Strawberry Lemonade

I imagined that I'd have something else to show you, a beautiful tiered cake, but I ran out of something I needed for it during a failed experiment that shall remain nameless. So, I scrapped the cake idea for now and decided to go with flavors I love together.

These are vanilla cupcakes with lemon mousse filling and strawberry cream cheese frosting.

Oh. my. heck.

Really sweet, but hello, cupcakes? These are perfect for a hot summer day and are reminiscent of the strawberry lemonade my son got from Over Easy recently.

You can use your favorite yellow or white cake recipe with these.

Lemon Mousse

Lemon Curd (courtesy of The Whimsical Bakehouse)

1/2 cup strained fresh lemon juice (about four small lemons w/o a juicer)

1/2 cup sugar

3 ounces unsalted butter

1 tablespoon lemon zest (have fun zesting!*)

4 large eggs

Bring first four ingredients to a boil (whisking pretty regularly)

Beat the eggs well just before mixture boils

Slowly stir the hot mixture into the eggs. Return the mixture to the saucepan and cook over low to medium low heat until the mixture coats the back of a spoon. You will feel it thicken. Be very careful with the heat or the curd will curdle (hahahahahaha!). However, if you are not a perfectionist and you do get a teeny tiny bit of curdling, the next step, straining the mixture into a bowl will take care of it.

Once you have strained the mixture into the bowl, put a piece of plastic wrap directly on top of the curd and chill for at least four hours.

*The zest is the yellow part of the outer rind of the lemon. Do not zest the white part of the rind, you will get bitter lemon curd.

To make the mousse:

Whip up 1 and 1/2 cups of heavy cream with two tablespoons of powdered sugar, you want the whipped cream to have stiff peaks; but be careful, whip too long and you'll have butter.

Fold in 3/4 cup chilled lemon curd and do with as you wish. Spooning it directly from the bowl and into your mouth is a perfectly acceptable use for this light and refreshing mousse.

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Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting

(adapted from The Whimsical Bakehouse and modified almost beyond recognition)

(P.S. Also tastes divine on chocolate cupcakes)

9 oz softened cream cheese

1 stick softened butter

8-10 cups of powdered sugar

10-12 strawberries

1/2 cup strawberry daiquiri mix

Put the strawberries and daiquiri mix in a blender and liquefy. Set aside in a bowl.

Cream the cheese and butter.

Add the first six cups of powdered sugar and mix on low.

Add strawberry mixture and blend.

Add powdered sugar until you get to the consistency you want. This recipe is not for decorating, it is for taste, so you will not get a light and fluffy buttercream no matter how much powdered sugar you add.

Assembling the cupcakes

Cool the cupcakes.

My idea of filling a cupcake is rudimentary at best, so, uh, sorry about that. Basically, I filled a plastic plunger (that came with our Pancake Puff pan - yes, we own the Pancake Puff pan) with the lemon mousse and inserted it through the top of the cupcake. I did this three or four times on each cupcake after I discovered rooting around inside the cupcake trying to make a single "fill hole" compromised its structure. I settled for having several "tubes" of mousse instead.

To get the frosting's swirly effect, I squirted the frosting on to the cupcake using Ateco tip number 824.

Sip and enjoy.

&*^%# Cake

This is the last thing that went well on the practice cake. (It is supposed to be Optimus Prime, the lead Transformer, in his truck form)

It's covered in Spackle Paste, a mixture of butter cream and cake scraps that makes the frosting a lot more stable. It was supposed to make the fondant look better.

In fact, I threw in the towel on the whole deal. Ready to go to the closest grocery store and order a cake. But dadgumit the towel put itself right back in my hands because NO ONE sells Transformers cakes. Not that it was like this huge blockbuster or anything. Sure, there's Yugi-oh or whatever the heck it is called cakes, but can you believe one of the bakery gals actually asked me what Transformers are? OK, I totally get that that you don't go to the movies often, but this movie was all over the place, dontcha think?



Needless to say, since the goody bags are already Transformered out...I am probably going to give the cake another go.



The problems started occurring because I had to load in massive quantities of Super Red and Royal Blue food coloring into the fondant (Optimus Prime colors). The combination of that and the heat (even with the AC set to 70) made it mush, absolute mush.


So if I'm going to do this, I'm going to purchase fondant that is pre-colored so I only have to tweak the color a bit instead of trying to turn white fondant into Super Red fondant.



Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.



And if it doesn't work out, I'm going to have to rename myself.

Oh Gee, Another Flop

Not much to say about this one, except I'm not proud. Not in the least.

The bottom, unseen tier is strawberry cake with strawberry buttercream filling, and regular buttercream frosting.

The top tier is Chocolate Fudge cake with buttercream filling/frosting.

Gloria did a fabulous job, the heat and my lack of motiviation made this cake a disaster. Once the fondant started tearing I literally just threw stuff on it. While it's still true to my original vision, I had much better plans for it. I've been having a lot of flops lately so I am going to ease off a bit for the summer. I'll still make one on occasion, but me, cake, buttercream and heat don't make such a great combo.

Just pretend you didn't see this, K?

All right, this is NOT my finest hour, but I expressly forbid ANYONE from telling me just how ugly this truly is because I already know. I am not self-depreciating, really I am not; but this little confection had disaster written on it as soon as I started in on the blobs...umm...I mean flowers.

I was so buoyed by a wonderful email I received today that I decided my mom needed a cake to take to work with her that would not make everyone drunk.

