going to have to feed 150 or 200. It ended up being 200, which I had planned for. She didn't want any fondant, so it was only going to be cake and butter cream icing. She also wanted a more box-like look to the cake, so each tier needed to be three layers of cake. I also offered to make the icing on the cake a slightly off-white color so that the white decorations would stand out. You can't really see it in the picture, but the base coat of the icing was an ivory color and the accents were a stark white. Even up close, the difference was subtle.



My wife and I started this one early in the week. She did a majority of the baking for me, because there was so much to do, there was no way I would have finished the cake in time for the Saturday wedding. We baked four 12 inch square cakes, three 10 inch squares, and three 8 inch squares. The top tier was made out of a 12 inch square cut into 6 inch pieces. Because the layers were going to be so heavy, I used two layers of plastic cake board under each layer. The bottom tier sat on a piece of plywood which was covered with aluminum foil, then cake board foil. To support the tiers, I used PVC pipe which I washed, sterilized and washed again. I wanted to make sure that this thing wouldn't fall.

I didn't start decorating until Friday night. I covered all of the tiers with crumb coat, then by the time I finished the last one, the first one was ready for the final coating. That actually took most of the evening, because I had to constantly mix icing throughout the evening. I went to bed around 1:00 am with all of the cakes covered, but no detail work. With a lot of work left to do, and the stress of wanting to make sure I get it right, it wasn't the best night's sleep I've ever had.

I got up at 6:00 am and started working once I had my tea to wake me up. I put the detail work on the second and top tiers. This design is a smaller version of the design on the lace of her dress. I filled in some of the space with a few more curls and dots, but the design was essentially the same. It didn't take too long to put the design on the two tiers. I decided to put the monogram on the third tier once I got to the reception hall. That way, if there was any shifting of the icing on the way there, I could fix it and then put on the monogram. The letters only take a minute to put on, so that wouldn't be a big deal. The piping between the layers to cover up the cake board would obviously wait until the cake got to its destination.

I refrigerated the top tier because it was such a strange shape. Since it was as tall as it was wide, I was worried about that one falling over. Chilling the icing gives it a little more stability for the trip. Since that one was likely to have stability issues, I wanted to make sure it survived transport.

I loaded everything up in the car and headed out at about 12:30 pm on Saturday. I had planned to be at the reception hall at 2:30 pm, but figured I would give myself a little more time than I had originally planned. It always seems to take longer than you plan, so I gave myself another hour. I called the reception center and made sure that I could get in. The drive from my house was almost an hour. I put down a comforter on the back of the car to soften any bumps and vibrations and set off.

I got to the reception center around 1:30 pm and started work. the bride had mentioned that the center had a shield to put up if the sun was coming in through the windows. The sun wasn't really a problem, but the room was really hot when I arrived. They hadn't turned it down yet for the event. I was there for about an hour before the guy who knew how to operate the A/C showed up and cooled it down for me. I was sweating, literally, up to that point. The bride gave me the silver cake stand to put the cake on. The thing was gorgeous. I didn't want to touch it and put finger prints on it and ruin the effect of that perfect shiny finish. I opened up all of the cake boxed and everything had survived the trip! One hurdle down. There is always a pucker factor when transporting, because one serious bump and you could lose a lot of icing. There were a couple of spots on the second tier where the design formed a few breaks in the lines, but those are easily fixed.

I stacked the layers and made sure that everything was straight. I then used a wet spatula to glaze over the icing on the smooth tiers. This gives it a perfectly smooth finish and a slightly hard crust on the outside once it dries. I then piped the icing between the layers to cover up the gaps and cake boards. I put on the monogram of their initials and then started looking the cake over. The combination of the trip and the heat of the room had taken a toll on the icing. There were definitely points of stress on the cake where you could see the icing had softened. The second tier from the bottom showed the most weakness. I shored up a few spots with extra icing I had and smoothed it out at much as I could between the lines of the design. It wasn't perfect, but I tried to make it as clean as possible before everyone started showing up and I had to leave. I sat around and fiddled with it as long as I could, because I was really worried about the toll that the heat had taken on it. The top tier had a glazed look, but all of the icing seemed to be intact, so i didn't touch it. Finally, at around 3:30, I left the reception hall and hoped for the best, but feared that things would not remain as I left them based on what I saw.

