First Time Cake Makers

I'm not exactly a stranger to cake making, but I did feel like a fish out of water when I was at the supply store today. Like I have previously mentioned, I have worked on cakes before, but never anything too large scale like a wedding cake. I decided to tackle my fears head on and go to the store without any lists or plan of action. I knew I needed fondant and some Styrofoam cake tiers, but that was all I really had in mind. $200.00 later I had quite a haul...

I picked up some white vanilla fondant (which wasn't enough to cover my cakes so I had to pop back to the store to get some more), white gum paste, brushes, a straight edge leveler, a holder for my peonies, peony cutters, a ball tool, floral wire, yellow ribbon and some cake dummies. I am pretty sure I bought out the whole store. 

This shopping trip taught me that whoever I buy my wedding cake from deserves every penny! The supplies alone to make a fake cake costs around $90.00 and that isn't even including all of the tools needed to make the actual cake. I suggest that if you are going to attempt to make your own fake cake, it's best to buy the proper tools and equipment. Although there are definitely some techniques out there that eliminate purchasing a whole plethora of tools, there are some things that you just can't skimp out on. It's very obvious when a cake is made with improper tools and if you're going to invest all of that time and effort into making a cake, it would be a shame if it didn't turn out quite right. 

As my cake journey continued, I felt nervous about turning my supplies into a work of art. I started with kneading the fondant (which was almost impossible to take out of the container for some reason!). I sprinkled my work surface with cornstarch as it has a nice slip and is inexpensive. Some prefer to use icing sugar, but I needed to preserve my icing sugar stash for my sugar cookies. Kneading the fondant was really easy, but rolling it out was a bit more challenging. Since I don't have a super large rolling pin, the sides of my rolling pin kept digging into the fondant. It was also difficult to make sure that all sides of the cake dummy would be covered.

I love the feeling of fondant, it feels so smooth and it was easy to lift off of the surface. I draped the fondant over my forearm and managed  to place it on my cake dummy. I then used my leveller to smooth everything into place (it got rid of the little indentations that my rolling pin kept making). This is the scariest moment of the whole fondant covering process. If you don't place it properly the first time, it can be a little bit difficult to go back and fix your mistake. 

After shaving off the excess fondant and adding some ribbon, the cake began looking like a cake!

I have finished covering and stacking all three cakes and I am now working on making my sugar peonies. I am a little bit frustrated as all of the gum paste peonies I have been looking at do not use the cutters that I have purchased. I will make a tutorial for these gum paste peonies in future for those of you who have purchased the same cutters as I have (a tutorial using these cutters literally does not exist on the Internet for some reason and if they do, I can't find it).

Can't wait to show all of you the finished product! In the mean time, I will continue posting process pictures and after the Cinderella Wedding Fair I promise I will start posting recipes again!

Beautiful Baking Sweeties

Cookie Weekend and Summer Cakes

Been super busy the last few days. I don't think I had much of a weekend, but it was well worth it as I had the opportunity to make some really adorable cookies! Seemed like there was a black and red trend this weekend which made it easier for me to complete those orders. Here is how they turned out:

I hope my customers enjoyed them!

Anyway, I am super excited to construct my fake cake tomorrow in preparation for the Cinderella Bridal Show. There was a point in time where I became obsessed with making marshmallow fondant, but I haven't really had time since. After many many MANY cake requests from customers, family and friends, I have finally decided to buckle down and study up on the art of making a cake. Most of you are probably wondering why I didn't start serving up cake right from the opening of the bake shoppe. Well, I must confess that I believe cakes require a lot more responsibility than cookies do. Don't get me wrong, cookies take an awful lot of tender, love and care to create, but there's just something about the delivery and set up of a cake that terrifies me. I finally have my cookie and old fashioned sweets system down though so I know I am ready to embark on this cake journey. After conquering macarons (and still working tirelessly at those!), I believe that I can pull off this whole wedding and birthday cake thing. I have made plenty of cakes in my time, but the thought of creating something so poignant for a wedding or birthday party is still a little bit scary (and exhilarating all at the same time). Those are the best types of journeys don't you think?

There is something so incredibly magical about cakes. They can be decadent or light and airy and they have such a range of style and drama. Fondant, butter cream, chocolate, the possibilities are endless and delicious. I absolutely love dramatically elaborate cakes, but there is also something to be said for an understated delicate cake. I lay awake dreaming up cake and macaron flavours. That blank stare while I'm trying to finish writing an essay? Yeah, I'm day dreaming about making a chocolate cake or macaron with chocolate ganache adorned with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. I can't wait to get started on experimenting with unique and more complex flavours although I will say I do love the classics like vanilla and chocolate.

