Wedding Cake

Phew! It’s been a few days since the wedding, but all went well. Very well. Very, very well. And I’m sad that it’s all over. I can’t help but think when the next time I will get to do something so fun again.

I spent 2 days on the cake. The wedding was this passed saturday, the 14th of November. I started working on it the thursday before.

What I made (with the help of my dear mother!) was 3 cakes, tiered separately.

A 16″, a 12″, and an 8″. The 16 was a dummy cake because they didn’t need that much cake for the wedding. The 12″ was the tiramisu cake. What I actually ended up making was DELICIOUS. It went like this:
-vanilla cake on the bottom brushed with a soaking syrup made of bailey’s caramel+disarono+espresso
-mascarpone filling
-chocolate cake
-more mascarpone filling
-another layer of syrup soaked vanilla cake

then I covered the cake with a french buttercream. That was then covered in fondant. It was absolutely divine! I even had many compliments that my cake was better than the various cakes served as dessert after dinner. That made me very happy and more confident in myself as a baker. If you want the recipe, feel free to leave a comment with your e-mail address and I will gladly send it to you (:

The 8″ cake, which I unfortunately didn’t get a picture of it until it was covered in fondant, was the one I wanted to eat but didn’t get to. It was a lemon poppyseed cake, soaked with a lemon syrup and filled with a french buttercream+lemon curd mixture. Then covered with french buttercream and fondant. You can see it all finished on the top of the first picture. I didn’t get to taste it all together, but the individual components of the cake were super delish!

Making this cake was an absolute blast. It was so much fun and a good learning experience for me. I’m so glad I did it and I would happily do it again in the future!
Enjoy!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Okay, so call me crazy.

Halloween is barely over and I’ve already started listening to Christmas music and thinking of menu ideas.

I can’t help it! Christmas is my absolute hands-down favourite time of the year. Not because of the presents, not because of any of the “commercialized stuff”, but because of these 5 things:

1. Snow. I effing love it. Can’t get enough of it.
2. Decorations. Everything looks so pretty with all the lights and garlands and ornaments.
3. Getting together with all sorts of people.  Especially people you maybe don’t see so often. I love it!
4. Getting to snuggle up on a cold night in a big blanket drinking hot chocolate while watching Christmas movies.
5. FOOD! Who doesn’t love the food aspect of Christmas.

Christmas just makes me so happy. There is no other time of year when I am happier or in a better mood. I busted out the ol’ classic Christmas tunes today and guess what? No really, guess! IT SNOWED! Seriously man, it snowed like crazy. Maybe it was just for 2 minutes, but it snowed none the less. And it got me all shivery inside with excitement and happiness and wonderful feelings. So that’s when I got down to the business of starting to plan the menus. This is something I do every year and it brings me so much joy! And then when I finally start making all the things I planned it’s sort of a bitter-sweet ordeal. I get to make the delicious wonderful things and then eat them, but it also means that it’s either super close to Christmas day or already is. And that makes me happy and sad at the same time because I know that it means that the next day it will all be over and time to take down all the decorations! So sad.

But this year it also means something else bitter-sweet. After new years I will be leaving home and heading to school. Sure it’s only 5 hours away, but that’s a long way! Not as close as my last school was where I could just go home every weekend if I wanted to. But guess what school I am going to? That’s right! Pastry school! And I couldn’t be more excited about that fact. I can’t wait for Christmas. And I can’t wait to start school.

This is going to be a wonderful holiday season. I can just feel it.

Oh yeah! And here is my first draft of what I plan on making (most things with mom!) for Christmas and the holidays in general!

Christmas Menu

December 25th Breakfast

Crisp corn flapjacks w warmed maple syrup and butter
thick cut applewood smoked bacon
scrambled eggs
(with cream cheese and chives)
fruit salad
(banana, mango, apple, peach, pear, dragon fruit, passion fruit juice)
cherry cheese danish

December 25th Dinner

rosemary & garlic turkey
(basted with butter and dotted with garlic and rosemary)
apple walnut stuffing
(traditional stuffing with apples and chopped walnuts)
garlic & artichoke mashed potatoes
sautéed corn w shallots
pull apart soft and buttery home-made dinner rolls
cranberry-cherry sauce
(my twist on a classic cranberry sauce. A hint of cherry sweetness and lime zest)

Cookies and Breads

shortbread cookies
(mom’s classic with glacee cherries)
gingerbread cookies
nanaimo bars
cinnamon bread

All of which I will include recipes for slowly but surely!

Oh man I am so excited for Christmas!

Wedding Cake Taste Test #1

I officially suck at cutting cakes evenly just look at those uneven layers! I need one of those cake slicers…If I were in school already, I would get a really bad mark on the montage of this cake!

Okay! So yesterday I made a trial cake in my new 12″ cake pan and the results were fantastic. What a great wedding cake recipe! The cake turned out fluffy but not light enough that it would sink under the weight of fondant. And it was moist and had a really good flavour to it. I didn’t have any almond extract to add, but I have a feeling it would make the cake even more wonderful. When you eat the cake on its own though, it tastes a little bit floury. Do you know what I mean? But once it was all put together it was really good.

So this is how it all started. I’ve been eyeing up this one recipe from Epicurious.com for a while and decided that it was the day I would try it! I divided the recipe by 1/3 with no bad results. While the cake was baking I made a random soaking syrup by combining some ingredients we had in a small saucepan and letting it simmer. They were Bailey’s Caramel and some Disaronno. I put some ground up espresso beans or whatever they were in a coffee filter and tied the top. Then I put all of these on the stove in my new wonderful $5 saucepan and let it gently simmer until the alcohol was evaporated and the espresso had diffused into the mixture. It was really really really good once it had reduced slightly. The only problem was that I didn’t have enough! But that’s what this trial was about. Figuring out things like that.

So then I cut the round cake in half to make two half-circles. Then I cut those each piece into 2 layers so I would have a 4 layer half-circle cake. I made some random cream out of some cream cheese, mascarpone cheese, sugar and a bit of milk with a touch of the buttercream to spread on the layers of the yummy-soaked cake. Then I covered it all with an italian merangue buttercream. It was really really good! I wasn’t trying to make it look good or anything, I was just trying to get an idea of the flavours we wanted. I was overall fairly happy with it. I now know you always need MUCH more soaking syrup than you think you do to actually get a good amount in the cake.

You can find the recipe I used and dived by 3 here.