Ohhh, I also wanted to mention another cake I made recently for Adam's office. His coworkers like to give me challenges. Recently one of them challenged me to make a Chai cake. Chai is one of my favourite flavours so I was all over that one!  I went searching for a recipe but most of the ones I found were experiments with which the creators were not quite happy. With this in mind I set out to create my own recipe.

Meanwhile, Adam's coworkers made a little fun of him by making an "Adam Potatohead". They stuck little post-its to it with Adam-like sayings. He told them that they were cut off from cake so they circumvented him and emailed me directly. I decided to make a Mr. Potatohead cake. I was going to sculpt the Mr. Potatohead but I ran out of time so I used a real one instead.  

In order to save some time I decided to doctor a cake mix instead of starting completely from scratch.  That's rather amusing to note when you find out that I hand ground the spices. I started out using an old coffee grinder but I managed to block that so completely that I had to switch to the mortar and pestle. Heh.

The cake came out spectacular and may be one of my top five best cakes ever. I'm going to try it again and try to make it a bit less sweet.  Here is a rundown of what I did:

For this recipe you'll need a total of 4 tsps. freshly grated ginger and 1 and 2/3rds cups of chai tea.

Spice Mix

2 tsps. fennel whole seeds
2 tsps. whole cloves
2 Tblsps. whole cardamom pods
1 star anise
2 peppercorn seeds
1 cinnamon stick

Grind up in your coffee grinder or failing that use a mortar and pestle. You may need to strain out any big chunks afterward.

Chai Tea:

2 Chai Tea bags
1 2/3 cups boiling water
1 cinnamon stick
1 star anise
2 peppercorns
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp. freshly grated ginger

Let steep until you're ready to use and then filter for use in everything but the syrup.

The Cake

1 Duncan Hines Orange Cake Mix
1 packet Dream Whip
4 eggs
1 small vanilla cook 'n serve pudding mix (not instant)
1/4 cup oil
1 cup strong chai tea, cooled
1 tsp. freshly grated ginger
2 tsps. spice mix

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Combine all ingredients in large bowl of electric mixer.
Beat on low speed just until moistened, scraping bowl sides often.
Beat on medium speed for 4 minutes, scraping bowl sides often.
Pour into greased and floured pans. I used one 8"x3" round pan.
Bake for about 40-50 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in centers comes out clean.
Cool for 15 mins., then turn out onto cooling rack.


Icing

2lbs. confectioners sugar, sifted
3.5 oz. cream cheese, softened
1/3 cup warm chai tea
7 oz. Crisco
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tblsp. butter, softened
dash salt
2 tsps. spice mix
1 tsp. freshly grated ginger

Beat until smooth

Filling

1 Dream Whip packet
1 large instant vanilla pudding mix
8 oz cream cheese
2 tsps. spice mix
1 tsp. freshly grated ginger
1 cup cold milk
1 tsp. vanilla

Beat until smooth, refrigerate until you're ready to use.

Chai Simple Syrup:

Boil 1/4 cup chai tea. Pour over 1/2 cup sugar and 1 Tbsp. brown sugar. Stir until thick and melted. Set aside.
(Note: If you have leftovers, eat it on pancakes. Mmmmm...!)

Assembly:

Tort (split) the cake into 3 equal layers. Starting with the bottom layer:

Sprinkle lightly with chai syrup.
Using a piping bag, pipe a dam of icing about 1/2" inside perimeter of cake.
Fill inside the dam with filling
Add next cake layer.
Repeat

When layers are assembled, ice cake.

Of course, I'm an overachiever and had to hand mold some chocolates for decoration, too.

This cake had a definite chai flavour and everyone loved it! Several people said it was the best cake they'd ever eaten. One woman said she wanted to roll around in it. Heh.

Today I had the good fortune to take a cake decorating class with Food Network star and local favourite, Bronwen Weber.  Bronwen used to be a pastry instructor here in Austin at the Texas Culinary Academy. Today she taught us to make caricature cakes as well as an adorable stand-up poodle cake.

