Pots and Pans

This is a continuation of the Ratatouille posts, because as nice as all the little fondant figurines are, they're not actual cakes. And as much as I love snacking on some fondant scraps*, fondant will never be as delicious as cake is, because cake is just amazinggggggg <3
Obviously, Remy and the veggies were made to accessorize the cake, so here is the cake (or at least one of them) that goes with Remy and his entourage.

Every piece of art begins very humbly, and so does a cake. And here is the making of Ratatouille!!!!

*Ahem* drum roll please?

*Drum roll*

What? Isn't this good enough for you???

Sigh....

This is only step one guys.
This beauty (or not so much, he's a little plain still) has this delicious chocolate cream inside called brigadeiro. It's a Brasilian sweet made out of condensed milk and chocolate powder. It's delicious <3
There are two cakes, one stacked on top of the other with the brigadeiro in the middle. Then there's a smooth layer (sorta) of buttercream covering the cake. It's only a crumb layer so it doesn't have to be perfect.

After letting the cake rest for a while, allowing the icing to become a little more stable, I covered it with brown fondant. Now here's the thing about dark colors: they SUCK! It takes forever to make a dark shade of fondant. It requires a LOT of coloring, which usually paints your hands as well as the fondant. So making dark colors is never fun. Brown, red, dark green, purple, etc. They're all in that category. Black is too, but I cheat when it comes to black. I bought a tub of Duff's black fondant so I wouldn't have to spend 30 minutes and two little tubs of coloring every time I needed black (which surprisingly enough, is often). So I don't have to color the black =)
But the black isn't what's important right now, brown is. The same brown that was used to cover the cake, was also used to create the top of the pan. The brown got rolled into a long snake, then wrapped around the top of the cake, like this:

I know that this doesn't look very pan-like, but it will very soon. Because this isn't just an empty pan, it's a pan with food inside! So I put some yummy food** in there (:

All I did was throw some buttercream on top and gently smoothed it out*** with my spatula. Spongebob was right, spatulas really are magic!

Doesn't it look purty? (:
But unfortunately, no one wants to eat plain, white, creamy soup. So let's spice things up a bit. First ingredient....

Peas! Remember these guys? They finally made their way onto a cake (:
But as awesome as peas are,**** this stew is still looking a little bland to me... So let's chop up one of those big carrots we made in the beginning and toss them in there too.

There. That looks MUCH better (:
But it's still missing something... The stew looks edible, but our pan is still kinda iffy. It needs a handle.

And as much as I've been calling it a pan, it's really more of a pot. So the handles were short and stubby, like pot handles.

These were fairly simple. All I had to do was wrap the brown fondant around these plastic tubes, then tie them up in a way that they would make the shape I wanted. After drying overnight, I slipped them off the tubes and stuck them into the cake. But because of the way they were put in, instead of using gumpaste glue, I used icing to make them stick.

This is what the pot of stew looked like at the end (can you see the pieces of the board? Take it as a sneek peek into the next post ;D)

We are now one step closer to finishing the Ratatouille posts!
Next is the second cake that went with the set, then how I tied up the ensemble for the party. So stick around if you want to find out how it turned out!




*Only when there's no one looking cause it makes my mommy mad (;
**And by food, I mean buttercream
***Slightly, I left some ruffles to make it look natural
****Come on, have you seen Veggie Tales? The French Peas are the bomb! And of course, we are NOT, under any circumstances, allowed to eat cartoon characters. So no peas for dinner, ever again. Mwahaha. Take that mom (;

Ratatouille Cake... The Chef: Remy - Part 2

Remember Remy? It's been a while. Remy had a little 'fall out' with his arm, and well... It just took a while to um... remedy the situation. But now that everything's all fixed again, Remy is back and ready for action! (Just don't touch his arm... please?)

Day Two? Eh, not so much. Let's stick to Part Two.
Well, what's a rat without his hands, feet, and tail? Or a chef without his hat (We've gone over this remember? A magician needs a sorcerer's hat and a chef needs a chef's hat) and apron and dish towel? So that's what we worked on during Part 2.

First off, let's see how well Remy did without all that extra back (and head and arm) support.

Yes, I am aware that this is Remy sort of already ready, but I forgot to take a picture before I started. Usually I just take pictures of the final product, so this is all new to me. Please bear with me, I promise I'll get better at this (:

Anyways, Remy is holding up great! He can even hold his wooden spoon!

