My first Wedding Cake

So, you want to know how this happened?  Yeah, me too. 

Ok, ok.  I'll fill you in on the parts I remember.  Luckily I took pictures of most of it to help me remember to just say NO! the next time someone asks me to make an all buttercream cake for a wedding again.  j.k.  Kind of.  If it pays enough, I'll do it. :)

Up first: mixing the batter:

I used this chocolate cake recipe.  

It was pretty good, and it held up well with just a few crumbs.  Another plus is that it baked up pretty flat and even, Good news for any baker!  And the wedding guests seemed to like it. :)

After the mixing came the pouring and baking:

We used three sizes for the cake: these two are 10' and 6'.  You should use a heating core (the silver thing in the middle) for any cake 10' or larger.  It will bake more evenly and be friendly. :)

This is the bottom layer, at 14'.  Not to shabby. 

P.S.  I used Wilton's Cake Release and the cakes came out fabulously with no sticking!

A quick long trip into the oven and the cakes were done.

You know it's done when your toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs attached.

This is how I looked/felt after 3 hours of baking, with more to come.  Literally we mixed, baked and cleaned from 5:30pm-1am.  Not fun!  What was fun was wearing my new chef's coat and apron!

For the night, to aid in icing, we wrapped all layers with Saran Wrap and had them chill out.  This helped with the stacking/icing crumb issue I was anticipating.

Making the icing was the easy part.  I used this icing.

I started with the middle 10' layer, but followed the same steps for all of them.  First, I unwrapped the layers and decided which would be the bottom.  Then I put some buttercream on top.

And stacked the next layer on top, bottom side up.  I find that usually the bottom side is the easiest to ice, but any side up is generally ok.

At this point, I measured all layers to be between 4 and 5 inches tall.

And I might have been a little obsessive about making sure they were all level.  I used the extra cake pieces I shaved off the tops to splint up layers that were not level.

Start by icing the sides with the icing tip to make sure your crumbs don't show.  Looking back, I probably would have done two coats of icing just to make sure it was completely crumb free, but one coat held up just fine.  :)  Then we used the icing tip to ice the top and were very meticulous in making sure the icing was as smooth as we could make it. 

Now, I would generally use a crusting buttercream so that I could use the famous paper towel "iron" method to ensure proper smoothness, but this buttercream did not crust.  It says it was supposed to, so I was super bummed.  I guess this is why you are supposed to test out the recipes before hand.  Oh well.

After all of the layers were iced, we transported them to the church and assembled.

Sorry there are no pics of the process, It took all I had to make sure that I didn't mess up the cake at this point.  We did have one stacking error and the middle tier fell mid-stack and we had to fix the icing on the bottom tier, but all in all the stacking was fairly easy.  (again, we used the bubble tea straws to aid)

Simple Ribbon was placed around the bottom of each tier to hide the board and flowers were arranged and placed inside.  (using cake picks, of course).

birds eye view

And, viola.  Done.  

Being poor turns me into a farm girl. :)

In other news, I'm broke.  But that's ok, because it provided me with this blog post:  Butter.

That's right.  I said butter.  I think it's an important thing to learn how to make properly.  Ready to learn?

Wait!  Let's back up a bit.  First you need to know that I taught my kids about the inventions of Benjamin Franklin this week.  This is important because he invented a rocking chair that churned butter while you rock.  So I thought it fitting to make butter with them on Friday as a treat.  We did it the old fashioned way, to fully understand and appreciate the importance of Ben's rocking chair.  So I poured some cream into jars, added salt and food coloring and let them at it.  Shake, shake and shake.  And 30 minutes later we had butter!  Exciting, I know.

I have had that story in the back of my mind all weekend, so you can understand why when I went to make the poor folk food of Mac&Cheese and didn't have butter, I was sad.  All was remedied and my eyes lit up when they spotted the leftover Heavy Whipping Cream in the back of the fridge!

I decided to use my kitchen-aid mixer to make it for me, cause lordy knows I'm not gonna shake rattle and roll all night long just for some food.  :)

Next time you find yourself at a loss for butter, try this:

Take some heavy cream and a dash of salt and toss them into your favorite mixing bowl.  Turn on the beater (I used the paddle attachment and then traded for the whisk.  Both should work fine.)

This should sound familiar.  And look familiar after awhile.  These are the same steps you use when making whipped cream.

Only, keep mixing after you reach the whipped cream stage.  It will begin to look like this, and flatten out.  I scrapped the sides at this stage.

After a bit, it will turn into butter chunks and buttermilk.  I had to dump some of the buttermilk and then keep mixing because of all the splashing!

When it looks like this, strain the buttermilk out.

You need to add cool water and kneed the butter together by hand.  Keep dumping the water and adding more until the water runs clear.  When it does, you will have the best butter ever!

