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.

Special cake for a a special one year old

A very close friends of mine is having a birthday party for their beloved one year old. Zio along with their parents are some people I hold dear to my heart. I have always been there since this baby was brought to this world, a tiny 600grams premmie to the chubby boy that he is now. So, when the mother asked me to make the cake, it's a task I take very seriously. This will be my first baby cake and since this will be a big party, I can go all out. I'm planning to make a baby blocks cake as the centerpiece and also cupcakes. What's more perfect than cupcakes for a kid's party. For the flavour combination, I decided to make chocolate mud cake for the block cake, and chocolate cupcake with cookies and cream cheese frosting. You can never go wrong with chocolate.

If you can think of things that can go wrong in baking and decorating a cake, I have just experienced it all at once when making this cake. If you think that I didn't think it through enough or plan it enough, you were wrong. I planned the whole thing more than a week in advance starting from getting all the ingredients, the decorating tools also the reference pictures to help me in creating the decoration. I even scheduled the whole thing to the last second. Create the figurines on Monday - Wednesday, bake the cake on Thursday, make the chocolate ganache on Friday night, colour the icing on Saturday morning, decorate the cake on Saturday night and make the cookies and cream frosting for the cupcakes and finally, bake and decorate the cupcakes on Sunday morning just before the party so everything will be nice and fresh. Up until Friday night, everything was on schedule and went according to plan. Even my essay was on schedule I even felt proud of myself for creating the figurines (the first time I ever made one I might add). Not until Saturday morning when the series of disaster began. One, I found out that the essay was 3000 words, not 2000 words as I thought it was. Panic mode: on. And this is not due to my ignorance to the brief, the lecturer have been saying it's 2000 words in class all the time, so I just take her word for it, but the official brief states 3000 words, so to be safe (and it's too late to write an angry email to her asking which is the right one), I decided to aim for 3000. So I have to put my essay first over the cake. Assuring that everything is in place, if I just wake up really early on Sunday, I can finish decorating the cake and the cupcakes. Or so I thought...


Starts off with the ganache not sticking to the cake.. I have worked with chocolate ganache before, but this is the first time this ever happen to me. Have any of you experience the same thing? The ganache is just very oily and paste-y. It's really hard to get it to stick to the cake, and when it's cold, it set hard like a chocolate block, not soft as it should be. So, it's impossible to get that sharp edges on the block cakes. Pressed for time, I just have to live with it. It looked more like a blob than a baby block. Of course, without the ganache having sharp edges, it would be impossible to get it from the fondant. While waiting for the cake to set, I decided to move on to the cupcakes. Another disaster! The cupcake paper I bought yesterday was too big for my cupcake pan. I have moved beyond panic mode to nearly hyper-ventilating. M tried to calm me down by driving me to the homeware store to get some. We stopped to get some coffee in the hope of it calms my nerve a little bit.

When I got home, it only have gotten worst. the blue fondant was too soft to work with, so I tried to fix it by adding some CMC to it. It helped a bit, but it's still very tricky to work with. By this time, M has moved to become my sous chef. Poor him, I was actually turning into Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen. I have seen my version of a mad woman.


Eventhough we were an hour late to the party (hey, we're Indonesian, being on time is not in our blood), we manage to get the cake there in one piece. It still looked cute on display. The proud parents still very impressed. Thank God for the figurines, it manages to make the block cake still cute. I ended up not putting the block cake on top of the cupcake tower, because it was too heavy.
I need a lot more practice with fondant decorating. Hopefully I can be a lot better at it. Just glad it's all over, and I manage to finish my essay on time. This essay has been a wake up call for me. The very reason why I was done with being a student. Only 3 more months to go till I graduate. I think I'm going to take 2 days off after easter. I really need to unwind after a very stressful week.

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.

Green Tea-ramisu

A little snipet of my e-mail conversation with my housemate (why email and not face to face you say? it's because eventhough we share the same address, we rarely share our nights under the same roof. I see her more outside the house rather than inside)

Me: What cake do you want?
Miss Polip: awww.... so twit... you know what I want.. TIRAMISU.. any version you like as long as it has heaps of sponge
fingers.. xp

Of coursee... After days of contemplating what cake to make for my special housemate, I completely overlooked the one thing she always asked me to make. It's not that I don't like Tiramisu, it's actually one of my favourite dessert of all time. It's one of the very first dessert I ever made from scratch after I move passed the premix cakes. But it's just that I made it in one too many occasion. But, since this is the first time we spent her birthday together after 3 or so years of our friendship, her wish is my command!

