A little on the wild side

I'm home sick today and thought I'd catch up a little on blogging. :) Today's subject: Diaper Cakes. I made the above diaper cake for my sister-in-law's baby shower. It had a jungle theme, so the white tiger was appropriate as the topper and I chose the ribbons to go along with him.

I thought I'd do this tutorial-like so I took lots of pics as I assembled it. Here's what you need:

1 base (I used a cake cardboard circle the same diameter as the cake covered in blue wrapping paper)
1 pole-like item to use as the center (I used an aerosol air freshener)
approx 60 size 1 diapers (newborn diapers usually are outgrown before the entire package is used)
at least 63 rubber bands in varying sizes
Gift wrap tissue paper or burp cloths (which I didn't use)
Toppers and other decorations (baby themed)
Ribbons

I first started by rolling up all of the diapers with the crease on the outside. (That's my dad's hands.) I secured each one with a small rubber band.

Next, I prepared the base and center and positioned one layer of diapers around the air freshener, securing the layer with a medium sized rubber band.

This is where the tissue paper comes in. You could wrap each diaper in tissue paper, giving the entire cake the appearance of being white, but since green was used so much in the jungle theme, I decided the leave the diapers as they were. I added two more layers of diapers to the bottom tier of the cake and secured each with a large rubber band.

Then I wrapped a wide ribbon around the bottom tier - covering the rubber bands - and taped the ends together. Then I tied a medium width ribbon around that and tied a tight knot

leaving tails so I would be able to tie a bow to them later.

The repeated these steps for the second tier of the cake, only using two layers instead of three.

Then I made two bows and tied them with the tails.

Finally, I used the remaining medium width ribbon to tie a bow around the tiger's neck and I set him on top of the cake. Success!

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?)

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.

Peanut butter and chocolate in a cup!

Have I mentioned how much I love any combination of chocolate and peanut butter? The Peanut Butter smoothie at Jamba Juice is always what I purchase. I will eat all of the Peanut Butter Cups out my sister's Halloween candy before she notices my hand is in the bucket.

And I make peanut butter cookies with a Hershey's Kiss on top frequently.



You can't tell from this picture (I must remember to take the picture from another angle!), but these cookies are actually in the shape of a cup. Because I bake them in mini cupcake pans. I like to bake them this way for a few reasons: 1) there's a uniformity to the cookies; 2) I know exactly how much to make each ball of dough; and, 3) I know exactly how many cookies I will get out of this process (the following recipe yields 48 cookies made in the mini cupcake pans).

Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1-1/4 flour
honey, if dough proves to be too dry

48 chocolate kisses (or mini peanut butter cups)

Preheat the oven to 325*F. Cream together the butters, sugars, vanilla and egg. Add in the salt, soda and flour. The dough should naturally clump together away from the walls of the mixing bowl. If it doesn't, then add more flour. If the dough is crumbly, add some honey.

Coat the bottom each cupcake slot with non-stick spray. Roll a pinch of dough into a ball slightly bigger than a quarter and place in cupcake slot. Bake one tray at a time, at 325*F for nine minutes (or ten minutes if you add honey). Take pan out of oven immediately, place pan on cooling rack, and nestle a chocolate kiss in each cookie.

Remove the cookie when cooled completely.

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.

Tier cake

Here's a recent cake I made that I'm particularly proud of:



This is my first true tier cake which I made for my now-former co-worker Lisa's last day. The bottom tier is 8" inches across, the middle is 6" and the top is 4".