These are happy Farm Sanctuary animals, btw. 

I was asked to make cupcakes for a little boy’s 2nd birthday with a farm/barnyard theme.  I made pigs, sheep, cows, and horses:

I love Halloween.  It’s my favorite holiday.  Here are some pics of things that I’ve made this Halloween, as well as some pics of my butterfly fairy.  My edible “blood” recipe is also included below.

Creepy Halloween Cupcakes:

Edible “Blood” Recipe:

Corn Syrup

Red Food Coloring (use the gel food coloring available at cake and craft stores.  The liquid stuff from the grocery store will thin it out too much).

Cocoa Powder
Combine the corn syrup and the food coloring until it is the color that you want it.  Add cocoa powder, a little at a time until the desired opaque-ness and consistency is reached.

Cupcakes for the Halloween Party at Emma’s school:

My Pumpkin (Jack & Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas):

My beautiful Butterfly Fairy:

A scorpio themed birthday cake:

And a cupcake topped with some edible dice:

Another Under The Sea themed birthday party, this time for twin girls.  One girl requested a mermaid, the other a dolphin:

The birthday girls each had a jumbo cupcake.  The rest of the cupcakes were all regular size and topped with corals, fish, shells, and other sea creatures.

These were two of my favorites.  Using a super fancy technique (not really), I affixed “sand” to the gum paste round that topped the cupcake.

I had two cake orders this week– one for a baby shower and one for a birthday.  One I was pleased with; the other, not so much.  You’ll see what I mean.

The birthday cake was for Matt’s cousin’s coworker who loves her cats and France.  I was asked to incorporate both into one cake.  I had grand ideas for this cake, but none of them worked out.

So this picture compilation is the worst quality, but the left shows you the birthday girls’ cats and the right shows the cats that I made for the cake.  I’m pretty impressed with the cats since they look pretty close to the pet cats.

I’m impressed with how the French flag turned out.  It looks pretty realistic.

And here is the cake.  It’s lemon cake with lemon buttercream and a layer of blackberry jam.  I’m sure it tastes great, but it looks like a whole lotta ideas thrown up all over the cake with no rhyme or reason.  One thing I wanted to do was to make a 3D Eiffel tower out of gum paste, but it didn’t work out.  So I had to settle for a 1D Eiffel Tower with royal icing detail piped on.  It didn’t turn out bad, but it was bigger than I had wanted it to be and I didn’t have any way of putting it on top of the cake, which is where I had originally wanted it.

I also wanted to stamp on cat tracks, but they didn’t really turn out that great.

Aargh!  This one definitely won’t go on Facebook. 

Now, let’s get to the cake that I’m kinda proud of, which is Facebook-worthy.  It’s for a baby shower:

The baby shower was yesterday (Thursday) and I was only asked to do it on Monday or Tuesday.  If I would have had more time, I think I probably could have come up with something a little more than flowers, but I still think it turned out pretty.

My friend Ginger is the owner of Celebrate Art, an art studio in Redwood City that offers art classes for children. She just moved into a new (and much bigger) art space and hosted an open house yesterday so people could check it out.

Celebrate Art is now located at 1023-B Chestnut St, Redwood City, CA. Check out the class schedule here.

I haven’t announced it here yet because my website for my bakery is still in progress, but I think it’s time to share some exciting news.  My bakery name is Bliss Bakery.  The website will be located at www.biteofbliss.com.  Get it– a little bliss in every bite!    I will make another announcement when the website is running, which will be pretty soon hopefully.

For the open house, I made some (okay, LOTS) of cupcakes for people to sample. Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, pumpkin, gluten-free vanilla, gluten-free chocolate, and tiramisu. Everyone really enjoyed them and were pretty surprised to find out that they were vegan! Some people, in fact, were happy to find out that they were vegan due to an allergy to eggs or dairy.

My table all set up!

A sample cake.

In addition to birthday parties, you can also host bridal and baby showers and even bachelorette parties at Celebrate Art!  Ask for a package deal that includes art, cake and favors.