The class was somewhat frustrating. There were 16 students at 4 small tables in a very small room. You had to fight for space to roll out your fondant and you had to wait for people, like myself, who were inexperienced with an airbrush as there were only 5 airbrushes.

Those inconveniences aside, I learned some fun techniques and it was a class with Bronwen so how bad could it be?
;)

There were also a couple members of cake  decorating"royalty" present. Ruth Rickey and Janet Rosebeary were both present, having driven all the way from Oklahoma to attend the class. The class was held at All In One Bake Shop, which is owned by Jennifer Bartos who is Bronwen's sidekick for the Food Network challenges. Jennifer is a very nice lady and Bronwen is just as bubbly in person as she is on television.

Unfortunately, the cakes they provided were pretty soft. Couple that with a heavy head made from rice krispie treats and many of the poodles were falling forward by the end of the class.

Mine was perfect and didn't tip in class. The ride home, however, proved too much for the cakes infrastructure. About halfway home it started tipping forward and was resting it's ear on the side of the box.  I managed to get it in the house, snap a couple of pictures and then it split. That was hugely disappointing, to say the least.
 

My airbrushing was more than a little heavy handed so I decided to make my character cake a bit punk and gave him a mohawk and a soul patch. In the end I was pretty happy with the way he turned out. It was rather difficult to do some of the sculpting due to my long fingernails. I really need to cut them down before sculpting cakes in the future.

Last night I prepared a recipe from the latest Bon Appetit magazine called, Bombay Sliders. I thought they sounded good but that turned out to be a major understatement, they were delectable!

The sauce is sort of a curried aioli sauce. I made mine extra hot and spicy using Aunti Arwen's Fireball Freakout Hot Curry spice blend. I think the Hawaiian Rolls added another dimension, too, with their slightly sweet flavour.

Garlic Curry Sauce

1/4 cup mayonnaise
3 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 1/2 tablespoons ketchup
1 garlic clove, minced
1 Tblsp. Lemon Juice

Mix ingredients and let stand at room temperature while preparing sliders.


Bombay Sliders

2 pounds ground turkey
6 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1/4 cup yogurt
1/4 cup minced onion or green onions
2 tablespoons minced peeled fresh ginger
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 Tblsps curry powder
3/4 teaspoon hot chili powder or Hungarian hot paprika
1 teaspoon salt
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tablespoon olive oil
12 King's Hawaiian Rolls or small dinner rolls, cut horizontally in half, lightly toasted



Toppings:

Tomato slices
Cucumber Slices
Red onion, sliced or minced

1 Tblsp. Oil (for pans if cooking in oven or on stove top)





Preparation:

Place ingredients in a large bowl. Mix with fork or hands just until blended (do not overmix). Divide mixture into 12 equal portions. Using wet hands, form each portion into patty about 1/2 inch thick.

Preheat broiler, grill or heat 1 tablespoon oil in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. If broiling patties, brush rimmed baking sheet with 1 tablespoon oil and arrange patties on sheet. Broil (or cover patties in skillet and cook in batches) until cooked through, pressing patties down lightly with spatula before turning over, about 3 minutes per side (or 4 minutes per side if cooking in skillet).

Place patties on bottom halves of rolls. Top each patty with sauce, thin slices of tomato and cucumber and a sprinkling of red onions. Cover with roll tops. Place 3 sliders on each of 4 plates and serve.

Makes 4 servings.


Note: I have altered this recipe slightly from it's original.

Bon Appetit!

In my last post I shared the cookie recipe provided by Penny McConnell at the Capital Confectioners' Sugar Art and Cake Competition. For Valentine's Day this year, I decided to give her recipes a try and make cookies for my sweeties and my friend, Gloria, who was home sick.

The dough was perfect. It was heavy but soft. It rolled out beautifully and there was no need to refrigerate it overnight like so many sugar cookie recipes require. I rolled the cookie dough out about a quarter of an inch thick.

