Brimming with Roses Birthday Cake

I have been behind on my blogging recently, due to a job change. So this blog is a little late, as I originally made this cake a few weeks ago for my mother-in-law's birthday. But better late than never!! So my husband has mentioned in the past that his mom never baked that much when he was growing up. The only cake her could ever remember her making, was carrot cake from scratch. So for her birthday, we decided I would search for the best home made carrot cake recipe I could find. So I hit the Internet and I probably read about twenty different recipes before I found what I now know to be the best carrot cake recipe ever! I mean it's been about two weeks since I had a slice of this cake, and I can still recall the wonderfully warm taste of cinnamon, nutmeg and black walnuts combining with the tangy, rich cream cheese frosting. Now that I had my cake recipe pinned down, I wanted to come up with a good design for decoration, so I could show off my new decorating skills to the family. So I flipped through a Wilton Cake Decorating book that I had. I didn't really have to flip too far, as the cake I was inspired by was on the cover of the book. Below are the pictures I took as I assembled and decorated the cake, I hope you enjoy!

Here is the cake, the cream cheese icing and the walnuts used for decoration. The recipe I used made enough batter for a 3 layer cake using 8" round pans.

Hmmm, this looks good!

All three layers stacked high!

I put on a pretty thick crumb coat, as I knew that you wouldn't really see much of the icing once the cake was decorated. After crumb coating, I pressed a mixture of regular walnuts and black walnuts to cover the sides of the cake.

See, TaDa!

And here are my beauties. The stars of the show. My royal icing roses.

Since I work full time, and I knew I had to bake my cake on a Friday night, and assemble and decorate on Saturday morning, I spent Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night making my roses. I worked with one color of icing each night. I just sat in my living room and made roses while I half-watched TV. It was actually quite relaxing.

Once I positioned each of my roses on top of the cake, I piped green royal icing leaves to fill in any gaps.

And here she is, all ready to go and celebrate!

And as I mentioned before, it was DELICIOUS!

Here is a nice shot of the whole cake.

And one more shot from above.

This cake was a lot of work, but totally worth it. It came out beautiful and it really was a (big) slice of heaven, right here on earth!

Happy Valentines Day Cookies

Happy Valentines Day! Love is in the air, well actually, that's the sweet smell of sugar cookies baking in the air. Louise at Cake Journal totally inspired me to jump into cookie decorating. Her cookies are absolutely gorgeous! You can some of her wonderful work here. I have been pretty busy lately with cakes and cupcakes, and I thought my honey would appreciate something different for his Valentine's treat. Now I have made and decorated my fair share of Christmas cookies, so I wasn't totally in the dark here. But some techniques, like flooding the cookies with royal icing, were completely new to me. This was also my first time making cookie lollies, which was pretty easy and a lot of fun. Enjoy the pictures and have a wonderful Valentines day!

I made my cookie dough in the stand mixer, divided it in half, and wrapped each half in plastic wrap, and put them into the refrigerator for half an hour. The cookies roll out and cut so much better when chilled. A chilled cookie also keeps it shape better when baking, instead of spreading out. I rolled out my dough about 1/4" thich on lightly floured parchment paper, and then cut out my cookies. I made heart shaped cookie lollies with one half of my dough. The other half I made regular heart shaped cookies, and some fancy scrolled shape cookies.

Here some heart shaped cookies go into the oven. I highly reccomend baking them on parchment paper! Not only do the cookies not stick to the pan, but it makes cleaning up so much easier!

Here are my fancy scroll shape cookies, waiting patiently to go into the oven.

This is one of my heart shaped cookie lollies, post baking. Making the cookie lollie was pretty simple. I followed the excellent tutorial posted on Cake Journal.

After baking all of my cookies, I let them all cool for about four hours. And then it was time to decorate! I made royal icing and divided it into three parts. I tinted one part pastel pink, one part mint green and left one part white. When decorating, I outlined some cookies and then flooded with icing. Some I just outlined and decorated with dragee's and sprinkles. And since I had some edible pearl dust in my decorating supply box, I did a little experimenting. I mixed a little pearl dust and some vanilla extract in a small painters pallete, and painted a cookie that had already been flooded with icing and dried. It's pretty important that the icing is dry, or this will not work.

fancy scroll work cookies...

more fancy scroll work cookies...

heart shaped cookies...

heart shaped cookie lollies...

more heart shaped cookie lollies...

you get the idea...

Happy Vanetines!!!

Back in time.... Wilton Cake Decorating Classes

Last October I started Wilton's Cake Decorating Course One and continued straight through November with Course 2. Needless to say, that was a lot of butter cream! I started the first course with some basic cake decorating knowledge and by the time I finished course 2 I felt like a pro :) Well, maybe not good enough to compete on the Food Network Challenge, but I was feeling pretty confident. I thought I would post some pictures here of my Course 1 and 2 cakes and re-cap the experience.

Cake One - Over the Rainbow

This is a french vanilla cake, filled with raspberry fruit filling, and decorated with vanilla butter cream! In this class (this was the second night of class) we learned the secret technique of the pros to make your butter cream frosting smooth all over the cake. We then learned how to do a pattern transfer, using piping gel, and then fill in the pattern with the star tip.

Cake Two - Scary Birthday Clowns

This is a red velvet cake, filled with home made cream cheese filling, and decorated with butter cream. In this class we learned more star tip tricks. We made star tip borders around the top and bottom of our cake, and we learned how to make the scary clowns. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the clowns. We also learned how to make star flowers and drop flowers, not pictured on the cake though. I added the multi color dots on the side of the cake after I got home from class to jazz it up a bit.

Cake Three - The Big Finale, The Wilton Rose

This is a chocolate cake, filled and decorated (except the roses and leaves) with chocolate butter cream. So when I first signed up for cake decorating class, I knew the one thing I had to come away with was how to make a rose. It's not rocket science, but it's also not something that most people you meet can do! So I practiced, and practiced, and then practiced some more. I'm not kidding, my husband wanted nothing to do with the site of frosting by the time I was satisfied with my roses :) Well, it may not be identical to the roses in the book, but I was pretty darn proud of my little Wilton Flowers. Oh, and this was definitely my favorite cake from the entire course!

Cake Four - Course 2 Finale, Basket of Rock Hard Flowers

This is a devils food chocolate cake, filled with cherry fruit filling, and decorated with butter cream and royal icing flowers. This cake is the only cake produced in course 2. Course two is ALL ABOUT FLOWERS! I am not even sure I can name all of the flowers on this cake, but I'll try. Here we go : Rose, Primrose, Daisey, Mum, Pansy, Violet, Apple blossom and Daffodil. Wow, I think I did it. So, the first three nights of class we learned how to make all of these flowers using royal icing. Then on the final night of class we learned the basket weave technique. By the end of the night we had an entire basket of flowers. This cake was hard work, but I loved the way it turned out!