Saturday, March 27, 2010

Wilton Course 2, Final Basketweave Cake

What's Baking?
My last cake - final - for Course 2.  I had class this morning and made a Heavenly White Cake (Colette Peter's recipe) with Chocolate Buttercream Icing (Wilton recipe), Royal Icing flowers and Color Flow butterfly.  It was a lot of fun to make although the basketweave is very time consuming, so are the flowers and color flow, too.  I guess it will get faster the more I practice.  It was hard piping all that buttercream icing while smelling the chocolate the whole time!

I am quite pleased with the way it turned out considering it was my first time doing basketweave, those kinds of flowers and color flow and I was very excited to be able to give this cake to a friend who is hosting a brunch tomorrow for Palm Sunday!

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Wilton Course 2, weeks 2 and 3 - RI flower practice

A few of the royal icing flowers I learned how to make on Saturday--Wilton Course 2, classes 2 and 3 combined.  Great teacher, but I need to practice, practice, practice and make a bunch for my cake final coming up on Saturday.  Would like to get that all done before I clean out the kitchen and start preparing for the Seders.  Looking forward to learning how to make a basket weave pattern in butter cream.

As usual, you can click on photos to enlarge them and comments are always welcome!  Funny thing, I started to add a few photos of finished cakes to Facebook and I got a couple of comments there!  Maybe it's easier to comment there or it's just my friends being nice!  Anyway, thanks for looking!

Monday, March 22, 2010

Chocolate Ganache Cake

What's Baking?
After yesterday's cake. I decided to try to learn more about chocolate ganache so I made Chocolate Ganache Cake  from Epicurious (Minor variations include using very strong espresso coffee instead of the espresso powder and boiling water since I recently ran out of espresso powder.  And I only had 1 cup of brown sugar so I used that and some white, but cut back the total amount.)

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Saturday, March 6, 2010

RI Flowers

Royal icing flowers from class.  Morning glory, lily, poinsettia and petunia.  Need lots of practice!  Next week the tiered cake.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Royal Icing, Wilton course 3

Looking forward to working with royal icing and class tomorrow (was snowed out last week).  I need to make some using the Wilton recipe and color it for making a variety of flowers.  I've never worked with royal icing and am a bit concerned about two things I've heard about. 

Monday, March 1, 2010

Operation Baking GALS, round 17


I just got back from the post office and had taken a few quick pictures as I was packing up this package. I baked a double batch of mini-chocolate chip shortbread cookies, cut in squares, and included brownies and banana bread that some friends had baked.  I also put in a bag of marshmallows -good for padding (and snacking!).  It's a great way to show our appreciation and it's nice to be part of larger group baking and supporting our troops.