Sixtieth Birthday Party

My pops turned 60 earlier this month. We threw him a big surprise party. And even with all the cooking and preparation we did, he (shockingly) was surprised! We really went all out too; it's quite something that we still managed to surprise him.

Gingerbread House

I always have high hopes for making an elaborate gingerbread house from scratch. I never actually do it. So this year I used a kit from Williams-Sonoma. It's a really good kit. Yes, the pieces are a bit clunkier than homemade pieces, but it's so much easier to unwrap them than it is to bake them. The pieces are printed with door and window outlines as well as the loop-y pattern on the roof. While I don't like that because it cramps my creativity, it also does keep me from going crazy with it and messing it up (or having that blank page freeze like when you start writing a paper) so that's probably for the best.

Gluten-Free Battenberg Cake

I mentioned this a while ago. I told my cousin that, as her birthday present, I'd make her a birthday cake (it's so difficult to find good gluten free cakes that are fit for a birthday). Any cake you want, I said. She asked for the one type of cake I'd never even heard of: a Battenberg cake. Apparently it's a very common feature at afternoon tea. After some research I discovered that it's a less almond-y, checkerboard version of an Italian (or rather Italian-American) tricolor cake. They are traditionally pink and white, filled with a thin layer of apricot jam, and covered with untinted marzipan that is scored in a diamond pattern.

Orange Pound Cake Bites

I'm still without a kitchen so I'm going to take the opportunity to talk about some of the desserts I never posted. In this case, I made it before I blogged. It was for my cousin's wedding shower. It had a purple theme and I was asked to make purple desserts--the cake was supplied by another family member.

I made purple spritz cookies, which I believe I previously posted, and this. This is orange pound cake (really delicious orange pound cake, if I remember correctly.) It's topped with little purple (they were more purple in person, I swear) royal icing flowers. The bowl is filled with a purple-ish, mixed berry dipping sauce. It was very nice! (Is it terrible to say that it was better than the official cake?)

Circus Cakes

I clearly have a mental block about posting these, seeing as I made them just about 2 years ago. They were for a Diabetes UK fundraiser. Yes, I know, cake for an event about diabetes... The event was for children with Type I diabetes and their families. And what kid, diabetic or not, doesn't want cake?

The challenge was twofold. First, I had to make at least some of the cake gluten free since type I diabetics are more likely to be ceoliac than the rest of the population (also the carbs in flour aren't great for the blood sugar.) Second, the cake had to be circus themed.

Christmas Cake

Whoops, as with the Christmas candy, I completely forgot to post the rest of the photos of the Christmas cake I made last year. I made the same chocolate and orange cake I'd done the year before (since it was a hit) and kept the marzipan decorations because the family loves marzipan. I wanted to do something different for the decorations. After much Pinterest searching, I decided to use quilled snowflakes as decoration.

Pink Ombre Bunny Birthday Cake

Every year for my birthday my mom makes me a boxed cake mix bunny cake. (She can make great cakes from scratch, don't get me wrong, but I like boxed cake one day a year.) The deal is--or at least has been since I was 8ish--that she makes the bunny cake and I decorate it. When I was younger I made tie dye one and pink ones and really whatever I wanted. The last bunch of years though, I've been on a "I should make this resemble a bunny" kick. This culminated in last year's coconut bunny cake. I didn't think I could top the bunny-ness of that one, so this year I decided to go for something a bit less bunny and a bit more fun: pink ombré.

Wedding Reception Tea

Remember that wedding cake tasting we did? This afternoon tea was for that couple. Instead of the one cake, we catered an afternoon tea wedding reception for 30 people. For this afternoon tea, we served tea sandwiches and assorted desserts.

Football Cookies (and some simple things to do with royal icing)

In honor of the Super Bowl, I whipped up some football cookies. They are made from chocolate sablée dough. Pâte sablée dough is a French sugar cookie dough that makes wonderfully tender cut out cookies as the high fat and sugar content inhibits gluten development even when you roll and reroll the dough. To chocolate the dough up I added some cocoa powder and a drop of brown gel food coloring.

Dark Chocolate Raspberry Truffles

These are one of Christmas chocolates I made this year (technically last year, but you know what I mean). On a related note, while these were Christmas chocolates, they could very easily be Valentine's Day chocolates; between the flavor and the red sugar on top they'd be perfect. The dark chocolate raspberry ganache recipe is from one of the Baked cookbooks. It's raspberry purée (made from frozen raspberries), honey, heavy cream, and good quality dark chocolate.