Hehe. That was written before the 'fall out'. Point is, he could hold the spoon before losing his arm.

Remember how I said that the nose and eyes were hard to make? Yea, well the hands beat those BY FAR! Once again, two pink round cuts of pink fondant*, but this time a little thicker. About a third of an inch high. Then I rolled the round cut into an oval, and came along with my handy, dandy, small, but sharp knife and cut out fingers for this sucker. Then I rounded them into finger shapes using my hands. The thumb wasn't anything special, I just made it shorter**. Sounds simple? Yea. Done easily? NOPE. These hands took forever to make. I tried and retried a good 20 times. Pesky hands... 

Well, to add insult on injury, as I was putting the hands on, one of Remy's arms decided to fall off (uncooperative much?). I fixed this pretty quickly with a small toothpick*** and left him drying a little longer. While Remy was drying his hands, I worked on his feet, which weren't quite as much work as the hands, but still not the easiest part of this cake (I still can't believe I thought the nose and eyes were difficult... Those were kindergarten material compared to hands and feet...).

That was his right arm... The fall out occurred with the left. So neither of Remy's arms were very nice to me... =/

These were made using the same method as the hands, except thinner and the feet have less fingers (...toes) than the hands. I left them drying on that little wavy drying fondant rack while I worked on other stuff so they would have a nice arch.

And of course, it's not a rat if it doesn't have a tail!

The tail is fairly simple to make. Just get a log of pink fondant and roll it in your hands until it looks like a tail and then cut it to the size you want it to be. And of course, make the tip thinner than the part that connects to the rat.

And these little suckers are whiskers! Same technique as the tail, except smaller and in white. Once they dry, they'll be going on Remy's snout.

And these little guys are...

You guessed it! Teeth! It's kind of hard to see, but it's essentially just a small white fondant square with a line cut down the middle.

Now that we have most of the essentials for Remy, let's have a review really quick, Every chef needs a...

...chef's hat! So of course, Remy needs a Remy-sized chef's hat! 

This hat was made in the same fashion as the ones made for the cupcakes, only longer. Remy also has a little collar and towel. The collar is just a very thin strip of white wrapped around his neck, and the towel is a rectangle shaped piece of fondant that got draped over his arm.

The next part, in theory, is fairly simple. All you have to do is glue everything on Remy! Easy right?

Well, you have to be very careful as you do this, or else Remy will fall apart. Poor guy, he's been through enough don't you think? So let's be very careful with him.

First, on go the feet. They were fairly simple to glue on, considering the rest of Remy. All I had to do was measure them in a way that I thought looked good then glued him up. The whiskers, on the other hand, were a pain in the butt. I glued them on, they fell, I glued them on again, and they fell again. After maybe the fifth repetition of this tedious process, I gave up and just stuck the whiskers in his face, creating a small and unnoticeable hole where the whiskers could fit in.

The teeth were pretty difficult as well, but because they're so unnoticeable, I pushed them back a little to make them fit in the hole of his mouth**** 

The hat was very simply glued on, since Remy's head was so nicely flat I didn't have much trouble with it.

Finally, the tail just got glued on veryyy gently. But it kept falling off, so I waited until Remy was completely ready and on the cake before attaching his tail.

And that's Remy in the making!

In the end I just gave him his wooden spoon and put him in between a pot and a slice of cheese.*****

And that's all for this post. Stay tuned to learn all about Remy's pot of stew and his chunk of cheese (;

*With lots of gum paste... catching on yet? (;

** Only Pixar would give a rat thumbs... And Disney of course, we can't forget our favorite mouse, Mickey (:

***Or maybe it was a big toothpick that I cut into small toothpick size

****Which now that I think about it, isn't that where they're supposed to be?

*****I'll teach you how to make those soon (;

Spring Is In The Air

This weekend was prom, and needless to say, it was amazing* (:
We had dinner at a pretty restaurant on the river and I finally got to see my boyfriend in a tux (;

But anyways, enough about my weekend and onto the baking goodies (:

This post is going to be a little different from past posts because it's going to be about cupcakes! I bet you thought that I only did cakes huh? Nope, I do cupcakes too, and cake pops too. I've even done cookies once (But I forgot to take a picture =/ darn it).

