sea lion ahoy!

chocolate cake with vanilla bean buttercream

This Sea Lion cake and accompanying cupcakes were for Amelia's 8th birthday party at the Prospect Park Zoo. I can't remember what I did when I turned 8, but it certainly couldn't have been as cool as having your party at a zoo.

I carved the sea lion's body out of cake, but his head was Krispies. I did a test run with this fellow because I've never done a Sea Lion before and I wanted to experiment with his body shape and his massive flippers. In all honesty, he doesn't look quite look like an actual sea lion. He's a little cartoonish because that's my style---I grew up copying Garfield comic strips, so I like things with rounded edges and a chubby look. I tried a billion different things for his whiskers, but couldn't get them to look natural and ended up leaving them off altogether. He was still pretty cute, though, and I thought the color palette was lovely.

The Sea Lion with just a buttercream coating, with his fondant skin in place
and lastly, headless, so you can see the Krispies interior.

Amelia's mom, Roxy, is an amazing illustrator, and she drew the sea lion on the actual invitations. I tried to use her lovely drawing and colors as inspiration. You can see more of Roxy's work here.

southern exposure

coconut layer cake and lemon layer cake
This month's Saveur magazine had a stellar article and set of recipes from Ben Mims about Southern layer cakes. The photos were spectacular---I bought the magazine in the first place because of the giant wedge of red velvet cake on the cover. I intend to bake each of the five recipes, so I started this weekend with the two that looked most intriguing to me.

I was concerned that they would be too sweet. There was just so much sugar in the recipes for the frostings, the cakes and the fillings. But I was pleased with the end results. Sweet, but not sugar bomb sweet.

The coconut cake was my favorite. The cake was a basic butter cake, but it was soaked with coconut water. The frosting was thick and candy-like and covered in a shower of freshly grated coconut. The longer it sat in the fridge, the better it tasted.

The lemon cake was the same basic cake but with lemon zest in it. Delicious. The frosting was a different story though. It was lemon curd with an indecent amount of butter in it. Too much for me. It tasted like the cake was frosted in butter rather than a lemon frosting. Yech.

what you'll be eating in 2013

chocolate almond ice cream cake
So this is your sneak peak into what I'm working on for my business! There are layers of coconut cake, chocolate ice cream and roasted almond ice cream. And those are shimmery, crunchy golden sprinkles on the top.


I am in the middle of writing a business plan right now and will be finished by mid-May. And then the real fun begins. First off, I'll need to find investors. Then I'll need to find an accountant and a lawyer, incorporate my business, buy insurance, find a location, supervise a build-out, finalize suppliers and much, much more. It's mind-boggling, but I am still aiming for May 2013.

So stay tuned and I'll keep you up-to-date on how I'm progressing. Sometime soon, once I finalize a menu, I'll be having a tasting party and I would LOVE for everyone to come!

bears, bunnies, bottles

red velvet cake and cupcakes
So Anthony and I finally got to do a cupcake tower. You would think that we would get more requests for them because they CRAZY popular right now, but we haven't. The tower was for a baby shower and we completed it with a 6" cake on the top.


We made little sugar paste toppers in the shapes of bottles, bears and bunnies to go on top of the cupcakes. I loved the color palette, too. Deep red (from the red velvet cake) next to baby blue (from the fondant) is a stunning combination.

Can you say CHUBBY TEDDY?

Now a word about NJ restaurants. This is the second delivery we've done to a NJ restaurant that has gotten messed up by the staff. We included the actual stand with this order and carefully explained to the restaurant workers how to display the cake and cupcakes. Then we get pics from the event and the cupcakes are piled on trays with the cake haphazardly in the middle. C'MON MAN! Everything was labeled for the event. So what happened to the stand????

ice cream education

2012 ice cream short course, penn state university
I spent the past week in total ice cream immersion at the nation's oldest and best-known educational program dealing with the science and technology of ice cream. My brain is still overwhelmed with knowledge and my stomach overfilled with ice cream samples.

The most important thing I learned was that consistent ice cream quality depends on having a balanced recipe. We learned formulas to help us determine if a recipe was balanced or not, and we learned how to adjust recipes to compensate for ingredient add-ins.

Here are some of my favorite pics from the week. For more ice cream fun, visit our facebook page, 2012 Penn State Ice Cream Short Course.

The production area for the school's ice cream creamery.
On the left, ice cream cartons on a conveyor belt, ready to get filled.
On the right, the actual ice cream freezers.

Me with Dr. Bruce Tharp (stabilizer and emulsifier guru) during a sensory evaluation lab.
We are showing everyone how to rock a hairnet.


Churning ice cream in an old-fashioned White Mountain ice cream maker.


My dream soft-serve machine---frozen custard ROCKS!


A continuous ice cream freezer.
That's ice cream with 150% overrun in the bucket on the right.
Overrun is the amount of air you churn into the base.

A calf in the Penn State barns. Moooooo!

I was elected Secretary, or my preferred term "tech guru", of the class.
I instituted the Golden Cow Award for our favorite teacher.
I made this trophy all by myself---I love using gold spray paint, don't you?

Christmas cake and Christmas pup

Christmas cake: chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream
For Christmas, I got to make a baby's first Christmas cake for a very special baby, Sydney Mae. I decided to make another giant red bow because I'm really loving how my bows are looking lately. I like to make them hugely puffy (a quality, in truth, that's only desirable in a bow).

I added candy canes, which I made out of fondant, and a few holly sprigs (thanks again to the incomparable holly-making skills of my partner, Anthony).


I made the candy canes by rolling out to thin ropes of fondant, one red and one white, twisting them together, then rolling the twist out two meld the two ropes together. They looked freakishly realistic once they were dry.


Skippy
Chris and I have adopted a seven-year-old Shih Tzu named Skippy and it took me no time at all to become completely obsessed with him.

I have this week off and I am already dreading having to go back to work because I will miss hanging out with my pup all day.

two-tiered holiday cheer

first birthday cake with vanilla cake and nutella buttercream
This holiday cookie-themed cake was for Xavier John who turns a year old today. The cake was for his birthday but also for a cookie baking competition and party that his mother, Erika, holds every year during the holidays.


Anthony and I decided that since this cake was for the cookie party as well as a Christmas birthday, we would make blinged out gingerbread "cookies" out of fondant and decorate them with royal icing and gold dragees. We made Christmas tree shapes, stars, snowflakes, gingerbread men, candy canes and ornaments. They looked so real I wanted to bite right into one.

Anthony created the finishing touch in the form of a few of his lovely sprigs of holly that we tucked in next to the cookies.


lemon tarts with toasted meringue
I also made lemon tarts for Chris' Christmas party at work this past week. Fifty bite-sized tarts in crispy, buttery pastry shells. I was able to get the scalloped edge on the shells by cutting out the pastry dough with a scalloped cookie cutter. Yeah buddy.

For the filling, I used a lemon cream which is lemon curd but with much, much more BUTTER in it. The trick is to cook the eggs, sugar and lemon juice first, then let the mixture cool enough so that when you add the butter, it doesn't melt but emulsifies instead. Once you chill it, the mixture come together to form a very thick, buttery cream.