All Ruffled Up!

I'm not an adventurous person by any means, but when it comes to cakes and bakes, I'm a whole different person. I love taking on new recipes and attempting to jazz things up in tried and tested recipes. Doesn't often lead to success but hey if you never try you never know right?!

So having leftover buttercream in my fridge, I set my mind on attempting something I saw while trawling the net some time back: the Ruffle Cake.

Piping decorations can really help improve the look of any ordinary looking cake and take it to another level visually. If a plain sponge cake is Cinderella then the buttercream is the fairy godmother...or something along those lines!

I got down to making two 7" sponge cakes and it wasn't long before they were sliced, iced and stacked with a crumb coat layer and put back in the fridge while I prepared the buttercream to go on the outsides. I decided to go with a yellow tone to complement the mango flavoured insides of the cake.

Before long, the cream was ready but I was still feeling a little nervous about the doing the lacy frilly design. After another couple of minutes watching YouTube videos on achieving the pattern, I was ready to go. 

The strange thing was that, once I started, I didn't look back and only stopped once the sides were all done...such was the momentum that carried me through the whole way! Thankfully, it came out alright and pretty even in size. The top was a little tricky and I had abit of a problem getting into the rhythm and had to keep stopping along the way as I wasn't sure if I was doing alright. 

Piled up a couple of cubes of fresh mango and the middle and I was done! Woohoo!! 

Probably should have taken more pictures at different angles though...

The Engagement Bouquet!

It's an Indian tradition to bring desserts and "sweets" for engagement ceremonies and the interpretation of "sweets" has inevitably changed with time. Traditional sweetmeats which are now considered much too sweet for the modern palate, have given way increasingly to cakes and cupcakes in particular.

My brother-in-law's brother held his engagement ceremony recently and my Mum and I decided to make a very presentable and unique cupcake bouquet. She had done one many years back so she was comfortable with the idea while I couldn't say I was completely sure!

She took about a week to piece together the basket by gluing individual chocolate coins round and round a cake board. It didn't look anything like a basket initially to me, but by the time she was done, I have to admit, I was extremely amazed!

I decided to go with large red velvet cupcakes as the "flowers" for the bouquet as it was pretty easy to whip up. I cut back a lot on the red food colouring though..I certainly don't think they need to be that bright in colour like the ones sold outside! That's like colouring overdose!

Instead of the rich cream cheese frosting swirls, I chose Swiss meringue buttercream swirls tinted in various shades to sit atop the cupcakes. I was afraid about the temperature that these cupcakes would have to sit in as the ceremony went on and in this tropical heat, I wasn't prepared to risk it with the cream cheese frosting.

In the end, the frosting held up well and everything went without a hitch!

Shirt And Tie For Dad!

Somehow, Father's Day gets totally eclipsed by Mother's Day but I guess that just goes to show how much respect and love we have for our mothers. Not that the fathers don't deserve any! I guess it's just the way it is, the world over!

Ever since I made my first mango mousse cake a couple of years back, my dad was hooked. So it wasn't difficult to decide on the filling for our annual Father's Day cake - a vanilla sponge sandwiched with 2 layers of silky and aromatic Italian mango mousse.

But me and mum wanted the decoration to be a little unique and slightly departing from the usual. So we jumped on the fondant bandwagon. She had recently bought a whole packet of white sugar paste and we weren't too sure how to use it although everyone seemed to be making really interesting cakes and decorations with sugar paste of all colours!

It was an interesting experience working with it for the first time and I think we did pretty good. Both of us didn't really like the taste of sugar paste, so we decided against covering the whole cake with a massive piece of it and instead went with a tie shaped piece that gave the cake a shirt and tie look! 

The creaming job should have been alot smoother though and could have been done in a darker colour for more contrast...

Nonetheless, he was delighted with it!

The Occasion That No One Ever Forgets!

If there's one occasion we have all marked mentally, its Mother's Day. Even if by some chance, you've completely forgotten, the world itself will remind you. With florists seemingly swimming in overpriced roses to gift shops stocked to the ceiling with gifts for moms and dedication events and tea parties and what not, it's quite impossible to miss it.

I had decided some time in advance about the decoration and type of cake for Mother's Day but as past experiences have taught me, its not too good to be set on one and only one decoration idea as things can turn out pretty different from the grand image that you had in your head...

Mum had been craving for chocolate cake for the longest time and I decided there was no better occasion to satisfy that craving! The cake wasn't much hassle I think - just try to load as much chocolate as possible onto a chocolate sponge cake! Thankfully, everything went well with the cake and it was left in the fridge to set while I agonized over the decoration.

I had an idea in mind to use macarons as part of the decor but as with macarons, you don't really know what you'll get - at least for me! To prep myself beforehand, I had attended a lesson in macaron making and I was a little more confident but it still was a nerve wracking couple of minutes as I stood in  my kitchen folding the egg whites into the almond mixture.

The macarons turned out well in the class and thankfully didn't let me down at home either!

The next step was getting all the decorations together and placing them on the cake..which doesn't sound that difficult but for me, after I had everything on, I realised I had focused so much on the macarons that I had completely forgot about the other areas of the cake which now looked pretty bare. Sigh.