I would love to get more feedback from all of you wonderful readers out there so although I am embarking on this cake journey, I will still be making plenty of cookie tutorials. Please post any cookie design requests that you may have!

Beautiful Baking Sweeties

For the Love of Baking: Chocolate Eclair Cake

I am feeling a little stressed out with the amount of baking that must be completed by the end of the week, but I am definitely not complaining! I never thought that my tiny online bakery would even experience half the success that it has in its first year and I have all of you to thank for that. 

I used to think that I needed to keep my techniques top secret and my recipes hidden away in a fire proof box, but after many months of researching the online community of bakers, I realized that that is silly! I love the way all of you bloggers, at home and professional bakers out there freely share all of your tips and tricks. Like I have said before, the heart of baking withers when it is solely rooted in business. Baking is all about a cohesion of ideas, flaws and imperfections. After all, how many awesome sweet treats were discovered by accident? The list is endless! Hopefully we can continue to stumble across sinfully delicious treats together...

Speaking of sinfully delicious, this chocolate elcair cake recipe that I found on allrecipes.com was absolutely delicious! If you love chocolate ganache and whipped cream, you will absolutely love this dessert! It was super easy to make and you don't need that many ingredients. I didn't change anything at all about the recipe so go and check it out. Here are some photos of the journey:

Making the pastry was a little bit scary at first as I had never made pastry on the stove. The key is to keep the heat low and constantly stir so that the dough doesn't burn. After melting the butter and water, the addition and incorporation of the flour happens fairly quickly. After the dough was ready, I quickly tossed it into my KitchenAid and incorporated my eggs mixing the dough on medium speed. 

I then transferred the dough into a non-stick baking pan, but I still buttered the pan as I was afraid the pastry would stick (it did slightly so I am glad that I buttered the pan first!) The pastry was so puffy when it came out of the oven. Nothing better than puffy pastry. It's an exciting feeling.

While the pastry was cooling, I mixed the pudding powder with the milk. I then took the pudding and folded it into the whipped cream. So delicious. I am not one to lick my beaters, but I have to admit I did scrape this one clean to make sure every ounce of the whipped cream was salvaged. 

The pastry cooled fairly quickly and I generously spooned on the whipped cream and pudding mixture. Next time I think I will try chocolate pudding to make it a double chocolate eclair cake (did I mention how much I love chocolate?). I already had some chocolate ganache (Lindt dark chocolate ganache) whipped up so I spread it over top of the whipped mixture and popped it into the freezer. I took it over to my fiance's house and the family gobbled it up! 

I may have also indulged in a few slices myself...

Beautiful Baking Sweeties!

Custom Cookie Cake

I get orders all the time asking for custom designed sugar cookies. Most of the time I have the cookie cutter (with a collection of over 100 cookie cutters I should hope so!), but there are the occasional requests that cannot be filled with a cookie cutter so I make do with what I have. This will just be a short tutorial on how to cut out your own cookies.

The great thing about cutting out your own cookies is that you don't need a lot of materials. A sharp knife and parchment paper is all you need!

A customer requested a Range Rover cookie cake for her boyfriend for Valentine's Day. I first started with free hand sketching out the design on a piece of paper (I actually used a brown paper bag because it's a bit more sturdy than regular computer paper). Don't sketch directly on the parchment as pencil doesn't show up very clearly nor is it food safe to have lead in your dough! Even though I was using this sketch to trace the shape of the sugar cookie, I still added the details of the car so that it would be easier to pipe out the details later on. 

Take your sketch and place it on the parchment paper. Because parchment paper is non stick, you'll have to staple your sketch to the parchment in order to cut it out.

Remove the staples.

Only use the parchment tracer to cut out your cookie dough. In order to get the parchment tracer to stay put, dip your finger in water and lightly dab the parchment paper with water (don't soak it though or else your cookie will turn out bumpy)

Make sure that your dough is super chilled or else your cookie will become slightly misshapen as it bakes. Carefully cut around the tracer with a super sharp knife. Try and use fluid motions while you're cutting rather than an up and down motion. 

Place your finished cut out on a parchment lined cookie sheet. 

Click here to see the finished product!

