My first two tier cake

My second cake order.. This time for one of my close friend's birthday. I would naturally made a cake for her anyway, but this time, her sister made a special order from me. I'm so happy. I'm getting sick of making chocolate cakes, so I decided this time I want to make it interesting. The birthday girl is someone who really appreciates food, so I can be a bit fancy here. At first, I want to combine raspberry with chocolate. Classic flavour combination, nothing can go wrong with that. However, I just bought a bottle of Yuzu lemon Juice that already passed it's best before date, so I need to use it right away. Ever since I read about Yuzu lemon, I was intrigued. I always thought there was only one type of lemon in this world. But now I've been hearing about Yuzu & Meyer lemon.. Of course, Australia being very remote, don't have those two fruits. So I'm on a man hunt for some kind of extract or some sort of puree. I finally found it at Simon Johnson two weeks ago. But it's price makes my jaws drop! $50+ for a 500ml bottle!!! you got to be kidding me!!

But wait! there's hope after all. when my housemate told me Simon Johnson is having a warehouse clearance, I literally jumped for joy. So off we go at 7.30 in the morning to Port Melbourne. When she told me she wants to go at 7am in the morning, I thought she was out of her mind, but it turns out to be quite packed when we got there. By 8.30am, some stuff has already run out. And yes, my Yuzu juice was on sale!! down to just $10. Fabulous!! Less to say, I couldn't keep myself composed on that sale. I was like a kid in a candy store. My biggest splurge would be the 4kg bags of Valhorna chocolates. Gosh! all that chocolates!! my mind was spinning from thinking the numerous fabulous dessert I can create with that. I wasn't the only one that went mad with chocolates. by 8am the once high piles of Valhorna chocolates was cleaned out. At $15-$20 a kilo for what normally is $50-$60 a kilo, that chocolates are a steal!

I can keep the chocolates for a while, the Yuzu juice on the other hand, need to be used immediately. I think I will have "Project: Yuzu Lemon" for the whole next month. So far, I can only think making lemon curd and lemon mousse. Any better ideas??

Back to the cake.. if I had trouble decorating for guys because I'm too feminine, this time I have trouble because there is just too many options!! I tried drawing inspirations from what I know about her. She's fashionable (a fashion desgner I might add), very feminine, likes owls, loves chocolates. Oh gosh! the options! As always, I turn to Flickr for inspiration. Then I saw a wedding cake with black and white polka dots and a fabulous flower details on them. It looks like a fashion hat. So I used that as inspiration. With every cake, I like to push myself everytime. This time, I challenge myself to make a two tier cake. Chocolate cake as the base, with lemon and chocolate mousse filling, chocolate IMBC frosting and chocolate flavoured fondant.


A little drama.. the flower decorations turns out quite brittle. I may have went overboard with the CMC therefore it's very dry and brittle. I should have used gum paste instead. One other thing, I forgot to let the frosting hardens before enrobing it with the fondant, therefore the fondant didn't have a solid ground to hold on to, that's why I can't get the edges to be sharp and the frostng actually got pushed down, creating a bulging bottom. Aside from that, I love the design. The combination of brown, green and red is very chic and gorgeous.

Chocolate mousse
Recipe taken from Delicious - June 2009

• 300g good-quality dark chocolate, roughly chopped
• 3 eggs
• 1/4 cup (55g) caster sugar
• 1 tbs good-quality cocoa powder, sifted
• 300ml thickened cream, plus extra whipped cream to serve
• Grated chocolate, to serve

Method

Place the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pan of gently simmering water (don't let the bowl touch the water). Stir until melted. Remove bowl from heat and set aside to cool slightly. Place eggs and sugar in a large bowl and beat with electric beaters for 5 minutes, or until mixture is pale, thick and doubled in volume. Fold in cooled chocolate and cocoa powder until combined. In a separate bowl, whip cream until thickened (be careful not to over-beat). Use a large metal spoon to carefully fold the cream into the chocolate mixture, trying to keep the mixture as light as possible.

Yuzu Lemon Mousse
Recipe taken from Delicious - June 2009

• 1 eggs
• 100ml of Yuzu lemon juice
• 1tbs finely grated lemon rind
  
• 25g caster sugar
• 150ml thickened cream

Method

Place eggs and sugar in a large bowl and beat with electric beaters for 5 minutes, or until mixture is pale, thick and doubled in volume. Fold in juice and rind.
In a separate bowl, whip cream until thickened (be careful not to over-beat). Use a large metal spoon to carefully fold the cream into the lemon-egg mixture, trying to keep the mixture as light as possible.

My first cake order - Madagascar theme cake

Baking can be quite an expensive hobby sometimes. Especially when you're a self thaught novice where mistakes and wastage are inevitable. Especially in my case, where the number of recipes that I want to try my hands on doesn't really balanced the level of consumption of me and the people surrounds me. I'm running out of people to be treated as "lab rats" or probably nicer to say "taste testers". So, when my friend ordered a cake for her nephew's second birthday, eventhough i'm in the middle of two major assignments, I just couldn't say no. My first official order? The first time I actually getting paid for doing what I love? How can I possibly say no.