Yummo.

Double yum!  Enjoy!

Peanut Butter Pie

I promise this story ends in peanut butter pie--bear with me. :)

So my grandma came to camp.  It's true...I have proof.  

See!  As I was saying, Grandma came to camp.  And I took her driving on the golf cart and we passed the archery field.  This is when she said "I haven't shot since I was young!"  So we fixed that...and yes, she shot as a blind person and made the bullseye.  She's a bad-a.  Anyhow, after all of this activity Mom Gma and I went to the Hick's house to eat.  You haven't heard of it?  Yeah, it's in Utopia...go there.  And eat...then eat some more!  GOOOD FOOD!

So while there Gma decided to take a pie home since she was stuffed and couldn't eat anymore.  She chose Cherry...this is why I love her so much!  In our discussions on pie she confessed that Peanut Butter Pie is her favorite, but we Southerners cannot make it correctly.  It never tastes like her mom made it.  Then she went ranting and raving about how good her sister's Peanut Butter Pie is.  

So of course, I took out my phone and emailed Aunt Edie for the recipe--This is why I love technology.  I got quite the prompt reply with a recipe and purposed in my heart to make this pie for my grandma.  Now, I am probably not the best pie maker in the world, so I am hoping that this pie tastes like what it is supposed to taste like.  

It's pretty easy to make, just mix Powdered Sugar with peanut butter using a 2-3 ratio, spread most of it in the bottom of a pre-baked 9inch pie shell, whip up some vanilla custard, pour on top of peanut butter mixture, and then top with remaining mixture.  Serve chilled.

Advise:  Don't try to make pie crust with fake nails.  I think I'll be digging flour and water from under the tips for days.  (yes, i know that sounds disgusting...I promise I washed my hands!)    

More Advise:  Pie made with love is sure to make a Grandma happy be.  So do it.  NOW!

The cake of all Cakes

Ok…so I promised I would blog about this crazy undertaking.  Here it is.

*Don’t try this at home.  Or, at least, don’t try it without supportive friends and people to help lend a hand.  Or five.  J  These things are necessary.

So, the objective was to effectively surprise our friend/Camp Director on her birthday with a massive cake that depicts some major elements of Camp La Jita.

This started with a brainstorming session, followed by lots of planning.  IT was intense.  We thought through every detail, wrote a materials list, made a hand drawn and digitalized model of the cake design.  I didn’t photo that.  You’re welcome.

Here’s a tip from me to you:  When making massive cake in the middle of nowhere, don’t forget the eggs.  Yes, that happened.  After returning to Camp with all of our purchases of pans, fondant, cake mix (yes, I admit I used it—was a safe bet when so much could have gone wrong), coloring, and decorating materials I realized that we had forgotten the most important part:  eggs and oil.  Luckily, we had oil at Camp…but eggs; that was another story.  Lesson learned.  And thank God the Pico had a couple dozen to get us started.

Step one was baking.  Starting at the Bottom:  Storybook Tree.  This is the inspiration.

We wanted to get the hole, because that is the most important part of the tree.  I knew it needed to be big, so we decided upon 4 layers-2 yellow and 2 chocolate, filled with vanilla pudding, chocolate icing and butter cream between the two flavors.  Advise?  Buy more than one 16in round to bake it in.  You’re welcome.

Stacking of the layers came next.  More Advise?  Don’t try to be a hotshot.  Things will collapse and crumble on you.  That’s right kids.  I thought I would be smart and stack the yellow layers and then the chocolate layers and then pile them together.  Not my best idea.  Carving came next, rather quickly.  It’s a good thing this layer was supposed to look like a tree, the crumbling made it more life like.

Luckily icing is like glue.  It’s holds things together…in this case bits of cake that crumbled on my as I tried to be super awesome.  Luckily.

We stuck the cake in the freezer for about 30 minutes to further hold things together, and then Livy rolled out 4 lbs of chocolate fondant to cover.  We molded the fondant to look bumpy , then used a knife to mark up the sides a bit and finished by brushing on black food coloring with a paper towel.  Some tools can’t be bought in a cake shop.

Here is the 360 of that layer.

Let’s take a short break to discuss what happened while I was waiting upon the tree layers to bake.  Fondant figures.  It’s like play dough for grown ups.  Only, it melts in the humidity.  This is where the walk in refrigerator became our best friend.

Here is the progression of mine.

And here is Twinkle.  I told her it looked at little “come and get it”.  She crossed her legs in the end.  J

Then came the Archery Field layers.  These would be marble with peanut butter filling.  Yummo.  This was by far the easiest layer.  We leveled the tops, stacked them together and iced.  Easy. 