At the cake show, Penny showed us the coolest technique that I was just dying to try. Following her instructions, I took a chunk of dough and slowly added water until it was the consistency of buttercream and could be piped out of a piping bag. I then coloured the mixture using Americolor decorator gels. I spooned the mixture into paper piping cones and just cut the very tip off the cones. I then piped this mixture onto the cookies, outlining them in red and purple.

I have to say, I LOVE the Americolor gels. They come in squeeze bottles and the colours are more vibrant than Wilton's.


I popped the cookies into the oven at 325 and baked them for approximately 15 minutes a tray. I took them out of the oven and the piping was just as vibrant as when they went into the oven! They were so pretty, in fact, that I really didn't need to decorate them.

But, of course, I did anyway. Hey, they were for Valentine's Day, after all!

I made up the royal icing and decided to do a couple of different techniques. Firstly, I took some of the cookies that I had not outlined and dipped them in coloured icing. To do that, I watered down some of the royal icing and tinted some red and some purple. Why purple? Well, it happens to be my friend, Gloria's favourite colour. The icing has to be thin enough to dip the cookies but not so thin that it all runs off. You should be able to dip the cookies, pull them out, give them a little shake and set them on a drying rack, and have them look pretty smooth.

Next, I took the remaining thinned icing and thinned it even more to use as a flood colour for the outlined cookies. The cool thing about these cookies is that the outline already provided a dam so I didn't need to outline them with a thicker icing to hold in the flood colour. This icing should be fairly runny. I spooned it into piping cones and cut just the tip off. It's runny enough that it will run right out the tip and back up the cone and leave you a bit messy. I should have put gloves on right away but I didn't so I ended up with red hands for a bit. Ooops. Heh. I set these to dry, too. The outlined borders provided a pretty contrast to the icing.

I had some pretty sanding sugar in purple and a really nice red/gold and I dipped some cookies into the sanding sugar.

With a half dozen remaining cookies, I melted some dark chocolate and dipped half the hearts.


I let the cookies dry overnight and packed them up in pretty boxes the next day and delivered them to my loved ones. The cookies not only looked fabulous but they were also the best tasting sugar cookies I'd ever made.  They were big hit!

If you love beautiful and tasty sugar cookies please try this recipe yourself!

I just wish I'd thought to take a picture of them all boxed up.

(Edit: My girlfriend managed to snap a  few picture of her cookies. Yay.)

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend the 2007 Capital Confectioners' Cake & Sugar Art Show and Competition here in Austin, Tx.

As luck would have it, I went off Saturday and forgot my camera. Grrr...

There were demonstrations and competitions throughout the day on topics ranging decorating cookies to a 90 minute three teired wedding cake competition to painting fondant.

Many well known cake afficionados (and Food Network stars) were in attendance, including our very own Bronwen Weber, a former pastry chef at the Texas Culinary Academy and current Executive Chef at Frosted Art Bakery & Studio in Dallas. Bronwen is a bubbly blond who posses wonderful pastry skills. Competing in the 90 minutes wedding cake challenge were two cake decorators who were featured and placed in the Oklahoma State Sugar Art Show, the largest sugar art show and competition in the United States. They were Janette Pfertner who is actually from my litte town of Pflugerville, Tx and Ruth Rickey, a two-time gold medal winner at the Oklahoma State Sugar Art Show. Aslo in the competition was Steven Stellingwerf who was one of the judges in the 2006 OKlahoma show.

Sadly, this show was rather poorly organized. The demonstrations were done at tables with chairs in front of them in rows. There was a camera focused on the table which projected onto a drop-down screen but the camera never seemed to be in the right place and even when it was it was difficult to discern what was on the screen. There was a fellow who came and occasionally fiddled with the camera to get a good angle but apparently he had no remote because every time he did this he blocked the view with his body for a few minutes. One of the instructors, a very entertaining british lady named, Lesley Frymire, kept running through the audience to show us her fabulous gumpaste flowers.

Overall, though, I enjoyed the show and learned a few cool tips.