Luckily mum came to the rescue and took a look around in the fridge before coming back out with multi-coloured chocolate pearls which made the cake alot more attractive in the end! I didn't want to involve her in the process but oh well!

Présentation de Crème Brûlée

Next up is.....not a cake. Rather, it's something that I thought was quite impossible to make at home due to the involvement of a torch. The nearest I've been to one was the Bunsen burner back in the chemistry labs in secondary school and I wasn't too keen on using one at home!

But as with anything else, I succumbed to curiosity and began researching for a Crème Brûlée recipe and most importantly, got the torch as well. It wasn't that difficult to get one but there were actually quite a surprising few varieties to choose from...

Once the recipe was chosen and the hardware in order, it was all about getting it done!

Unfortunately, other than having seen this decadent dessert on TV and being served to others in restaurants, I've never had one myself! So in the end, I didn't exactly have a benchmark to base my recreation of this French wonder.

I turned to the Internet once again to see what others would describe its taste, and I got words like creamy, silky, melt-in-your-mouth...along with specific notes (no surprises since it is a FRENCH creation!) on how exactly crisp the caramel on top should be.

Well, in the end I thought it wasn't the best Creme Brulee made by Man, but I wouldn't say it was too bad either. The custard was firm yet a little wobbly, it was smooth and silky yet rich and creamy, and the sugar shell wasn't unappetisingly burnt or too hard. And I had fun with the torch as well. So what can I say...it was a good day!

On A Bed of A Thousand Roses!

I'm not one to follow trends of any sort but a couple of months back, a trend began to emerge in the baking community here in Singapore that I simply could not ignore. It was and still is probably the prettiest cake I've ever laid eyes upon.

Introducing the Hairy Baker's Lana Cake! Or as I'd like to call it - the Thousand Roses Cake!

It wasn't a particularly difficult decoration to do, but it certainly lends an air of classiness and elegance to any cake that's adorned with these buttercream roses. When pictures of this decoration began emerging from all corners of the world and even here, I knew I just had to try it out for myself!

The first try was a little messy but with a couple of minutes of practice on an overturned baking tin, I got the hang of it and soon the cake was all done! 

I was even lucky enough for receiving an order from my colleague for this cake in Tiffany Blue for a birthday! 

Having nailed the pattern, the challenge with this order was getting the colour right...and I was at my wits end to replicate the famous jeweler's iconic colour with tries after unsatisfactory tries. Since the buttercream had a slight yellow tint to it, adding any form of green colouring turned the whole thing a dull purplish yellow colour which was no good at all.

Finally, after many experiments with combinations of colourings, I began edging closer to the Tiffany shade of blue. In the end, I felt the colour could have been a lot better but thankfully my colleague was happy with it...phew!

I had some stale cake left over and Mum suggested I use it to practice some new piping patterns since it was going to the bin anyway. Tried my hand at the basket weave pattern and I have to say...it was quite complex, requiring more concentration than the other designs I've tried so far.

Wasn't perfect but the flower Mum dug out of her cupboard gave the whole thing a more complete look I think!

Dainty Little Beauties!

Ah macarons. Where do I begin now?

Google "Macaron Recipes" and in no time you'll be begging for someone to throw you a lifeline and drag you out of the recipe tsunami. Not only are there possibly hundreds of recipes, there are also possibly tens of variations of each step involved and even variations in the pre-processing of the ingredients!

I foolishly decided that the best way forward would be to pick one recipe at random and just roll with it. I ended up with little maca-frisbees instead of dainty, well risen macarons and had to consign the whole batch to the bin. Hard lesson indeed.

Nevertheless, I decided that I had to make these or at the very least, turn out something that remotely resembled macarons. So began the long research and cross referencing between popular recipes, ditching some and picking others.

Shells aside, the filling had to be sorted out as well and a reliable buttercream recipe had to be found. It looked like my work was really cut out for me.

Thankfully I managed to stumble upon a buttercream that wasn't too cloyingly sweet and bitty with sugar crystals. Now for the shells. After reading through seemingly endless pages upon pages of tips and tricks, the gist seemed not to over mix the beaten egg whites and to sift in the ground almonds.

Armed with that, I set about making the macarons, determined to get at least one decent looking one that I could reward myself with for all the time spent on the research. The importance of using a hand mixer instead of a stand mixer cannot be over-emphasized enough! Using the much less powerful hand mixer gave me so much more control over the whisking process and I was able to stop before ending up with hard, foamy and chunky whites.

The batter still looked good after mixing the almond meal and sugar in with the colouring - not too runny and definitely pipe-able. Wasn't long before I had baking trays with little beads of glistening macaron batter neatly arranged in rows...very near the end now..don't screw up!

After resting the dainty little babies for about half-an-hour, in they went into the oven in a double tray to get that elusive "feet" everyone swoons about. After about 10 minutes of frantic finger crossing and pacing back and forth, they were done!

Oh what joy it is to find the feet on these lovely, fragile and temperamental beauties! Not the most perfect bunch of macs by a mile but compared to my maca-frisbees, these are a definite upgrade!