Surprise!

Wow, so much has happened in this past week! For starters, I graduated from college. These past four years I have been studying for my Bachelors Degree in Health and Environmental Studies at Luther College in the cute little town of Decorah, Iowa. I know what you are thinking... why the heck did I go to Iowa? Well, this place is beautiful... not your average flat, endless corn-field Iowa. Decorah has endless bluffs, springs, valleys... it's beautiful. If you ever have the chance to visit this place... do it! Decorah is like the mecca of local foods too... A-mazing! Aaand, it is home to the best little food cooperative I have ever set foot in! I can honestly say that the saddest thing about leaving this little town is that (besides no longer living near some of the best gals anyone could ever meet - ahem, Anna, Julia, and Steph!), I am no longer a member of the Oneota Community Food Coop... removing my membership from this amazing coop was so sad that it actually brought tears to my eyes. Yes, I can be emotional at times, but still... this was a big deal!

So now I am settled back into my little apartment in Hopkins, Minnesota and am very happy to have my kitchen and kitten back. She's such a goof...

So of course, with graduation season here and all, there are cakes abound! Wahoo! My boyfriend's little brother is graduating from high school this year, so I will be making the graduation cake for his party during the first weekend of June. He requested a marble cake and since I have a wicked awesome chocolate cake recipe, I wanted to make sure it went well when 'marbled' (yep, making a new term up here!) with my yellow cake recipe. Ooooh I loove experimenting in the kitchen!!

In my mind, the moistness of a cake can make or break it... basically, cakes are never moist or chocolatey (yep, another new word) enough. So a while back, when I originally started putting my chocolate cake recipe together, I made sure that I took care of that problem!

Being that I am such a chocolaholic, I have not used my yellow cake recipe as much as the chocolate cake recipe... which means I also needed to experiment a bit more with the yellow cake recipe. The key to making my chocolate cake so moist is the hot coffee (and it has to be hot!). I have found that by adding this pippin' hot ingredient, not only does using coffee accent the rich chocolate flavor of the cake, but the high temperature also helps blend all the dry ingredients together.

I believe so strongly in this hot coffee technique, that I'm even using the last of my Oneota Coop coffee beans. Ahh!

I knew I either wanted to add hot milk or hot coffee and in the end, I decided to go with the coffee because, well... how awesome if the secret ingredient in my yellow cake could be coffee?! (F.Y.I. - I love coffee)

In the end however, I found that while adding hot coffee to your yellow cake recipe does improve the moistness, it also dampens the flavor the cake gets from the eggs... making the yellow cake not taste so much like a yellow cake. It's tasty, but it's not yellow cake. So, I will be using hot milk the next time I make yellow cake.

So the next day, after the cake had a night to rest, I began the fondant expedition! Some of you may remember my previous fiasco with fondant, and for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about... good. Lets keep it that way! One of my first blog posts documents that horrific fiasco... yikes. All I am going to say is that it was bad and you should never try to take the easy way out when making fondant. Anyway, I now have the proper ingredients (glucose syrup and glycerin), which made all the difference.

I have heard that you can use corn syrup in place of the glucose syrup but after my last fiasco, I didn't want to cut any corners. The biggest key to workable fondant is that you don't knead the fondant for too long - the fondant will begin to crack and will lose its play-doh like qualities.

Also, be careful with the food coloring. A little goes a long way. I went with neon blue for this cake and it only took five drops to accomplish this orchid-blue... yay!

Once I finished draping fondant onto the cake, I decided to play around with some Ghirardelli chocolate... because I just couldn't resist.

Although this cake was mainly used as a test run for my marble cake and fondant recipe, I had to decorate it. Using wax paper that's been taped to a paper printed with my template, I put melted Ghirardelli chocolates into a squeeze bottle and traced the template onto wax paper. A word of advice: it is best to use candy melts to do this but since I loove the taste of these 60% cocoa chips, I couldn't resist! (the candy melts will dry hard and stay that way, but the cocoa chips take forever to set and will easily melt at room temperature or when touched).

By the way, my kitten Lila has a fortress on top of the cabinets in the kitchen. She watched this whole process. She thinks I'm crazy.

The next decoration on this cake was not edible, but I was getting tired and am not great at making edible flowers (not yet anyway! - I will be attending a class on this soon, yay!).

I used pins and artificial flowers...

They turned out well. I put golden luster dust on the cake and the flowers... it looks better in person than in the pictures...

Lastly, I wrapped a little yellow streamer around the bottom half of the cake's rim to match the golden luster dust. I have been obsessed with combining yellow and blue lately.

