My friend HT hosted yet another awesome Christmas party in early December. I made my very first Bûche de Noël with chocolate genoise, chocolate mousse and chocolate ganache. I'm glad that everybody liked it - but I found it a little too bitter/too much of dark chocolate :p
A week later, I made quite a few Bûche de Noël at work. Hazelnut sponge, white chocolate mousse and hazelnut buttercream. Mmm. That's more like it ;)
Here's a great opportunity to review what I learned at baking school a while ago. Chocolate Truffle Mousse Cake, as per my friend Mrs. HT's request. Slices of chocolate sponge nestled in luscious chocolate mousse, topped with rich chocolate ganache.
I could have skipped the decorative sponge part, but... why? That's the fun part of this cake! :D haha I piped the word 'friends' in mirror image with decorating paste and froze it while prepping biscuit joconde. Spread the biscuit joconde over the chilled decorating paste and bake it at quite high temp quickly... and there you have it. The most difficult part might have been finding the right font in right size for the template to pipe on!
I'm so excited that Threadcakes is back!! Here's my "first" entry this year :) The design I chose this time is very cute "Chick Love".
Outside is store-bought chocolate fondant with homemade marshmallow fondant decorations.
Inside is Betty Crocker Butter Pecan cake (yes, I *do* use box cake mixes occasionally), Smucker's orange marmalade and homemade orange custard cream.
Leftover cupcakes and marshmallow fondant from the book cake project turned into these cakelettes. The bottom two in the photo have names of my friends in Japanese. I used たのしメール from Arnest Inc. to cut out those Japanese characters.
There was a book talk/signing event for my friend EK's parents, and I had an honour, privilege and pleasure to make a cake for them.
Spirit of the Nikkei Fleet: BC’s Japanese Canadian Fishermen was nominated for this year's Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award.
The 'body of the book' cake was supposed to be the same size as the 'half title page' sugarpaste piece on top of the cake :( and that's one of many, many shouldas & couldas...
The top line was piped with black royal icing and the bottom was written with FoodWriter.
Pacific Dogwood is the provincial flower of British Columbia.
I always have a hard time figuring out cake serving size... a dozen of cupcakes to the rescue!
Sunday. My day off. I was hoping for another beautiful day but the weather decided to ignore me :( *boooo* Craving for sunshine, I made something sunshiny in terms of colour and flavour.
The original recipe can be found here. I substituted orange juice with mango pulp and omitted orange zest. Ingredient ratio for the glaze had to be changed a bit because I was running out of icing sugar...
There was a get-together at The T Family's. I knew we're having a Chinese dinner, so I decided to make something along the same line... You say Chinese desserts? I say mango pudding & egg tarts!
Instead of pudding, I went for a mousse cake.
Mango mousse, topped with mango jelly, nestled in sponge fingers. I used a canned mango pulp for both mousse and jelly. 850g for only $2! Yay, Walmart! :D
My fave dim sum: egg tart. When at a dim sum restaurant, I have to grab a plate (or two sometimes) of egg tarts as soon as I see them even before my actual meal starts... Here I cheated with store-bought tart shells *gasp* Sprinkled with cinnamon à la English custard tart or South African Melktert.
On my day off today, I had a quite strong (almost uncontrollable for some reason) craving for cupcakes. So I made some.
Watching the Olympics almost all day made me do this: 5 M&M'S to represent Olympic rings - they are not interlocking like they should, but they will be completely together later in my tummy. Maple leaf and Hinomaru are cut-outs of Fruit To Go.
I had an honour to make a birthday cake for my friend UW. It's a quadruple layer cake with white sponge and orange mousse filling. Sponge was drenched with coconut-flavoured simple syrup. The outside is coconut-flavoured whipped cream and coconut flake coating.
It had been quite a while (6 months?!) since the last time I made something out of rolled fondant, which made it even more enjoyable to make these frangipani/plumeria decoration. Also, this wonderful tutorial made it so much easier!
UW's husband PW asked me if the cake had a name and all I could come up with was "uh... orange mousse coconut cake?" Lame, I know. That got me googling for some info and I found this wiki article; hence the name "Ambrosia Cake"!
Here's more interesting fact! I'm pleasantly surprised how appropriate this flavour combo was for a birthday party ;)
"In ancient Greek mythology, ambrosia (Greek: ἀμβροσία) is sometimes the food, sometimes the drink, of the gods, often depicted as conferring ageless immortality upon whoever consumes it."
I decided to make something fun for the nabe party hosted by my friends Mr. & Mrs. T... and here it is! My version of Gingerbread Cake House from Martha Stewart Holiday Sweets 100.
Since I don't have two 9-inch square cake pans, I used two 9-inch round pans instead and cut round cakes into squares... so the final product was much smaller than the original one in the magazine.
5 gingerbread kids represent my friends' kids - S-kun & K-kun of the T family, T-kun, L-kun & L-chan of the A family. It was so rewarding to see them excited to find their own gingies!
L-chan is in charge of decorating their Christmas tree ;)
Wishing you all and your loved ones a happy, safe holiday season from my teeny tiny kitchen!!
This is the first chiffon cake I baked in almost 12 months, and probably it'll be the last chiffon cake made in this teeny tiny kitchen...
I used the instant green tea powder from Itoen.
On the last day of my work experience (practicum) at Luscious Creations, my classmate and I got to design and decorate mini 4" cakes... on the spot à la Food Network Challenge :) We decided to make ones for each other, which made this assignment even more like FNC where you have to design a cake for a client you'll meet just before the challenge begins!
This is the one I made for my classmate Yoyo. I wish I could have made a Transformer cake for her but there's no way I could make it without some reference to look at :( So I combined her favourite colours: pink & black, one of her favourite decorations on cakes: a bow, and "Frog Prince" :)
I had an opportunity to work on a "free reign" dummy cake during my work experience (practicum) at Luscious Creations. It was meant for some charity event and their theme colours include lime green. I took the word 'lime' literally and designed this very lime-ful cake.
Each tier is 'double-height' (approx. 6"-7" tall) and I had a hard time covering those with rolled fondant :(
Here's my second entry into Threadcakes. This time I chose "Revenge Of The Sushi". Check out my entry here :)
The cupcake batter recipe is from シンプルスポンジケーキ (Simple Sponge Cakes) published by Daiso.
I added cocoa powder to the 'nori' (black) frosting to avoid using too much black gel food colour.
Rolled fondant was used only to make 'Gari' and the weapons (a knife and a pair of chopsticks).
Chopsticks to eat a cupcake...?
I entered this cool online cake-baking contest called Threadcakes. The t-shirt design that I chose is "Hey, Mr. Blue Sky"... Check out my entry here :)
I cheated a little bit and used Betty Crocker Super Moist :) I picked Rainbow Chip because I thought it would be cute some rainbow colours underneath the blue sky, yet underneath the dark, gloomy sky.
Frosting is homemade :)
Grey rolled fondant isn't very appetizing :(
