Happy Harvest

This is the same Pumpkin Honey Cake from about a year ago. I persist in trying to decorate with cream cheese frosting, which is almost always way too soft to do anything by slather on, hence the messy basketwork and sloppy rope border. Giving the frosting some time in the fridge might have helped, but I'm also the world's greatest procrastinator. This cake was barely finished in time to take to my friends' annual harvest party.

The fondant pumpkins and gumpaste ghost proved to be the chief distractor from my less than stellar piping work. My other secret was that I took the cake to the party in a pink cake box. A friend's friend could not believe it didn't come from the store.

I had to hit two stores over two weeks before I could get a hold of orange food colouring. Halloween season is exactly the wrong time to be looking for that particular colour. I dusted the pumpkins in gold shimmer dust. Fabulous stuff! Here's another (grainy) look from a different angle.

What drew me to try the pumpkin honey cake recipe: if you ever watched the Smurfs, there's an episode where entire village gathers for Smurfberry honey cake, this giant confection that Baker Smurf pulls out on a wheel wagon that is some three Smurfs tall. I've been on the lookout for something-honey cake since!

The recipe made a lot of frosting. I had enough left over for the cake trimmings as well as a batch of quick pumpkin cupcakes (to try and use up the leftover pumpkin, which only comes in giant cans (>_<)).

Pretty in Pink

This is a cake made for a baby shower at the request of February's winner (yes, I know it's May). I apologize for the horrible picture. My camera was once again not cooperating and my Photoshop skillz are just plain sad. I couldn't tweak it to look anything like what it did in person. If you can imagine the decorations in pink on an off-white cream cheese frosting surface lightly speckled with orange zest bits, that's what the cake really looked it.

This was an orange spice cake, with orange cream cheese frosting. I heard from my friend that it was quite a success and the showeree described it as a "big, baked cinammon roll" (may not have been the exact words, I forget (>_<)). I'll definitely have to bake it again to see how it tastes (^_^). The decoration was a little tricky as the frosting was quite soft. I thought a star border would be a bit easier to do than a shell border. I also piped ridged strips up the side of the cake because I thought it gave it a more baby-shower look.

Birthday Banana Cake

A good friend of mine has her parents in town visiting. I hadn't delivered her March dessert and it happened to be her dad's birthday. It seemed like a great opportunity to make good on what I owed. We settled on banana, walnut, and cream cheese, which naturally lead me to banana walnut cake with white chocolate cream cheese frosting (the old standby and one of her favourite frostings). For the banana walnut cake, I used this recipe. She had requested it eggless, so I substituted the eggs for a half cup of applesauce and 1 tsp baking soda. I also subbed the buttermilk for yoghurt (what I had on hand) and threw in a cupful of walnuts. I love banana cake, and its sibling, banana bread, for their versatility and sturdiness. It doesn't seem to matter to a banana cake if you use buttermilk, sour cream or yoghurt, if you threw in an extra half a banana or two, or if you bulked it up with nuts or chocolate chips. It's all good :) The cake, like the eggless banana cupcakes from earlier ago, came out a little pale and sank in the middle. You can't tell because I artfully covered it up with frosting (*^_^*) I was assured that it tasted fine and her parents sent me thanks.

Of course, when baking banana cake, you can't bake just one banana cake. Bananas generally come in bunches of six, and you usually only need three to a cake recipe. So this is mine, with eggs. All mine! Om nom nom nom!

The Tale of Two Cakes

Yes, the last post was obviously rushed, but I have catching up to do!

Technically some of those desserts were baked in January. Actually, technically, and in reality, they all were, but please do the time warp with me, so I don't have to go back and edit the time stamps on those posts. I know I'm not suppose to store up posts like this, but this is the last one. Promise.

And to demonstrate that I am in earnest, I'm going to cram two cakes into this one post. I think this is completely valid because both cakes were delivered on the same day to the same venue.

Exhibit #1: Lemon Ginger Cake With Lemon-Cream Cheese Frosting
This was dessert at a potluck. I went with this recipe because I'd bought a Costco-sized bag of lemons, buttermilk only comes in quarts, and I'd bought too much cream cheese for the cake below by a block and a half. I try really really hard not to waste. I tried candying lemon peel but wasn't quite as successful as I was with the orange. I tried to cut corners by using some simple syrup I already had in the fridge, but I completely forgot I had it on the stove. By the time I remembered, the syrup had already begun to caramelize and the peel was shriveled and sad-looking. I tried to rescue it by dousing the lot with water and allowing it to boil some more, but they still ended up kinda stringy-looking. I curled the wet strands around chopsticks and dried them in my toaster oven (because it was taking too long). I liked the cake and frosting combo on this cake; not overly spiced, but something different from the run-of-the-mill chocolate and yellow cake.

Exhibit #2: Lemon-Blueberry Cake with White Chocolate Frosting
For those playing along, this is January's dessert. This cake is a good stand-by. I love making it in the summer, when fresh blueberries are cheap and plentiful at the farmers' market. Because blueberries are out of season, I used frozen ones, which work fine in the cake, but aren't really very good to decorate with, so I ended up piping a shell border around it. I found myself wishing I had something to write on the top.

The 13th Dessert

The final dessert of last year's charity auction...pumpkin honey cake.

This cake looks better in person. I've got to find a better background for my pictures, or at least clean the counter off before taking a picture. But I am quite happy with how this cake turned out, especially as I hope it'll help cheer a friend up a little too.

I made this cake a number of years back and remember it turned out overly dense and dry. Since then, quite a few more positive reviews were written for it on the recipe site and I thought I'd try it again. I'm glad I did. The cake turned out light and airy with a fine crumb and a delicious spicy pumpkiny flavour. I'm not really one for cinnamon in sweet things, but it works in this cake. Because there's ground allspice in the icing as well as the pumpkin that went in, I wasn't too concerned about the cake crumbs showing up in the frosting since it already had little specks in it.

I'm glad for the trimmings and leftover icing.

Because of the way this cake is made, I was left with quite a bit of trimming and thought I'd attempt my first petit four. I made quite a mess, so there aren't any pictures. I guess there's a reason why petit fours are always glazed...trying to frost a tiny cake is a (pardon my French) bitch.

The recipe for this cake: Pumpkin Honey Cake

More old stuff: Carrot cake

This squiggly mass was my attempt at candying orange peel. It turned out pretty well, although I later found I couldn't curl it into tight springs, which when you think about sugar and stuff, makes sense. I'd used a channel zester to make as long a strip as I could for that purpose. D'oh!

I found several different recipes for candying citrus peel, but they were in the end mostly the same. I'm guessing you can skip steps 2 & 3 if you managed to get your peel without any pith on it.

Candying Citrus Peel
1. Strip peel from fruit using a vegetable peeler (or channel zester)
2. Blanch in 3 changes of cold water (put peel in cold water, bring to a boil, rinse and repeat)
3. Scrape off white pith with a small spoon
4. Bring a simple syrup to a boil (equal parts sugar & water)
5. Put peel into boiling syrup and cook until peel is translucent (I think it took me about 20 minutes)
6. Fish peel out of syrup and roll in sugar (or not)
7. Set peel onto a piece of waxed paper to dry

I used the peel to decorate a carrot cake for a friend's birthday. This was before I learnt that that liquid food colouring that come in those cute little dropper bottles can wreak havoc on the consistency of my frosting. The cream cheese frosting used here turned out thin to begin with, the colouring didn't help, and even after refrigerating, it didn't set up. I'm guessing that was the intention of the recipe: Orange Pineapple Carrot Cake