I also wanted to try Italian Meringue Buttercream. I had tried the Swiss version a while back (which is very similar); but thought maybe I had done something wrong because I thought it was disgusting. As I have mentioned, I was kind of floating along today so I decided to give it another whirl.

Meringue buttercreams are not made with powdered sugar. They are made from regular sugar, egg whites, and butter. LOT'S of butter. I cannot tell you how much butter I go through nowadays, but I will tell you that Albertson's had it for 50 cents for four sticks because it is expiring in a week. I felt like a kid in a candy store when I found this, and I made sure to test it on myself before sending spoiled butter out to any unsuspecting cake-eaters. This is another reason for my mad-cake-baking frenzy. I need to use up the TWELVE POUNDS butter or freeze it (that's six bucks worth if you are counting). I literally smell like a stick of butter right now. I am normally covered from head to toe in white powder from the "POOF" of powdered sugar that occurs when mixing my normal buttercream, so I don't mind the trade off of smelling like a piece of toast.

I also tried out a new cake recipe today. Golden Butter Cake from The Whimsical Bakehouse. I added some new lemon oil that I found today just to give it a little spunk and cautiously proceeded with the buttercream preparation.

I now know what went wrong with my last attempt. I did not mix it for long enough. None of the recipes tell you that you need to mix it long enough for it to basically change it's composition, because it went from whipped meringue texture to buttercream-y after a while. I had nooooOOoo idea it would do that. I am a bit shy of overmixing things after I made butter out of heavy whipping cream (no, I'm not kidding). And it is delicious. It's a much lighter, non-gritty frosting that is much less sweet than traditional buttercream. I still like my traditional buttercream, but this was a nice change of pace. It also smooths shiny, which I thought was kind of fun.

Now onto the mess I'll call a flower spray and scrollie thingees. I thinned down my buttercream because I'm sick and tired of those dang ragged edges. I'm all for the "natural" look on myself, but I want my buttercream roses to look like fake buttercream roses darn it. I did use my traditional buttecream for this part of it.

Well, I thinned it a bit too much, the air is a bit too warm, and my hands are hot. So instead of flowers, I got blobs with definition. Those big blobs are roses, and those three horned blobs are supposed to be Sweet peas. Oh and the green blobs are my sad sad attempt at melted leaves.

I can only hope the cake tastes good. I greased the pans with Crisco instead of butter and the edges got too crisp so I'm worried it's too dry. Oh well, don't look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

Dragon's Lair

This was a REALLY fun cake to do, up to the point where a pillow was launched at it by a three year old who wishes to remain anonymous. :P It happened right as I was completing the painstaking brickwork that "used" to be pretty even and solid looking. The original intention was not for this to be an old decrepit castle, but it took that turn after the pillow incident. There is also supposed to be another level (smaller cake) on top, but such is life. I really learned about using fondant/gumpaste for modeling purposes and covering a cake in fondant a little bit differently. Instead of using a solid circle of fondant, I applied buttercream and then cut "bricks" to cover the buttercream with. I had originally used plain white buttercream, but it seeped through the bricks and looked awful so I applied another layer of grey which didn't really show until "the incident".

Because the idea for this cake was inspired by Debbie Brown, and was originally supposed to contain some carved cake elements to it, I originally made the recipe for Madeira cake contained in her book (here). I suppose if you are inclined to eat dog biscuits that recipe might taste ok to you, but I am not so I threw the whole cooked batch out and used Duncan Hines Yellow cake mix modified to be a pound cake. Normally I'd do it from scratch, but I'm experimenting with mixes now because there are some awsome "doctored" mixes out there. I will still do mostly scratch, but mixes are great for when time is of essence or the supplies are low (like butter, eggs, buttermilk, etc...) I just used regular old buttercream because it can sit out and because of the fondant this cake should be left out of the fridge.

One thing I don't understand. I don't dispute that Debbie Brown is an incredibly talented cake decorator, but to me, a cake must taste just as wonderful as it looks. I can't imagine spending oodles of money on a cake only to find out that it was not very palatable.

P.S. Yes, the end of the dragon's tail didn't quite make it onto him. I was so fed up when I was done I just didn't care!

Good neighbor

Since I was only making 6" cakes with a huge recipe, I ended up with three two tier cakes. This one went to our downstairs neighbor in appreciation of them being MUCH better than our last ones! I was trying to get a little better at buttercream and tried my hands at scroll work. It's all fine when it's on top, but the sides are what I need to work on. It's not perfectly even but it's not meant to be because it was really done on the fly. I am really into mixing colors with brown, it's really fun. The third cake shall never be posted. It was a sad little cake meant only for my families eyes. I was trying to do a basket with roses on top; the basketweave was great, the roses...well, they were lacking. I am going to get myself in a class as soon as I can find one so that I can get hands on instruction with those wiley little buggers (buttercream roses and flowers in general). It's funny, the first time I tried my hand at them I did pretty well, but ever since then I end up with these blobs of jagged edges! Excuse the lame wording tonight, I knocked the crap out of my head trying to take this picture and I think I'm still a little dizzy. Don't ask! :P

Too many ideas, too little time

This is what happens when my brain goes into overload. I had way too many cakes I had planned on making, and as a result, only came out with three (and one that is NOT shown it was sooo bad - really); and they aren't even good. I am really embarrassed to post these, but this blog is about my progress so I am going ahead with it. I think I've regressed. From now on I won't plan on making four heart cakes and some mini cakes for work to look like conversation hearts (the pink hearts letters are purposely blurred in case you are wondering). I will post more about this adventure tomorrow or the next day. I am exhausted and need to go to bed right now.