Happy Halloween!

My Halloween cake project is done and I couldn't be more happy with it. This was a purely for me project. It has been a long while since I made a cake just to play. I sunk a good 30 plus hours in it. In between the eyeball cake inside a cake and the from scratch modeling chocolate flowers with meringue cookie eyes, it was a labor of love. This cake is a compilation of lots of things that interest me. Halloween being number 1 :) I had already decided to make a Halloween cake and had been researching ideas. During the research, I saw several Halloween unicorn cakes and have been wanting to play with that trend as well.

Of course, this being my first unicorn cake,  I didn't want a happy and cheerful unicorn. There had to be something a little off about it. So I bring you pretty in the front and jacked up in the back!

This turned out to be a perfect idea.  A week after working out the final plan, I was asked to help so the makeup for a local production called "Zombie Shakespeare". Yay! My cake now had a deadline and a destination. We shared it with the Chinooks staff and a few folks still bellied up to the bar after our finally showing. Since it was late, dark, and I was tired and may have had too many Tipsy Mermaid drinks at that point, I don't have any good pictures of the inside.

When cutting into the cake, the bottom tier had surprise eyes inside.  Here is my earlier post about it. It was two full cakes so double layer of eyes separated with chocolate smbc.

The top tier "bled" raspberry coulis. Its a pretty simple process.  I stacked 3 cakes together, the middle was cut to hold a pool of blood. Since this cake was going to take a few days to finish decorating, I lined the pool with marzipan to keep the cake from getting soggy.

Of course, there is no fun in Halloween unless I torture my loved ones in the process.

Both cakes were encased in espresso dark chocolate ganache. Again, I needed it to be sturdy to support the weight of the heavy modeling chocolate flowers and stable so that I could take my time decorating. This cake was only a 7 inch base and 5 inch top but it was a heavy mofo!

Once they were ganached, it was time to add some exposed brain. To do that, I carved out a little cake and tinted modeling chocolate to a nasty grey color. To which I later painted in some red and dry brushed with grey coloring to give it dimension. Before packing it up for the final show, I brushed it with corn syrup to give it a gross sheen.

Both tiers were then covered with black fondant.

The top had homemade edible glitter on it. I am in love with this stuff. It is super simple to make. Best of all, it doesn't alter the taste of your cake. And to my surprise, even though you think it would be sharp or rough in the mouth, it just melts on contact. So at worst, you have black spit. But hey, what is Halloween without a little black on your tongue!

Check out Kara's Couture Cakes for a rocking tutorial.

A side note, as it falls away from the acetate, it makes strange crackling noises. Don't combine this with late night scary movie viewing!

I so love this look.

Now time to apply the flowers. The week before, I made meringue eyes to go in some of the flowers. Years ago, I made them for the first time and thought it would be fun to bring them back. The last time, they kind of looked like colorful boobs as I made them in pairs. Here are this year's. Notice they are in a dehydrator. I live in a rain forest and it needed to dry them out a bit so they didn't pick up the moisture in the air and become mush on the cake.

And then I set out to make the modeling chocolate rosettes. Lots of rosettes. I have warm hands and it is always a struggle to keep from melting modeling chocolate or buttercream while piping. After opening the window and letting the Alaska air in, this went much faster.

Time to apply! To stick em, I used clear piping gel.

Next went in the gumpaste sutures.

Then all that was left was to put on the horn, ears, eyes, and necklace. The cameo skeleton mold and airbrush colors for the horn came from The Cookie Countess. I opted not to do the traditional buttercream rosette mane. It had enough going on and I felt it would be just too much. I'm happy that I stopped there. Sometimes restraint is the hardest part!

And the sky stopped dripping just long enough for me to snap some pictures before heading out to cover zombies in corn syrup blood and marshmallow burns. Now, you didn't think I would leave food out my Halloween make-up skills did you?

Happy Halloween Everyone!!

I See You - Halloween Eye Cake

I see you!  Here is another teaser to my Halloween Cake.  The bottom tier will have eyeballs :) 

The tester for this came out great. It came out a bit dry as I was needed deeper pans to accommodate the size of the eyes. The problem has since been fixed and I just fired off the real thing with black batter last night. Can't wait to put it together. There are several Halloween surprise cakes out there. This idea came from Haniela.  She has a great YouTube tutorial if you want to see the full step by step.

I started with baking several sheet cakes in various colors.Using concentric round cutters, I built the eyes. Make sure these don't get too dry as they will be twice baked. A dense recipe works best, and cut when frozen.

I made 3 colors so that as you cut through you get a different colors that will echo the entire cake theme. Then back in the freezer they go.

In the original tutorial the eyes are placed in a round, but there are gaps in them. I wanted every slice, no matter how small to have an eye.  So again, frozen is key here.  Some of the eyeballs have to be cut into a wedge shape to fill the gaps.  They are arranged in a smaller pan so that I can freeze in the round and then insert into a larger pan.  My final cake is a 7 inch round. This is a 6 inch pan.  At this point I also brushed with espresso simple syrup for good measure.  The cake batter that it sits in is a chocolate stout cake.

