Louis' Totoro Cake

Ugh.  I am like 5 lbs heavier today.  I spent all day Saturday making this cake and *sampling* the frosting at various critical junctures.  Yeah, I was just eating the heck out of the stuff.  I couldn't stop.  It was sooo good.  And now I feel sick.  If I'd just known when to quit, I would have been fine, but there was all this delicious chocolate ganache and marshmallow fondant and...oh, God it was good.

Look.  Totoro can hardly bear to look at me...I'm that miserable.

You might be able to see from this photo just a hint of the deeeluscious ganache frosting that I poured all over this guy.  You might even be able to see where I repositioned the nose.  You have to get the nose position just right or it won't look exactly like Totoro.  I based the cake loosely on the below image.

Isn't he cute?  He's cute and the movie is cute, but watch the hell out for chocolate Totoro, he's deadly.  Deceptively sweet.  Rich and chocolatey.  Spell check says chocolatey is not a word, but I beg to differ.  Oh, Totoro, how you have destroyed my digestive peace!  How you churn away in my stomach for an eternity!  Why?!  Why did I have to eat so much of your delectable outer coating?  UUUURGH!  UUUUNG!  The pleasure!  The pain!

Oh well, happy birthday, Louis.  13 may be your lucky number, but it hasn't been mine so far.  Still, I think I may have captured the essence of the Totoro character here.  I at least can say that.  Even if I have no common sense and ate too much of the frosting while decorating, at least I have photos to prove that I'm a mean (though not so lean) cake-making Mamma.

Bryce's Dagobah Cake

Bryce always has very specific ideas about what he wants on his birthday cake.  I love this about Bryce.  I'm all too keen to accommodate his every bizarre whim.  So, when he said, "I want Dagobah," I was psyched.

He supplied the Star Wars action figures and I supplied the crazy swamp goo.  I whipped out my entire candy making arsenal on this one.  From the caramel sauce pool Yoda is standing in to the chocolate plastic gnarl trees that sprout from the swamp cake, this cake was treated with every skill I'd developed over the last year or so.

The white gooey stuff is marshmallow sauce and the frosting is my mom's traditional buttercream.  I also embellished with a few color-coordinated gummi worms.

Check out the lime Jello swamp goo on the X-Wing fighter!  Luke looks a little out of scale, but Bryce didn't care.  He was totally into the chocolate plastic gnarl trees.  Snarfed one down right after we sang the birthday song.

Candied Violets

I've been meaning to do this every year that we've lived in this house.  The far end of the backyard is heavily studded with violets every April and there's such an abundance that I find myself thinking of ways to enjoy them for longer than their very brief season.  Violets are such a mysterious flower and their sensory delights rather unexplored by the general populace.  I've sprinkled them in my bathwater.  I've gathered them up into huge bouquets and brought them to my nose, inhaled, and detected an ethereal sweetness with just a hint of old lady.  Yes, you read right, old lady.  Don't ask why, just go out and gather a bundle and you will see what I mean. 

Finally, I've read of candied violets and I have made several previous (unsuccessful) attempts at producing them, filing away what I think I may have done wrong (or right) each time.  This year, I felt I had the winning combination.  I whisked an egg white with 3-4 tbsps of sugar and got a sort of proto-meringue.  I then used this meringue to gently coat each petal.  There's really no other way to do this--you must use your fingertips.

Once your flowers are coated in the white foamy stuff, lay them on a sheet of parchment paper, preferably face-up.  Set your oven to "warm" and cycle it on and off a few times until the meringue is dry and the flowers peel up easily from the paper.  Seal the cooled candied violets in a small resealable container. 

I suspect I may use these as toppers for chocolate frosted cupcakes or crumble them on top of vanilla icecream.  I snuck a couple--so strangely sweet and delicious!

Warm up the stand mixer, mama!

After a long and foolish hiatus during which I starved myself and ate very little chocolate, I'm dusting off my baking skills and thinking about maybe enjoying life once in a while.

Exhibit A:  a chocolate ganache frosted cake.  The thing that really got me going last weekend was the fact that I'd promised a cake to the folks coordinating a fundraiser at the boys' school.  Well, one boy still goes there.  Reluctantly at first, I baked and then frosted a chocolate cake using my mama's good old-fashioned chocolate frosting recipe.  Equally as reluctantly, the boys turned the cake over to the fundraiser people.  My oldest stepson did make a valiant attempt to win the cake back, but his efforts were in vain.  Luckily for him, stepmama had an even more decadent cake on her mind, and I went to work on it that very afternoon.

The kids snacked on some mini-cupcakes (frosted with mom's basic frosting) while I baked the second cake and put together the ganache.  Ganache, as you know, is just chocolate melted in hot cream.  Many smarter people go by an actual recipe, but I just keep pouring chocolate chips into the hot cream and stirring until it "looks right."  You have to let it cool down to 68 degrees F (I use a digital meat thermometer) if you wanna frost cakes with it, but if you catch it at around 70 degrees F, you might be able to pour the ganache over the cakes for a smooth glistening chocolate outer coating.  The more glistening, the better.  So, I don't have a recipe for my ganache, but I will post here the recipe for my mom's never fail chocolate frosting recipe, because some lucky cake-walk winner out there probably really enjoyed it!

Mom's Chocolate Frosting
1 cup softned butter
1/8 tsp salt
3 cups confectioners sugar
3 oz unsweetened chocolate
1/4 cup milk
1 1/2 tsp vanilla

Beat butter with 1 cup of confectioners sugar until fluffy. Melt chocolate.  Allow chocolate to cool.
Blend chocolate into butter mixture.  Add rest of sugar, alternating with milk.  Add vanilla.

Pooh Cake

My first baby shower cake.

I based it on this map of the Hundred Acre Wood as illustrated by E.H. Shepard.

As I was plotting how to do this, I faced a number of problems. One, I had to use fondant. There was no other way to really execute the map. I knew I could water down the food coloring and get a good approximation of "paint" but it simply wouldn't have worked on regular old butter cream. I had to use fondant. I hate fondant. I've worked with the store bought stuff before and it tastes about as good as modeling clay. I needed something that behaved like modeling clay and could create a smooth canvas for my painting, but I didn't want to sacrifice flavor.

So, I'd been reading of this marshmallow fondant on various blogs and it sounded like a good deal--and pretty simple. Here's a link to the recipe on Cake Journal. One tip: when you're ready to roll it out, sprinkle sifted powdered sugar on your counter. That seemed to be the only way to get it off the board in one piece.

The other problem was paint. I was very concerned that it would bleed. I'd read somewhere that adding grain alcohol to food coloring would prevent that since it would evaporate quickly, just leaving behind the color. I didn't have any grain alcohol, so I used strawberry vodka, which seemed appropriate.

Once the cake was frosted, I draped the rolled out fondant onto it, trimmed, tucked, and set to work painting. I treated it like watercolor painting--blocking out white space for later painting and then applied some color washes in spots that I would later define with more layers of color or outline in black as in the Shepard illustration.

It was another one of those all-night-ers and the big bummer was that I had to be at the hospital early the next morning for pre-op testing (did I mention this dang gall bladder is coming out on Tuesday next? Yay!!) Alas, a gal has to have a nice cake at her baby shower. And I was determined that it should be so for my work colleague.

Ultimately, we had a very nice shower for her. Lovely flowers in vases, doilies, delicious snacks, loads of presents, and yes, the cake wasn't half-bad either.