Anywhooo, I pulled some cupcakes out of the freezer and got ready to have some fun-sized** cake fun (:

Now my theme is spring, because all the flowers blooming and birds singing outside have gotten me in a spring-y mood. Soooo, spring cupcakes!!!

I had my incredibly reliable best friend, Sana, help me come up with ideas, and bugs won.

...

Yes, bugs.

But they're cute bugs, don't worry. Like bumblebees*** and ladybugs (:

I have 12 cupcakes, so we're going for 6 of each. First, I rolled out a long piece of black and a long piece of yellow and I cut out 6 round circles from each one. This makes sure that the cupcakes will be completely covered with fondant so we can decorate. Oh, and here's a big surprise for you! No gumpaste required (; Gumpaste is just for when you need the fondant to harden quickly.

Now that we have 6 yellow circles and 6 black circles, we can just stick them on the cupcakes.

Now for the ladybugs we're also going to have to make 6 red circles as well. I forgot to take step by step pictures for these guys so bear with me.

The 6 red circles are going to be elytra (which is really just a really fancy term for ladybug wings. I wish I was that smart, but yes, I googled it). So with a pizza cutter (mini version), I came and cut out a little triangle from the red circle, so when it goes on the ladybug it looks like opened elytra and you can see the abdomen of the ladybug. The elytra then get placed on the abdomen. Then I cut out little mini black circles of different sizes to put on top of the elytra (I've decided that I like that word ;D). I also needed a circle (Actually 6) thicker than the ones that go on the elytra to be the face. Then with tiny pieces of white I made cute little smiley faces for my ladybugs (: Their official scientific names are coccinellidae, might as well let you know since I'm googling (;

Aren't my coccinellidae adorable? =D

I agree that the iris-less eyeballs are kinda creepy, but that's why I put even smaller black dots on them. Pictures of that later.

Now, for the Andrena (Hesperandrena) limnanthis.**** Again, I failed at taking step-by-step pictures =/ So i will try my best to paint the picture for you with my words.

I rolled out another slab of black fondant and came with the ribbon cutter to cut the fondant into long strips. But I didn't disconnect the strips yet, instead I went over them with the same round cutter I used for my initial circles. Now I could peel the strips back and fit them perfectly on the yellow circles. Then I made their faces the same way I made the ladybugs' faces. I arranged all these lovely yummy chocolate buggy cupcakes on my cupcake stand and here they are (:

These little pesky critters got eaten up in seconds by the little 1st grade pesks... er, I mean kids*****, that I teach at Sunday School. It was our very last class together for the school year. I doubt that their parents had fun putting them to bed after all the pizza, ice cream, soda, cake, cupcakes, candy, etc we stuffed in them. Oh well, it's not like I give them cupcakes EVERY week... Oh wait, yes I do... Hmm. At least they only see me once a week =)

*It also contributed to why the posts have been so few and far in between. I was busy prepping nails, hair, etc, then finding restaurants, then sleeping the night off the next day.

**Will someone please explain to me what exactly is fun about less candy or less cake??? It's quite mind-boggling to me and I've searched all over for the answer, and all I can come up with is the fact that it prevents my waist from getting huge.

***They stop being cute once they sting you...

****That's a bumblebee, just in case you didn't already know. But of course you did, cause it's very common knowledge that bees are Andreas. That must why my friend Andrea is always busy... Hmm. Interesting.

*****I'm totally kidding. I love those kids. They're the best class =) First graders are so cute and adorable. Sigh... I miss those days.

Just cause I couldn't help myself from posting another prom picture (:

The Cake Purse... #2

Spring break is over and school is back in session! I've had so much homework the past few days that I've been too bust to finish the posts =o But fear not, I am here and we shall continue baking!!!

And we're back to purses!!! 

Sorry boys, I know things have been a little girly, but how about a football cake sometime soon? Sound good to you? (:

Anywho, remember this guy?

He's back and ready for action!

Just as a reminder, we carved a frozen and thawed round yellow cake, and we put it on its side then 'iced' it with ganache. The next step is to cover it with fondant.

Hehe, it looks like the little ghost from Pacman! Maybe that'll be my next cake XD
Anyways, not all of it is so pretty...

But that's the wonderful thing about fondant, mistakes like that are easily fixed with.... more fondant! So later on while decorating, I'll make sure to make a design that covers up that piece of ugly.

