Mario Kart Go Cart Track

My son wanted a go cart birthday party. We went to a local go cart track, which also had a huge game room. Personally, I spent most of the time out on the track and had a blast. After the party, the kids that were at the party that I raced with started telling others at school that I was an awesome go cart racer. Love it!

So, to go with the party theme, we decided he would get a Mario Kart themed cake. I pondered this one for a while, because I wanted to bring in the go cart feel.

The "tires" around the outside of the track are cut out using an O fondant letter cutter, then rounded out a bit. The track is also fondant. The cake was chocolate and I used a chocolate buttercream icing (my favorite combination) on the cake to make it look sort of muddy. I then used the hair/grass tip to put on the grass. During a trip to the party store, we found the other props to put on it. The Yoshi and Mario carts were attached to small containers of candy. I popped those off and just used the carts. The prize box in the back left was filled with the gold coin candy that I ended up using to spell his name out on the track. The mushroom also had candy in it, but I didn't use that candy for the cake. I think it was green apple candy, and it was really good. We ate it later. The bomb and star were also candy filled. I thought putting the mushroom under the jump was a nice touch since that is like one of my favorite tracks in the game.

Since this one was chocolate on chocolate, I got a lot of compliments on it. It always turns out real moist. I think we ate less than 2/3 of it at the party, so I took it to work the next day. It didn't last until lunchtime.

Soccer

I never realized just how complex the design of a soccer ball really is. The combination of different types of polygons never really struck me until I had to reproduce it. The child for this party wanted a soccer themed cake. This is pretty much what I came up with.

I think you can safely assume that the kid's name was Emily and she was 8. Most of this was done with only buttercream icing. Only the black part of the soccer ball is fondant. The balls were two layers of cake which were hand-carved to get the ball shape. In order to get them all onto a board that would fit into a standard cake box, I had to keep them pretty close together. It doesn't look bad, but icing the area between them was a nightmare.

Elmo Cake

I'll go on record saying that there are two icing colors that I hate to make. Red and black are horrible because they take a whole mess of dye to get a vibrant color. You can't exactly do an Elmo cake without being bright red.

The heart, mouth, nose and eyes were fondant, but the rest was buttercream icing. In fact, it took a little while to do because I used the grass/hair icing tip to give him a fuzzy appearance. That means that for every square centimeter of surface that I had to place the "hair" and pull away to get the effect I wanted. It's not hard, just tedious. He looked cute though, and they loved it. I've gotten other orders of of this one.

Carving the figure was probably the hardest part of this cake. Trying to get enough detail so that it wouldn't disappear under the hair and especially trying to make it look like one leg was slightly in front of the other without compromising the strength of the cake was interesting. It worked out though. The eyes were the biggest problem because they kept wanting to fall off since they stuck out a bit until I got the fondant over them and sort of tacked it down with icing. You could see individual fingers in person, but they don't really show up well in the picture.

Elegant Baby Shower Cake

So, the research and development for the last post was to make this cake.

I was asked to come up with ideas for the baby shower cake. When she sent me the invitation, I immediately said, "Why don't I do that?" The picture in the middle of the invitation was the basis for the cake above. The flavor was Italian Cream, and I used cream cheese icing under the fondant and between the layers since it had two. The whole cake was initially covered with the pink fondant to provide a solid layer for structure. If you piece together the colors, they tend to want to separate and look terrible. If you cover it with a solid layer, then layer over that with the other colors, no problem. I used buttercream for the outlines and facial features. My wife tells me it looked much better in person. I generally agree, but still like the picture.

I received great feedback from the party that this cake was a major highlight of the festivities. They loved the flavor as well.

Research & Development

The people at my office are often my guinea pigs for trying out recipes. Not that they are complaining. I generally try out lots of recipes before settling on one that I am going to use full time. This time, I had an order for an Italian cream cake for a baby shower. I wanted to make sure that I had the best recipe possible, because the person I was making it for holds a special place in our hearts as one of my son's former teachers, and an excellent one at that. So, what I did was try two different recipes, each prepared with different ingredients. Then I tried two different icings. For each cake recipe, I split the batter and made one cake layer with unsweetened coconut, and the other with sweetened coconut. The two recipes were completely different as well. One was this real elaborate recipe, much like a German chocolate cake, and the other was a quick throw together recipe. For the icings, both we re cream cheese based, but one was loaded with nuts and the other was smoother. I took all of these to work and put out a sign explaining that people had to work for their treat. They were asked to vote on their favorite cake recipe and favorite icing recipe. The winner would be my new go-to recipe.

I looked over several recipes before picking the two I did. After you've been cooking for a long time, you get pretty good at looking at a recipe and gauging whether or not you'll like it. These two recipes stood out. I  got lots of very good feedback from people. Since my office is loaded with engineers, some people put a whole lot of thought into their feedback. I was very surprised with the result. My personal favorite was the more complex cake recipe. Mostly because the texture was light and the flavor was more delicate. The overwhelming winner of the vote was the easier recipe. Who am I to argue with popular opinion.

Hello Kitty

This one was challenging to get photos of. I took photos of the figure and the various layers, but I had to have the customer take a picture of the final product. They didn't live anywhere near me, so I wasn't going to deliver. Instead, I gave them the layers and some extra icing to cover the seams with after they stacked it.

The figure is pure fondant. To give it structure, it just had to sit out for a day or two to dry out. I was a bit worried about damage to her during the trip. The flowers did come off, but they were able to reattach them.

Above is layer one before delivery. Then, there's layer two. Note that the supports (straws) are already in the cake and it's ready for stacking. From what I recall, one tier was white and the other was chocolate.

The final picture was taken after they assembled the cake at its final location.

Demon Pumpkin

This is another non-baking post, but it is food related. It's another one of my Halloween creations. I entered it into my company's pumpkin carving contest and took first place again. Sadly, I'm not sure that first prize even covered all of my materials for this one.

I cleaned the larger pumpkin and carved it, saving some of the goo. The part that I cut out for the mouth was carved to make the tongue. I bought the teeth at a Halloween store. The actually glow in the dark, which is pretty cool. The smaller pumpkin was only carved enough to get the face on it. That thing was rock hard. I little of the goo from the big pumpkin was draped over the smaller one. The eyes are radishes with the ends snipped off and the horns are squash pushed into a hole I cut in the side.

We put this out front Halloween night and I think I had more comments on this one than any I've done in the past. Hmm... It's summertime, so it's time to start thinking about this year's entry.