Yet another cake that was made for a boy.

My friend Debbie has a baking blog: The Joy of Baking. You should definitely check it out. I stole one of her ideas for this cake:


Debbie's cake was a plain yellow cake, with chocolate ganache in between layers and on top with a white chocolate drizzle. I did mine with a 8-inch triple chocolate fudge cake, almond-flavored butter cream frosting and a vanilla cookie drizzle over the strawberries.

And it was easy to put together! I made sure I used a lot of frosting in between layers and on the sides. The pirouette wafers stuck easily to the sides. The *only* hard part (besides not eating it before it was time) was finding enough wafers that hadn't cracked in half. (I ended up using 2.5 packages. Can I say that I DO NOT enjoy having to go to Wal-mart multiple times a day?)

More cakes for boys

So, obviously I don't check my million and four email accounts often enough or else I could have linked you all to this blog: www.tiepedia.com/tie-blog, which I was directed to by Matt himself. If I had been checking all my email accounts regularly, I would have linked his post before Father's Day. :(

Anyway, check out tiepedia.com.

I went way out of my comfort zone making this cake for my sister's 17th birthday party. She had a luau/pool party but originally requested a ice cream sandwich cake, which I didn't think was feasible so I persuaded her that she actually wanted a sand castle cake.

I started out a few days ahead of time by baking two 9x13 vanilla cakes to serve as the base (and the vast majority of the cake), which I cooled, leveled and froze until I was ready to build the cake. The morning of the party, I baked another vanilla cake in a castle cake mold. While it cooled, I mixed up my go-to butter cream frosting with pure vanilla flavoring. (I normally use clear flavoring, but since the frosting was going to be covered in graham cracker crumbs, it didn't matter that the flavoring was brown. And if I had been smarter, I would have tinted the frosting tan so white spots didn't show through the graham cracker crust.)

I layered the two frozen cakes and covered it with frosting. The I leveled the castle layer and positioned it on top of the cake.

At this point I wasn't sure how I was going to get the graham cracker crumbs to stick to the sides of the cake so I took a break to mold some fondant shells.

I took a handful of white fondant, worked in rose tint until the fondant was almost uniform. Then I worked in some copper and ivory tint just a tiny bit so that there were streaks. I pressed a bit into a shell mold, trimming the excess, and the brushed each with pink, white, or gold edible pearl dust and set aside to firm up.

Then I mixed graham cracker crumbs (I bought a box of crumbs so there would be one less thing for me to do), quite a bit of cinnamon, even more white sugar, some dark brown sugar (all three to taste), and edible gold glitter (to give the "sand" dimension).

Then I iced the sides of the castle with butter cream frosting thinned with milk and sprinkled the graham cracker mixture on all of the horizontal surfaces. I mixed in a cup of melted butter with the remaining graham cracker mixture and pressed it on the sides of the castle and the cake. It worked okay, but the entire effect would have been better if I tinted the frosting.

Finally, I positioned the shells on and around the cake. These were helpful in hiding the "baldest" spots.

And I got to tell you - I'm not shy about it - this was the best tasting cake I've ever had.

Speaking of cakes for men...

...I made this one for one of the guys at work for his birthday.



I think it's very pretty, but I didn't say so to him. Wouldn't you want this cake if you were a gouty 38 year old man?

As for specifics, this is a Devil's food chocolate cake that I baked in a regular bundt pan. It baked fairly flat so I didn't need to level it. It's covered in a semi-sweet chocolate ganache (my first *ever*) and white cookie drizzle frosting. And left over fondant daisies that I had made two months before for a different cake. (Shh! Don't tell. And you should be eating fondant anyway, it's gross.) The yellow centers are yellow cookie drizzle frosting.

This is how I made the ganache:

I took four squares of baker's cocoa, slightly melted, and mixed with 1/4 cup of heavy cream until unified. Then I added white sugar to taste and poured it over the cake immediately. I kept going in circles around the cake until I used it all up, that's why there's a puddle in the middle.

Cakes for boys.

The cakes I decorate tend to have a lot of flowers on them. Which I love. So I've been having a hard making appropriate cakes for men. Below are ones I made specifically for persons of XY chromosomal type.


This was a six inch yellow cake with vanilla-flavored butter cream frosting I made for my (former) co-worker's teenage son who loves basketball.


This was an eight inch white cake with almond-flavored butter cream frosting. The stripes are made of one-inch wide strips of fondant.

And you can do it, too!

I know I promised a Banoffee post (yum, banoffee) but I'm still experimenting with recipes. In its place, I offer a fast and easy cake decorating post.



I made the above cake for my friend Lisa's birthday last week, with a total decorating time of one hour - which is four hours less than my normal decorating time.

I started off a few days ahead of time by baking a milk chocolate cake with pudding (from a mix) in 2 - 9" circle pans. I let them cool in the pan for 5 minutes and then on a wire rack for an hour. Then I leveled them, loosely wrapped each in plastic wrap, placed in the clean pans and froze until I was a ready to decorate.

When I was ready to decorate, I prepared a cardboard base (a plate is fine, too) and placed one layer on it. Then iced the top of that layer, placed the other layer on top of that, and iced the sides and the top. I used Pillsbury milk chocolate frosting (it was the cheapest kind).

I purchased these to use in the middle because I knew that I would be short on time (and I don't know how to make roses yet). Then I drew curlies around the edges and a rim around the bottom edge with vanilla-flavored ready-to-use cookie icing. I put it in the refrigerator overnight and took it to work in the morning.