Bake Sale Cupcakes that Should Have Sold for More

The young men and young women in our ward were having a garage sale/bake sale/car wash the weekend after the wedding cake adventure happened. Since I had some leftover frosting on hand, as well as some raspberry jam, I whipped up some cupcakes and tweaked the frosting to make the following selections. Unfortunately, they were only selling the baked goods for $.50/each. My cupcakes were by far the most beautiful item there and could have easily sold for $1.00, thus helping the youth get more funds for summer camp. Maybe next year I'll suggest a price increase. . .

Three Tiers, or Three Tears

July 24th is a holiday in Utah, and thus the perfect day for me to spend working on making a wedding cake for the next day. I was glad to have the full-day because this was going to be my first attempt at a three-tier cake! I was a bit nervous, but confident that it would turn out well.

I regret that I didn't take more pictures of the step-by-step process that went into this cake, so you'll just have to make due with my comical descriptions!

Step One: Obsess over the fact that I moved to a new apartment with an oven that was new back in 1960. If one half of the cake was slightly darker than the other half, the bride didn't seem to notice.

Step Two: Get a last-minute email from the bride, deciding to change the base color of the cake from white to an undefined "teal/light green" color. Freak out and then go buy teal food color, luck out and magically match the color of the cake perfectly to the ribbons at the reception.

Step Three: Watch movies on the projector while you frost and stack the cake.

Step Four: Freak out because you don't have a good way to pound a dowl through two layers of cardboard cake bases. Accept sensible suggestion of husband to hammer in the knife sharpener her pulled out of your knife rack. Give him a hug of joy as it works beautifully!

Step Five: Stick stacked/undecorated cake in fridge while you take a break and go see The Great Gatsby at the dollar theater. Come back feeling depressed, but refreshed and ready to go back to work!

Step Six: Laboriously spend 2 1/2 hours piping Korean-style flowers and vines around the bottom two tiers of the cake. Bride has agreed to provide some kind of cake topper to make the top tier look less awkward.

Step Seven: Naively believe bride about the cake topper.

Step Eight: Pick up your Korean cousin, as well as her extremely upset with the world friend, not only making you late to deliver the cake, but also providing you with a chorus of Korean anger while you drive.

Step Nine: Arrive at reception let, with most of the guests arrived. Hunt down the bride, only to learn that she has NOT brought a cake topper.

Step Ten: Firmly explain to the bride that the cake looks dumb without something on top and tell her you are going to put some piping on the top tier to make it match.

Step Eleven: Kneel awkwardly in the middle of the reception room, piping crooked flowers and curly cues onto the cake. Thus destroying your two and half hours of hard work the night before making sure every line was perfectly straight. All the guests stare at you, little girls won't leave your side because they are too entranced.
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Step Twelve: Take a few poor quality snapshots with your phone of your (almost) masterpiece while the bride and groom start greeting guests. Sigh with sadness that this will be the best picture that you get, since they had no photographer for the reception. The only other picture posted to Facebook was a blurry, yellowed version of your work of art that whites out half of it.

 Step Thirteen: Return to your day job, just in time to not go over your lunch break. Vow to get someone else to deliver your cakes next time!

Star Trek with a Twist

July Birthday #3 was for my 17-year-old brother-in-law (again with the hyphens!). He is a Star Trek fan, although not as intense as my husband (you know it's true, Derek!). I had the idea to do a tie-dye style cake, so I thought I could easily incorporate the Star Trek logo into it. The result wasn't quite what I had imagined, but still rather cool.

Cake: Funfetti filled with cooked, flour-based vanilla custard.

Frosting/Decoration: Plain vanilla frosting mixed with the three famous Star Trek colors: blue, red and gold. I wish I would have made the yellow look a bit darker and mixed with some orange. As is, it looked a bit like a Captain America cake. But the Star Trek logo surely put away any doubts to that effect. The tie-dye effect was done by layering the colors around a central design and expanding outward, repeating until the whole cake was full. I learned this method when I was in third-grade art class. I used paintbrushes to make the logo smooth and more precise. This was my first paintbrush attempt on a cake and I was very pleased!

Basketball "Cake"

July is also a busy time because there are not one, not two, but THREE birthdays in my husband's family. Here is birthday #2, the "cake" I made for my ten-year-old brother-in-law(look at all those hyphens!).

"Cake": The original request for his birthday cake was to have strawberry shortcake. I worked it out with his mom, or so we thought, to have her get a strawberry shortcake ready and I would make a "rice crispy" cake. Basketball is is favorite sport, so a giant basketball of Rice Krispy Treats is what he got! I created a double batch of the krispies and formed it into a ball, which I then refridgerated to help it get firm. (Unfortunately I made it with real butter. "What? But real butter is the best," you say! Yes, it is the best if you want to make a flat pan of treats. Margarine is what I should have used. Margarine makes the treats harden much more firmly. I learned that little lesson multiple times over the years. I wish I would have remembered it when making this basketball. By the time we got around to eating it, it looked like a half-deflated basketball instead of a perky round one!)

Frosting: I covered the rice crispy ball with a thin layer of buttercream. Then I mixed up some marshmallow fondant and dyed it using brown and orange coloring until the shade was what I wanted. It took some work to roll the fondant out nicely, but I was quite pleased with the result. It was only my second attempt at a fondant cake and I was rather pleased with the result.