I didn't take a pic of the cake in the batter.  For baking, I put a layer of batter down and set the frozen eyeball ring inside, covered with more batter, making sure to get the outer edges. A few raps on the counter to make sure it all settles is never a bad idea!  I'd recommend a pan a good 2 inches taller than your eye size and a flower nail in the center.

Keep a good "eye" on it in the oven. On my final cakes, I didn't fill the center as full. It will naturally rise higher than the rest as the batter is pushed while baking.  And that can lead to dark and dry edges.

This was definitely time consuming will all the colors but super fun and exactly what I was looking for.

My knitting made it to the Ravelry homepage!

I warned you that there will be knitting and other things than baking!

Even though I have been knitting for a couple of years, I never made a hat.  If you haven't noticed, I'm one of those jump straight in with both feet type of gals. When I first started, I made a pot holder to figure out how the needles worked and cause and effect. Then I jumped right into making the Exploration Station shawl

and have mostly been doing statement pieces / project pieces since then.  This summer, I put my newest on hold and made several buffs and headbands for my staff at Adventure Sixty North. 

I was just about to restart my newest project and I got a text from my son saying his head was cold at college. So here you go, my first hat!

Little did I know that my quick no makeup picture in front of work would catch the eye of the Ravelry folks.

It was a quick knit from Tin Can Knits that I will definitely come back to later. The 4 stitch cable pattern is easy to do without using a cable needle. After a couple of rows of the pattern you get the hang of it and cruise.  Which means I can drink my wine and knit!

As I am a shop local as much as possible person, I need to plug Cindy at A Flyin' Skein.  She knows exactly what I look for in yarn and the projects I like.  She has recently started dyeing her own yarn under the label "Sheep Shades".  You can find my cookie related post on FB here.

Snowflake Decorated Sugar Cookies

Happy Holidays everyone! Figured I had better get it in while I have a moment :)

For me, one of my favorite things to make over the holidays are these snowflake cookies. They are my zen. After a hectic day of knocking out caramels and other holiday treats, I can sit down and literally get lost in these. They are one of those things that don't require much concentration, no boiling temperatures to watch or beer boiling over when I take my eyes off the stove. It takes just a moment to make the cookie dough and royal icing; and as long as I set my oven timer I am golden.

These have a little citrus zest in the dough and a lemon vanilla royal icing. I've had this shape for a couple of years and can't wait to snatch up a new one at this year's after Christmas sales!

Here is the all white version:

Lightest blue. This color was my favorite this year. I used Alan Tetreault's Sky Blue, just a little. The color looks like a slightly translucent robin's egg color. The camera doesn't do it justice. Absolutely lovely.

And then a couple darker blue variations:

In case I don't "see" you all before the Holiday, have a happy and blessed one!

Wedding Cake Round-up

What a rocking summer here in my kitch!  I'm finally at a point that I can catch up on cake posts. Gotta get it in fast before holiday baking begins.  Over the next few weeks I'll try to get these on the blog.  There will be a few halloween posts thrown in too.  It's gonna be an interesting mix :)

Each of the cakes this year were so different from each other. I have a hard time deciding which one shall go first. Let's start with one of my favorite type of style, rustic elegance.

My clients were had a few rustic twig and vine style cakes, which are cool, but not as original.  After perusing the net and some sketching I suggested this one. Lucky for me, the bride loved the idea as well.

It was inspired by several spackle styles and one cake with wooden flowers.  The shape of the wooden flowers was so different compared to most cakes I have seen, almost poppy like but not quite. These of course aren't wood :)  As a finishing touch plum luster dust was brushed on the flowers to give them depth.

The top layer is red velvet with cream cheese swiss merigue filling. The bottom layer is vanilla almond cake with from scratch fresh raspberry curd.  The final coat over the entire cake was an vanilla almond swiss meringue buttercream.

Holy Sea Turtle Shaped Cake!

Holy moly folks! Thanks for all the awesome shares on this week's turtle cake.  264 likes, 66 comments, 56 shares, and over 2,900 people reached in 24 hours! Thanks to everyone that shared this. I certainly didn't expect that from a quick short notice project.  Ha, shows what I know :)

This cutie was made for a birthday girl who came into town with the Eisenhower War College this week. According to the person that ordered it, this woman goes bananas for turtles; love it!  She requested that the cake be butter cream and not fondant. So this sweet little bugger was a chocolate stout cake with Swiss meringue butter cream and from scratch dark modeling chocolate as the "shell". Since this was for a grown woman, I didn't want it to have a uber fake cartoon appearance.  After a quick google, isn't google grand, I settled on this design based off of several other similar cakes. The most amazing non fondant sea turtle cake that I found came from Love to Cake in the UK. Be sure to click the link and check out her off the charts work. I loved the naturalness (is that a word?) of the one that she did and set out to do something similar.

So from "hey I need a cake" to delivery a little less than 24 hours later, this fella was born.  I would have liked to spend more time shaping the feet as they still appear a bit bulbous for my tastes. Hopefully someone else wants one and I get another opportunity!

