Flowers on Woodland Stump - In cake form

I like when friends & family request a cake and let me pick the design.  I get to try out a cake design from my "Things To Try" list. Wahoo.  Here is my latest creation.  I call this one Flowers on a Woodland Stump - or Stumpy Flowers for short.

I know the flowers on the cake are an odd assortment of shapes and colors, but that's because most of them are the left over from other cakes I've made.  It is strange, but once I put a gumpaste flower on a cake I have no qualms about throwing the flower away after the cake is cut and served, but for some reason I can't make myself throw away gumpaste flowers that I made but didn't use on the intended cake.

My strange quirk came in handy when I needed to make a last minute cake for a friend's 50th birthday party.

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There are lots of different flowers on this cake, but the peonies are my favorite. With just the peony petal cutter and a styrofoam ball, you get a beautiful flower with very little effort.  Just cut out a bunch of petals in various sizes, and give them a little texture with a veiner wand.  The veiner wand is this great all purpose tool that you can use to add a little texture to any flower or leaf.  With this baby you don't need a different silicon veiner for each flower type.  Saves on storage space and money.  Win-win.

After the petals are made and textured, just glue them to the styrofoam ball.  I use both the 1" and 1-1/2" balls for my peonies.  To see this process in action just look up gumpaste peonies on YouTube.  Here is a link to the Global Sugar Art video on peonies.

I allowing each layer of petals to dry a bit before putting on the next layer.

You can make the peony small by using less petals (and a smaller styrofoam ball), or make them huge and fluffy by using more petals.  In the peony making videos they tell you to wire the larger petals, but I don't bother with that.  I just glue all the petals to the styrofoam ball.  Saves a lot of time and materials.

For the bark of the "stump" I used a Tree Bark Texture Mold.  I melted chocolate chips and poured the chocolate into the mold.  I spread the chocolate into all the crevices, and then put the mold into the freezer to speed up the hardening of the chocolate.

Then I unmolded the solid chocolate plank...

And then broke the large block into smaller pieces that roughly fit the height of the cake.  You don't need to be precise or exact, the bark looks better if it is a little messy and oddly shaped. Stick the pieces of chocolate to the cake using chocolate frosting.  Any gaps between the pieces of chocolate can be filled with chocolate icing.  And don't worry if the frosting is a different color than the chocolate.  The bark looks much better if it has different tones and colors.  You can also dust the chocolate with edible food color powders (brown, green, white) to make it look even better. (I forgot to do that on this cake so the bark looked a little monotoned.)

The mold for making bark worked pretty well, but you need to be careful not to make the chocolate too thick.  If it is too thick it is hard to break the plank into appropriately sized pieces, and frankly it waste a lot of chocolate.  And let the party goers know that the bark is chunks of Ghiradelli chocolate and not fondant.  I couldn't believe that people were throwing away all that luscious chocolate thinking it was nasty fondant!

The topper on the cake was a last minute addition.  I have this Cricut Explorer that I don't use nearly enough.  I bought it thinking I could use it to cut out fondant and gumpaste, but I never got it to work correctly.  So now I just use the Cricut to cut out random things - like this cake topper personalized with the birthday girl's name and age.  Kind of cool, huh??  And all it cost was $1 for the sheet of red glitter paper, well that and the $200 for the Cricut.

So I think the birthday girl was pleased with her cake.  Happy Birthday, Gwen.  Hope we are both around for you 100th birthday.  I wonder what the cakes will look like in the year 2068???

Happy Decorating,

Carol

Mock Clotted Cream Recipes - Mascarpone vs Sour Cream / Cream Cheese - Which tastes BEST?

I recently hosted an Afternoon Tea and I have to admit I went a little wild with the setup.  I bought tea cups and tea pots and cute little pastry serving platters.  I had everything for a proper English tea except for one thing: Clotted Cream (aka Devonshire, Cornish or Jersey Cream).  I couldn't find fresh Clotted Cream anywhere so I figured I would just make some.

I found tons of different recipes that fell into three different categories.  One recipe category was for "real" clotted cream, but you needed unpasteurized cream to make it.  I was only able to find ULTRA pasteurized cream, and since there is no substituting ULTRA for UN, I had to nix the real stuff.  That left two vastly different "mock" recipe categories.  One called for a mixture of sour cream and cream cheese, and the other recipe category called for mascarpone cheese. (see recipes at bottom of post)

So how did the two Mock Clotted Creams compare?

Well as you can see from the photograph, the Sour Cream/Cream Cheese version was far silkier and smoother than the Mascarpone version.  The sour cream really had a huge impact on the texture of the final product.  The texture of the Mascarpone version on the other hand was denser and heavier, and much stiffer.  It wasn't lumpy or chunky by any means, just thicker.  A good comparison would be egg whites whipped to soft peak vs stiff peaks, or pudding vs cold ice cream.

Taste wise the Sour Cream/Cream Cheese version had a noticeable tang from the cream cheese.  The Mascarpone version was very mild, and tasted almost like pure whipped cream.

It's been a while since I had real Clotted Cream, but based on my memories I think the Mascarpone version tasted and had a mouth feel more like the real thing.  To me the tang of the Sour Cream/Cream Cheese version just wasn't authentic.

But surprisingly every guest at the Afternoon Tea picked the Sour Cream/Cream Cheese version as their favorite.  I was the lone occupant of the Mascarpone camp.  Go figure.

Another things to note is that the Mascarpone version did not keep very well.  After just a few days in the refrigerator the leftovers started to turn moldy and blue.  Yuck.  So if you try this version --- only make what you can eat in a day or two.  On the other hand, the Sour Cream/Cream Cheese version tasted fine even after a week in the refrigerator, but it did start to separate and lose it fluffiness.