I had to wait until Monday to find someone who had gone to the wedding and get a status. I asked if anything had gone wrong with the cake. They said that there was a corner of the top tier that came off. The icing took a small part of the cake with it. He said that they simply turned the cake and put that part in the back. Of course, that means that the letters would be on the side or the back as well. He said it tasted great though. So, now I'm waiting until the couple gets back from their honeymoon to see how catastrophic it may have been to the event. Luckily, the bride is pretty laid back, so it may not be too bad. I'm fairly sure that the cake would have been fine after the trip if the room had been cool, but with the combination of the trip and the heat, something bad was bound to happen. I may put an update on this post once I talk to the couple again and see what their reaction was.

This cake was very stressful. Knowing it is for a wedding and wanting it to be perfect provides a little more pressure than usually. Then there was the sheer size of the cake. It would have been really rewarding if the delivery and ceremony went off without a hitch. It's unfortunate that this first foray into wedding cakes had to have an incident.

Update: I talked with the bride and she said that they didn't really even pay attention to the smal part of the cake that came off. In fact, since the people working the reception hall turned the cake, they really didn't notice. The fact that the monogram was turned to the side wasn't a big deal either. She said that the only bit they tried were the bites that they fed to each other and that they were probably going to tear into the top of the cake that was kept in the next week so that they can actually have some of it and enjoy it instead of a year from now when it's not going to be nearly as good.

Football

I'll be the first to tell you that I'm not a football fan. I'll watch an occasional game, but I just don't really have any interest in professional sports. However, my neighbor loves the Houston Texans. She wanted a Texans cake for her birthday. There were several ideas kicked around like a football with the logo on it and maybe one or two more. In the end, I decided on simply doing the team logo.



The cake was white with a white butter cream layer and a fondant covering. The colors of the logo are fondant as well. There is an odd optical illusion in the picture where it looks like the blue hangs off the side of the cake. In person, it didn't, but whatever angle I took the picture at, it looked like this. Weird. I finally gave up and kept the picture. I ended up not charging her for the cake since she ordered it for herself and she's ordered several cakes for me.

The cake was a huge hit with the family. They had several of the extended families get together as a combined birthday party. There were three cakes at the party and mine went first. She said that the other cakes were barely touched even later in the party.

For a Golfer

A co-worker who has ordered from me several times in the past wanted a cake to feed a small crown for a surprise party. The person it was for was in his seventies, served in three different branches of the military. He was in to golf, so they wanted a golf themes cake.

The cake was chocolate with chocolate butter cream icing. The writing and grass were regular butter cream icing. I used a hair/grass icing tip for the grass. It's a cool tip, because it covers a small area pretty quickly and you end us with this fuzzy look. Not pictured is a hole flag that I made for them to stick in once they got to their final destination. The flag was made from a bamboo skewer and a small piece of paper with a 1 on it.

I'm told that the birthday boy loved the cake and the surprise party. The cake lasted until the second day, since there was more than enough to go around. I'm told that some people had it with their coffee the next morning.

Skylander Cupcakes

I asked my son if he wanted a cake or cupcakes for his birthday and he said he wanted cupcakes. You would think that cupcakes are easier to make than an actual cake, but that's not always the case. It's true if you're making a small batch, like one recipe. When you make reveral recipes worth of cupcakes, it increases the time to decorate significantly since you have to decorate each one separately. I took a beating with the stein cupcakes because they were just so labor intensive. I personally like cupcakes, but I don't really care for decorating them.

Since the boys are in to Skylanders and the things that my son wanted the most for his birthday were a few skylander figures, I figured I would tie that in to the cupcakes. Skylander figures are broken up into eight elements. They are earth, fire, wind, undead, tech, water, magic and life. I decided to put the element symbols on the top of the cupcakes. I ended up with 22 cupcakes, so most of the symbols were put on three cupcakes and a couple of them were only on two.

It's an Oktoberfest Carnivale

This was an interesting request. A co-worker called me asking if I could make some cupcakes for a bridal shower. The theme was a combination of Octoberfest and Carnivale since the couple had those backgrounds. The invitation had a stein with a big plume of feathers coming out of the top. They were also giving away gummy bears as part of the party favors.

I stewed on this one for a bit before I came up with the design. The person ordering wanted an example, which I typically don't do, but made an exception in this case. I made a couple of examples. One was a flat option where the stein was cut out of fondant and laid on the cupcake. The other was the more 3D vertical option that I ended up with.





Beleive it or not, the vertical stein was easier than the one laying flat. I had to cut out the one laying down freehand, and it took a while. I liked the result, but I would have had to charge an arm and a leg for those. The vertical ones took some time, but were a lot easier to make. I only had to worry about stability with those, which I figured I could handle.

