Rockin' Drum Set Cake

Not everyone can actually say with seriousness that they have a cool boss. We can. Just last week, our boss turned 40 and we seized the opportunity to celebrate the occasion/embarrass him. I took on the responsibility of baking a cake suitable for the event. Our boss loves chemistry like nothing else, but this seemed too easy and obvious a choice for the cake. Instead I focused on one of his hobbies: drumming.

With the help of Chris, we designed and built a platform (using a sheet of plywood, 1/2" dowels, 1/4" dowels, and small wood discs) to hole several cake drums and fondant cymbals in a configuration including 5 drums (two toms, big tom, snare, and bass) and a "cushioned" stool. For the most part, the small drums for the various platforms were pretty straightforward; what was challenging was the bass drum. Cake typically hates to be turned on its side. It settles, crumbles, falls over, and never looks the way you want it in the end. I took a page from the Hometown Homage cake and constructed the bass drum of rice krispie treats. When covered in buttercream and fondant, it looks just like a cake but has better structural integrity. The other challenge for this cake were the cymbals. For these, I used fondant treated with a little gumtex (to firm it up more and help it dry out) and templated them with teacup saucers. I punched little holes in their centers and suspended them on top of the 1/4" dowels.

Overall, I was very very pleased with the outcome and I think the boss was pretty excited about it too. The only drawback to this design is that there isn't really enough cake to serve a large group. To make up for that, I prepared about 70 cupcakes in three different varieties.

Alligator!!!

For some reason I know an unnaturally large number of people who share February 7 as their birthday. For instance, my grandmother Kiki would have been 100 this year (and she wouldn't have let us forget it either if she had lived so long). In addition to Kiki, my boss' little son turned 7 this year (lucky 7!). As it turned out, our annual Super Bowl party also fell on that day. So my boss' son wouldn't feel like a bunch of old graduate students stole his birthday, we decided to sing to him at half time. I volunteered to make cupcakes and turned out 36 of the little treats. As I planned my treats, I realized that I just didn't want to serve up generic cupcakes but wanted to produce something a little kid would love. After one of my exhaustive google searches, I saw a picture of this alligator cupcake "cake" in which 24 cupcakes were arranged and decorated to look like a fierce(ish) alligator. Such imagination! Unfortunately, the book had been checked out of my local library and I was forced to figure it out from the pictures online.

I whipped up 24 vanilla cupcakes and then frosted them with the help of my handy pastry bag with green vanilla frosting to look like they were each covered in lizard scales. Next I bought some Keebler chocolate covered grahams and carefully cut them into little isosceles triangles for the ridges on his back. From a box of Runts candy, I fished out all the yellow banana candies to use as claws. Finally, the teeth and eyes were fashioned out of large marshmallows that I either cut to size and shape, or covered in frosting and m&m's. Lastly I arranged them as shown. In all, it took about 2 hours.

To complete the "cake" I made 12 chocolate cupcakes and topped them with vanilla frosting and silver sugar sprinkles. I melted some semisweet chocolate and used my pastry bag to pipe "Happy Birthday Harry" onto a piece of parchment paper. After a few hours in the fridge, it was hard enough to stand up on the chocolate cupcakes as in the picture below. If you do this, just make sure the chocolate is at least 1/4" thick so it doesn't fall apart.

This was my first cake for such a young kid, but it was fun to do something more whimsical than my usual fare.

Black and White and Cake All Over

It's been a little while now since I baked like a maniac. Fortunately, one of my labmates again gave me a good excuse to destroy my kitchen. We decided to go with 4 dozen cupcakes and a two-tiered cake to match! I was really conflicted over what kind of cake I wanted to do. For some reason I was just stumped. Then, it came to me. My bedroom curtains were the perfect inspiration! I have an eclectic mix of black and white striped and black and white floral curtains in my bedroom that made for what might be my favorite cake yet. I decided to add to the mix of patterns by stacking a round cake on top of a square one.

On the cupcake side of things, I went with 4 different designs to give everyone a good choice. First off were vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream adorned with pearlized silver sprinkles and gold-dusted white chocolate "J" pieces. Second were (my favorite) red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing adorned with silver sprinkles and gold-dusted dark chocolate finials (generously gold-dusted by E.!). Also with cream cheese icing were a set of carrot cake cupcakes (easy as pie to make!). Finally, I went with a unique caramel cupcake with a caramel buttercream (E. and I ate all the extra out of my bowl!) and spun sugar abstract decorations on top. All this baking taught me one thing: I need to make cupcakes more often. The most difficult thing: keeping Chris away from all the cupcakes for any appreciable amount of time.

I was very pleased with how it all turned out and even more surprised we got everything to the park in one piece! I had good help with the transport. Hopefully there will be more cupcakes in the future.

Hometown Homage

Yesterday another one of our labmates graduated and as is becoming the custom, I made the cake. It's been a little while since I made a big cake (and as such I must have forgotten saying I would never make one during the work week again), so I was itching to do something big and extravagant. Our labmate is moving on to a postdoctoral position in New York and this is where I drew my inspiration. What better way to instill excitement about his upcoming NY adventure than an homage to my own hometown in cake? I went with a 2-tiered blue fondant white cake with vanilla buttercream. The bottom tier was rectangular while the top tier was a small round cake offset from the center of the lower tier. Around each cake I depicted silhouettes of the city in black fondant (tip: buy black fondant, don't dye it yourself!). The lower tier had silhouettes of the city skyline while the upper tier had a Brooklyn bridge silhouette wrapping it. Both cakes had the little yellow "Broadway lights" along their lower border (and great thanks to Chris's little sister for rolling all those for me!). On top of the round cake I thought I would mould a "Big Apple" our of rice cereal treat (great trick for keeping it light) and cover it with fondant. To finish it off, a Broadway street sign, a few subway line signs, and a little "I Heart NY" sign surrounded the big apple. For the first time ever, the cake I served actually looked like the picture I drew. Maybe I'm getting a little better at this or maybe I'm becoming more realistic about what I can accomplish in a week's time in cake (likely the latter).

Birthday Cake, Anyone?

This Saturday will be my 26th birthday and I'm happy to share it with our great friend, Andy! Some of you may also know that Chris' birthday was just last week. Of course this calls for birthday cake! I put this little guy together over Wednesday and Thursday nights after work. It's a 2 tier, blue and yellow, birthday gift cake with a great big blue fondant bow on top. I added a few little yellow bows on the first tier to jazz it up a bit too.

Cakes Galore!

Lately, I've been making a lot of cakes for graduations and just for fun. Here are the three most recent cakes. All of them use a recipe for white cake from "The Joy of Cooking," which is a cake that is both light and strong enough to hold fondant and other heavy decorations. It really has a great taste and texture. For fillings, I use primarily vanilla or chocolate buttercreams (the Wilton recipes). Because these icings use shortening they seem to hold up longer. They taste great too!

This cake was based on "Oh the Places You'll Go" by Dr. Seuss and was made for my sister's graduation from college. All the letters are made from fondant (painfully cut out with a craft knife!) and the hot air balloon was painted with "paint" made by mixing powdered food colorings with small amounts of clear vanilla extract.

This cake was another graduation cake for a colleague who had just completed his Ph.D. I tried to create (from fondant) elements of his thesis while using the Caltech colors to accent the cake. All the decorations are made from fondant and painted with black food coloring "paint."

I call this my celebration cake. It was made for the same party as the one just above it as a graduation cake for a group of graduates. These decorations had to be prepared several days ahead of time, so I used gum paste instead of fondant. This might be my favorite cake so far.