Decoration Posts

The Marble Cake, it is meant to look like a graduation hat

Another cake from my favorite recipe site, allrecipes.com.

This cake was a surprise to Heather for her convocation of a Master’s degree.  In a secret dual party at her aunt’s we celebrated Father’s day and her degree.  I’ll be honest at the outset, it was her aunt’s idea to secretly make the cake at Heather’s Nanny and Poppa’s house (Thanks Nona!).

I can’t say enough to express how much we loved this recipe however.  It was absolutely delicious!  It was moist and tasty but above all was strong enough for me to shape it and decorate it as I wanted!

On one afternoon on my way home from work, I made the cake and got to know all the splendors of mixing a cake with a mix master in stead of by hand. Then I was able to leave once it came out of the oven and Heather’s Nanny froze it for me.  Two days later I came home a bit late again but this time I had cut it, made the fondant (a first for me) and decorated it in its entirety.  Not only that but I made a huge mess of the countertop.  Oops!  Who knew that black food dye would leave a white counter pink?!  I scrubbed at it for about half an hour before it started to look mostly white again.

The night of the party, Nanny and Poppa brought the cake to Nona’s and I brought it up to Heather’s surprise.  Actually, I’m terrible at keeping surprises very well as I don’t lie very well, so she guessed I was making a cake, but the surprise was the flavor and decor.  This is cake recipe that I would recommend to anyone!

This is the golden cake with fondant and gelatin decorations

This recipe was one of the many layer cakes from The Complete Canadian Living Baking Book.  After last week’s success with decorating Serena’s birthday dessert, I found that I have really enjoyed decorating cakes.  As a result of this, I may change my goal slightly.

It seems to me that there are really about three types of cake: cheese, light fluffy (angel food etc.) and butter/sugar.  The butter/sugar type is certainly the most common and once you get the hang of the basics, they all so far seem to be very similar.  After making 16 cakes (13 of which are butter/sugar) I think I’m going to experiment with doing fancier decorations.  This isn’t to say that I won’t continue to try out different recipes but I may make two cakes out of one recipe so that I can try different ways of decorating.  I still have a fair number of cakes I would like to try on my list!

So this week, I went with a fairly easy cake and I’ve split it into two separate cakes.  The first cake is going to be posted today and the second is in the freezer for future decorating.  If you’ve never tried it, decorating can take as long or longer than actually making the cake so no complaining!

For this week’s decoration, I was inspired by my work.  As a back story, to help explain where this comes from, I’ll explain my job.  I work in pharmaceuticals; specifically, I work with radioactive pharmaceuticals.  I quality control them by running different chemical tests on them before they can be shipped off for many different uses including diagnostic testing and treatment.

Top view of the decorated cake

My first foray into fondant is with this cake.  The large circular symbol is a trefoil, the radiation symbol.  The black barrels are to represent waste containers and the green gelatin oozing from the horizontal one is representative of cartoon nuclear waste.  In reality, most of the chemicals I work with are clear despite their radioactivity.

I have really enjoyed decorating this and all of my coworkers enjoyed the cake!

Maple Cake, Cappuccino Ice Cream and Chocolate Decorations

I found this recipe in The Complete Canadian Living Baking Book.

This one was less about the cake and more about the presentation, as can be seen by the photo.  I’m starting to think that 50 cakes was a lot more than necessary to learn how to make a cake.  My next goal is to make some fancy looking cakes!

I made this cake for Serena’s birthday.  For my birthday, I received some cake decorating utensils as well as decorating books and a book of ice cream recipes.  So for the full out presentation, Heather made a cappuccino ice cream and I made some chocolate decorations.

The cake itself was pretty simple, 3/4 of a cup of maple syrup and few other normal cake ingredients, but pretty average as cakes go.  The full out recipe was meant to have pecans but as there are some nut allergies, we conveniently left those out.

Enough for a party

To present it, we took bowls, cut a slice of cake and placed a scoop of ice cream next to each one.  Whipped cream was placed on top of the cake with cocoa powder sprinkled upon that.  The chocolate decorations then adorned the creation.

In all, I was pretty happy with the outcome and I had a few very nice comments about the whole thing afterward.  I’m hoping that I’ll be able to do more of the fancy decorating in the future!