She wanted half chocolate and half white cupcakes so people could choose which ones they wanted. There were also going to be up to two cupcakes per person, so I think I ended up doing close to fifty. The steins are made from marshmallow fondant, with butter cream icing highlights and foam on top. I then attached a yellow gummy bear to the side of the stein to pull in that detail as well. The feathers in the top are real. I glued the feathers to a sucker stick and pushed that down through the stein and cupcake to stabilize them.

Christmas Tree

My neighbor asked me to make a cake for her mother that they were going to bring over for Christmas. She brought me a picture of one that her mother was absolutely in love with. After examining the picture for quite a while, because it was fairly low resolution, I realized that the tree in the picture was made of fondant or sugar paste. The person who made the original cake in the picture wanted to reuse the tree. I didn't like that idea, so I started modifying the cake design.

I decided to use cookies for my tree. I have a nesting star cookie cutter set. The problem is, one of the cutters is missing. Regardless, I made some sugar cookies and started cutting them into the various sizes I would need. I had to manually cut out the start in the size I was missing. After the cookies cooled, I glazed them with royal icing and stacked them up in a spiral pattern so it would look more like a tree and not a stack of cookies. After that, I piped in "ornaments" for the tree and little icicles. Some of the ornaments are tiny balls of fondant.



The cake was white with butter cream icing. The presents under the tree, including the bows, were made from marshmallow fondant.

This cake worked out great. The kids ate the cake, and the adults sat around eating the cookies with their coffee since it was pretty early. The mother loved the cake so much that she cried when they gave it to her. I'm told that she also has a picture of it hanging prominently on her wall.

A Birthday Roast

My son wanted a Skylanders cake for his birthday. He waffled between a Starcraft theme and Skylanders, but Skylanders finally won out.

If you are not familiar with Skylanders, it is a game where you have this little figures that you put on a base that connects up to a game system. When you put a character on the base, you get to play that character in the game. It's been a huge hit since Christmas. You almost can't find these things in the store at all.

After working on ideas for a while, my son decided he wanted one of the characters called Ghost Roaster. Now, I could either to the character laying down, or use an idea that I had been wanting to try for a while. Originally, my wife and I came up with this idea for a Ben 10 cake. I won't explain who that is if you don't know. The idea is to take a character like this and copy it onto a transparency so that it looks like a projection coming out of the cake. That's exactly what I did here.



I made the base out of cake and covered it with a thin layer of fondant. Now, I only had a couple of hours to do this, so it is certainly not my best work. Normally, it would look more like the stone it is supposed to be made out of. I was pressed for time because we had a really busy week and lots to do to prepare for the party.

Once the base cake was done, I took a glob of the fondant and formed it into the base for the figure. I then took the transparency and bent is slightly before pushing it into the fondant base it had. It stood up perfectly. My son was happy with it, though I was a bit disappointed. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so wasn't totally thrilled with this one.

Baked Millionaire Pie

For Christmas Eve with the in-laws, I was volunteered to bring the dessert. I made baked millionaire pies and a chocolate covered cheesecake. I figured I would give people an option and anything left over could be eaten at my mom's the next day.

You've seen the picture of the chocolate covered cheesecake from an earlier post, but the millionaire is one of my wife's favorites. It's like a pecan pie, but it has coconut and chocolate chips baked into the mixture as well. I make them as tarts, because the recipe allows me to make two tart-shaped pies. It also means they are a little more firm and there is a little bit less of the goo on the inside.

Holiday gift baskets

I try to give little treats to those that are close to me around the holidays. This year, I happened to be in the dollar store some time in October and saw these cool little metal baskets that were in red or white. I bought a huge stack of them, because I thought they would be perfect for giving out with my goodies for the year. Plus, they were only a dollar, so I wouldn't be forking out all sorts of money for the container to deliver everything in.

I put tissue paper in the baskets, then placed my baked goods in clear bags for display and to keep them fresh. This year, I make Greek cookies that are similar to a biscotti, but not nearly as hard because they are layered. It's one of my favorite cookies to make, but they are rally time consuming. The recipe makes a whole lot of cookies. Plenty to give out and still have some to keep for the family.

I also made some oatmeal cranberry cookies. Another one of my favorites. I gave them out to some of my neighbors and co-workers.