Beautiful Baking Sweeties

Wedding Cake Cookie

Wedding season is fast approaching so it's time to get piping for your friends and family! The key to creating a beautiful cookie is making sure that you have the basics down. Practice piping straight lines as this is the basis for many cookie creations. Piping straight lines are actually the easiest to pipe as curved lines need more control, but both will be a breeze once you get the hang of it.

For this wedding cake cookie, you will need the following:

1) Disposable piping bag

2) Thin metal piping tip

3) Edible gel food dyes

4) Any colour dragees

This particular cookie is a cookie pop, but feel free to make a regular wedding cake cookie.

First pipe the heart's outline. I always start at the top of any cookie creation, but feel free to start anywhere you please!

 Pipe the rest of the outline.

Pipe the lines that represent the layers of the cake.

Whip up some icing. I decided to go with a Tiffany's blue (blue and a little bit of turquoise) colour to match the Tiffany's blue macarons that this cookie was paired with. 

Notice how the icing is quite shiny and not super thick. 

I iced the centre 'cake' first just in case the icing turned out to be too drippy (If the icing flooded into the upper or lower parts of the cookie, it would be fixable, but it would be more difficult to fix if it flooded into the heart or base of the cake). 

Then fill in the rest of the cookie. 

As you can see, the lines on the cookie are now slightly messier, but we will fix that!

Now, outline the outer edges of the cookie.

In order to avoid making a mistake, I try and stick to using straight lines at all times. As you can see on the bottom layer, I made one fluid piping line rather than breaking up the line, but it will probably be easier if you stick to breaking up the lines. It doesn't alter the finished product too much. The base icing is also still quite wet which means that the cookie's outline won't be as defined. This cookie gets a lot of detailing added to it so that's why I wasn't too concerned with waiting for the base icing to dry. 

Here is the finished product!

Because I refuse to make videos of my tutorials at this point in time (so awkward to see yourself on camera, but I am not completely shutting the door on the idea!) it is a little bit difficult for me to show you how I decorated this particular cookie. I will say, however, when you're decorating a wedding cake cookie try and get inspired by looking at real wedding cakes. If you're a little bit nervous about piping fine details, use some silver dragees (the small candy balls) to bling out your cookie. 

Click here to see the full bouquet!

Beautiful Baking Sweeties

Piping Sugar Cookies: Simple Writing

The Valentine's Day rush is over which means the blogging can begin. Ironically, I think I have more orders next week than I did this past week (over 200 cookies and macarons!).

Writing with icing can be very intimidating. I know that when I first started icing sugar cookies I felt very apprehensive and nervous about ruining my cookies. Here are a few things to note before you begin writing:

1) Map out your wording. If needed, trace the cookie cutter you used on a piece of paper and map out where your letters will be placed.

2) If you're writing for the first time, make sure that your cookie's base ice is fully dry (otherwise if you make a mistake, it's a little bit more difficult to reverse). 

3) Make sure you have a really thin piping tip and super thick piping icing. Nothing is worse than having your letters run into one another so add more than enough icing sugar and you will come out with the perfect writing icing. 

Now we can begin!

This was a cookie design requested by a super sweet girlfriend. She wanted a blue and black swirled designed Valentine's Day heart cookie (reminiscent of another cookie creation I made back in July) with a simple message. These types of orders are super common so I have gotten pretty good at mapping out names. 

I base iced my cookie with a wet on wet swirling technique. After the icing was fully dry (overnight) I whipped up some super thick icing. A sweet tip: when filling your piping bag, make sure to twist the end while you're filling it so that your icing doesn't come out the other end as directed below: 

I use a fairly thin tip, but you don't want to go too thin as it makes it nearly impossible for the icing to come out when the icing is thick. 

If you would like your lettering to be centred on your cookie, determine the 'centre' of your words. If you word has an even number of letters, then imagine there is a space in between the letters (as shown below). If your word has an odd number of letters, use the centre letter as your anchor. Notice how the tip of the heart is used as the anchor for my lettering:

Make sure that your lettering isn't too large. It is super easy to fill in the gaps with little designs and sugars, but it is quite difficult to make room. 

After I finished the lettering on this particular cookie I found that there were a few gaps and spaces. On the name 'Satpal', there seemed to still be a little bit of a space at the end so I decided to add some hearts. Once I added that heart, I decided to add more to give it a cute and whimsical feel. This is the final product that I came up with:

If you mess up the first few times, don't worry! There are ways to fix it (I will show you in a future post how to fix your cookie mistakes!)

