Chocolate Covered Cherry Cake - Take 2

I had originally made this cake in April for our monthly office birthday party.  It turned out pretty good - had a very rich flavor to it, but I just wasn't too happy with the appearance of it.  Looking at the pictures - it developed a slight bulge around the top edge to it.  OK - but I wanted a more streamlined look to it.  So - since my boss fell in love with this cake (she lives for chocolate covered cherries) I decided to fulfill her request and do this cake again for September.  With a few changes.

This cake is a basic 10" white cake.  The first layer is trimmed, frosted with buttercream and then covered with approximately 3 boxes of chocolate covered cherries.  Which, by the way, are VERY difficult to find in the stores in September.  Who knew they were a seasonal item  - mainly for Valentine's Day and Christmas!  In the future, my friend Carli very graciously shared with me her recipe for chocolate covered cherries, so I can make this cake any time of year! 

Once I put the cherries on the cake, I frosted them with buttercream.  Basically making a 2nd layer of the cake.  Level the next layer of cake and add to the stack.  Crumb coat the entire thing with buttercream.  Then I stuck it in the fridge to chill while I got the chocolate ganache ready and crushed my Oreo's. 

Chilling the cake seemed to help the ganache to stick to it.  Last time I didn't use any ganache and had major difficulties getting the cookies to stick to the buttercream.  I just smooshed the cookies onto the ganache and then put it back in the fridge again to chill.  At this point, it was already smoother than the first cake, but I wanted to try making sure it had no bulges at all.  Once I had chilled it (for about an hour) I used a piece of wax paper and my fondant smoother on it.  It turned out beautiful and I loved that you couldn't see any white underneath the cookies. 

Pipe a few rosettes on the top with buttercream, top with maraschino cherries and a cookie and voila!  Everyone at work liked it better than the original - thought the ganache added an extra richness to the cake. 

Mum's The Word!

I've been in a slump lately.  It's been about 6 weeks since I've had a cake order and I'm going through withdrawals!  That means its time to bake and decorate.  So - the hubby got nominated (by me!) to take in cupcakes to work.  Since its September, I wanted to do something kind of fall related - hence the mum's.  However, I also wanted to use up extra sanding sugar I had, hence the spring colors. 

A friend of mine gave me the "What's New Cupcake" book recently and these nifty little cuppies were featured in them.  They turn out to be super easy to do - but a little time consuming. 

I highly recommend enlisting your child (Thanks Geoff) to help you cut the marshmallows.  I had doubled the batch in order to accommodate the hubbies work place, and you need 22 mini marshmallows for each cupcake.  I found that it was easier for me to cut the marshmallows with a clean pair of kitchen scissors, rather than trying to cut them with a knife.  I had small bowls of the sanding sugar set out and would dip about 4 marshmallows at a time in the colors.  You can easily store the marshmallows in ziploc bags if you want to do this in stages, which is what I did. 

The cuppies were white cupcakes which are frosted with buttercream and the marshmallows are adhered to them starting with the outer ring and moving inward.  The book recommends licorice pastels for stamens, but I was unable to find them in the grocery stores.  Instead, I just went ahead and filled in the centers with the marshmallows, which gave my mums a full look to them. 

This was a fun project and easy to do!  The hubbies work reported that they tasted great and looked great too! 

RV Cake

Our family loves to camp.  We started with the basic tent, moved up to a pop up tent trailer and just recently made the move up to an RV.  This was a LONG process - over 9 months.  I think we seriously had our RV sales guy thinking about running when he saw us coming.  Anyway - in order to thank Rex for all of his patience with us, I decided to make him a special cake of his own.

I have to say - I am NOT a big fan of carved cakes.  They get all crumby when you carve them and I have had troubles in the past with putting fondant over them.  This one, was actually a dream!

I started with a 1/2 sheet of triple chocolate fudge cake, split in in fourths and stacked it (with SMBC in between).  I then started angling the front with my bread knife, a little at a time.  I think I actually ended up making about 5 cuts before I got the angle right.  Once that was done, I crumb coated the whole cake with SMBC and then chilled it in the fridge.  While that was happening, I made the pine trees out of sugar cones and green royal icing and let them dry.  I also made the wheels, and the trailer hitch out of black fondant and let them all dry as well.  The hitch I put in toothpicks on the ends, so that I would be able to attach it to the trailer easily once I was done.

Remember the graduated color cake?  Remember how I made A LOT of green fondant.  Well, I used that to cover my cake board.  Things always happen for a reason.  :-)

Once the cake was chilled, I covered the entire thing with white fondant.  Once it was smoothed, I used a picture of our new RV and copied it as best as I could with the accent pieces.  The graphics were painted on with gel food coloring.  Then it was put it all on the cake board.  I had some leftover candy rocks from a golfing cake I had done, so I put them in a circle with pretzel sticks - voila!  Instant fire.

Rex loved his cake, we love our RV - life is good!