Vanilla cupcakes with (just the tops) of chocolate cupcakes and frosting in many colors.

Mouth expects burger, but gets cupcake!

And I wanted to do something I’ve never done before:

FONDANT

I scoured the city for 6″ square baking pans, but none were to be had so I ended up just cutting down the 8″ squares. I made red velvet, which looked to almost be a disaster: cupcake recipes do not always directly translate to cake recipes. But! Three crumb layers later (holy buttercream), I made it work.

Four layers of Red Velvet with buttercream, and fondant (which tastes like oatmeal by the way) with chocolate roof.

On New Year’s Eve my friend Sarah lent me her volumes of Invader Zim. And this was all I watched for about a month.

Thus we have the Zim cake, complete with Gnomes and Pig.

Oh Pig. I love-ed you Pig, I love-ed you so much.

Due to oven issues (I am really not fond of gas ovens) I baked and frosted everything in 12 hours. A bit of a marathon, but very worth it.

I ended up with:

25 chocolate cupcakes, with blue buttercream frosting, with semi-sweet chocolate “K”s that matched the monogram on their invatation.

25 vanilla cupcakes, with white buttercream frosting, with yellow rosebuds and purple violets.

25 strawberry cupcakes, made with strawberry puree from fresh farm picked berries, with strawberry buttercream frosting.

1 6″ three layer vanilla cake, with white buttercream frosting, with strawberry puree filling.

It was my first wedding, and it went wonderfully. Everyone seemed to enjoy the cupcakes. The only pictures I took were of the bride and groom eating the cupcakes (of which I will post a picture as soon as they give me permission).

The new things I tried for this order:

1. Altering the strawberry recipe to include that incredible puree, which I think turned out rather tasty. I think I’ll add some red food coloring to make it a little more red.

2. The chocolate “K”s. I melted down some chocolate chips and filled a pastry bag. I used a scanner to blow up the “K” on the invatation to the right size and covered the paper with waxed paper and traced the letters with the chocolate. I will certainly do this bit again, although the chocolate got soft very quick in room temperature, so I may have to experiment with different kinds of chocolate.

3. Flowers. I’d never done flowers before. So far it has been trial and error, and I think I need to find someone to teach me, I just have a hard time learning this stuff out of books. I’m hesitant to take a class (I would like to keep being able to say that I’m completely self taught), and I think all I need to do is experiment with different stiffness of frostings and practice practice practice.

It is a bit of a cross between a chiffon and a pound cake. The whipping cream is mixed with a little cream cheese to give it body. The strawberry filling, made of macerated strawberries mixed with the reduced juice (simmered with a little cherry Pucker), is held in with a very appealing row of cut strawberries.

And lo, my contribution to Easter dinner:

Strawberry Cream Cake

I’ve never really had food allergies (well, there was that curious case of pineapple and kiwi, but my reactions to those fruits never really impaired my ability to function normally, it was more of a slight bother).

And then I went to college in Iowa, where I discovered that I am allergic to soy, in a state filled with soybeans. It was around this time that I was also casually flirting with being a vegetarian. Already with limited meat-alternative options in the vast state of Iowa, nixing soy from my diet eliminated the entire “alternative foods” section of the grocery store. Everything had soy. And I started having to read labels and ask in restaurants. The less soy I ate, the more sensitive I became. Ranch dressing has soy, meatballs have soy, margarine has soy, anything with soy sauce was completely out. I like to joke that I am a sushi purist, as I don’t dip my sushi in soy sauce, but eat it straight up.

When I moved into North Minneapolis a few years ago (holy cow, has it moved into the plural already?), my landlord/roomie explained that she was vegan, and that her previous tenant had repeatedly eaten all her food. Well, no danger there, I told her, I can’t eat your food.

My preconceived notions of vegan food was that it was boring and not good. But she made some incredibly delicious looking meals. Did I mention that my bedroom was right off the kitchen? I baked some cakes for her work, and then decided I should make something that she could eat. If she could make some yummy looking things, why couldn’t I?

Thus the vegan cherry almond cupcakes were born. I found the recipe online, and was a bit skeptical about them. Would they turn out flat and hard? Gooey and shapeless?

No.

They turned out moist, sweet and delicious.

I ended up bringing the overflow to work (a great place to unload food, by the way), but I didn’t tell anyone they were vegan (I knew if I had been hesitant about them, coworkers wouldn’t touch them). And, of course, they were gone by lunchtime.

My Grandma is awesome. So I wanted to bake her an awesome cake. She loves apricots, and what goes better with apricots than almond?