My last purse was a zipper purse, so I wanna make this one a little different, so I'm putting a flap on it. I think button purses are cute (:

Here's my flap (: I like to make things more than just one color, so I went with my two favorite colors, purple and blue (: So the purse itself is blue, and the details will be purple.

And like with any cake, we need a border to hide the bottom. I just bought these cute sugar pearls, so I decide to try them out.

I spaced them out a centimeter between each one. I used a ruler so they wouldn't be all over the place and drive me crazy with OCD. That's just a long (LONG) strip of purple fondant, long enough to cover the entire border of the cake. So this part got to be a little tedious...

Meanwhile, I needed a handle for my purse, so I grabbed another strip of fondant, folded it in half, poofy-like, glued it, then came along with the ridged pizza cutter (this time I got a picture of it ;D) and made some seams in it.

I have pretty much everything I'll need to glue on the purse by now, so I need stuff for the board. To decorate my board and make it prettyful, I made these cuties.

Aren't they pretty? I initially wanted them to be hibiscuses, but I couldn't them quite right. But there are soooo many flowers on this planet that I'm sure one day someone will discover these right here. So if it's one of you guys who discovers it, remember me and know that I dreamed of it before it was discovered. So name it after me! (;

And of course, all these beautiful goodies need an equally pretty board. I used a slightly lighter purple to cover the board and a pretty ribbon to cover the sides.

Hey look! It's Remy!!! Let's get a closer look at our little buddy here

Looking good buddy! 

He's still healing after his recent fall out with his arm. We had to brace his arm, but very soon he'll be back and ready for action! Just hang in there Remy, you'll be on a cake soon!

Ahem, now back to our current cake.

Let's start piecing things together. First off, we need to put the purse on the board. Then we can arrange the flowers nicely on the board to make it look nice. Also, our purse is missing a button. But that's quickly remedied with a bit of fondant and a cookie cutter. Ooo, and a pearl!

Isn't it cute?? And Remy is still there in the background watching us work (:

Only thing missing is the handle

Here we go (: Just leave some paper towels there, holding it up. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture without the handle, so this is about as good as the final product I have

Use your imaginations for the handle (;

And that's all for now folks!

Caking with my Best Friend... Sana!

This is Sana.

She's the one on the bike, I'm the one dressed like I'm from the 80s (;

Say hi to Sana folks, cause she's a part of today's post!

So here's a little background for you. Tonight, my boyfriend and his grandfather came over for dinner. His grandpa lives in Minnesota (I live down South). But, he decided to come down to visit Luis and his family. So after 2 years, I still hadn't met his gramps, so tonight was a pretty big deal for me. I was freaking out. I would've sworn that everything was gonna go wrong tonight and I was gonna make a fool of myself. But anywho, I'm working to impress over here. So dinner was a nice lasagna* and for dessert... You guessed it! Cake!

Actually, we had ice cream first and after everyone had had 2 servings of lasagna and a serving of ice cream.... No one had space for cake. Aw boo. Still, they saw it and they thought it was cool (:

Now Sana is my best friend. She's awesome (: And she's been dying to learn how to make cakes from me. Since this week we're on Spring Break, I figured, why not? So she came over yesterday to learn how to decorate a cake. And since I had to make a cake for tonight... Well, you get the idea. The whole two birds with one stone thing? Yea, that's it. Anyways, on to the cakes.

So I didn't wanna look like I was trying too hard (even though I am. Have I mentioned that I was freaking out?) so instead of making and decorating a full sized cake, I decided to make a few of those mini cakes. I used one of Wilton's Mini Tasty-Fill Cake pans to make two chocolate cakes. I filled one up with ganache and the other with strawberry filling.

Here's the pan (: Don't those sample cakes look GORGEOUS? Well... This is what my cakes came out like (after being ganached):

Here's the thing I've learned about ganache (I 'ganached' these and the cake purses on the same day, so it was a first try. Please bear with me), if you don't ice it smoothly on the first time, there is nothing on God's green earth that will smooth it out later. So once I put the fondant on, it still looked pretty ugly

It's all bumpy and stuff... Not pretty. But of course, that's why we decorate the cake. To hide the imperfections and make it look purty. So I'm gonna try to save these little guys, cause goodness do they have some problems.

