PhD Proposal Cake

Pardon my pink roses, I have lot of them kicking around after that huge black and white wedding cake that I made for my last competition... 

Anyway, today I gave my PhD proposal presentation.  For those of you unfamiliar, this is where you present your current results and research plan to your PhD committee, and they get to have some input as to what you will do for your dissertation.  Any time you present (your masters thesis, proposal, dissertation), it is customary to have food for your audience and your committee.  Naturally, I wanted to bring a cake.

I decided to try the pumpkin cake with burnt orange silk meringue cream from Rose's Heavenly Cakes.  Rose also wrote The Cake Bible, both of which are very popular recipe sources.  Her recipes are known for being delicious if sometimes a little complicated, requiring many steps and some hard to find ingredients.  I followed her pumpkin cake recipe exactly; fortunately I managed to find Walnut Oil at a local organic food store.

Rose's Pumpkin Cake

Instead of following Rose's recipe for the burnt orange silk meringue buttercream, I made my own version.  Her recipe requires 3 distinct steps and seemed like a lot of work.  So I made a more basic italian meringue base, then added heavy cream, orange concentrate, orange zest, and grand marnier.  This icing turned out awesome.  The down side-- it didn't crust.  It would be hard to work with as a decorator.

After icing the cake smooth, I topped it with some of my left over gum past flowers for a quick touch of class. :) 

Rose describes this cake as 'the best non-chocolate cake'.  Many people seemed to agree with this; the cake was delicious and I really loved the buttercream.  Still, for me, there's something about chocolate cake; nothing else seems to quite measure up.

My proposal went very well-- as well as I could have hoped for.  And most of the cake got eaten.  :)

As a reward, I am spending the weekend in another gum paste class with Nic Lodge.  I'll have some new holiday flowers and foliage to show you on Sunday!

Have a great weekend.

Simple Draped Cake

I've decided to enter a cake competition at the end of June-- that's the good news.  The bad news is, I have a lot of commitments in the days leading up to it, and this competition (unlike most others) requires the use of only real cake-- no dummies allowed!  So I'll let you in on a little secret-- I'm going to have to make my cakes the weekend before and freeze them.

So I froze 2 6" layers of my famous Chocolate Blackout Cake last week, took it out of the freezer on Friday, and did the stacking and decorating last night.  Then I tasted it-- since taste is one of the criteria in the show!

Now, I'm also on a quest for a perfectly clean looking cake-- neat corners and no bulges from the filling.  Ever seen a cake where you can tell where the layers end and the filling begins??  Yucky weird looking right?? Okay, maybe you don't care, but I want my real cake to look as good as the dummies (And taste a lot better). ;)

Here's last night's cake:

I kept the design really simple for multiple reasons-- it was late, it wasn't for anything special, and the point was to get clean lines-- no point in covering them up!  But you can see, it's got a nice corner, and no bulges!

How'd I do it?  A magician doesn't reveal her secrets-- but I was never much good at magic so I'll reveal mine.

Another objective in making this cake was to try an Italian Meringue Buttercream-- basically, you beat some egg whites, pour in a boiling sugar mixture, and then beat in tons of butter till it's creamy.  It's a little harder to work with than classic butter/shortening-based buttercream, but the taste is really creamy and slightly less sweet.

So here's the big secret:

You're looking at the bottom of the cake here-- I iced it upside-down.  Crazy talk, I know. ;)

You can find the details of the technique on Cake Central: http://cakecentral.com/articles/69/upside-down-icing-technique-for-perfectly-smooth-icing

Basically, you ice a circle slightly larger than your cake on a piece of parchment taped to cardboard-- make sure it's perfectly smooth!  I found out mine had ridges...  Anyway,  you refrigerate it and then stack and fill your cakes in reverse order (upside down), and apply your icing to the sides.  Then, you take an icing scraper or a paint scraper, run it under hot water, dry it, and drag it around your cake as you turn your turntable, going through the icing circle you created, all the way down to the parchment.  This makes a clean corner.  Then, you smooth the bottom (or top in the picture) by tucking in any rough edges.  Refrigerate, and flip onto your iced cake round:

 Refrigerate for 10 minutes again, then gently remove your parchment:

Nice corner, right?  The icing has some air bubbles, but I think with a more stable buttercream (and a smoother cardboard- you can see the ridges on the side from running my scraper over them as I smoothed), you could get pretty close to perfect.  Then, I decided to cover in fondant:

Pretty clean looking... :)  Always room for improvement, but I think this is the cleanest looking cake I've seen in a long time-- at least in person.

I wanted to try a draping technique that I might use in my show cake, so I figured this was a good opportunity.  It was a bit of a struggle because I wanted a pretty long drape, but I learned some valuable lessons and I think it will be easier when I try again.

Here it is after steaming.  To keep things quick and easy, I added a modeling chocolate rose that I had around, just to give it a focal point:

Done!  Then, I just 'had to' taste it:

Is it possible for a cake to taste even better after being frozen for a week?  Cause I'm a believer.  Was even moister (I think) than the cake from the same batch that was eaten fresh... Phew!  At least I know I have a recipe that will taste great for the competition.

To freeze my cake, immediately after cooling, I double wrapped each layer with seran wrap, followed by aluminum foil.  Then I put each cake in its own freezer bag.  To defrost, I just left the cakes in their packaging and set them on the counter. 

Happy caking!

  nom.. nom.. nom... ;)