Twins!

In my "free time" I made a cake for a baby shower for Casey McElligott.  Her sister Corinne came over and helped me make the cake by cutting out all of the brown polka dots.  A lengthy production!  The cake was vanilla on top and chocolate on the bottom with buttercream filling.  The cake was covered with blue fondant and topped with 2 chocolate pacifiers for the twin boys she's expecting in April.

Layers inside the cake.

Bon Appetit!

Carrot Cake

As far as carrot cake goes, this is not my favorite recipe, but I did like the decorations.  We sliced and candied carrots to make them pliable and a beautiful bright orange color and then we decorated our carrot cakes with the carrots.  Beautiful and delicious!

Bon Appetit!!!

Children's Book

For one of my favorite projects we had to choose a book and design a cake inspired by the book.  One of the biggest obstacles in the project was creating a cake that people could look at and immediately know what book inspired the cake.  My sketching is terrible, but my cake was beautiful!  Can you guess which story my cake represents?

My sketch

My Snow White Cake with
hand crafted poison apple

A close up of my hand painted
Magic Mirror.

Thanks for checking back in and Bon Appetit!

Small Desserts

Here I am in the middle of working on the wedding cake for my final project tomorrow and none of you have even seen the work I've done because I haven't been posting on my blog!  Well, hopefully I can summarize and highlight everything for you in a hurry.  Here are photos of smaller individual size desserts that could be wedding cakes or could be layers within a wedding cake.

4 chocolate mouses, 2 cheesecakes,
2 raspberry charlottes with candied flowers on top

petite fours and a row of opera cake
topped with candied violets and gold leaf

And the following photos are closeups of the traditional petit fours that I hand piped with decorations. The conch shell on the last one was a mold that was also painted.

These pictures are our Dobos Torte.  It is a 5 layer cake that is then topped with a pinwheel decoration of cake that is covered in caramel.  The chocolate buttercream rosettes are holding up the spokes of the wheel.

Thanks for reading and Bon Appetit!

My First Design

I've been way behind the eight ball lately so I have to apologize, but at the end of December right before New Year's I desinged my first cake.  Our task was to design a birthday cake with several required elements.  The cake needed to be a 6 inch round, covered with fondant, have a snail trail piped border around the base, and a plaque on top that had Happy Birthday written using royal icing.  The cake also had to incorporate at least 3 other techniques we'd used over the course of our class.  My cake included a fondant ribbon around the top edge, cornelli lace on the top of the cake, and swiss dots and sways piped around the sides of the cake with royal icing.

So, here's a look at my first Jennifer designed cake!  I was the first one finished with the project and very, very proud of myself.

Hope you enjoy the photos and thanks for reading!  Bon Appetit!

Quick Projects

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and Happy New Year.  I had a busy time traveling for three weeks between Washington, New York, and Boston enjoying the holidays, but still going to school.  During the broken up weeks that we were in school we decorated sugar cookies using the colorflow method.  We made runny royal icing and piped an edge around the cookies and then "flooded" the cookies with the icing.

We also made some cupcakes trying out vegan and gluten free recipes.  Some were good, others just ok. We decorated them with fondant practicing making cutouts and using impression molds.  

Another project was practicing covering cakes with fondant and piping upside down swags with royal icing.  We also used fondant to make roses that are supposed to look like they are made out of fabric. To finish off the cake we stenciled on top of the cakes.

Hope everyone is having a great 2012! Thanks for reading and Bon Appetit!

The Eventful Voyage of a Lemon Cake

Last Thursday before our Christmas break we assembled a delicious coconut chiffon cake with lemon curd filling and covered it with marzipan that we made from corn syrup, almond paste, and powdered sugar.  The cake was beautiful and delicious!  It was adorned with marzipan roses and leaves and it was quilted and then decorated with royal icing.  The newest technique we learned for this cake was lace points.  We piped out small lacy like designs with the royal icing and then once they were dry we picked them up and attached them to the cake using more royal icing as an adhesive.  You can see how the lace points stand up so that they are 3D coming off of the cake.

Another try at quilting and piping dropped strings.

My monogram writing and 3D lace points border.

My Marzipan Roses

My finished cake before it's voyage.

Since I was leaving straight from class to fly home for Christmas I decided to wrap my cake in plastic wrap and attempt to bring it home.  It was a very involved voyage, but my cake made it to VA only mildly damaged.  I carried the cake on my lap in a taxi to Laguardia, I put it in a bin and sent it thru the xray machine at security, and then I carried it on the plane and held it on my lap for the entire flight.  

The best part of the trip was that I was upgraded to first class at the last minute and I only had to carry the cake to seat 1D, perfect!  Carrying a cake, which again was only wrapped in plastic wrap, and not in a box, gets you a lot of looks from people.  Luckily, I made friends with the girl in the seat next to me.  As many of you know I HATE to talk to people on planes, but this girl was very nice and we had a lovely chat (and obviously a few drinks) on the way home.

When I landed in DC Emily came to pick me up and when we got to her house we sampled the cake and both loved it.  After dinner I took the cake home and my Mom, Dad, and Grandma tasted the cake  and also loved it.  The next morning Greg took the remains of the cake to work and all of EJF Capital got to taste one of my creations as well.  Greg said the feedback was positive, but I'm working on another not-half-eaten creation for them for January 3rd.

Until next time thanks for reading and Bon Appetit!