Christmas Day

I love Christmas in London! The city is beautiful, everyone seems to celebrate (even Jews like me!), and I have a delicious lunch with my family in Clapham. Jeff is an excellent cook and he made turkey, veg, roasted potatoes, bread sauce, and chestnut stuffing. Yum!

Chocolate Peppermint Cookies

I had left over cookie dough from the chocolate wafer cookie crust I made for my Mississippi mud pie, so I sliced it to bake off. But plain, crisp, chocolate cookies, while very nice, don't thrill me on their own. So I asked myself, "self, what could kick these up a notch?" (I love Emeril!) Since it's the holiday season I figured peppermint would do the trick. I happen to have a jar peppermint "snow" (basically crushed candy canes but with out and of the resulting powder or giant chunks), which I mixed with some plain and some red sanding sugars, to make a topping for the cookies. I make the mixture since the peppermint snow would melt a bit during the cooking process but the sanding sugars would stay nice and sparkly.

TARDIS Cake and Jammie Dodgers

Hi everyone. I'm Mercedes and I'm a nerd. I love Doctor Who (as you may have noticed when I dressed my yorkie up as the Doctor for Halloween). As you can imagine, I was very excited about the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who that aired last weekend. In celebration of the landmark episode I made my dog dress up again--she was not happy--and I baked quite a bit.

My Favorite Holiday

I love Halloween! It's my favorite holiday. You get to dress up in silly costumes and eat sweets without feeling stupid or guilty (respectively). Because Halloween fell mid-week, I got to celebrate it twice! Once with my friend Katy and her flatmates--it was a Halloween party crossed with a birthday party for Katy's flatmate Lucy. The invitation said come in fancy dress (that's British for come in costume) or come dressed as Lucy. So I decided to try out a costume I've been wanted to do for a few years: Lucille Ball. I found a close to perfect Lucy dress at a charity shop near me. The pearls and pumps were mine already. The real effort was getting my wavy red hair curly and pinned up (I think I used over 30 bobby pins!) The party was good fun even if I don't think any of the Brits there knew "I Love Lucy."

Plated Dessert for the Jewish Holidays

I made this dessert (honey milk chocolate semifreddo on apple almond cake with caramel apple sauce, milk chocolate almond bark, marzipan and nougatine) for the Yom Kippur break-fast meal this year. Yom Kippur was in mid-September, but I guess with all the excitement of starting school, I forgot to post this.

The beautiful thing about this dessert is it could be for almost any Jewish holiday! I had been away from home for Rosh Hashanna so I decided to use the traditional flavors from that holiday--apple and honey--as inspiration for my dessert. Since some of my cousins can't eat gluten- the whole dessert is gluten free and is therefore suitable for Passover (obviously if you keep Kosher there are other considerations besides leavened goods and flour, but in my household that's pretty much the extent of Passover.)

Scribble Roses

A few months ago I saw a good guide on Arty McGoo's blog on how to paint scribble roses onto royal icing coated cookies. I decided I had to try it and did so with pen and paper (well actually with a finger on a drawing app on my iPad).

Anniversary Cake, con't

Various views of the finished product

Okay I lied before, I'm not just leaving you with one photo! Here's another montage:

The cake at various stages of not-done-ness

Anniversary Cake

As I mentioned, my mom and I volunteered to make my a cake for our cousin's 40th anniversary. We decided on an impressive, 4-tiered confection. You can see the baking process, as well as a generalized timeline for making a large scale cake here. In addition to that guide for making a wedding cake, I'd like to share some thoughts specific to making this cake:

The cake that inspired me

Sugar Dahlias

A finished dahlia.

Sugar paste dahlias, as it turns out are made with daisy cutters of varying size. They aren't terribly hard, but then again they are quite tedious. You have to work quickly but still carefully and relatively precisely when you are frilling the petals. You have to brush each layer with petal dust before you put them together and then touch up the whole thing at the end (unlike roses which are typically dusted at the end only). But they aren't as difficult as roses, since the petals are all attached to each other and you just have to put on layers of them.

In the process of making the outer petal layers.
Notice the parchment between the petals to hold them
in position as they dry.

How to Make a Wedding Cake

As I mentioned, I'm making a wedding-style cake for my cousin's anniversary party. Making a large, tiered, fondant-enrobed cake takes time and planning; the key to a successful large-scale project is making a schedule. At culinary school, we had to make schedules that accounted for every minute of class time. At home I don't get so granular, but I still need a general, but still relatively comprehensive schedule.  I personally prefer to devote large chunks of time to working on the cake with days off when needed, rather than working on it for small amounts every day. I also like using buttercream when it's freshly made (when I can, at least). Given those preferences, here's the schedule I worked out:

My final sketch