The biggest question here is not what design or what flavours should I make the cake, it was how much should I charge? With little to no experience on pricing strategies nor business strategies for that matter, I would just have to guess it this time. I still feel inadequate to charge for my time. With the quality control being inexistent, I still feel very scared of how people might think of my rates. I'm happy enough if people exchange me for all the expenses of buying the ingredients. The most expensive ones would be the chocolates. I thought by using the supermarket brand, it would be much much cheaper. But I was wrong. The couverture chocolate sold in the supermarket is actually almost doubled the price of my fancy Lindt couverture chocolates I bought at Essential Ingredients. I guess buying in bulk really pays off sometimes. I thought of using compound chocolates, but for the chocolate ganache, it will go through several times of reheating. And to my knowledge, compound chocolates are not meant to be reheated. Couverture in the other hand will be fine. I may be wrong on this, but the limited time that I have will not allow me to do a trial and error.

I want to try using a lighter chocolate cake this time. I'm not a big fan of mud cakes or any dense cake in that matter. Ideally, I'd go for a sponge cake anytime. But I know, sponge cakes cannot suffice the weight of the icing, it needs a dense cake. I just realized by doing this cake that I actually don't have a basic chocolate cake in my recipe repertoire. You would have think for someone who bakes as much as I do, chocolate cake recipe should have been one of my staple recipe. I found a recipe of a chocolate cake that I found interesting. So based on that recipe, I start calculating my cost. Give and take here and there (I can't really measure the cost of my flour and sugar as I buy it in bulk and was too lazy to calculate how much it cost per 100g) I ended up with a couple of options. $45 for choc cake with choc buttercream, $55 for choc cake with choc mousse filling and choc buttercream, $65 for choc mud cake with choc ganache. To serve 30 people, I think that's a very good price. I absolutely have no idea whether those prices are good or not. More experienced cake decorator out there, please help me out.......

I ended up over budget since the chocolate cake recipe said it would serve 15, but it ended up not rising and quite short, so I have to make 3 times the recipe instead of 2. My friend opt for the cheapest option, which uses choc buttercream. It actually work to my advantage, one, I get to try Cake Journal's IMBC (Italian Meringue Butter Cream) recipe and two, I don't have to sacrifice my chocolates even more, because even at $65, I don't think it will cover the cost of the chocolates. There must be a better way.. I need to do more research.


The birthday boy loves sponge bob, Alex the lion from Madagascar, and Thomas the Tank. So naturally, that's what he wants for his birthday. At first, the thought of modelling all the Madagascar cast seems very daunting, and Thomas the Tank has navy blue and christmas red colours (the two colours that are hard to produce in icing). So I pushed the sponge bob idea. But it's very unlike me to turn down a good challenge. After hours of looking at Madagascar pictures, I decided to go ahead with the madagascar design. In one of my cake decorating books, I found a cake design where it looks like a round jungle with animal heads popping out between the trees. This is perfect for my Madagascar cake. I only need to model the heads of the cast, I don't need to do their bodies.

Out of the four (well, Melvin the Giraffe has to be singled out as I ran out of time), I think my Gloria the hippo looks the most like the real one, with the Zebra (I forgot his name) being the hardest one to sculpt. The feedback from everyone has been fantastic. They loved every bit of the cake. The flavour, the look, everything. It's a job well done!

Step-by-step chocolate cake (for this cake I made 3 times the recipe)
Recipe taken from Notebook - September 2007, page 136

125g butter, chopped
2 tsp instant coffee powder
3/4 cup (185ml) water
100g good-quality dark cooking chocolate, chopped
1 cup (200g) brown sugar
1/2 cup (75g) self-raising flour
1/2 cup (75g) plain flour
1/4 cup (30g) cocoa powder
1/4 cup (30g) almond meal
1 egg, lightly whisked

Preheat oven to 160°C. Grease and line the base and side of an 18cmround (base measurement) cake pan.Place the butter, coffee, water, chocolate and sugar in a saucepan over low heat. Cook, stirring, for 2-3 minutes or until butter and chocolate melt and mixture is smooth. Remove from heat and set aside for 5 minutes to cool slightly.Transfer mixture to a bowl. Sift the combined flours and cocoa powder over the chocolate mixture and add the almond meal. Use a balloon whisk to gently fold the flour into the chocolate mixture. Add the egg and stir to combine.Pour cake mixture into the prepared pan. Bake for 1 hour or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Remove from oven and set aside for 30 minutes before turning on to a wire rack to cool completely.

cake scraps = cake chocettes

I have some cake scraps from the baby block cake I made last weekend and whole lot of cookies and cream frosting from the cupcakes. Not wanting to waste any of this, I decided to make same cake chocettes. I know I know.. I should have been relaxing and catching up on some sleep after being sleep deprived for more than a week, but I just hate to waste all this up. It's very simple to whip these babies up anyways, and by using compound chocolate to dip it, takes the hassle from having to temper the chocolates.

