hello kitty graduation cake

My little boy graduated from preschool last month!  I can't believe how fast time flies!  His school had a graduation ceremony for his class, so I decided to bake the class a graduation cake.  Since I didn't get to use my designs and sketches from the last graduation cake that I made, I decided to use it now, except in blue!  The cake would have Hello Kitty piped on the top, with a graduation cap on her head, and a piped petal frosting on the sides.

I started by making my favorite homemade chocolate cake recipe, baked in two 8-inch pans.  Once the cake layers were baked and cooled, I made my favorite chocolate mousse recipe from America's Test Kitchen.  (Once again, the same chocolate mousse recipe from all the triple chocolate mousse cakes that I've made in the past).

After I piped my chocolate mousse onto the first layer of cake, I used an offset spatula to smooth it out, and then placed my second layer of cake on top.  And then I was ready to frost!

I whipped up a quick batch of cream cheese buttercream, basically a basic buttercream with a stick of cream cheese added to it, colored it light blue, and then did a quick crumb coat of frosting over the entire cake.

Then came the petal piping on the sides.  I first saw this great technique at Hungry Housewife, and since then have used it to make a purple ombre petal cake, as well as a camoflauge petal cake, and I love the effect every time!

The first step is to pipe a vertical row of round circles, using a Wilton #12 tip.  Then using an offset spatula, drag it accross each circle to smear the circles into petals.  Then pipe the next vertical row of circles, drag with the offset spatula, and continue this process until the entire cake is covered.

Then I used black frosting to pipe a Hello Kitty outline on the top of the cake, as well as a black graduation cap on her head, and a yellow nose.

Next I filled in Hello Kitty's face using a star tip and white frosting, and I filled in her bow with royal blue icing.  And the final touch was a yellow tassle coming out of her graduation cap!

By the way, it's no coincidence that I used UCLA colors.  GO BRUINS!!!

I also piped a congratulations message for his class, but I misjudged the spacing and so I had to add a bunch of exclamation marks to even it out!

The teachers served the cake at snack time, right before the graduation ceremony, and even though Matthew usually doesn't like chocolate cake, he ate the whole slice!

Here's a picture of him walking out of the graduation ceremony.

Happy graduation, my Matthew!  I'm so proud of you and can't wait to see you flourish in Kindergarten!

cookies and cream camouflage petal cake

For my husband Grant's birthday last year, I made him this cake covered with rainbow sprinkles, with a hidden chocolate mousse heart inside.  I had wanted it to be happy and rainbow-themed, but I guess it turned out kind of ... girly?  So this year, I wanted to make him a manly cake.  So I made him a camouflage cake!

For the frosting, I had brainstormed and sketched a few ideas on how I would execute the camouflage design.  One idea would just be a simple piping of swirls of camouflage in two shades of green, brown, and black.  The other idea was to use those same colors, but pipe them in sort of a petal effect, similar to the purple ombre petal cake that I made for Mother's Day.  After sketching it out, I thought the petal effect would be super cool!  So I decided to try it.

Grant's favorite ice cream flavor of all time is cookies and cream.  So I decided on a three-layer chocolate and vanilla cake, filled with cookies and cream whipped cream!  I baked two 6-inch layers of chocolate cake using my favorite homemade chocolate cake recipe (I actually baked three and put one in the freezer, tightly wrapped of course), and one 6-inch layer of vanilla cake using the "hot milk cake" recipe from the book "Miette: Recipes from San Francisco's Most Charming Pastry Shop".

For the whipped cream filling, I chopped up some oreo cookies (actually, I used "Joe's Os" cookies from Trader Joe's), and mixed it into freshly whipped cream, flavored with a hint of vanilla.  I wanted a thick layer of the cookies-n-cream filling, so at this point I also made a cream cheese buttercream frosting so that I could pipe a border of it on each cake layer, to keep the filling from squishing out from the weight of the cakes above it.

I wanted the inside of the cake to look like an oreo cookie itself, so the bottom layer was chocolate cake, followed by a layer of vanilla cake, and then a final layer of chocolate cake, all separated by the cookies-n-cream whipped cream filling.  This created quite a tall cake!

With the remainder of the cream cheese buttercream, I divided them into four portions, the amount varying by how much of each color I would be needing: brown, black, green, and light green.  For the black icing, I added dark chocolate cocoa powder, as I try to avoid coloring as much as possible, so I only had to add a tiny bit of black coloring.  For the brown icing I simply added cocoa powder, but for the greens I had to use coloring (although for the light green, I added a bit of cocoa powder to give it more a "dirty" light green effect).

First I did a quick crumb coat with the chocolate frosting, and after letting that set in the fridge for a bit I was ready to start camouflaging!

Using the method described in this tutorial from The Hungry Housewife, I piped my petals one vertical row at a time, creating patches of different colors to create the camouflage effect.

Then I piped the top of the cake using the same technique (although in my opinion, it came out kind of squished, and resembled M&Ms on the top of the cake).

And then I was done!  One very tall camouflage cake.  (I won't call it a "petal cake", to keep with the "manly" theme of the cake!)

I hope you enjoyed your cake, my love!  Happy Birthday!

purple ombre petal cake with chocolate butterflies for mother's day

My mom likes desserts that are not too sweet.  And, she loves lemon.  So for Mother's Day I decided to make her a lemon blueberry cake, with purple ombre petal frosting for a girly feminine touch.

Initially I was going to make a lemon cake with blueberries in the batter itself, but last minute I decided to just make it a lemon cake, filled with blueberry whipped cream.  I had been eyeing a recipe for "hot milk cake" in my copy of "Miette" by Meg Ray; it sounded interesting because it was the total opposite of any other cake recipes I had tried.  While usually I would combine the fat with the sugar and then add eggs, and then alternate a flour mixture with milk, this recipe called for beating eggs with sugar, then adding the flour, then melting butter with hot milk, which is then poured into the cake batter at the end.  Interesting!  I wanted to try it.  The only thing I changed was adding lemon zest to the batter, to give a nice lemony flavor to the cake.

The blueberry filling was fairly simple - I whipped heavy cream with a bit of confectioner's sugar and vanilla, and when it started forming stiff peaks I added a few tablespoons of pureed blueberries (blueberries that I had pulsed in the food processor), and then whipped it a bit more to incorporate.

For the frosting, I wanted a light frosting that wasn't too sweet, so I chose this swiss meringue cream cheese frosting at 6 Bittersweets - I've been wanting to try her recipe, and it sounded perfect with the lemon and blueberry combination.  But I must have done something wrong, because my frosting came out very loose.  I tried refrigerating it for a while and then rebeating, but this only lead to clumpy not-smooth frosting.  But I was running out of time, and besides it still tasted great, so I used it anyway.

I piped a border of frosting on the perimeter of my first layer of cake, so that the soft filling would not leak out.  Then I filled it with the blueberry whipped cream, and then topped it with my second layer of cake.  After a quick crumb coat of frosting, I began the fun part of creating the petal look of the frosting.  I found this great tutorial at Hungry Housewife, which shows you step by step how to create the petals.

I also made chocolate butterflies for the finishing touch!  I found a great tutorial here.  Initially I was going to make the butterflies purple, but since the top of my ombre cake was purple in the middle, I decided to just make them chocolate so that they would stand out.

When we cut into the cake, the inside looked so pretty with the purple and lemon yellow constrasting colors!  The cake was nice and lemony, but very very dense, and tasted almost like a lemon pound cake.  But the overall combination of lemon and blueberry flavors was nice.

Happy Mother's Day, Mommy!