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I managed to complete 29 cakes but due to unforeseen circumstances I had to quit there and cut the documentation at 25 cakes. Thank you for reading and the lovely comments.

This was the Anniversary Cake. Decorated by Gloria.

This cake is one I’ve been excited to post about since I began thinking of it a few months ago!  I reused some good recipes (the Marble Cake and the White Cake) but I assembled it into something else.

Heather’s Aunt and Uncle celebrated their 25th Wedding Anniversary at the beginning of September.  In May I was approached by Heather’s grandmother, the same one that has loaned me a good many recipe books, to make them a cake for the party.  I eagerly accepted!

Since Heather and I were away for much of August and September, I had to make the cake on the week of the 17th between Heather’s sisters wedding, renovating our bathroom and preparing for school in the Fall.  I froze the

Cutting the Cake.

cakes and spent the day in Heather’s mom’s kitchen making fondant and layering the cake.  Once that was complete I froze it and went on vacation.

Before the party, Heather’s mom and grandmother took the time to make it fancy by adding ribbon and other decorations.  Her grandmother had even stored some of the icing flowers from their original wedding cake which she placed on this one as well.

Though we weren’t in attendance, I had heard that the cake was enjoyed and appreciated.  It certainly was a fun experience.

The first cut into the cake already shows something is not quite right.

This cake is from The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook.  Thank you to Patrick and Katherine for lending me the book!

Now, I’ve heard very good things about this kind of cake.  It is essentially wafers covered in whipping cream.  Unfortunately I misunderstood the directions and got wafer cookies.  I was a bit confused reading the recipe which suggested making an alternating arrangement that was almost a circle shape since the wafers that I had were long and rectangular.  I arranged them as best I could but was already starting to doubt the cake at that point.

I brought the cake to a party and when I brought it out mentioned that I was a little concerned about this one.  In taking the first bite I found that the cookies had become quite soggy and realized for sure that I had made a mess of this one.  One of the other people at the party had made it before and told me that while I had picked up iced wafer cookies I was supposed to have picked up wafer cookies.

We still ate it and everyone had a good laugh.

This was a coffee layer cake designed in the image of my parents house.

I’ve been really bad at updating, life has been busy and honestly I haven’t been too good at keeping up with the cakes either.  I’ve been getting back into it though so I’ll start updating from the beginning.

This cake was made for Father’s day and I found the recipe here.  I was looking specifically for a cake involving coffee (as my dad enjoys coffee) but also that would be good for layering as I wanted to build my parents house.

The building turned out alright but I didn’t have time to go into tremendous detail.  I wanted to make a driveway and a lawn but that got cut in the end.  The address and the window borders didn’t work exactly as planned either because the pen that I was writing with (an edible marker) didn’t write on fondant as well as I had hoped it would.  The garage isn’t well defined nor are the basement windows but it was close enough that everyone there knew it when they saw it.

The model as seen by google street view.

For a comparison, this picture is how google street view captured their house.

I didn’t care too much for the cake itself but everyone else said that they enjoyed it so it couldn’t be that bad.

Sponge cake with simple syrup and some fancy ice cream

Going back to my classic cookbook by James McNair, this one is called an American Sponge cake.  At Heather’s suggestion, I soaked it in a raspberry simple syrup to accompany her Rasberry sorbet.

We’re heading into barbecue season, not that the weather in Vancouver is showing it, so we decided to bring this dessert to the first one of the year.  I think the sponge cake is something that really needs to be served with something and I’m not sure that a frosting is quite right for it.  The simple syrup was good with it and it’s very light.

There isn’t much else to say about this one.  It wasn’t my favourite cake, but maybe I could learn to like it more if I topped it with something else.  The real treat for this evening were the other desserts: Heather’s raspberry sorbet (pictured above); Heather’s vanilla, honey goat’s milk ice cream (also pictured above); and the brownies by Keith and Michelle (not pictured).

A colourful cake with a bow and stripes

As I mentioned in the previous post, I am interested in trying some fancier looking cakes as well as different flavours.  This cake is made from the second half of the recipe that made the first Golden Cake.

Inspired by reading the Ace of Cakes book, I wanted to try something colourful and not so measured.  I also really wanted to try to make a bow of fondant.  As with many of my cakes, I will most certainly take some of this cake away as a learning experience.

During the decorating of this cake, I learned that it’s not ideal to try to stretch your leftover fondant to fit the cake.  I had to roll out the bottom blue layer really thin in order to cover the entire cake.  In doing this, you see every crumb that is sitting on top of the cake.  If you left a large crumb on your crumb coat, it shows as a bump on the outside of the fondant.

Second, carving a warm cake is not as easy as you want it to be.  I tried to flatten out the edges of my cake since I baked it in a slightly sloped dish (which makes it easier to remove from the pan).  In doing this, I accidentally carved off some of the corners and made it look worse than it would have if I had just left it alone.  A little butter cream icing allowed me to fix it up, but it was awkward to say the least.

