I admit it – I’ve read all four books of the Twilight series and I loved them. So, I was quite excited when I was asked to make a cake replica of Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book, for a fan’s birthday. The cake was a surprise from her boyfriend, so I really hope she liked it!
If you know the series, you’ll recognize that the bookmark is a throwback to the red scarf on the cover of Eclipse (which is the third book of the series, but of course you all knew that too!).
I just dropped this cake off a couple of hours ago, so I’ll have to wait to hear how it went over. It’s dark chocolate cake with whipped dark chocolate ganache filling. Yum. (Update – Here’s an excerpt from the email I got later that evening: Hi Caralin,
We just got back from the Dinner & the Cake was Incredible!!! Gina loved it, we took hundreds of pics & she still wouldn’t cut/serve it. Thanks again, it surprised everyone & set the bar for all of the boy friends tonight. I’m so glad they liked it!)
This is another of my recent cakes, for a birthday boy who likes – can you guess?? Ferrari!
This is a Black and White Cake, covered in fondant with red modelling chocolate. The Ferrari logo is handpainted gumpaste, with the lettering on Kevin’s name made to replicate the Ferrari font. What birthday boy wouldn’t love a car cake, especially a snazzy sports car?
I didn’t make any New Year’s Resolutions this year. Who wants to resolve to lose weight when there’s still all that Christmas chocolate around to be eaten? Not me!!
Anyway, I did make a couple of February resolutions, one of which was to take better photos of my cakes. You’d think that since I do photography too, of course I’d take nice pictures of my cakes, but usually by the time I’m done I’m tired and/or I forget, and by the time the goodies are picked up I just have time for a few snapshots!
So, last week was a very busy cake-week for me. I’ll post about the other two cakes soon, but first I want to share some photos of some cupcakes I made. They were for a fundraiser bake sale, and apparently they went over quite well, so I’m happy about that!
The first kind I made was Chocolate Covered Strawberry (chocolate cake, strawberry buttercream, topped with a strawberry slice and ganache drizzle).
The other flavour I made was Vanilla Raspberry Swirl.
I’m quite happy with the vanilla cake recipe I used for these cupcakes – most of the ones I’d tried in the past were heavier and almost pound-cake-like. This one is much lighter and fluffier. It takes way more bowls to make than my go-to dark chocolate cake does, but it sure is tasty!
Stay tuned for posts coming up soon featuring my other cake adventures from this week!
In my last post about the polka-dot birthday cake, I mentioned that I’d had a busy weekend because I was working on two projects at once. This is the other one I was talking about!
My sister, Sherry, got married this summer to a fabulous chap named Ryan. They’re both Canadian, but they met WAAAAY over in Qatar, in the middle east, where they both live and work. The wedding itself was an intimate, lovely affair at the Millcroft Inn near Orangeville, Ontario, but since we have a huge extended family (our dad was one of 14 kids, which means that I have 46 first cousins and over 100 second cousins on my dad’s side alone), our parents held a big celebration the following weekend for all those who weren’t at the main event.
This was the cake!
I wanted to make a cake that represented them as a couple. They live in a desert country, so the sand and the camel make sense. They’re both avid kayakers, so I included a kayak and paddles (though a water sport may seem contrary to a sandy country, Qatar is actually located on the Gulf of Arabia, so they get out on the water fairly often).
Now, I do confess that they don’t actually have cacti (cactuses is more fun to say) like that in Qatar, but I decided to take a little creative liberty there. 🙂
This was my first time making a gumpaste goatee! (and camel, kayak, and cacti, I suppose – like I said, the occasion doesn’t come up often to make those!)
A close-up of the kayak:
The sand is crushed up vanilla wafer cookies, and all other decorations are gumpaste. Top and bottom layer are Black and White Mousse Cake, and the middle layer is carrot cake with cream cheese icing.
For this post, I decided to take two mini-posts and smush them together, because more is always better when it comes to cake.
The first cake I’ll feature here is a pink polka-dot birthday cake I made for a friend of mine. She was turning 25, and sadly I was unable to make her birthday party so I sent this cake to take my place. You know how cakes like to party, after all. 🙂 Both layers are dark chocolate cake with strawberry buttercream. I think this was actually my first full-size fondant cake since I did the one for my brother’s wedding!
This was actually a two-cake weekend for me, so that was busy, but fun. I’ll feature the other cake I did (and my reason for skipping my friend’s party) in my next post! In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a quick shot of a cupcake I made with my friend Elena (who is an amazing baker – more on her later!). This cupcake is actually from earlier than the birthday cake, and was one of my first forays back into fondant. It made for a fun afternoon!
So, you remember how last time I said that the “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” cake started it all?
Well, a few days after the wedding I got an email from the maid of honour. Her boss was throwing an 80th birthday party for her dad that weekend, but the person she’d had lined up to do the cake was pregnant and had delivered her baby early! Needless to say, she was looking for new cake arrangements, and fast. The maid of honour passed my info on to her boss, and I was happy to do it. Cakeless crisis averted, and I was thrilled because I had another cake to work on!
The birthday boy’s name was Stan, and his family wanted to incorporate some of his favourite things on to his cake: he’s an avid gardener, he loves reading (his favourite book is “Marley & Me” by Josh Grogan), he’s a big fan of Volkswagen, and his best friend is his Golden Retriever named Hogan.
This is what I came up with:
Look like another grassy cake we’ve seen recently? The theme just fit so perfectly again for this second request! The cake flavours are the same as Katy’s: top and bottom tiers dark chocolate cake with white chocolate buttercream, and the middle tier carrot cake with cream cheese icing.