From our emails, I got the sense that she's asking me to be more creative with the tiramisu, so I decided to try making an Asian take on this beloved traditional Italian dessert. I researched for some recipes online and found a lot of great ones. However, from reading this recipes, I noticed that what they're doing differently than the original one, is just adding matcha powder to the cheese mixture, and substitute the liquor with sake or a fruity based liquor rather than the usual coffee based liquor. So I went back to my trusted recipe that I've been using for a while. I made Tiramisu so many times I can make them with my eyes closed.

When I'm making a whole cake, especially if it's being served in a party-like environment, I like to use sponge cake rather than sponge fingers so it can hold their shape when it's cut. I used a joconde biscuit recipe for the base. I still have some matcha powder left in my pantry, but opted for a fresh batch since I read online, that it's better to use fresh matcha powder for better tasting result. Old matcha powder tends to loose their taste intensity and their caffeine level is usually increased with age.

In using matcha powder, a little actually goes a long way. Using too much, you can end up with a bitter after taste and might make your guest high strung in caffeine. One recipe can make a generous amount of cream cheese mixture, so I ended up with an 11 inch cake and two 4 inch individual cakes. The cake was fabulous! not too sweet and had a very aromatic and intense green tea flavour.

Green Tea-ramisu (I forgot where I first got this recipe, I think it was from one of the little recipe collection book from Periplus)

Joconde (from "Paris Sweets" by Dorie Greenspan) - half recipe
30g unsalted butter, melted
3 large egg whites, at room temperature
10g granulated sugar
112g almond flour
112g icing sugar, sifted
3 large eggs
35g all-purpose flour

Preheat the oven to 220C. Line two jelly-roll pans (pans with raised edges) with parchment paper, and coat parchment with 1 tbsp of the melted butter.

In a clean, dry mixer bowl fitted with the whisk attachment, whip on low speed until the whites become foamy, then whip on medium-high speed until the whites reach soft peaks. Add granulated sugar, and whip on high speed until the whites are stiff and glossy.

In a separate mixer bowl fitted with the paddle attachment, beat almond flour, icing sugar, and eggs on medium speed for 3 minutes or until light and voluminous. Add flour and beat at low speed until it disappears. Use a rubber spatula to gently fold meringue into the almond mixture, then fold in the remaining melted butter until just combined. Divide batter between the two pans and spread evenly.

Bake cake 5 to 7 minutes, or until lightly browned. Remove from their pans, and let them cool to room temperature.

Green tea cream cheese
250g Mascarpone cheese
250g Cream Cheese
1/2 cup thickened cream
4 eggs, separated
1/3 cup caster sugar
2 tsp matcha powder

Cream the cheese using the paddle attachment on your mixer. Add cream, matcha powder & egg yolks one at a time and mix thoroughly. In a separate bowl, whip the egg whites until soft peaks form using the whisk attachment of your mixer. When soft peaks form, gradually add caster sugar and mix until stiff and glossy. Gently fold egg whites to the cheese mixture.

Soaking mixture
freshly brewed green tea
sake or orange flavoured liquor, use according to taste, depends on how strong you like your alcohol

20 sponge fingers for decoration
100g icing sugar mixed with 1 tsp of matcha powder for decoration

To assemble
Using a spring form pan, position the pan in the middle of your cake board and line the sides of the pan with glad wrap or parchment paper to avoid cream sticking to the pan. Align the sponge fingers to form a picket fence on along the inside of the pan. I cut the bottom of the sponge fingers so it can sit nicely in the pan, and I made them to tilt slightly for an extra touch. Trim the joconde to fill the middle area of the pan. Make sure it covers the bottom of the pan. Brush the cake with the soaking mixture. Pour about 1/3 of the cream cheese, level them with a spatula. put another piece of joconde on top, and brush with the soaking mixture. Pour another 1/3 of the cream cheese until it reaches about 1 cm shorter than the sponge fingers. level them with a spatula. cover it tightly with a glad wrap and refrigerate for at least 6 hours, preferably overnight. Use the leftovers to make individual cakes. Sprinkle with green tea-icing sugar just before serving