1. During the wedding cake competition, I noticed that both Ruth and Steven were using clear vinyl sheets on which to roll out their fondant. They were pressing hard but still able to pull the fondant up with no trouble. I was intrigued as they were usuing no corn starch or powdered sugar. I asked the Emcee to find out what kind of vinyl they were using and it turns out they were using upholstery vinyl. They said it sticks just enough to allow you to roll out your fondant but not so much that it sticks to the matt! Steven was even using two matts. After he rolled the fondant out to the appropriate size, he lifted it up and placed it over the cake still attached to the bottom piece. Once he got it where he wanted it, he peeled off the vinyl!
2. Pizza Cutters were the decorators choice for cutting off excess fondant. A cheap and useful tool!
3. Master Cookie Decorator, Penny McConnell, was there giving some great tips for cookie decorators. She dipped cookies in a fairly wet royal icing and after they dried she used regular stencils to decorate them by simply laying the stencil over the cookie and swiping a stiff mixture of a different coloured royal icing over the top. She pulled away the stencil and voila!
4. If you want  your royal icing to maintain it's sheen and not go dull, set them to dry in front of a fan.
5. If you need custom stencils, you can get them at any trophy shop for the unbelievably reasonable price of $10 or less!
6. During the summer use LESS meringue powder in your royal icing. I have Penny's cookie dough and royal icing recipes that I will post toward the end.

I was totally entralled by all the beautifully embossed acrylic rolling pins. I want one! Miss Janette also used a large rectangular stencil on her fondant. First she rolled out the fondant and then overlaid the stencil and rolled over it again so that bits of the fondant were protruding through the stencil, she then dusted the protruding bits with pearl luster dust and then laid it on the cake. The effect was just beautiful!

Ok, so I'm sure you want to see the pics! :-)
























































If you'd like to see the rest of my photos, you can find them here.

Here are Penny's Recipes:


You're going to love using this dough in your home. It's really quick to put together, doesn't need to be refrigerated before rolling, and is formulated to accept additional flour as y ou roll our the cookies. Feel free to make as large a batch as your mixer will hold.

Yield: 3-4 dozen cookies
Temperature: 325 degrees F

2 Cups butter, salted
2 Cups sugar, granulated
2 large eggs
4 Tabldspoons pure vanilla
4 Tablespoons Almond (or other flavour) extract
6 Cups flour, all purpose
1 Tablespoon baking powder

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Prepare cookie sheets with kitchen parchment.
2. In mixer bowl, mix butter with sugar until smooth. Remember to just incorporate these ingredients, do not cream until light.
3. Add all liquid ingredients to bowl. This mixture will probably curdle but the finished dough will be just fine.
4. In a separate bowl, mix flour with baking powder.
5. Add the dry ingredients all at once to the mixer bowl and process until heavy dough forms.

Penny mentioned that if your cookies come out inconsistent then you're probably not thoroughly mixing your dough.  She said your cookies should look almost uncooked with the bottoms being a slightly darker blond.



6 Tablespoons water
3 Tablespoons meringue powder (half this in very  hot weather)
3.5 Cups powdered sugar, sifted.

1. Put water in mixing bowl. Add all other ingredients.
2. Put the mixing speed on low. Mix ingredients untill they form a thick frosting. Depending on the freshness of the sugar, you may need to add additional water. The frosting at this point should resembel thick cookie glaze.
3. When thie icing is smooth, put the mixer on it's highest setting an process until the icing goes from shiney to dull and will stand in stiff peaks.

Note:  After you make the icing, keep it covered with a damp cloth at all times (including when you have tinted it and put it into the pastry bags) or it will crust over. This icing is not a "keeper". It does not have a long shelf-life so make jast as much as you need for the day of decorating.

Another super cool technique Penny showed was colouring your cookies with dough. She took a walnut size piece of the cookie dough and added water until it was of a consistency that it could be piped onto the cookie in a piping bag with a number 2 tip. She then coloured the dough and put it in a pastry bag. She cuts out her cookies and then pipes the coloured dough on to outline words. The effect was really pretty. I am so going to try it this week.