I made some into choc-kabobs and gave it to some friends as an early easter treat.

Just another birthday cake

Just something from the archive that I didn't get a chance to post. I made this cake for a friend's birthday a little over a week ago. The 24th February to be exact. If you've been paying attention, yes, this would be my 4th cake for February. This time I went with an all time classic, something I know everyone would like, chocolate cake.

My housemate first introduce me this chocolate cake around 3 years ago when she made it for a friend. She told me she got it while watching Oprah. It's one of those Oprah's favourite kind of thing. The cake is very dense, almost flourless bmaking it very rich and moist. What differentiate this cake from any flourless choc cake out there is the texture of the cake. Eventhough the mid section is moist, it has a crispy skin that surrounds the cake. This in my opinion is what makes this cake the best chocolate cake. Crispy outside, and moist chocolatey goodness when you bite through. That paired with the whip cream and chocolate sauce.. a true chocoholic dream come true. These texture is in result of the baking technique. It is first baked for 20 minutes in high temperature, then the temp is lowered every 30-40 minutes. Follow the recipe exactly, and you can taste the benefit later. ike the Valentino cake , the chocolate is the key ingredient here, so best to use the finest chocolate, and prefereably couverture. I used my all time favourite (after Valhorna), Lindt couverture 65% semi sweet chocolate.

When making a cake for a guy, I tend to find trouble in decorating the cake. Every decoration I made always ended up very feminine. So this time, I did something fun and quirky. I made a bunch of tuxedo strawberries and some chocolate scribbles for the side of the cake. Here's a video of detailed step by step instruction on making the tuxedo strawberries on YouTube.


The Man Who Took The Cake
by Barbara Kafka, as published in Oprah Magazine, October 2004

Cake:

• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter , cut into 1-inch pieces, plus extra for pan
• All-purpose flour for pan
• 10 ounces bittersweet chocolate , coarsely chopped
• 6 large eggs , separated
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Whipped cream:

• 1 1/2 teaspoons unflavored gelatin
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons sugar

Chocolate glaze:

• 4 ounces bittersweet chocolate , coarsely chopped
• 1/2 cup heavy cream

To make cake: Preheat oven to 375° and position rack on lowest rung. Butter and flour an 8-inch springform pan.

Place chocolate in top of a double boiler over simmering water. Heat, stirring occasionally, until chocolate is almost melted. Add butter and stir until mixture is completely smooth. Remove pan from heat, discard simmering water and replace it with warm tap water. Place chocolate mixture back over water and set aside.

In a bowl with an electric mixer, beat egg yolks at medium-high speed until light and lemon colored. Gradually beat in 3/4 cup sugar until mixture becomes very thick. Switch mixer to low speed and blend in chocolate mixture and vanilla.

In a separate mixing bowl, beat egg whites until soft peaks form. Gradually beat in remaining 1/4 cup sugar until soft peaks form again. With a rubber spatula, fold 1/3 of egg whites into chocolate mixture. Fold in remaining whites until just blended. Pour batter into prepared pan; smooth top.

Bake cake 15 minutes; reduce oven temperature to 300° and bake an additional 15 minutes. Reduce temperature again to 250°; bake 30 minutes. Turn off oven, leaving door ajar and let cake stand in oven for 30 minutes. Transfer cake to a wire rack, cover pan with a damp cloth and let stand 5 minutes. Uncover and cool completely. Remove side of pan. Cake will have a crust that cracked and collapsed as temperature was reduced; gently remove top crust and discard.

To make whipped cream: Bring a small skillet filled halfway with water to a simmer. Fill a glass measuring cup with 1/4 cup cold water and sprinkle gelatin over it; let stand until gelatin softens, about 1 minute. Place measuring cup in simmering water and stir until gelatin completely dissolves. Remove from heat and cool to room temperature.

In a large mixing bowl, beat cream at medium-high speed until thick. Gradually beat in dissolved gelatin. Beat in sugar until stiff peaks form; chill.

To make chocolate glaze: Place chopped chocolate in a medium bowl. In a small saucepan, heat cream over medium heat until small bubbles form around edge of pan. Pour hot cream over chocolate and whisk until chocolate melts and forms a smooth glaze; let stand until cool enough to mound slightly with a spoon.

Meanwhile, with a long serrated knife, gently cut cake in half horizontally to make two even layers. Place one layer on a serving plate and spread a 1/2-inch layer of whipped cream over it. Gently place remaining layer on top. Cover top and sides of cake with remaining whipped cream, making it as smooth as possible. Freeze cake for 30 minutes.

Remove cake from freezer and pour chocolate glaze over top. Smooth with a spatula, allowing excess glaze to drip down sides of cake. Refrigerate cake at least 1 hour before eating. Makes 20 servings.