Dinner Lately…

Last week, I made this cake for my final Wilton Fondant and Gum Paste class. Here is the recipe as promised, with a few minor modifications. This cake smells heavenly while cooking in the oven (from the bananas), and texture-wise, I’ve been told that it’s similar to carrot cake. Manipulating the cream cheese frosting isn’t as easy as using buttercream. It was actually quite messy because it was drooping everywhere. But this worked out well for my unpretentious “baby shower-like” cake. I am planning to make this cake for my mom on Mother’s Day

Ingredients

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 1 1/4 cups vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 can (8oz) crushed pineapple, well drained
• 1 cup chopped pecans
• 2 cups chopped firm ripe banana

Cream Cheese Frosting

• 16 ounces cream cheese, softened
• 1 cup butter, room temperature
• 2 pounds confectioners’ sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 to 1 cup chopped pecans

Method

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Sift flour, sugar, salt, baking soda and cinnamon together into mixing bowl several times.
2. Add eggs and oil to the dry ingredients. Stir with a wooden spoon until ingredients are moistened.
3. Stir in vanilla, pineapple and 1 cup pecans. Stir in the bananas.
4. Spoon the batter into 3 well-greased and floured 9-inch round cake pans.
5. *Bake for 25 to 30 minutes,or until a wooden pick or cake tester inserted in center comes out clean. (see note)
6. Cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn onto cooling rack. Cool completely before frosting.
7. Cream Cheese Frosting:
   Combine cream cheese and butter; cream until smooth. Add powdered sugar, beating with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Stir in vanilla.
8. *Frost the tops of all 3 layers, stack and then frost sides. Sprinkle top evenly with the 1/2 to 1 cup chopped pecans. (see note)

Source

Notes:

• I baked the cake in a 8″X8″X2″ square pan in 2 separate batches. Each batch was about half the batter and it took close to 45 minutes to be done. The batter was still able to rise after it sat on the counter for 45 minutes (phew!!).
• I then used a cake level to cut each of the layers to two, making it a 4 layer cake. BIG MISTAKE! there was so much stuff in the cake that it made a huge mess when I tried to cut the cake. Next time, I’ll just get another pan.
• Use Wilton’s cake lifter to stack the cakes on top of each other so that the layers do not crumble in half in front of your eyes. THIS IS A HEAVY CAKE.
• Because this was a decorated cake, I did not sprinkle the pecans on top per the instructions.  
• Again, THIS IS A HEAVY CAKE! One layer of cake cardboard cake board was not able to hold the weight of this cake without caving in down the center. Use something sturdier than a piece of cardboard, or simply get 2 layers of cardboard.
• The cream cheese frosting gets messy and droopy as you work with them. Putting them back into the fridge seems to help solidify the frosting.

I cannot contain my excitement any longer, must post this before I go to bed
This is my final cake for my Wilton cake deco class series. The baby booties were made using fondant & gum paste mix and I found a template online. This was not taught in class. I will share the instructions here  tomorrow. The green flowers were “modified” daisies, and they were meant to be mums. The cake is made from scratch this time, and it’s called Hummingbird cake.

This cake will be so darn cute for a baby shower or “full moon”!

Will also post full review of the Wilton classes on my blog in near future (this Saturday)

This is the cake that I made tonight. I was supposed to make the flowers out of royal icing or buttercream but I was gone last weekend so the flowers will not be dry enough for cake assembly. The objective of the class was to learn how to tier the cake, so I did some research online for some designs.

Basically, I covered the cakes with fondant and the transferred the rose pattern onto the cake using piping gel. Then I piped buttercream on the gel and used a wet brush to paint the edges in. This is called brush embroidery technique. We learned this in our first class for Course 3. I’ve read that you should use royal icing instead, but my teacher taught us using buttercream. The only difference is that royal icing dries hard.

I used silk flowers between the tiers and used a ribbon to cover the imperfection of the fondant edge. I’m still having trouble getting the fondant to lay right at the edges. The ribbons were “glued” onto the cake by piping a line or a few dots of buttercream onto the cake. We’ll get to make beautiful flowers like these next week in the Fondant & Gum Paste class…

I love this cake so much, and the pink roses are the same that I’ve used at my wedding. I wish that this was my wedding cake instead

I’ve been asked to share my buttercream recipe with quite a few people, and it is a recipe that I got from my cake decorating supply store in town called Joy’s Kitchen Magic in Dearborn. This is the same buttercream and I’ve used in all of my Wilton cake decorating classes despite what the textbook says This buttercream is truly white in colour.

The buttercream recipe below yields 6+ cups, (which is A LOT) I use to ice a whole 2 layer 8″ cake plus extras for class …You may want to just make half of this and store extras. They last quite awhile during the winter in Michigan. In hot climate you might need to store in the fridge. Whip them up with the electric mixer prior to using again.

Ingredients

• 1 pound shortening (in M’sia popular good brand is Krimwell, in US it’s Sweetex) - room temperature
• 1 pound white margarine - room temperature
• 2 lbs. icing/confectioner’s sugar, sifted
• 1 cup evaporated milk (water is OK too, but evaporated milk is yummier)
• 1 tsp of flavouring (butter + vanilla, or butter + almond/orange, etc)

Method

• Cream shortening and margarine together on low to medium speed until fluffy and nicely incorporated.
• Add flavouring, beat again.
• Add sifted sugar and evaporated milk alternately until you get the consistency that you want.
• Note: Use less milk if you want stiffer consistency.

Chocolate Flavoured Buttercream
For chocolate flavoured buttercream, simply add melted unsweetened chocolate to the regular buttercream until you achieve the chocolat-ey taste that you want. I like a lot of chocolate To get the colour that you want, you can add chocolate brown icing colour to the mixture due to melted chocolate to white icing ratio being relatively small.

I had been looking forward to this class for a long time. I have heard a lot about working with fondant, and how it tastes like. It was a jam-packed class, with so much to learn in 2 hours. I’ve made the marble cake on Monday which was lightly iced and I had decided that the fondant should be in “Tiffany” blue. The colour came out nicely, and then we had to make the bow. I was going to just plain white with the whole “Tiffany” theme but decided to go with canary yellow instead. So here’s my first fondant cake, whereby the “Tiffany” blue looks more like robin’s egg’s blue. I love it so much. As for the bead buttercream border, that didn’t go too well. I had invisioned them to be perfectly oval to be consistent with the whole Easter theme but obviously my skills are not quite there yet.
We also learned to make our first fondant rose, which I’m extremely proud off. I have a hard time making my roses with buttercream and royal icing, so this turned out to be much better!

I was making a cake for tomorrow’s Wilton cake decorating class and I was trying to get creative with a box of yellow cake mix. I’ve used different fillings before, so I thought I’d try to make marble cake instead. I was looking for an easy way to make it without using too much extra ingredients, and one of the recipe I found simply required me to mix melted unsweetened chocolate with 1/3 of the yellow cake batter. Simple enough, I thought, except that when I poured it into the 8X8 pan, the batter overflowed! So I quickly lined a muffin pan with paper cups and poured the remaining batter in to make cupcakes.

They turned out quite good, but I should probably have added more sugar and melted butter or sour cream so that they chocolate parts are more moist. For the cake itself, I halved the cake when it was done and cooled, and spread leftover chocolate buttercream as filling and then covered with a light layer of vanilla buttercream icing so that it is ready to be covered in fondant tomorrow in class. I’m excited!

As for the cupcakes, I filled a piping bag with both vanilla and chocolate buttercream and piped a swirl on top. The swirls look like soft-serve ice cream! Andy was happy to see them ready for his belly