This is the icing done on the sides, and top, and just needs to be blended.  A small spatula will do the job.  Just roll it down on the sides and smooth away. 

A quick cool down in the fridge while we rolled out the Green fondant.  More advise?  Be nice to your fondant.  Keep it cool.  It’s best to roll out fondant in a cool place, on a cool tabletop.  Not like I did, at 3 pm on a 100 degree day, with 50% humidity.  After 3 failed attempts, we put our melting, ripping fondant in the freezer to chill out.  Then we rolled it out once more and smoothed it out.  Yes, there were a few holes and some ripping but we decided it was as good as it was going to get.

The Archery pieces were easy as pie, roll out fondant, paint, apply to cake.  Confession?  I was worried about stacking the layers together.  I should not have been.  Super easy.  We ordered Boba Tea straws (the Charm City Cake blog recommends them) for this purpose. 

We stuck one in the cake all the way down, marked about 2mm above the top of the cake (so the cardboard from the next layer didn’t stick to the fondant).  Scissors allowed me the snip off the excess and make sure all straws were the same height.  Once they were all cut, we stuck them in the cake and plopped the Archery Field on top.

That same day we being the crazies we are decided to work on the Council Rock layer.  I so wish I had an inspiration picture of this, unfortunately, I forgot to take one.  Maybe I’ll do that this week so you can see that I’m not crazy.  Go with it.  Council rock is an area right next to the river that is carved into steps.  We have our weekly campfire here.  It’s also one of my favorite spots on camp to go when you want to be alone.  Good times.

We baked up some lemon layers and filled it with lemon pudding.  The carving of this one went slightly better than Storybook tree.  Icing was simple, but if you try this, be careful.  Lemon cake has a higher moisture content so it tended to crumble more than I expected.  Covering with fondant was simple.  We used white fondant.  Then we shaped and molded to make it look rocky.  And then came the fun part.

We bought Wilton Grey Spray Food Coloring and PME Silver Luster Spray to use to make it look two toned and rocky.  I recommend using the Grey and then Silver.  This is one thing we did right the first time.  Yea us!  More Advise?  Don’t use the PME Silver Luster Spray to paint your teeth into a grill.  I hear it is not pleasant.  You can double check this with Livy, but I think she’d agree.

The fire was also made with fondant, and this layer was stacked the same way.  That spot with the trees?  Yeah, It cracked and looked a little lumpy, so I covered it with another aspect of camp...the nature trail.  These things happen.

You still there?  Good.  It was about this time in the cake making when I wanted a break too.  Hang in there, it’s almost done.

Our final layer was the bell tower.  Again, I forgot to photo this inspiration, but trust me, the final product looks almost identical.  Minus the shape is a square and not a rectangle.  And Minus the real thing has a real bell.  But identical.  Trust.

I found a handy little house pan made by Wilton at my local Michaels store.  This was dandy, cause I was worried about how to make the roof overhang without it toppling over.  This part was super easy…just bake, ice and fondant.  We rolled out extra fondant to make the windows, roof and bell.  Just cut out and attach with icing, or piping gel if you don’t forget to pack it like I did.

Other must haves?  A fondant smoother.  Definitely don’t forget that one in your kitchen drawer.  You might have to make do with extra cardboard circles.  J

My final advise to you?   Just try it.  Playing with cake is fun!

Turkey Chili in a Bread Bowl

No better way to kick off this blog then with a few posts of what I've been cooking lately.

Sometimes I cook for myself, other-times I bake for orders.  Here, you'll find the best of both worlds.  

Batter Up:

Turkey Chili in a Bread Bowl.

The finished product, was so good, I ate it for the next three days.

Meet the Ingredients:

I don't know what I would do without my crock-pot, it is very handy...and for this recipe almost essential.  

Turkey Chili Recipe Ingredients

• 2 pounds ground turkey
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 4 large garlic cloves, chopped
• 1/2 cup green peppers, diced
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 2 teaspoon dried cumin
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1teaspoon chili powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1 can refried beans
• 2 15 to 16oz cans of kidney beans (not drained)

Turkey Chili Recipe Directions

In a large skillet, brown ground turkey and drain

.  Add all ingredients to crock pot except the can of refried beans.

Cover and cook on low 2 hours.  Add refried beans to chili for thickening.  Cover and cook on low for an additional 2 hours

  Here are a few tricks I have.  Use fresh oregano.  I used some Greek Oregano we have growing on our porch.  Also, when chopping onion, keep the end part attached..you won't cry this way.  And finally, to peel your fresh garlic, turn your knife flat on top of the garlic and pound it with your fist.  Viola, skin just comes right off, then chop away!  Enjoy!

You'll be seeing more of me!

I'm gonna be posting about my food things here...maybe I'll upgrade eventually to a full blown food blog, who knows?