Sample Baby Shower Photos:

Since Halloween is right around the corner, I also made some sample Halloween cupcakes.  I didn’t get a picture of the full display, but did get some of the individual cupcakes:

Yummy chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream.  I made this at the request of my cousin–in-law whose coworker is a die-hard Giants fan (his bday is tomorrow).

I have to admit that I broke down and started using store bought fondant.  My recipe needs some tweaking.  At least the store bought stuff is vegan, but it does have nasty hydrogenated oil in it.  I wish someone would make a vegan fondant that tastes good and does not have hydrogenated oils in it.  Is this too much to ask for? 

I had 4 pretty big cake orders all due yesterday and today.  Phew… I managed to get it all done and without any headaches.

Sharks

For a little boy’s 3rd birthday party, his mom requested 2 dozen cupcakes with a dozen each shark head and shark tail toppers AND a sculpted shark head cake.  Aside from the boobs, I’ve never really sculpted cake before and after the cake-tastrophy that was Star Wars, my confidence was a little shaky.

I’ve thought about this shark cake for weeks.  I’ve drawn diagrams so that I’d know exactly where to cut and what cake to leave.  The part that was worrying me the most was cutting too much around the mouth and making the top of the cake unstable.

That’s how he turned out.  I was going for a more smiley face than mean shark face (the kid is only 3 after all!).  He’s a friendly (vegan) shark taking a bite of his vegan cupcake.

Jungle Fever

For a jungle themed baby shower, I was asked to make 2 dozen cupcakes: 6 chocolate, 6 vanilla, 6 sugar-free vanilla and 6 gluten-free chocolate.  The sugar-free was made with agave (both the cake and the frosting) and was so incredibly delicious.  I thought it tasted a little bit like caramel.  Yum…  No photos of the cakes, unfortunately, but I do have photos of the cute little jungle animals that went on top of the cakes.

Mini Me

2 dozen mini cupcakes: tiramisu, chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.  All topped with little flowers.

Summertime

A friend’s end-of-summer work party.  Toppers were ladybugs, butterflies, flowers and bees.

Yesterday was Elijah’s 6th birthday.  He is the son of a very good friend of mine and I was asked to make his special Star Wars cake.  He wanted a full-on cake, not cupcakes, and since I rarely get to do real cakes, I was pretty excited.  We had decided to base everything off of the classic Star Wars movies, episodes 4, 5 and 6.  Armed with a plan, I got to work.

On Wednesday, I baked, frosted and refrigerated the bottom tier.  This took pretty much the entire day because I only have one 9″ square pan and had to do each layer (there were 4) one at a time.  It wasn’t as bad as it sounds since I didn’t have to stand guard at the oven all day.  Everything went very smoothly at a relaxed pace.

On Thursday, I baked, frosted and refrigerated the top tier, a 6″ round.  This only took a few hours in the morning and that night, I covered each tier in chocolate fondant that was tinted black.  So far, so good.  No hangups along the way.  Nothing went wrong.  Everything went according to plan.

On Friday, all I had to do was stack the cakes and decorate them.  All of the decorations were done, I just had to put them on the cake.

It was hard to get a good photo with all the sun flooding my kitchen, but the cake board was supposed to be Yoda’s planet, Dagobah.  The cake board is covered in fondant, which I then painted (with food coloring) green and brown to look like the swampy forest.  The forest floor was sprinkled with fallen “leaves” made from gum paste.  I made the trees by first making a wire support and wrapping layers of brown fondant/gum paste onto it.  The leaves on the trees are “glued” in place by royal icing.  The beads of fondant around the base of the cake were all imprinted with a star.

On the front of the cake, was the Star Wars logo (made from white gum paste) glued into place with royal icing.  On top of the first tier, Luke and Darth Vader are engaged in a light saber battle while Han Solo is fighting the Stormtroopers.

On the top tier, Emperor Palpatine is standing in front of the Death Star and is guarded by another Stormtrooper.  I made the Death Star out of a 5″ styrofoam ball covered with gray fondant.  The detail is piped on with gray royal icing and then painted with more gray food coloring.

