Beer Yeast Cake!

When it comes to personal style, I have two sides. I love solids that are clean and sleek (my city girl outfits are modeled after that thought) and I love cartoon shirts (it’s the nerd and dork in me, what can I say). I may be 26, but I still love Hello Kitty, Gummi Bears, Harry Potter, Angry Girls, and anything Disney, so I rock their t-shirts! I also love t-shirts from Threadless and Think Geek.

Which brings me to this week’s cake… If you’ve never visited ThinkGeek.com, you should! It was Tyler’s birthday this past week, and seeing as Tyler is a science nerd (I say that with love) we were inspired by the giant plush microbes found on thinkgeek.com.

They have a beer yeast microbe. So, we thought it was a perfect match to his beer-tasting event.

Tyler has an appreciation for beer, so I thought we might as well continue the beer theme and make a stout cake. The recipe is from the Martha Stewart Cupcake book and it was interesting. It was a spice cake with a lot of molasses and stout. I personally think the recipe calls for too much molasses, and the next time we make the cake it will definitely have less molasses and more brown sugar added to it. I filled the cake with chocolate ganache, which helped cut the earthy taste. I then covered the cake with fondant and created beer yeast fondant figures. I thought it would be funny to have the microbes sit in a Petri dish at 100X magnification… later in the day, I thought it would even more hilarious if we saw the microbes having a little party of their own, so I added red cups.

I, personally, am not a fan of the stout cake (Tyler loved it), so I decided to make vanilla buttermilk cupcakes (my favorite!) with vanilla buttercream frosting as well.

I also made cake lollipops with the leftover stout cake and buttermilk cake. I learned this technique at Sweet and Saucy and people just love cake lollipops.

Hope you enjoyed our nerdiness!

I will be taking a break from my "1 new recipe a week" for the next 3 weeks. I do a have a couple things up my sleeve to show you, make sure to stay tuned. I can give you a small hint... our kitchen is being remodeled! Until next time, happy baking!

Hand-Painted Optimus Prime

As I mentioned, I did a Transformers themed ice cream cake today. But I didn't get a chance to talk about the decoration. So here are a few behind-the-scene pictures of Optimus Prime.

I used this image from Google as my guideline

I used modeling chocolate and fondant for the base

Because of the gradient in the colors, I had to do more hand-painting. So, I got another chance to practice my skills!!! Woohoo!

And that's it! I hope you like it!

Until next week, happy baking!

~Danielle

My First Ice Cream Cake Experience

I was asked to do an ice cream cake for a friend today and I thought it would be interesting to try it. Here is the final product with an Optimus Prime (from Transformers) decoration.

So let the story begin...

I had wanted to make an ice cream cake. I looked up directions online and it seemed easy enough... line a cake pan with cling wrap.

Spread ice cream onto cake pan, cover with more cling wrap and then re-freeze.

After a layer (or two) of cake that has baked and cooled. Stack the cake and then flip the ice cream layer on top of the cake. Sounds simple, right... Well that part was, but spreading frosting on an ice cream cake is a totally different story.

We had originally wanted to frost the cake with a chocolate ganache glaze. We poured the ganache over the cake and the ice cream started to melt immediately. I ran to the freezer and started taking things out to make room for the cake (my mind was racing, I just needed to get the ice cream back into the freezer). Sadly, we just wasted all the ganache, so I asked Tyler if he could run to the store and buy store bought frosting (I know, I don't do the store bought thing normally). Tyler came back from the store and I frosted the cake in the freezer :)

In the end, the cake worked out (I was a little worried about it melting on the drive over to the party, but luckily it didn't).

Good luck with your ice cream cake experience!