Beautiful Baking Sweeties!

Cookie Pops

I just want to say that I love living in the 21st century because recipes, tips and tutorials are so readily available on the internet. I will say though, that some bakers are so skilled that they make constructing cookie and macaron pops look as easy as pie which, from my experience, it is not! I thought that since I will be posting tutorials on some new cookie designs, you guys might want to turn your creations into cookie bouquets or arrangements. As a word of caution, make sure you have plenty of baking, drying, packaging and arranging time set aside for this project. 

Cookie and macaron pops are so aesthetically pleasing, but there have been many times where I have been frustrated with the process of making them. I occasionally use bamboo skewers (normally used for barbecuing meat and veggies), but I have recently started using lollipop sticks. There are pros and cons for each type and I will show you how to insert them in the following tutorial.

Bamboo Skewers:

Pros:

They are super easy to insert into a sugar cookie and you don't have to make your cookies ultra thick in order to accommodate the thickness of the skewer. 

They are easy on your wallet as they only cost about $2.00 CDN for a bag of 100 skewers.

They're quite long and are easy to chop down to the proper size.

They insert easily into Styrofoam bases.

Cons:

Although you may get 100 skewers in a bag, about 15% of those skewers are unusable as they are prone to splitting (splinters and cookies definitely do not mix).

The skewers tend to fall out easily if they aren't handled with care.

Cutting the sticks down to size is easy, but you do have to add a dab of chocolate on the end of the stick to avoid cuts and splinters.

Lollipop Sticks:

Pros:

In my opinion, they're more aesthetically pleasing to me than the bamboo skewers. There are plain white ones and there are also ones with more fun designs like polka dots or stripes. 

They really hold the cookie in place even if the recipients are a bit rough with them!

Like the bamboo skewers, they can also easily be inserted into Styrofoam bases and chopped down to size.

Because lollipop sticks are more 'standard' in terms of making cookie, cake and macaron pops, most edible pop stands are made to hold these particular sticks in place.

Cons:

These sticks are expensive! I paid about $4.95 CDN plus tax for only 50 sticks (for the bake shoppe, that won't last more than a month, but for those of you who are just baking for fun, I would recommend that you splurge a little)

You have to make the cookie extremely thick. If the cookie is too thin, the stick will pop out and cause a bump on the cookie's surface.

Because there is no pointy portion of the stick, it is really difficult to insert the stick into certain cookie shapes (such as a heart) and this step ends up altering the shape of the cookie.

You can purchase thinner lollipop sticks, but it might not be able to withstand the weight of the cookie (you'll have to test it out).

Here are some step by step instructions on how to insert both types of sticks:

For the bamboo skewers, cut out your cookies and lay them on a parchment lined cookie sheet. Make sure that the cookie is thick enough to encompass the width of the stick without peeking through the front or the back of the cookie. Lightly use your index, middle and ring finger to hold the cookie in place, slide the skewer in (pointy side first) making sure that it is leveled. Do not insert the stick on an angle as this will cause the stick to poke through the other side. 

For the lollipop sticks, I have used several different methods and have found that only one really works for me. Roll out your dough slightly thinner than usual and make sure that the surface of the dough is generously floured. After the dough is rolled out, fold the dough in half and cut through both layers of the dough with a cookie cutter. When you lift the dough out, the two layers of dough should naturally come apart if you applied enough flour to the dough. Place the two layers on a parchment lined cookie sheet and lift up one of the layers, place the lollipop stick inside and gently press it into your dough (but make sure not to press too hard as this will cause the stick to peek out on the underside of the cookie pop). If you feel that your two layers are far too dry and are not sticking together whatsoever, dip your finger tip in water and use your finger to lightly brush the water in between the two layers of dough so that they meld together. 

*Note: The sticks take up a lot of room so you will most likely only be able to bake around 6 or 7 cookies per tray. After the cookie are finished baking, do not immediately lift your cookies or move the sticks whatsoever. If you do, the cookies will shift around on the stick after they are fully cooled. When transferring the cookies to a cooling rack, I like to actually hold the cookies rather than the stick to avoid any shifting during the cooling process. 

After they are finished baking, the back of your cookie should like this:

No stick is peeking out the back although there is a slight indent. These cookies were super stable on their sticks, but if you notice, the cookies are quite thick.

In the next few days I will be posting some decorating techniques (as promised!) and then I will be making a tutorial on the assembly of a cookie pop bouquet. 

Beautiful Baking Sweeties