Decoration: This was the most challenging part of the whole thing. After a lot of research online, I had a few different options for how I could make the pattern of a basketball on the fondant. First, I bought a sheet of basketball texturized scrapbook paper from Hobby Lobby. I laid this on top of the fondant and used a rolling pin to impress the pattern. The pattern looked alright once imprinted, but it sure made it impossible for me to pull the fondant up off the table because I had to roll hard to get the pattern to stick. Thus, first attempt failed. Attempt number two was to use one of those small, hand-held cheese graters and roll it over the top of the already placed fondant. This method worked like a charm and was a super fast way to imprint the texture onto the basketball. I finished it off by cutting lines of sugar paper to go around the ball and piping the words onto it. It was near midnight by the time I got to this point and my artistic skills were failing. I made the mistake of not measuring out the letters and centering them before piping them on. Although I will say I was pleased with the little NBA logo, as well as the awesome Jimmer Fredette autograph I put on the bottom (a brilliant idea by my sister-in-law!). 

The final result was delicious. I may have liked it even more than anyone else who tried some. . . so I at least one person appreciated the minimum of six hours of work I put into it!

BONUS STORY:

Now here is the unfortunate part, apparently there was miscommunication, and my mother-in-law hadn't gotten the message that my cake wasn't a "cake" but a "treat". Thus, when we arrived, there was no strawberry shortcake to fulfill the birthday boy's request. My mother-in-law and I just looked at each other and said, "oh well, this'll do!" The candle stuck into the fondant well enough, and everyone seemed content with one dessert. And while the birthday boy seemed pleased with the basketball, his quiet request of his mom later that evening made us both roll our eyes, "Mom, can I still have some strawberry shortcake?"

A Consultation

July 13 is an important day in my husband's family. It is the birthday of my brother-in-law Jason, who passed away over four years ago now. You can read a beautiful memorial about it by my husband here: Make Music of our Tears. To celebrate his birthday, we always go to the temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and then stop at his grave afterwards. I decided to make cupcakes to celebrate. These are pictures of a few of them that I kept aside. I was scheduled to do a consultation for a wedding cake later in the week, so I wanted to have something for her to try (foreshadowing for a future post about my first three-tier wedding cake!)

I made two kinds of cupcakes. There were chocolate cupcakes filled with regular frosting and covered in regular frosting. The pink cupcakes were white cake filled with raspberry and almond flavored frosting. I was personally partial to the white/raspberry combo. We all enjoyed gulping them down while an uncharacteristically strong wind buffeted us at the cemetery.

Binary Cake

My husband's grandmother commissioned me to make a birthday cake for one of my husband's cousins. We eat dinner with them on Sundays, so of course I would get to enjoy the cake as well!

Cake: After getting the down-low from his wife, I made this into a German Chocolate cake. I used a regular german chocolate cake mix and modified it with the WASC recipe.

Filling: I made a classic coconut-pecan german chocolate cake filling. It was thick and gooey and delicious. The whole cake was marked a delicious success.

Frosting/Decoration: This is just a basic vanilla frosting. But the decoration is where it really became unique. My husband's cousin is a computer programmer. I found a website that translated Happy Birthday into binary, which I then painstakingly copied onto the top of the cake. My hand was tired afterward, meaning I should have thinned out the chocolate frosting before I wrote with it, oh well! The cousins were thoroughly thrilled with getting to sit and figure out the words on the cake. They sat and analyzed it for at least ten minutes, discussing the virtues of binary.

Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese

My mom's favorite cake was carrot cake, so I happily obliged.

Cake: As mentioned, this was a carrot cake. I went all out and included nuts, raisins, coconut, and pineapple to a carrot cake mix made as a WASC base. Pineapple juice was the liquid. The cake was wonderfully dense and moist, just as a carrot cake should be!

Filling and Frosting: Using the same Sam's Club bakery frosting that I used in the previous cake, I mixed in a few 8 oz. packets of cream cheese. It mixed in nicely and really added a nice cheesy taste to the frosting. I used it to both fill and frost the cake. My extra large tips came in handy again. I even went to the effort to pipe little carrots onto the cake, just like a bakery. While the tres leches cake was delicious, my heart was with the carrot cake's dense layers and mouth-watering frosting.

These pictures were taken after the three hour drive from home to Capitol Reef. They survived the journel well, with a bag of ice sitting nearby to keep the cream cheese frosting cool.
                                                             

The Tres Leches Experiment

In May 2013 my family was having a reunion down in Capitol Reef National Park. Since I only see my family about twice a year, I decided to take advantage and make birthday cakes for both my mom and brother, who both have June birthdays. Here is the first cake, made for my brother:

Cake: My brother said his favorite cake was tres leches. Since real tres leches is super moist and is impossible to stack, I had to improvise with my favorite WASC cake recipe. I used vanilla flavoring with a white cake mix, with the addition of some evaporated milk and half and half.

Filling: Having a dulce de leche filling only seemed natural for a tres leches cake. I made my dulce de leche by boiling a can of sweetened condensed milk for about 2 1/2 hours. It turned out a beautiful carmel color and tasted great, too! I filled the cake with it, then used the rest to drizzle over the top. The effect was rather lovely and delicious looking.

Frosting: Plane white frosting from Sam's club. I got extra large tips as a gift from my husband for mother's day (despite not being a mother yet!). They came in handy and made the cake look like it came from a real bakery.