cake

4th of July | Flag Birthday Cake

July 5, 2016| Birthdays, Holidays

My birthday is just shy of July 4th, but it has always been fun to combine birthday celebrations with 4th of July weekend getaways and BBQs. This year, still inspired by summer fruits, I made a blueberry buttermilk cake, with pastry cream custard filling and homemade raspberry-strawberry jam. The blueberry buttermilk cake is actually one that I haven’t made in a long time, but I happened to remember it when I was brainstorming and it turned out to be a great building block.

As for the decoration, I had been thinking about red, white and blue for the cake, but not necessarily a flag cake. But as I was playing with the berry milk crumbs and extra blueberries I had, I kept gravitating towards a stripe theme. To make red stripes on the side of the cake, I frosted with buttercream, chilled the cake in the freezer, and then wrapped acetate strips around the cake.

I pressed the berry milk crumbs against the exposed buttercream.

And then pulled away the acetate strips to reveal clean lines.

For the top, I piped buttercream with a star tip and placed blueberries in between. I wasn’t counting, but I believe I ended up with 47 blueberries. If I had known I was going to fit that many blueberries on the cake, I might have planned for 50 blueberries! Next time 🙂

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Wedding | Milo’s Parents Get Married!

June 18, 2016| Milo, Weddings

You may have noticed that our blog was pretty quiet at the start of 2016. That’s because we were working on a recent wedding — our own! I’m so excited to share some photos of the wedding cake, particularly the gumpaste flowers that were a labor of love over the first couple months of the year. (Photo credit above to the wonderful Tyler Branch Photo.)

With a color theme that spanned a gradient of dusty blues and greens, I made gumpaste succulents, silver brunia balls, dusty miller leaves, silver dollar eucalyptus leaves, and an assortment of white peonies, mums and filler flowers.

I had also made a dusty blue dahlia bundle for the surprise groom’s cake, but then forgot the flowers in the hotel room. Bummer.

Fortunately gumpaste flowers don’t die, so now we have a lovely gumpaste flower centerpiece arrangement to keep as a memento at home 🙂

The cake itself was a Napoleon, which is made of layers of homemade puff pastry with custard filling. After covering with buttercream and creating a tree bark pattern, I sprinkled the top with feuilletine flakes and dusted with powdered sugar. We only made the top tier as a cutting cake (the bottom tiers are dummies), and served our guests with Napoleon sheet cake from Porto’s Bakery which makes a delicious version.

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Thanksgiving | (Part 2) Ultimate Chocolate Viking Cake

November 28, 2015| Holidays

For Thanksgiving this year, I got a request for a chocolate dessert. So I took the opportunity to make one of my favorite very very chocolatey desserts, the Viking cake from Extraordinary Desserts. This is a 3-layer chocolate sour cream cake, with a dark chocolate creme brulee filling, as well as a milk chocolate chantilly cream filling. The cake is also brushed with cocoa simple syrup and lined with ganache.

Finally, the cake is covered with the ganache and crushed cocoa almond praline. For decoration, I dusted the top of the cake with powdered sugar and made some marzipan autumn leaves and acorns.

This is best consumed in thin slices to avoid chocolate overdose 🙂

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