More cheesecake... lots more

My mom and I both like to cook and bake. It's something she passed on to me when I was about 5, and I've been doing it ever since. We both do a lot of baking over the holidays. A group of people at her church were going to have a Christmas dinner with somewhere around 60 people. They asked my mom to cater the event since they had all had her cooking during various parties that she would cook for. My mom decided to do all of the cooking for the dinner and she asked me to do the dessert. We had to figure out what to make. The lady in charge wasn't a lot of help. She wanted something with chocolate, but didn't want cake and didn't want my cake balls either. We decided we would offer the chocolate covered cheesecake.



Cheesecakes take a while to make. Since I have a full time job that doesn't involve any type of cooking, I'm limited to making things in the evenings when I get home from work. In the case of cheesecakes, you have to get the ingredients to room temperature, mix them, make and bake the crust, fill the cheesecake pan, put the pan in a water bath and bake the cheesecake. Then you have to let it cool very slowly in the oven and take it out to let it finish cooling before you can put it in the fridge to set completely. Since I was covering them with chocolate ganache, I couldn't pour on the chocolate until the cheesecake was cool. That usually meant waiting until the next day to coat the one I made the night before.

I started baking on Monday for the Saturday event, because I could only make one a night. I also only have one spring-form pan large enough for the recipe I was using. It makes a 10" cheesecake that's almost 3 inches tall.

The other problem I had was with portions. I didn't want them to randomly cut the cheesecake into pieces, because there was no guarantee that they would cut them equally and that the cheesecakes would go far enough. Plus, people usually make a mess when cutting cheesecakes, because they don't want to take the time to do it right. To ensure that the portions were the same size, there were enough, and they would look good after being cut and served, I had to figure out a way to do prepare them for serving. First, I had to figure out the equal portions bit. To do that, I needed the cheesecakes to be cut into 18 pieces each. If I wanted 12, that would be easy. Make a cut vertical and horizontal across the middle and then start dividing quadrants. For what I was doing, I needed math.



I created a pie chart in MS Excel and printed it out as large as I could. Then I applied that to a piece of card stock to give it some structure. I now had my template for the exact number of pieces. I didn't want to just lay it on the chocolate, because it would mess up the finish, so I inserted needles into the center and at between each wedge of the template. Then, when I pressed the template down on the cheesecake, it simply put little dots where I needed to cut. Next, I had to have a clean cut so these would be presentable. This was actually made easier by the chocolate.



To get the clean cuts, I boiled some water in a large container and placed my longest bread knife in the water. In doing so, the knife would pass through the chocolate and the top part of the cheesecake cleanly. Then, as I would pull the knife straight back out of the cheesecake, I would clean the knife and put it back in the water for the next cut. The result was a beautifully clean sliced cheesecake. Now I just had to do it with three more cheesecakes.

The cheesecakes were a hit at the event, as was the rest of the food. When asked about the cheesecakes later, I'm told that people's eyes would glaze over when talking about it because they thought the cheesecakes were so good. I can't argue with that sort of praise. I love the recipe too.

Strawberry Shortcake

A coworker asked me to make a strawberry shortcake for him. I explained that strawberry shortcakes are usually something you put together right before you eat it because the strawberries sweat from the sugar and make everything soggy. I came up with some ideas to make him a strawberry shortcake-like cake. Basically using all of the strawberry shortcake ingredients, but figuring out a way to make it last a day or two. It took some research.



First, I decided I would create a strawberry glaze or jelly type topping. This would prevent the strawberries from ruining everything, but you would still get all the flavor. This is done pretty easily by boiling strawberry puree with some sugar and maybe a little lemon juice. You cook it down until it thickens. You can add gelatin or corn starch if you want it to thicken faster.

I then had to find a good shortcake recipe. I found one that tasted pretty good. I tried it all as I put it together to make sure that it would all taste good. I baked two layers of the shortcake.

The next problem I had was making a whipped cream that wouldn't break down. Sure, I could make whipped cream icing, which I don't care for, but that would have had a different flavor. Instead I made something called stabilized whipped cream. You make the whipped cream from scratch and just as it is whipped, you add some melted gelatin to it. It sets up the whipped cream and doesn't change the flavor. The texture is just slightly different than regular whipped cream, but it won't break down and run on you. It's really cool stuff.

I assembled the shortcake by treating it just like a cake. Level off the layers, put whipped cream between them, then stacked them up. I covered the whole thing with whipped cream and then put the cooled strawberry mixture on the top. After that, I piped some of the whipped cream around the edges to make it look nice.