So, now you’re wondering where the “cake-tastrophy” comes in.  By this point, everything had gone so super smoothly.  I wasn’t stressed at all.  Everything was done way ahead of schedule.  Nothing went wrong.

That is until we were in the car less than a mile from the drop off location.  We had picked Matt up from work on our way to the party.  He took a quick look at the cake and said he thought it didn’t look very stable.  But I was pretty confident that I had put enough support in it that it would hold up fine.  Since it was riding in the back seat next to Emma, she was on cake lookout.

The minute we got off the freeway and had to make a left turn, the cake just sort of collapsed.  When Emma told us that it had fallen, I didn’t believe her at first.  Matt took a look in the back seat and found that indeed, the cake had fallen apart.  The top tier had fallen into the bottom, collapsing the right rear of the cake.

We had a mess on our hands.  And I had no extra fondant or anything to fix it.  All I had was a large knife for cutting the cake, a cake server, and a lighter to light the candles.  Yikes!  You can see that the inside looks so delicious.  Layers of chocolate and vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream in between.  And yes, it sure was tasty.

And here it is after the fix.  Luckily, the top tier was unharmed, so I was able to cut and scoop away the collapsed bottom tier and slide the top one in to make one long cake.  Strategically placed Death Star, trees, and characters hid the mess where the fondant broke away and the cake was exposed.  The trees in the front added more support to the front of the cake, which kept threatening to fall forward.

The crazy part was that no one noticed and everyone thought it looked awesome.  No, it wasn’t my original plan (which would have been so cool), but it salvaged pretty well.  Just yesterday, I had read a post about “silver linings” over at Kristen’s Raw, the timing of which was strangely perfect.  Normally, I probably would have freaked out that the entire cake had collapsed.  Last night, though, I was pretty proud of myself for keeping a positive outlook:

1. I didn’t swear once.  In fact, when I looked in the back seat and saw the cake in a heap, I chuckled to myself a little bit.  There was an instance when we were driving in which I called another driver a jackass, but he was not obeying the posted sign which read “no left turns between 4:30 and 6″ and was trying to make a left turn across a busy street at nearly 5 pm.  My calling him a jackass was because he made me slam on my brakes, not because I was frustrated over the cake incident.
2. I didn’t accept the $20 that my hubby tried to give me to run to the store to buy a new cake.  I was determined to save it.  Had this cake been for someone other than an understanding friend, I may have been a little more frazzled.  When I called her to tell her what had happened, she also said to try to save it since it was just going to get eaten anyway.
3. Everyone loved the cake.  People even thought it came from a professional bakery.
4. And, I’ve learned a thing or two about cake construction that will help me in the future.  I should have put a cake board in between the 2nd and 3rd layers of cake, but I thought I could get away with it.  I will always err on the side of caution from now on.

I made LOTS of fondant yesterday (seriously, I used about 6 pounds of sugar!) and experimented  a bit:

I’ve always used agar agar flakes to make it, but I was somewhat annoyed with how long it took for them to fully dissolve.  This one step often took more than 15 minutes and for something that I don’t necessarily enjoy doing, this was entirely too long.  Making fondant, to me, is somewhat of a pain– first you have to sift all that powdered sugar and then you have to wait for the flakes to dissolve.  Don’t get me wrong– homemade fondant is so far superior to storebought that it’s worth the effort.  But yesterday, I needed to make a batch of white and a few batches of chocolate.  That’s potentially 45 minutes or more of just waiting for the agar flakes too dissolve!

Enter agar powder.  I’ve tried this before and I think I used too much powder for the amount of water in the recipe.  When using powdered agar, generally the ration is 1 tsp of powder to 1 TB of flakes.  And in a recipe, you can generally substitute 1:1 agar flakes for gelatin.  So I used powder and it did indeed cut down on “dissolve time.”

If you use my fondant recipe, follow as directed, except use about 1 1/2 tsp of agar powder for the agar flakes.  You may need to add a little bit more water if it becomes too pasty.  The brand of powder I used (pictured left) even has vanilla flavoring in it, so you can get that vanilla taste into your fondant without using vanilla extract, which will give your fondant an off-white color.

