As I've been settling into my stay-at-home-mom-ness and figuring out how to keep an infant entertained while doing other things, I've become obsessed with baking and decorating. Maybe it's from watching too many episodes of Cake Boss on Netflix while nursing Lily.
Before Christmas I got my first set of piping tips and pastry bags. I decided to make some snowflake cookies for my mother-in-law's birthday. Since speed is a priority with a baby around, I used a boxed sugar cookie mix and vanilla frosting from a can. I decided to just make drop cookies so they would be irregularly shaped and then paint on a background color before piping the detail. I mixed some of the vanilla icing with some blue gel dye and almond extract then spread it on the cooled cookies. After letting that set up for a while I piped the remaining white vanilla icing in snowflake patterns. It wasn't nearly as hard as I expected it to be. I think they turned out pretty cute, and they were REALLY delicious with the almond frosting. I need to work on keeping my hands steady to make straighter lines, and figure out how to lift up the tip without creating that little tail of icing.
After my early success, I went my usual way and took things to the extreme. I started looking into culinary and cake decorating schools. Because clearly, I had found my calling. Turns out culinary school is expensive. So, I decided to just go it alone. There's a YouTube video for everything, right?
For Christmas, Joe and I decided to make a Yule Log to bring to my mom's house. The first step was to pipe the holly leaf and berry decorations so they could harden for a couple of days. Again, I used my trusty vanilla icing in a can and added some leaf green dye gel. Using a leaf tip, I piped a V-shape of leaves. Again, it was way easier than I expected. Then I kneaded some taste-less red gel dye with marzipan for the berries. They looked so good! I would have liked a darker green color for the leaves, but this was close enough.
Then on Christmas Eve we baked the cake, mixed the filling, and rolled it up. We used a combination of recipe. We got the cake recipe from All Recipes (one of my favorite recipe sites) and the filling recipe from Cooks Illustrated. We were making it a day ahead so the simple whipped cream filling would have fallen and made the cake all soggy. The mascarpone cheese helped stabilize it. We decided to not use any espresso, but a touch of vanilla extract instead. We sculpted the mushrooms out of marzipan. You can't see it in this picture but the have little stubby stems and I scored the bottoms of the caps with a knife to look like little gills. I tried to make marzipan pinecones from marzipan mixed with cocoa powder. They ended up looking like poop, so they became brown mushrooms instead. The joy of sculpting with marzipan is if it looks bad you just mush it up and start again.
Christmas morning I frosted the cake with whipped chocolate frosting from a can and dragged a fork through it to make it look like bark. I arranged the mushrooms artfully and dusted them with confectioner's sugar and cocoa powder to look like a little bit of dirt and snow. Finally, I was ready to add my piped holly leaves! I made 8 in case something happened to them. That was a good thing because I managed to crack every one of them trying to get them from the parchment paper to the log. So the least destructed one was placed on and partially repaired. Apparently frosting in a can doesn't set up as well as freshly made royal icing. Oh well. The cake was absolutely delicious, and I'm pretty proud of the way it turned out.
As Lily gets older and more tolerant of being somewhere other than in my arms I'm looking forward to experimenting with different cake recipes and decorating techniques. I want to find some natural food coloring agents and see what all I can do with only organic ingredients. So if you're in the Chicago area and you want a delicious homemade semi-experimental cake, I'm you're girl.
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