I'm sure you guys have noticed how the green one is losing its shape. At first I thought it was because of the fillings, so we can't put fondant on it. But when the red one kept its shape I decided that it was the jelly inside the green one that broke out of its little crevice to destroy the shape of my cake.

Notes for future Tasty Fill cakes: Don't use jelly, and try to ice it with icing, to see if the fondant will look better.

Baking is a trial and error game. And so far... these have been an error. I'll make some more later and update you guys on how well it works with the new information. I feel like we learn a lot more from our mistakes than from our failures, but um... I really really wish that the mistakes wouldn't happen before I have to serve a cake to important people. Like customers, or worse... My boyfriend's grandfather =/ I considered just serving one of the cake purses? But again... Trying to hard. Grrr. They were still all on display on the counter for him to see though (;

So let's get started. I let Sana work with the red cake since it's better done than the green one.

Isn't it purty? (:

Well, Sana informed me that yesterday was, in fact, her brother's birthday! So of course, he needs a birthday present, bakery style**! 

Presents come in boxes, and boxes come with bows. So we decided to do a simple bow on top of the cake.

Ta da!

.

This little beauty was made very simply. All we did was roll out a long piece of purple fondant, then come along with the measured roller and cut one inch strips for the bow and half inch strips for the laces. The bow is made by connecting one end of the strip to the other end (This one was 4 inches long) and putting a piece of paper towel inside. But don't glue them together yet, there's more to do in a minute. Then you do the same thing to the other strip. Now, what you can't tell very well from this picture, is that there's another long strip of fondant going from end to end of the cake. It's just aligned with the bow. Very simple. Just one long half inch strip. Then, you have three half inch strips that are two inches long: two for the front ribbons and one to wrap around your two 'bows'.

So back to the bows. To make the bow look realistic, scrunch up the edges then glue them together, then do the same thing to the other one. Now turn them upside down and wrap that third half inch strip around it. Make sure to glue everything. The last two strips get scrunched up as well then stuck under the bow on the cake. And now you have yourself a pretty little package (:

But of course, we had to cover up those nasties around the border of the cake. My favorite technique to do that is the shell border, so I had to teach Sana how to make a line with shells. Here's her practice board:

Sana did a beautiful shell border and I'm very proud of her (:

Look at that awesome shell border! That's an awesome first time right there. Anyways, here's the final product.

Cute (:

While Sana was working on the red cake, I was trying to save this green lump...

Since this is a terrible, ugly, green lump, Sana and I brainstormed for a while, and finally we decided on an apple! Since the ugly lump could probably be mistaken for a green apple. At first we thought about putting a worm*** in there to make it look like the lumpiness is the worm's fault, but we ended up wormless.

So after playing around with the "apple", trying to mold it better, I stuck in a little fondant stem in it (which really was just a piece of brown rolled up)

Looking better already (: But this apple needs a leaf! 

I used a cool cutter shaped like a leaf on a really think block of fondant. Then I curved it a little and left it drying in a little corner.

So while that leaf was drying in the corner I worked on the border. Even though the shell border is my favorite, it doesn't cover enough to hide all the defects on this apple, and shells and apples just don't mix.... So I needed a cool apple-y design for the border. I decided on leaf borders (:

Here are some practice leaves (: I just put them all over the cakes border. At first they were covering the board and I only had the leaves going on the apple where it was messed up, but Sana convinced me to make the leaves go up everywhere. So the apple ended up looking like this 

Awww, look at how much he's grown! I think I might cry a little. You can't even tell that he used to be this 

But as cute as little Mr. Apple looks, we're still missing the final touch. To get that giant leaf to stick I stuck it with a tooth pick then put it on the cake around the stem. Here's the thing about toothpicks though... Once you stick a cake, there's no going back. It stays like that. So beware. Here's our final product, Mr. Apple all grown up!

So now we have an awesome present box for Sana's brother's birthday, and a little apple to serve with my meal (:

Which actually wasn't served, but that's fine. The dinner started really awkward, but my mom just went on and on and on and on talking, so that helped a lot. Overall, I think the night was a success =)

*I'm a purely oven girl. I only know how to make it if it goes in an oven. No stoves for me. If you value your kitchen towels, keep them far away from the stove when I'm around.

**Not that Sana isn't a wonderful sister and hadn't already gotten him a present. Quite the opposite, this was gift upon her previous gifts. Which I do not know/remember what they are XD

***FONDANT worm, not a real one. That would be yucky.