Side Note:  I found this brand of agar at the Asian market.  Be careful when you buy it because it also comes in red and green (as in it has red and green coloring added to it) and all three packages are identical.  Read the ingredients list before throwing it into your cart.

The difference between using powder over flakes:

1. Once dissolved, the water will become gelatinous, but you are left with more liquid than if you use flakes.  This means that you will need much more sugar to get the right consistency.  Plan on using more like 9 cups per recipe (which will produce more fondant per batch).
2. The consistency of the finished product is near perfect once all of the sugar gets kneaded in.  The problem I find when using flakes is that the fondant reaches a perfect consistency after it has been allowed to sit for several days.  On the day it’s made, I find it to be a little too soft to use right away.
3. You won’t have to worry about having bits of undissolved flakes floating around your fondant.

The verdict for me is that powder is better than flakes here.  It dissolves faster and produces a better finished product.  My next fondant experiment will be to see if I can use my stand mixer with the dough hook attachment to knead in the sugar, rather than by doing it by hand.  The process of kneading in the sugar is very similar to kneading bread dough so it stands to reason that it should work.  Stay tuned!

This weekend was pretty fun…  we headed to Sacramento for a family reunion (my mom’s side) and I was in charge of dessert!  Not knowing how many people would actually show up, I made a batch of strawberry cupcakes with strawberry buttercream, chocolate cupcakes with cookies & cream buttercream, and (from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World) tiramisu cupcakes.  As you may expect, there were way more cupcakes than necessary, but it allowed people to have seconds and take some home!

The tiramisu cupcakes are a vanilla cake (I used my own recipe, not the one in the book because– in my opinion– the cake recipes in the book all turn out really weird) topped with cream cheese frosting.  Before putting on the frosting, you scoop out a little well in the center of the cake and generously fill it with Kahlua and coffee.  Delicious!  I think this is my new favorite.  It would also make a really delicious layered cake.

Everyone enjoyed all three, but I think the kids (well, teenagers) really liked the chocolate with cookies & cream.  I’ve made it before, but this time I used my food processor to get the cookie chunks much smaller.  I liked that better.

Last, but not least, we have my mom’s favorite, the strawberry.  I’m really anxious to try the strawberry recipe with peaches.  Doesn’t that sound heavenly and so summery?  Peach cupcakes!  Yum!!

My dad has a garden and this year he’s planted more than just tomatoes. His tomatoes are awesome, btw. Check out these zucchini that he said “got away from him.”

The photo doesn’t really do them justice.  The larger one is about 18″ long and 15″ around. It weighs 6 pounds. That’s not much smaller than Emma when she was born. The smaller one is 15″ long, 11.5″ around and 4 pounds. I predict lots of zucchini bread and some chocolate zucchini muffins in our future.

Now for the best part. There is this billboard near our house that I see all the time. Since I’m the one driving and I almost never have my camera handy, I can never get a picture of it. Well, as we were crossing the Bay Bridge yesterday (Matt was driving), I saw the exact same one and was able to get a pic.

In case you can’t read it, it says “Be Veg!  Go Green!  Save the Planet!”  The ad is sponsored by the people that run this website.  While the website is a little strange, it does have some very interesting information on it:

• According to the UNreport “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” livestock production is the greatest contributor to global warming.
• Animal waste and feed cropland dump more pollutants into our waterways than all other human activities combined.
• Meat-based diets require 10-20 times as much land as plant-based diets – nearly half of the world’s grains & soybeans are fed to animals.

I can think of NO good reasons to eat meat, when you take into account how horribly the animals are treated, how it contributes to climate change, and it’s effects on your health.  Seriously, I’m the weirdo at a restaurant who has to pick apart a menu item to make it suitable for me, when in reality, you are the weirdo for suppoting this.  Anyway, I was really surprised that someone would pay for such an ad (happy about it, but still surprised).  I do hope there are ads elsewhere other than the Bay Area where vegetarianism is really pretty common.