Trying Something New with Cakes

It’s been a while since I wrote a cake-related post, but since I had a chance to try a new technique for my sister’s birthday cake, I thought I’d share.

It’s also been a while since I decorated a cake so when the birthday cake came up, I thought it’d be the perfect opportunity to do something I’d never done before and that looked complicated: the frozen buttercream transfer. You can google that phrase and find tons of videos and images. In a nutshell, you use icing on an image like a coloring book, freeze it and then flip it onto a cake. Easy enough.

Magically Delicious

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and give the office a much-needed morale boost, the editorial department at my company decided to reenact our winter food fete with a … um … St. Patrick’s Day food fete.

I had grand plans for Guinness cupcakes or something like that, but ran out of time. So I created Pots O’Gold.

When Cakes Go Wrong

Remember the cakes of yesteryear? The pink and white fondant fantasy? The butterfly bouquet basket? The world’s largest beach towels on the world’s tiniest island? Yeah, those were good times. This is not a post about those types of cakes.

Making the mistake twice as bad

Odds and Ends Part 2 (the picture edition)

My attention has been on the insanity of writing a novel in 30 days so I haven’t blogged lately. Word count updates for the novel can be seen in the widgets on the left of the main page, Facebook and Twitter (follow small_pond). The story of the novel won’t be wrapped up in 50,000 words so here’s hoping I churn out over 5K a day or keep writing through December and into the future.

In the meantime, here are some pics of what else has been going on. Notice no pictures of books appear. Despite my growing pile of review copies, the time isn’t there this month to read and review. Besides, one of them may require me to buy a fiddle

On to the photos …

The Saddest Cake Ever

My first sheet cake is the saddest cake I’ve ever made. I don’t normally add salt to buttercream, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some tears fell into the mixer. The cake was for Nicole. She works with me as an assistant editor and has decided to leave our happy cube farm for the sea-swept winds at Margate to pursue her writing dreams. I can’t blame her – in fact, I envy her ability to chuck the 9-to-5 drudgery – but I will miss her terribly.

To give her a proper send-off, I put together a pizza goodbye lunch. Of course, the lunch required a cake for dessert. And the number of people invited meant a sheet cake was a better idea than some layered or tiered monstrosity. Nicole likes pink so I used rose coloring to create hot pink roses. I wanted the cake to have something unique to Nicole or her almost-former job, hence the proofreader marks.

I must remember that this pink darkens considerably from when it’s first mixed. I planned on some darker roses and then some marbled roses. The marbling never really took and by this morning, everything’s pretty much the same color. In fact, some of the roses may glow in the dark.