This was certainly my most ambitious cake to date. I made everything from scratch and it took all day. I had to start early with the apricot filling, made by soaking dried apricots in water for two hours and then simmering and pureeing. Whew. And, of course, I made a double batch. I must have run out of frosting/filling in a former life with dire consequences as I am overly anxious about running out. Anyways, I made four 9 inch almond cakes. Trimmed their tops (a mystery I’d wondered about for years: how do they get those cakes so even? They cut them. I’ve started doing that to my cupcakes too), and layered everything together, remembering to not put the filling all the way to the edge so it doesn’t squee out when all the layers are on.

America’s Test Kitchen is one of my favorite shows. I was watching them put together a strawberry shortbread layered cake when they gave some great tips on cutting the cakes for layering. She scored the outside of the cake where she wanted to cut. That way when she made the cut into the cake center, the scoring helps guide the blade so you get a nice even layer. Then she slid a cake round in between the layers so the newly cut top layer was on its own round. This, by the way, works so much better than what I’d been doing before (don’t ask).

Four layers and a healthy amount of vanilla buttercream later, it turned out to be rather heavier than I expected. I was glad I passed on the cake round (that cardboard circle) and started building right on my cake carrier. But it was beautiful. Grandma likes the color peach, so I added some accents. I love how the trim turned out, all swirly. I saw some cakes like that at Target once and thought it looked a little more fancy than the standard straight ones (see the carrot cake).

Since this recipe was from the ground up, I needed almond paste (but not all almond cakes call for this seemingly required ingredient. I found one with corn meal and almond extract. Ew). All the recipes I found online warned against the evils of using the canned almond paste and recommended the stuff in tubes. After scouring Minneapolis and various suburbs at upper scale grocery stores, I finally found the tube kind. And it sucked. It was dry and didn’t crumble into a nice powder like it was supposed to. As a last result, I ran to Cub and got some canned stuff. Fabulous. It was moist and was a nice powder after ten seconds of food processor-ing (after ten minutes of the tubed, I gave up). So yes, the canned stuff I will certainly use again.

Oh, and in the spirit of trying new things, this was my first cake with marzipan. I had always avoided marzipan like the plague, along with fondant, although I’m not really sure why. I made little marzipan leaves and apricots. My mom enjoys telling people that I ended up putting stems on the apricots because they looked a little too much like butts. Which is a little true. It’s mostly because I wasn’t able to color the marzipan. I found the marzipan dried like homemade play-doh. Dry and a little crumbly. The leaves did, anyways. The apricots fared a little better. Some are a little darker because I was experimenting coloring the marzipan with spices like nutmeg and cinnamon. They just ended up looking dirty.

I’ve baked for lawyers and co-workers, family and friends.

I used to make just cupcakes and the odd cake, but recently I’ve begun branching out into larger, layered cakes and using marzipan. I’m even developing some of my own from-scratch recipes. It has been quite a learning experience, and I do enjoy living across the street from a 24-hour grocery store.

Some of my favorite cake flavors include hot cocoa and red velvet.

I’ve even come across a recipe for cupcakes that taste just like my grandmother’s sugar cookies.

No frosting beats a good buttercream, and no one turns down anything with cream cheese.

I also make vegan cupcakes. I have yet to try a cake, but that will change shortly.

Pricing is currently on a case-by-case basis.

Enjoy!

Every year on my mom’s birthday, my dad would go to Baker’s Square and get a carrot cake from them. It was massive, sweet, and filled with things I thought didn’t belong in something called “cake.” Carrots? Raisins? Did I miss a memo?

I can’t remember when he stopped getting the cakes, but I will always associate carrot cake with my mom. So it was her birthday the other weekend, and I talked her into letting me bake her a cake. A small cake. That will freeze well. The good thing about my parent’s eating better these days is, well, they’re healthier. The bad thing is that my old standby gifts of wine and sugary things are no longer valid. But I made her a 6″ carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. Very tiny, very cute.

I like to try new things, so this cake had a few new ones. I’d never done (what I call) drapes, the orange half circles along the outer rim (they remind me of those red, white and blue banners that infest everything around July 4th). And I’ve never (successfully) baked such a small cake before. Both very exciting, I’m sure.

And because I was feeling lazy (due to the fact that I have a little paranoia about running out of frosting, so I usually make way too much of it) and I had a coupon, I got some Duncan Hines Cream Cheese frosting in a can. It didn’t taste at all like cream cheese, just pure sugar. Mental note to self: no more Duncan Hines.

I do feel the need to point out that I have started the habit of brining my baking impliments with me when I visit my parents. Case en pointe: there was no green food coloring. The only colors my mom had on hand were yellow and red. Albino carrots it is.