The Rest of Jacki's Cooking Adventures and Recipes

I've been making a few cakes lately for BF's work. As a result, I had some fondant kicking around, so since BF's birthday was last Sunday I decided to make him a cake!

It was supposed to be tiny. After all, there are only two of us and since we haven't lived here very long we don't have a lot of friends here and didn't throw a party.

So I used my smallest pan, a 6" round and made three layers. When I asked BF what flavour he wanted, the only answer I got was "fruit", so I made a basic yellow cake with a little almond extract and threw in loads of blueberries. I cooked up a strawberry sauce on the stove and used that to fill between the layers. As I was assembling it, I felt like I was playing with an easy bake oven because the layers were so small.

I frosted the cake with vanilla-almond buttercream, and covered the whole thing with a thin layer of marshmallow fondant. I learned that the taller the cake, the tougher it is to cover with fondant because the edges wrinkle more the further down you go. I didn't manage to get it perfectly smooth, but it was fine for just the two of us.

The lion and the tiger are made of fondant as well. This was my first attempt at making figures out of fondant and I think they turned out pretty cute! They were about three inches long and two inches tall. I made them ahead of time so they would have time to dry, but when I tried to link their tails together when I set them on the cake, the tiger's tail broke off! So I had to redo it, but it turned out good in the end.

I just did a basic bead border out of buttercream at the the bottom. See how much better I matched the icing colour to the fondant this time?

For how small it was supposed to be, it still made way too much. BF and I each had a slice, he took half of what was left to his work and it fed his whole team! And there's still half left in the fridge.

The flavours came out amazing, the cake was super moist, so I'm really happy with it! I think I'm getting better at making cakes!

Posted by Jacki at 12:06 PM 3 comments    

I know I haven't posted in quite a long time, but I made some cookies this weekend that I thought were too cute not to post.

Somehow it came to my attention that when flipped upside down, a tulip cookie cutter looks just like a PacMan ghost.

And once I had this information, I couldn't get it out of my head. I had no good reason to bake cookies, but for some reason I couldn't resist. So here they are:
They're just basic sugar cookies with royal icing. The sugar cookie recipe is from allrecipes here and the royal icing recipe is posted here. I used a Wilton tulip cutter for the ghosts (about 1.5") and a circle cutter for PacMan. I had a tiny little triangle cutter that I used to cut out his mouth, but a knife would work just as well. And the dots were made with a tiny circle cutter.

It took two batches of royal icing. I divided it into half cup portions and coloured one red, one orange, one yellow, one blue and one the lightest purple I could do (because the ghost is almost white in the game) and I left one bowl white. Each of these I diluted with water slightly to make them runny enough that I could just dip the cookies in. Then I took another 1/4 cup of white and coloured another 1/4 cup black in a stiffer consistency to pipe the eyes. I piped the whites of the eyes with a #5 tip and the blacks with a #3 tip.

I'm thrilled with how cute they turned out. And of course a batch of cookies makes more than eight little one inch cookies. So I made some more!

264 cookies. Or as BF says, 256 bits plus a byte.

I'm not sure why I felt the need to individually pack them neatly into bags, I think it's because I want to make sure that anyone who eats them gets a complete set so they can play with them first! BF is going to bring some to work and so am I, but I haven't figured out what to do with the rest of them yet.

Posted by Jacki at 10:27 AM 4 comments