Make Stuff Monday - recent cake adventures

 

Hello my friends! Happy new year! Today I'm sharing some of my recent cake adventures!

First up...Christmas cupcakes! I saw some cute decorated Christmas cupcakes at Preppy Kitchen where he used inverted ice-cream cones as trees and just piped frosting on them to decorate them.

Of course, my icing was too runny to pipe successfully because I refused to use so much icing sugar (this was when I made American buttercream). So I just brushed the icing on the ice-cream cones and added sprinkles. The cones were not empty either, they were filled with M & Ms too. 

However, they were pretty labour-intensive so the neighbours got just ONE Christmas tree cupcake and 6 regularly frosted cupcakes while I kept the Christmas trees for the Gangster Gang (aka 3 nephews + 1 niece). It was a hit! :)

Well, I've always wanted to try my hand at making aYule log.  So I did. I went with the recipe from Delish.com with slight modifications (I reduced the sugar for everything).

It was of course, my first go at making a roll cake because you know me, let's not try a simple sugar roll cake, let's go with the more technically difficult one. *LOL* Anyway, my roll wasn't perfect but there wasn't any cracks on the cake so that's a win! (yay, go me!) And I think I did a decent job with the chocolate frosting - it looked like a log, right?

It was really really good. Since nobody in the Yam household liked Yule logs, I thought I would be able to eat this all by myself over the course of a week perhaps. No such luck. They ate it all! 

Next we celebrated my sister E's birthday. Now I made FOUR 8 inch cake layers - 2 chocolate and 2 vanilla but had to improvise and just went with 2 layers instead because I underestimated the amount of frosting that was needed to frost a cake of that size. It happens when you try to Frankenstein a cake - I went with a chocolate cake recipe from one site, a vanilla cake from another, chocolate frosting from my Yule log recipe and chocolate ganache drip from another site. 

Anyway, I present to you my first attempt at a chocolate drip cake! The vanilla portion of the cake helped to temper the chocolatey parts and I added some crunch by adding a layer of crushed Kit Kats between the cakes. Yep, empty plates all around *pats self on back*. 

Of course, since I had two cake layers that were unused, I decided that my sister would get a second cake to celebrate her Chinese birthday. So I tried my hand at an island cake. (Clearly your gal here watches way too many YouTube videos..*winks*)

There were many technical challenges with this cake:

1. I decided to cut down my cakes to 6 inches so that they would fit my 6 inch spring form pan and I could make a taller island. 

2. Of course, there was a "landslide" and the island lost some of its mountainous regions in the freezer. And I had to patch up as much as possible.

3. As I patched up the cake, it got bigger at the bottom and it wouldn't fit into the 6 inch spring form pan. And of course, I only had a 9 inch spring form pan. So I had to use that.

4. But I had already made the jelly (for the ocean) for the 6 inch pan so  I didn't have enough to fill a 9 inch pan.

5. Then of course, the pan sprung a leak so we lost even more water. 

Hence I present to you - my first island cake at low tide. (Also with no sea foam because I didn't have white gel colouring).

And did I mention that the nephews asked, "Why is there broccoli on the cake?" *LOL*

In case you were wondering...the whole cake is covered with chocolate ganache so that the jelly would not seep into the cake. I used lychee flavoured pastry cream with lychee pieces in the cake and the jelly was also lychee-flavoured to tie everything together. I also used agar agar instead of gelatine because agar agar sets at room temperature while gelatine needs refrigeration to set. 

It was surprisingly good. I am contemplating making another one. With a lot more "ocean". *hehehe*

What do you think?