Unfortunately, the buyer didn't like the result. He said that it was really hard to cut. When I had it, it cut just fine, because I had to cut the layers to level them. It's possible that the shortcake just doesn't keep, but he didn't have any of it to return to me to check it out. Since the cake was covered with a fairly wet coating, I can't imagine that it dried out much. Alas, this was my first unhappy customer. Usually, I would try to make things right, but I tried to talk the guy out of this idea to begin with, so I simply let this one go. I haven't tried this one again, but I might make another one just to see if I can figure out what might have gone wrong, or if he was just being overly picky because he was expecting something different, like those spongy yellow cakes you get at the store and put the red goo and strawberries on. Who knows. I thought it looked great though!

It's Raining Cheesecakes!

Wouldn't that be fun? Well, no, not really. If you read the last post, you know that I had a meeting with my son's new principal that turned into a couple of orders for me. This one was the main one. She wanted two cheesecakes for a bridal shower. She had the invitation handy, so I snapped a picture of it.



Looking closely at the invitation, you can see a pattern in the borders. It's hard to put together because the pattern goes off the edge and under the box with the writing in it, but I pieced something together that looked pretty close. I played with the cheesecake coatings a bit. The chocolate coating I was familiar with since I found an outstanding cheesecake recipe recently that had a superb chocolate ganache coating. I wanted to do a yin and yang kind of thing with them, so the problem I had was coming up with a white coating for one of the cheesecakes.

I tried making a white chocolate ganache, and it didn't work out too well. I experimented with a going away cheesecake that someone at the office asked me to make and put it on there. It ended up being more of a glaze than a ganache. Delicious, but not practical, especially for travel. The glaze wanted to run off the cheesecake as it warmed up and as you moved it. If I wasn't on top of it, it would have gone everywhere. What I ended up using was modeling chocolate.

Modeling chocolate is incredibly easy to make. It's basically melted chocolate with a touch of corn syrup added. You knead it like dough and you can mold it however you want because it is pretty firm. The chocolate cheesecake ended up with the dark chocolate ganache and white chocolate modeling chocolate accents, and the white cheesecake was covered with the white chocolate modeling chocolate and I had to make some dark chocolate modeling chocolate for the highlights on the white cheesecake. I rolled out the white chocolate and simply laid the modeling chocolate over the cheesecake. Then I had to freehand the design in the opposing color to put on top.

If you're not familiar with ganache, it's basically chocolate that is melted by pouring hot whipping cream into it. You mix it up and let it cool a bit, then you can do all sorts of things with it. In this case, I simply poured the dark chocolate ganache over the chocolate cheesecake until the top and sides were completely covered. I chill it to let the chocolate set up then put on the white chocolate accents.



And a closer view.



In addition to the cheesecakes, I made 50 of my chocolate cake balls so that there would be a variety of desserts for them and the cheesecake would last a bit longer.

I learned something interesting about the modeling chocolate. If you use it to cover a cheesecake and then seal the cheesecake in an airtight container, the moisture from the cheesecake will soften the modeling chocolate quite a bit and it will turn into more of a ganache or glaze. Good stuff.

Movie Night

I've been really bad about keeping up with my cake entries lately. I plan on keeping up a little better in the future. There is no real excuse other than laziness, but I have quite a few to post, so I'll spend some time catching up.

This cake has an amusing story about it. My son was transferred to a new school this year because they moved his program to another campus. As part of that, we met with the new principal before the school year started. During the meeting where we were mostly talking about my son, my brings up that I had to finish the groom's cake that I was working on for the next day (the Saint's football helmet cake). The principal got excited to hear I did cakes because she had a shower to provide dessert for in a couple of weeks. She asked if I did cheesecakes. I told her I certainly did, and that will lead to my next entry, as you will see. Meanwhile, she also wanted me to do a birthday cake for her son.

The get together for her adult son was going to be a movie night. She told me a little bit about him so that I could come up with some ideas. One of the more amusing items was that he we extremely proud of the grass in his back yard. He spent a lot of time babying it and watering it and it was a point of amusement with the family as well. I decided to combine as many elements of that as I could. The idea I came up with was the movie clapper board. I considered a movie reel, but thought this would be better. I originally was going to call the movie on the board "Midlife Dawning," but his mother said that he was a little sensitive about that, so I instead pulled on the grass story and called it "Backyard Green Acres." In the Take box, I put his age.



It's been a while since I made this one, but I believe he had wanted a yellow cake with coconut. I thought putting coconut flake on the outside would make it extremely hard to decorate, so I got some coconut flavoring from the cake store and mixed it in to the butter cream icing. It tasted great, and they loved the flavor. The black part of the cake was a little bit of fondant I had left over from the guitar cake since I completed it just the week before. A little heating and the fondant was perfect for this application.