There you have it! I finally put together a reliable, from-scratch fondant recipe. Ta-da!!

Don't rush it... and don't take it out on the cat

Yesterday I began a project involving cake bites and fondant. The cake turned out well for what I was to use it for. Surprisingly, the cake recipe was not nearly sweet or chocolaty enough, however that should have been expected since there was no butter involved and bittersweet cocoa was the only source of chocolate. I followed tips found in "The Essence of Chocolate", by John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg- in That Chocolate Cake recipe, the water is brought to a boil and then mixed in with the other ingredients. I liked this technique as it improves the cake's texture, helps with blending, and brings out the flavors of the cocoa and sugar. The mixture was quite soupy when put into the oven, but came out nice and moist after 40 minutes.

After allowing the chocolate cake to cool, it was crumbled into a bowl and mixed with cream cheese frosting. After dipping my hands into a fresh bottle of olive oil, I began forming 2 to 2-1/2 inch balls, placing them on wax paper. So far so good right?

Knowing the cake bites would be far more workable if I refrigerate them for a few hours or even put them in the freezer for an hour, I was far too anxious for the end product... I decided to continue with room-temperature cake bites. Since the idea was to wrap a fondant bow around them and turn them all into little presents, I proceeded to shape the balls into squares. The chocolate bark was melted and ready so I began dunking my little chocolate presents in the bath of brown bark.

First cake bite out, on the parchment paper, and looking good! Second cake bite out, on the parchment paper, and also looking good! Okay, so this might be just as easy as dunking bon bons in chocolate for Christmas right? Nope, not really even remotely that simple- I soon found that with the more time each cake ball spent at room temperature, the less the cream cheese frosting seemed to act as an adhesive. Eventually, after covering only half a pan of cake bites, I found myself with not only lumpy square cake balls, but was even stuck with lumpy chocolate bark since each ball that went in for a dunk lost chunks of cake in the process. I soon concluded that it would be easier if I take the time to cool all of the cake bites and then proceed with the dunking (using a new, non-lumpy, batch of melted chocolate bark).

Two hours later I returned to the remainder of my now chilled cake bites and proceeded with the dunking. Pleased with the ease of forming and dunking the remaining bites, I dove straight into preparing the fondant... after all, the fondant recipe I was following recommended allowing 10 minutes of preparation start to finish...Half an hour later I was still kneading the fondant. I decided to call it a night. Finally the next morning I took a deep breath and dove back into my fondant mode. The heap of mushy white stuff, presumably fondant, from the night before remained the same: a sugary mess. I decided to soldier on and follow the recipe since I have doubted myself before while in the middle of a recipe and voila... by the end, things always seem to turn out like the recipe says it will, right?. Pulling out my fondant recipe once more, I looked to where I had left off: "...roll fondant out on a clean surface that has been dusted with confectioners' sugar until it is 1/8 inch thick or thinner... cut into strips to make bows and other decorations." Yes, my heap of fondant was complete... and yet it was not smooth and play-doh-like, but was coarse, grainy, and not even remotely elastic-like. All I could do at this point was keep going and hope for the best.

Removing the cake bites from the fridge made me wish I had a better air conditioner- my chocolate-covered cake bites were now starting to sweat. Great. Rolling the now yellow-dyed fondant onto the sugar-covered counter top and thinly slicing a ribbon, I moved the fondant to my first cake bite specimen. I gently worked to lay the fondant atop a line of sticky chocolate frosting (aka glue) already in place on the cake bite, which was lining where the fondant ribbons would go. Well over 30 minutes later, I finished my first cake bite. Sweating and frustrated, I threw down the toothpick I was using to shape the fondant and subdued to trashing the "short cut" fondant recipe. Leaving the house in search of what I would need to make fondant the right way, I tried to find the lesson I was to learn since I knew there had to be one somewhere within that thick mess of a fondant pile.

Now, hoping this is my last lesson on the short-cut subject, I confess that I have learned the hard way that it is best to not take the short cut or easiest way out in baking... and that no matter how much your kitten may love to jump up and clamp her claws into your beautiful silk tablecloth, you should not take your lack of fondant skills out on her... sorry Lila.

I am now on a hunt for glycerin and glucose syrup, once I have found these ingredients I will be right back at the forefront of fondant making. Until then, it's time to make bread!

Update! I have mastered fondant! I am now forging my way through mounds of fondant and am making and selling cakes with a fondant recipe that I actually designed!