Third, I found that making large looping bows didn’t work as well as I wanted.  You see the fancy bow loops on all of the really good looking cakes, but my just wanted to cave in.  To disguise it, I put a large glob of orange right in the centre.  That  glob also helped to mask the seems I had made right in the middle.

In all, I’m not disappointed in this cake.  It does look good, even better in the photos actually.  It was still a good learning experience however.

An Easter Bunny ready to be eaten.

I know this is not a type of cake (it was not made of real bunnies) but I thought it fitting for Easter to make a shaped cake.  In fact, this is the very first shaped cake I have ever attempted, so please excuse me if it didn’t turn out looking exactly like a rabbit.

The cake itself was merely a white cake made from Really Cookin’.  It was a simple recipe but that’s all I was looking for to make a bunny shaped cake.  The shaping instructions were from a page that Heather’s grandma gave me.  The page detailed very easy instructions for what shapes to cut out of two 8 inch round cake pans in order to create the bunny.

The most interesting part of making this one was learning to dye coconut for the ears, feet and mouth.  I took a tablespoon of milk and dropped food colouring in it until I got the pink that I wanted, then I mixed the milk into the coconut shavings in a bowl until the colour had mixed evenly into the coconut.  Voila, pink ears.  Coconut does not stick to icing as I had hoped it would, so it took some balancing and poking to get much on there.  Disguising a lack of icing with extra cocnut doesn’t work as well I expected either.  I was still decorating the cake when we were supposed to have arrived at brunch, so I wasn’t interested in actually making more icing.  Alas, next time.

The alternate title of this post would be “Random Cakes of Kindness”.  This was a very simple recipe which I picked up from my favourite recipe website allrecipes.com.  The frosting was simply melted chocolate chips poured over the cake and cooled.

It is amazing to me how difficult it is to find a good chocolate cake recipe!  I am currently in possession of about 10 cake cook books and only one has a chocolate cake recipe without nuts.  Maybe they are too concerned with fancier cakes that they don’t think a good chocolate cake is worthwhile.  This is why I turned to the internet for this one and I’m happy to say it turned out very well.

Since I was going for a simple recipe, I decided to something fun.  I would call up a random friend and deliver a portion of the cake to them that evening.  From the time I got off work to the time I delivered the first cake was actually only around five hours, so I’d say I did a pretty good job.  I baked the cake in two loaf pans and cut them each in half when they had cooled.  Then I melted the chips in the microwave and poured it over the cake and drove while it cooled.

Everyone was sure happily surprised when I showed up to their house with a fresh cake and at least a few of them were curious about the whole thing when I called them out of the blue to say I’d be stopping by to drop something off.  In all I would call my random cakes of kindness a success and may repeat the idea again in the future to some more unsuspecting friends.

PS There are sadly no pictures to go along with this post so you’ll just have to take it on faith…

This was the berry cake, the candle was for the birthdays we used it to celebrate.

This cake too came from James McNair’s cakes.  Maybe I should write to this guy and thank him.

Before I get started, I should address the lack of posts for the previous few weeks.  I injured my foot somehow and was unable to stand let alone bake.  I haven’t figure out exactly what caused it, but it seems to be getting better.  As I told one friend yesterday, it’s at about 85% at the moment so I am back to baking!

Ok, this cake was inspired by the fact that we still had 4 cups of local blueberries in our freezer from last summer.  It also may have been inspired by the fact that I had been watching the 100-mile Challenge on the food network’s website during my day off.  In any case, local blueberries were today’s theme!

This cake was probably the one I’ve enjoyed making the most.  I think I’m becoming more confident in my cake baking skill after having made 9 already this year.  I have an idea of what the batter should look like when it has finished mixing and what the consistency of half-cooked cake looks like through the window of the oven.  It was very messy though, and blueberries can stain.

Though I said I followed the recipe, I didn’t specifically use the types of berries suggested in either the cake or the frosting.  The cake worked out very well, though I may have overcooked it just a touch, not enough to complain about the flavor though.  The change in berries may have affected the consistency of the frosting however.

When I was mixing it up, I noticed that it did seem to be a bit thinner than I was used to, but I hadn’t followed this recipe before so I passed it off to being an amateur.  I figured that by the time I went to heat it and cool it, the consistency would change due to chemical conversion somehow.  I was wrong and I couldn’t bear to throw out 6 cups of icing sugar and 2 cups of blueberries so I just kept adding sugar until it thickened to a spreadable texture.  I really wanted to avoid pouring the icing on.

In the end, I had to clean up the puddles of icing that formed around the cake, but enough stayed on to cover it.  The blueberry skins gave it a nice spotty colour that made for a textured look on the cake.  The frosting ended up rather thin, but it was still delicious and appreciated.

I came up with the concept for 50 cakes before learning about the movie Julie & Julia.  From what I understand, the plot of the movie follows a very similar premise to this blog.  Clearly I’m in good company if a Hollywood film starring Meryl Streep uses the same idea.

Though I have not yet seen the film, I will watch it soon and post a review here with my opinion of how it turned out.