This would be a great time to make a cookie boquet for your special someone!

Penny's Cookie Tips
From Penny McConnel of Penny's Pastries

Cookie decorating should be fun!

I've been baking and decorating cookies for most of my life for family and friends and then in my business, Penny's Pastries, for the last ten years.

Here are some tips I've learned over the years that will support you and make your cookie baking memorable.

• Work with a dough that's easy to handle. (see recipes above) These are the recipes we use for all Penny's decorated cookies. Not only can you roll this dough immediately afte mixing (no need to chill before rolling), it will handle beautifully for you and give you delicious cookies.
• Bake cookes at 325 instead of the usual 350. It's easy to over bake or burn cookies. Keeping your oven 25 degrees cooler than is usually recommended helps you better control the short baking time.
• A fully baked roll and cut cookie usually takes 8-12 minutes in the oven. Perfectly baked cookies are dark blond on the bottom and light blond on top. Watch over baking!
• Use kitchen parchment paper on your baking pans instead of greasing the pans. Neater and you'll avoid the edges of the cookies "fringing" with the additional fat.
• Don't forget to rotate your baking pans. Reverse the top and bottom and also rotate each cookie sheet from front to back
• Take the time to measure and mix ingredients carefully. An uneven cookie with "spread" or "fringed" edges usually means the butter/suger mixture was not creamed correctly or the recipe was butter/sugar hyeavy. Dark streaks in the finished cookies? Baking powder/baking soda was not incorporated correctly into the dry ingredients before adding to the wet ingredients.
• Royal icing cn be used for both your base icing (just thing the finished Royal icing with a little water) and your top design. Remember to hand royal icing with care. Always cover the icing with a damp kitchen or paper towel. Also cover the tips of y our pastry tubes that contain tinted icings.
• On humid days use less merigne powder then is  usually recommnded - not more! Meringue powder contains a vegetable gum that holds moisture. On humid days that gum will attract the moisture in the air and soften your icing.
• Flip through your kids colouring books or browse the greeting card aisles for design/colour ideas. Kids coloring books are great for eye placement on character cookies. Greeting cards are great inspiration for design possiblilities.
• Keep your desing work simple. Cookie surfaces are small. Simple designs are pretty and professional.

In a moment of insanity, I've agreed to do a wedding cake.

No, not just a wedding cake, but also a groom's cake.

Yes, I know I'm crazy. Wedding cakes are stressful.

The bride wants a cake that looks like it has jewels. The place she saw the cake at used tulle that had tiny gems glued on it then wrapped around the cake.  The tulle had to be removed before cutting the cake. I've suggested candy gems so that it will be edible and so that the cake won't have to be disassembled before cutting. My challenge will be in finding a gem mold with small enough gems. The only ones I've found so far have big, chunky jewels:

This website sells edible jewels but they're also too large.

Here is a link to a mold but it's hard to tell how large the jewels would be as it doesn't specify. The entire mold is under 5" but it's pretty priced to order without knowingly

For the grooms cake they want a motorcross theme similar to this:

I found that one on Flickr. I may even sculpt the bride and groom to go on the cake.  I also think this is a really cute idea:


The bride would also like me to transport and set up the cake. I'm not sure what to charge for that so I'm asking my cake decorating buddies for advice.

Wedding cakes make me nervous. If there is any cake you don't want to mess up, it's someone's wedding cake!

I love fruit. I really do. However, I can be VERY lazy about fruit. I buy it but then I get lazy and don't peel it or whatever needs to be done about and so it often goes bad.

I looked in the refrigerator the other day and noticed the strawberries and raspberries that had been purchased for the oatmeal creme brulee that Chip made me for my birthday breakfast. Just thinking of his wonderful Oatmeal Creme Brulee makes my mouth water. It has a tendency to make me a little sickly but it's worth it because it tastes divine!


They were still good but they were on the cusp of going bad. I asked Chip if he'd cut them up and make me a fruit salad with a little bit of lime juice and honey. He said yes!