Here’s a close-up: The “dirt” in the garden is chocolate cookie crumbs, and the “rocks” are actually candy covered chocolate (I can’t take credit for them, though – I bought them). Cool, huh? The tiny flowers are made from fondant and all other decorations are gumpaste.
After making the cake, I had both batter and icing left over so I whipped up a batch of mini garden cupcakes. I love my mini muffin pan – it’s perfect for things like leftover batter, and the little bite-size cupcakes are super cute and just the right amount for a sweet little snack. I didn’t pipe the cream cheese icing on the mini carrot cupcakes as grass – I thought weird albino grass might not look so appetizing, so I just went with a classic swirl on those ones.
Yes, you heard/read correctly: a wedding cake inspired by the novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by Roald Dahl.
Fun, huh??
Katy and I know each other through work, and last year she was planning her wedding. She’d already arranged for me to take her photos (I also do photography as another side endeavor – check out my website for Caralin Ruth Photography here!), and was talking about the need to find a good cake. I hadn’t done too many cakes yet at this point, but I told her I could make her cake too, if she wanted – and I was thrilled that she said yes!
At first, Katy was thinking about a beach-themed wedding cake, incorporating her wedding colour of Tiffany blue. Soon, however, she had a flash of inspiration – a “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” cake! This was the first chapter book Katy read as a child, and it always kept a special place in her heart. Plus, her now-husband is a chef, so the food theme carried through.
What a fun cake this was to make!!
Here’s a close-up of the happy couple, made from gumpaste. Chris has a wooden spoon to show his job as a chef, and Katy is a teacher, so she has a book.
Everything on this cake is edible, except for two wooden skewers holding up the “Marriage is Sweet” signs, which are made from chocolate melting wafers. The bottom and top layers are dark chocolate cake with filled with white chocolate buttercream. The middle layer is carrot cake with cream cheese icing, and the grass over everything is more white chocolate buttercream. The river is chocolate ganache, the mushrooms are made from gumpaste, and the gumdrops are made from…well, they’re gumdrops. 🙂 I sprinkled on some Nerds to add an extra bit of colour in the grass and carry on that “candy land” feeling.
How awesome is a wedding cake that has Nerds on it? I ask you that. 🙂
A field of fondant mushrooms, ready to go on the cake.
I had SO much fun making this cake – it was a huge learning experience for me, as I hadn’t really done anything like it before. It has since turned into the cake that “started it all” in terms of my recent work – from here, things just kind of took off, and I’ve been having a blast since then! (Ha – “took off” and having a “blast” – no pun intended this time, but if I was talking about a spaceship cake those would be great. Now I’ll have to make a spaceship cake just to give these puns their due.)
After making the wedding party cake for my brother that I posted about last time, I didn’t really do too much in terms of “fancy” cakes for a while. I still did a lot of baking (and eating!), of course, but the baking bug took a bit of a back seat for a little bit.
One thing I did do in the “time off” was develop an AWESOME cake recipe (if I do say so myself!!). My sister was hosting a wedding shower for her best friend and asked me to make a cake incorporating the wedding colours, which were black and white. The recipe I came up with, now simply known as “Black and White Cake”, has four layers of dark chocolate cake filled and iced with white chocolate mousse, topped with dark chocolate ganache. Mmmmmm…. It’s not too sweet, not too rich, but just right – even my dad and brother, who don’t like chocolate, love this cake! So, now it’s pretty much the only cake my family eats. Except for strawberry shortcake, which is delicious too. Mmmmm cake. 🙂
So, fast forward a little while, and one day I got the urge to try working with gumpaste. My sister-in-law requested a Bob the Builder cake for my nephew’s first birthday – this is the same sister-in-law who that first tiered cake was for, actually, and Travis is their 2nd child, so you can see that I really did take quite a break!
Anyway, I sat up that night with a toy Bob as inspiration, and came up with this little guy:
Not a bad first try, I thought!
My brother (Travis’s dad) thought he looked tasty…
…but he DID make it onto the cake.
The bottom layer of this cake was the Black and White Cake I mentioned before, and the top layer was a lemon cake with blueberry mousse filling. Yum!
Well, I sure have a lot of catch-up to do in order to get this blog up to date!
Since I thought I’d go more-or-less sequentially, what better place to start than with the cake that started it all!
My brother was getting married a few summers ago, so I thought I’d make them a cake as a present. I’ve been baking with my mom since I could reach the counter, but I’d never tried either stacking a cake or working with fondant. Did that stop me? No! Should I have practiced first? Perhaps! (In my defence, this wasn’t for their actual wedding day – we held a big party at my parents’ house a month or so before the wedding.)
In preparation for the big event, I went out and bought Rose Levy-Beranbaum‘s book “The Cake Bible“. Indeed, it is a bible for all things cake-y, and if you’re interested in learning how to make fancy cakes, this book should be on your shelf (after you’ve read it, of course). I haven’t made nearly all the recipes yet, though it sounds like a tasty project.
Anyway, armed with my book of instructions, I dove right in. The experience was, admittedly, a little frustrating and nerve-wracking at times, but after all the flour and icing sugar was wiped away, I was pretty pleased with the final results!
The flower garland and topper are real, and I bought the little fabric butterfly.
This was long enough ago that I still used my film camera, and I was annoyed to discover when I got the pictures developed that I’d had black and white film in my camera! Luckily, another member of my family had taken this shot of my brother and his wife with the cake. 🙂
The cake itself was lemon with blueberry mousse. Yum!
Welcome to the new blog for Cakes by Caralin. I’ll try to keep this updated as often as possible to show you the snazzy, tasty goodies I’ve been working on. I always love to hear your thoughts and suggestions, so please feel free to leave comments or to just say hello!
