Alix's Birthday Cake

I haven't known Alix for as long but I do know she loves green.  She is also alergic to chocolate so her cake will be a vanilla cake with strawberries also in the middle and vanilla frosting.  Along with green frosting there will be a variety of things on her cake, a sheet music of fondont with edible paint, and a jamaican flag to represent her, which will also be made of fondont.  There will also be lots of sparkles which she loves.

Jessica's Birthday Cake

For my best friend's birthday cake I was planning on making it a one layer chocolate cake with strawberries in the middle layer.  Since Jessica loves and working with horses all the time and is on the polo team I was planning on making it a grassy top with a few hay barrels and finally a horse.  The horse will be made out of model chocolate which is new for me and i will mold it around wooden spools.  I did some research on this and figured out I can make the horse and put it in the fridge so it will stay good and not melt.

Cake Walk-Field Day

Today I have been asked by the Red Cross Club to bake a few cakes for the field day.  These cakes will be raffled off for the Red Cross Club.  Since field day is the last day of school and technically the start of summer I was thinking of making every bright and summery cakes.  Using some of my new frosting and techniques with different flower and making them very vibrant and flashy.

Neopolitan Cupcakes

These delicious bit of cupcakes are my vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry cupcakes.  First I made a chocolate cake mix and added a few chocolate chips, and put it as the first layer in the paper lining.  Second I made a simply vanilla cake mix with a little bit of added vanilla for an extra kick and put that in as the second layer.  I then put these cupcakes in the oven and waited for the magic to work.  Once cooled and settled I used the flavorless Duncan Hines frosting and added the strawberry powder packet.  Once it was all mixed and creamy I put the frosting in a piping bag and piped it onto the cupcake in a swirling motion.  It was a perfect mix of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate.

Final Paper Outline (Rough Draft)

I. Intro

• what my project is about
• why i choice cupcakes/design
• a brief info about what ill be discussed
• what has been researched

II. Body Paragraphs

i. -why the vet project didn't work out
  -why i originally choose it
  -why i picked cupcakes as a substitute

ii. -how starting my cupcake project was
   -what my original project was planned to be about and what i would do
   - what i did my first month

iii. -the struggle in blogging and motivation
    -beginning of looking at the business aspect of cupcake designs too
    -lack of hands on work and more research sections
    - loans, money, floor plans, my experience of looking in the buildings, equipment

iv. -the techniques for designs that i learned
    -talk about my best projects i made
    -the difficulty of each technique and the precision/practice needed

v. -my over all experience during this project

III. Conclusion

• restate the point of my project
• a final thought on how i thought during the process

Loans

Here some information on getting loans...which  I would need if I started a business.

General purpose loan: $2,000-$100,000

• you would have up to 120 months to pay it back
• Borrowing $100,000 for 120 months, the interest rate would be 5.84% with M&T Bank.

Business purpose loan: depends on what it is for (equipment, store, etc.)

Flavorless Frosting

While simpily shopping for some cake mix and frosting I came upon this wonder creation.  Duncan Hines is now making a flavor less white frosting in which you can add your own flavors too!!! To me this is so amazing being trying to make frosting a certain flavor is so difficult and if you mess up, most of the time you have to begin all over again.
I may plan on using this for my Girl Scout cupcakes on Wednesday, depending if I can find a flavor that goes with my Neapolitan theme.  This just goes to show that the baking world is still updating and growing.

Kaylee's Birthday!!!

After 6 hours of hard, messy, colorful work I finally finished Kaylee's cake.  My original idea was to make it 2 separate cakes, a 1 and an 8.  Once I started to prepare the cake and get all my ingredients together, I reevaluated my plans.  Being able to cover 2 big cakes was just going to be too difficult, so instead made 1 sheet cake with the one and 8 on top in fondant. 

Here is fondant that has been colored green for camo:

frosting a cake before putting fondant on it is important to make sure it sticks and staying in place, and being flat:

Here I used edible spray paint for make the dog tags and later painted on the wording:

Fondant with food coloring:

Slightly mixed fondant, which you twist and kneed until it is fully mixed in:

Fully mixed:

When you roll out fondant you spread flour so it won't stick and you then lay it on the cake and flatten it so it is smooth and cut off the excess fondant:

Four colors of fondant:

I took little pieces of fondant and mushed them together and then rolled them out with a rolling pin to make camo:

THE FINAL PROJECT!!



this is the hardest cake I've ever made.  Making camo was so hard to make it perfect and match up together.  I wish it had more sparkle to it but to me it has so much talent invested into it that it is worth the lack of sparkle.

Kaylee's 18th birthday

My best friends birthday is May 8th and she is turning 18.  Of course I want to do something uber special but what would be so amazing it would blow her out of her cowgirl boots??  And finally it hit me.  Instead of cupcakes I want to get big so I'm going to do a cake, that I will cut into a 1 and an 8.  I will then cover it in fondant, but how could I make this any more special? I'm going to make the fondant look like camo, YES camo, her most favorite thing in the work.  Not only is her husband a marine but she will be going into the navy next year.  But I don't want it to look like a boy camo cake so what makes it girly? SPARKLES.  I will be adding sparkles and many other little girly marks. Now that I think about it, maybe I will make it into pink camo.
Here is what the structure will look like:

Strawberry Short Cake

On Saturday I made pound cake so our family and friends could have some strawberry short cake for dessert. I used a recipe i found online from scratch, at http://www.cooks.com/.

4 cups cake flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon mace (optional)
1 lb. butter
3 cups sugar
8 eggs, room temperature
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 tablespoons rum or amaretto (optional)

This recipe made a huge cake which was good since it was for two families.  It was so thick and packed together, like pound cake should be, yet it was moist and delicious.  To top it off with the fresh strawberrys and whipped cream completed it.

During this proccess I had to look a few things up.  When looking at the ingredients I saw "mace", now i have no clue what that is, so I googled it.  I found out that ground cloves are the base of it, so essentially it just an additional spice.

Update On Girl Scout Cupcakes

That Girl Scout dinner i mentioned is coming up soon and I need to decide on a cupcake fast!  While surfing a Betty Crocker website I found the perfect kind of cake.  Now granted it doesnt have a cool design to represent Girl Scouts in general, but to me it does in a different way.  This cupcake/cake is a Neapolitan cake, to me these three different flavor are a good example of the different girls that are in Girl Scouts. I've been in Girl Scouts for 13 years and now that I think about it, I have seen every girl of every color, background, heritage, everything.  Baking is about new experiences and to me a way to bring people together for great baked goods!

Technical Difficulties

Having a seven year old laptop is quite rare now a days.  I got mine in sixth grade and it is pink, of course, and i LOVED it.  Now I don't, because it decides when it was to turn on or have a virus.  So sorry for all the delays and no posts in quite a while, but we are back up and working. :)