Thanks again everyone!

It Is a Beautiful Day for a Wedding!

A couple of years ago my laptop crashed. I had a back up so whew! My new computer is a mac and my old a pc, and since I was busy at the time I never restored all my files.  This week I went digging through my back ups and rediscovered a ton of cakes.  I'll be posting these newly found files over the next couple of weeks.

This cute little green cake was made for casual outdoor wedding. The couple met over a couple of cups of chai tea so I brought that memory into the cake. Under the fondant was a chocolate chai tea cake with swiss meringue buttercream. They wanted a rustic but classy touch so I added simple fondant flowers and stems.

Stay tuned for more trips down memory lane :)

Because Everyone Needs a Zebra Print Octopus Cake

The Association of Zoo Veterinary Technicians commissioned me to make a cake for their conference held at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward.  

Their logo has a zebra on it and they since they were spending their week at ASLC they decided on a zebra print octopus :)

This creature took me about 22 hours to make. I wanted to look as realistic and in proportion as possible.  To do that and not have a 6 foot cake base, I designed the arms to swirl around each other so that they would fit on a 2.5 foot board.

All of my cakes are from scratch so it was easy to make it a zebra print on the inside too. Everything you see is cake and fondant except for a couple of the places where the arms are in the air. Since they need to stand up, those were made with rice krispie, covered in chocolate, and then the fondant. And as usual, it was all hand carved. 

Alaska "peeps"!

The "peeps" are starting to arrive at my store. Some of you may remember these little guys. I thought they were to fun to keep to myself so I added them as my first Easter related item.  Easter related might be a little bit of a stretch but they insisted and I am not one to get in the way of a bear, moose, or orca :)

For those wanting something a little closer related, stay tuned.  I will be rolling out more traditional Easter related cookies, marshmallows, and peeps.

As always, be sure to follow me on Facebook and Twitter for the most up to date product info and specials.

Cake Catch-up

This cake was made to celebrate Pat Williams 100th birthday. It was a replica of the Ray Building.

Here is the real building.

Next is a Little House on the Prairie cake for a girls birthday party. The cake was a lemonade cake with brown lemon flavored butter cream.

There were lots of shingles!

I really enjoyed this one as I used to watch the show as a little girl too.

The last picture in this post is a sea star cake for a bride to be.

An Alaskan Wedding Cake

This wedding cake was for and Alaskan Bride and Groom that work at the Alaska SeaLife Center. It was a vanilla cake with strawberry and white chocolate ganache filling, white chocolate ganache layer over the cake, and then topped with fondant.

I was trilled to be able to make a truly Alaskan wedding cake topper! Thanks for the opportunity guys. I really appreciate it.

Here is a close up of the Bride and Groom.

Complete with a just married sign.

And finally a link to another xtra tuf post of mine.

Best wishes to the Bride and Groom!

Homemade Peeps, Alaska Style

Marshmallows are surprisingly easy to make. Go ahead, turn your nose but these infinitely better than their cousins in the plastic bag. And best of all, with a few modifications you can make any flavor you can dream of.

Make the marshmallows as directed in this recipe. Add the coloring midway through the whipping so that it disperses evenly. Once the marshmallow is set, cut out and roll in sugar.

This was my first time making homemade marshmallows. I followed the recipe as directed but they came out crinkly. The mixture set up as I was pressing it into the pans. In the future I think I will whip it a little less so that I get a smooth surface. Also, the sugar didn't stick at first so I used a barely damp pastry brush to wet the surface of the peep and that did the trick.

We woke up Easter morning to fresh snow. These guys enjoyed their frolic in the powder :)

Getting back into the swing of things.

OK, I have been seriously negligent about updating my blog. It is time to get back to it. My hard drive is fixed and my computer is working better than it did when it was new. So I have no excuse now :)

Just because my computer was down doesn't mean that I wasn't cooking. I have lots to catch up on. Here is a fun one. This was from our annual golf tourney on the mud flats this month. It is our way of staying sane during the sloppy time (break up) between winter and summer. This year it was brutally cold so we happily let the tide push us back towards the bonfire. Here is an ice tee just to prove my point!


And here are a couple of beautiful views!

Who can resist a pic of happy dogs?

Since xtra tufs are a way of life a good portion of the year and a requirement for the golf tourney, I was sure to include them on the cupcakes.

Real xtra tufs

My version. I regret that I didn't plan ahead. These were thrown together the day of. The event is annual, so it wasn't like I didn't know it was coming :)

The orange triangles that look like slices of cheese are replicas of the tourney flag. It is an orange pennant hung on a golf club. The material has a golf ball hanging from a short piece of chain. On windy days it can be down right dangerous to be near it! Each year the flag is embroidered with the current year. I had hoped to replicate something like that but alas... I didn't plan!

We had a fabulous time and the cupcakes (frozen from the cold day) were enjoyed....by the bonfire.

Now for the food part. These were chocolate stout cupcakes with silt colored Bailey's cream cheese frosting. All decorations were MMF.

To all my friends: Bug the heck out of me if I do not post again soon!!