I then remembered that we had a mango and a pomegranate and even an orange.


Speaking of pomegranates, I hadn't had one in years until Chip asked me what they tasted like which prompted me to buy one. I'm so glad I did because it's such a fabulous fruit! The pomegranates looked like sparkly gems in the fruit salad.

Chip laughed at me for saying that pomegranates were like little bursts of fruit juice in your mouth. Hmphf. Well, they are like little bursts of fruit juice in your mouth!

This cake is a 1st birthday cake for a little girl named, Mia. The only directions I had were to make the cake green with pink flowers and butterflies.



I saw a cake with a pond and fish that I thought would be a neat base and adapted it to have a little fairy sitting on a stump surrounded by flowers and butterflies. I think it came out pretty cute, what do you think?

I need to work on my figure modeling but overall I'm pretty happy. The mom's friend picked up the cake this morning and she thought it was adorable.







And here is a pic of the back of the fairy:

Yesterday Adam and his dog, Charlie, graduated from the dog training class at Petco. Adam wanted to thank his instructor and asked if I'd make a cake for her. 

I thought about doing a layered fondant cake and making puppies playing around it but then I remembered that I have the Wilton dog pan, which it looks as if they may no longer make.








Adam was running too late to pick up the cake so I delivered it to the store. As I was taking it in, there was a bit of uneven sidewalk and I tripped. Luckily I caught myself and didn't fall and drop the cake but boy was my heart pounding for a few minutes!


 I think his instructor liked it. I thought it came out pretty adorable.  Charlie got a bite of the icing. He liked that pretty well! Heh. 

Friday night I threw a birthday party for my friend, Gloria, at the bowling alley. Since her favourite colour is purple we thought it would be fun to make it a Purple Princess party theme.

Who cares that she was turning 43? You're never too old to be a princess. 

With the theme set, I decided to make a doll cake. I hadn't made a doll cake in years! As luck would have it, I couldn't find my Wonder Mold, the Wilton pan to make the big doll cake. This is a shame because I don't think Wilton makes that pan anymore.  (Actually, it turns out that they still do!)

I did, however, know exactly where my mini wonder mold pan was located. Ha! Usually I refer to it as my boobie pan since more often than not I've used it to make boobs for stag party cakes.



I stopped by Hobby Lobby and picked up a pack of doll picks. I thought I was going to put 3 dolls on a cake base but in the end I could only fit on two.

The cake itself, was delicious. It's one of my doctored cake recipes. It was a banana cake and not a morsel of it was left except for the cake under the dolls themselves. I made a Banana Cream Cheese filling and sprinkled the cake layers with Banana Rum. Mmmm... It was soooo good.

I found the little candles along the bottom, at Party Pig. Aren't they cute? They included two shoes, a handbag, a heart  & a star perfume bottle and a crown.



Here is a view of the pink doll.  Gloria was very happy with her cake and I was very pleased with the way it came out.

Ohhh, I almost forgot to mention where I found the crowns. I was hunting all over Hobby Lobby for something to use for crowns on the two princesses when I spotted these silver crown charms on half price at 50 cents each. I used the little holes to push in pins to hold the crowns in place.

Of course I then had to tease Gloria that it's my fault if she's an airhead. Heh.

Have you ever made a mistake while following a recipe only to discover something quite wonderful? Well, that's exactly what happened with this recipe.

The family was in town and we set out to make a Indian dinner. It was decided that we would make Beef Biryani and Crab Vindaloo at my house while my brother, who lives behind me, would make a vegetable dish and some sort of indian bread. They decided on a curried cauliflower and potato mix and chapti bread.

As sometimes happens we planned our time rather poorly and therefore I got recruited to make the vindaloo.

Billy recruited Cypress, my brother's girlfriend's daughter to assist him in shelling the crabl legs we'd found on sale at HEB. Four pounds of crab legs had been obtained.

It turns out that Bill is quite the expet at shelling crab.