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So here is my table all set for the party.  Like I said I went a little overboard.

I bought tea cups in four colors: yellow, pink, blue, and lavender, and I bought tea pots in 12 colors.  I actually got the pots directly from the English Tea Store for much, much less than other online shops.  I bought some 3-tiered  pastry serving platters, and some cream & sugar pots to match the colors of the tea pots. I had honey sticks in various flavors, lingonberries preserves, black currant jam, and lemon curd.  I had Walker Shortbread, these really delicious Chocolate Crisps, and almond biscotti.  I had sugar cookies, pecan pies and tiny petit four cakes. I even had tongs to grab the food but no one bothered to use them.  I decorated the walls and ceiling with pink pom-poms and paper fans, and on the tables I scattered "tea" inspired confetti in pink, green and gold.   Like I said, a little overboard.

And I made lots and lots of "tea" food: four different sandwiches, and three different scones.  I also had little bowls of berries covered in creme anglaise and whipped cream, and deviled/stuffed egg.

And the most popular item of the extire extravaganza was the Mixed Berry Scones from Averie Cooks. Yum.

So the Afternoon Tea was a huge success, but now I don't know what to do with all my "tea party" stuff.  Guess I will have to have tea parties more often.

 Happy Baking,

Carol

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Mascarpone Mock Clotted Cream 

Makes about 1-1/2 cups

4 ounces mascarpne 
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 or 2 tablespoons granulated white sugar

In a medium mixing bowl beat all ingredients until the mixture holds its shape and looks like softly whipped cream.  Use right away or cover and refrigerate the cream until serving time.  Note: Don't make more than you can use in a few days.  Even refrigerated the mixture does not have a long shelf life.  It will start to mold and turn blue after 3-4 days. 

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Sour Cream/Cream Cheese Mock Clotted Cream 

Makes about 1-1/2 cups

3 Tablespoons cream cheese
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons confectioners sugar

In a medium mixing bowl add cream cheese and beat at medium speed until fluffy.  Add sour cream and sugar and beat until smooth.  Add heavy whipping cream and vanilla and beat until combined.  Increase the speed to high and whip until stiff peaks form.  Refrigerate until serving.   

Drunk Emoji Cake - Big Lips, Little Lips or No Lips?

My 30 year old niece likes to party, drink, and party some more.  She is also addicted to her phone, so for her birthday I decided to make her a Drunk Emoji Cake.  I found a drunk emoji image that I liked, but sadly it had a "guy" face.  To make it more girly I added some pink lips and a bow.  But after it was all finished I couldn't decide if I liked it.

The lips just didn't look right so I made some modification and did some digital experimenting.  I tried big lips, small lip and no lips at all, but I couldn't decide which version to use.

Here are the different version:

No Lips:

Little Lips

 Big Lips

In the end I went with the Big Lips, but I wasn't completely happy.  So which do you think looks best?

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Construction of this cake was pretty easy, and only took about 4 hours from start to finish (which is really, really fast for me).  I filled, trimmed, and crumb coated the cake.  I added some lumps of Mona Lisa fondant to represent the bulging cheeks, and covered the whole cake with bright yellow colored fondant.  In the picture below you can see the paper printout I used as a template.  I printed the image to match the size of my cake, and then cut out the eyes, tongue, and mouth so I could get the size and placement correct.

First I made the eyes.  I cut up the individual components from the printed image and trimmed the fondant to match those shapes. I made the yellow pieces a littler bigger so they would wrap around the top and sides of white part.

Then I placed the completed eyes on the cake.  I added string of black fondant between the eye balls and the lids.

Next I worked on the mouth, lips and tongue.  I used a thin roll of brown fondant to form the mouth, and some red to form the tongue. I don't like coloring black or red fondant (too messy) so I keep some red and black Fondarific on hand.  The Fonarific has a long shelf life and it stays supersoft forever so I always use it for accent pieces.

So at this point I started to deviate from the drunk emoji image I was using.  I wanted the cake to look more girly so I added some pink lips.  Humm...

Brown went above the eyes to form eyebrows.

At this point the emoji head was almost finished, but sadly I didn't like it.  It just didn't look girly enough.  I added a pink bow hoping that would fix the problem, but I still wasn't happy.  It was getting late so I went ahead and formed the emoji "hand" clutching a little bottle of wine, and added the "Happy Birthday" text at the bottom of the board using the upper and lower Funky Alphabet cutters.  I also added some hollow circles and asterisks  to the board.  These are supposed to represent hiccups and burps.  Drunk Emoji remember :-)

Here it is all finished, but to me it just looked off.  I wanted to cry.

I made bigger lips and swapped them for the small lips, but I still wasn't happy.

I took off the lips to see how that looked, and while the "lipless" version looked fine - it just didn't look like a girl.  Sigh - cake making is hard.

I took a photograph of the Big Lips version and played around with it in Photoshop Elements.  (I didn't want to fiddle with the real cake too much and risk damaging it.)  In Photoshop  I removed the brown smile line on the left side of the face, but that didn't look good.

I moved the big lips and centered them under the eyes, but that didn't look good either (didn't look drunk enough).

In the end I just went with the Big Lip version.

And after all my angst, Laura loved the cake.  But I have to admit she was a little drunk by the time she saw the cake.  30th birthdays will do that to a girl.

 Happy Decorating Folks,

Carol



Supply List: 

Mona Lisa White Fondant
Red Fondarific
Black Fondarific
14" Cake Drum
Wilton Gum-Tex Tylose Powder
Alligator Impression Mat (used on the fondant covering the cake drums)
Funky Upper Case Letter Cutters
Funky Lower Cake Letter Cutters