Graduation Season Part I: The Graduation Cake

This is a two-part series. I recently made a massive graduation cake and in the coming days, I will be posting a whole lot of super cute graduation cupcakes!

So I have been talking this graduation cake up for quite some time now. You know... the one that needed to feed 100+ people and was going to be covered in beautiful golden fondant?

Well, there were a dew mishaps along the way. You see, I have a killer chocolate cake recipe... and I mean killer. This chocolate cake is so moist that it will make your taste buds think they've died and gone to heaven. I designed this recipe myself (after a lot of trial and error), but have used the recipe quite a few times since evolving it, so it has stood the test of time. Unfortunately however, I have never baked this recipe in a 12x18 inch pan. So ultimately what happened (to make a very long story... so very much shorter than it really was), my chocolate cake recipe uses an oil to achieve part of its moistness and because in this scenario I was using such a large pan and was therefore using a longer baking time... all the oil separated and sank to the bottom of the pan, leaving the top half of the cake mega fluffy and dry while the bottom half was more dense than a 90 lb pound cake, yuck!

So in the end, I used a different recipe - one that was far less moist and far less chocolaty - the new recipe was more of a generic type that not even my cat could mess up if she had thumbs. Since I was using a dry cake recipe, I decided to ditch the plans of draping this cake with fondant (since fondant is really only good on a moist cake) and decided to use my buttercream recipe instead.

The graduate requested that this cake be marble so for each pan, I made two batches of chocolate cake and a quarter batch of the yellow cake. Then, it was dollop time!

Followed by swirl time!

Oh yes, and I used a TON of eggs! (and butter... of course)

The baking time for this cake was an hour... so with the weather being in the balmy 90's, I was in one hot apartment!

It took three 12x13 inch pans to assemble this cake.

After baking the cakes, I arranged them onto a large wooden board covered with foil and plastic wrap to make it pretty. Once the cake was covered in orange buttercream, I wrapped a 1-5/8 inch black ribbon around the border to tie in the school colors (black and gold) and to make the buttercream look less sloppy (after all, I had my mind set on fondant, so I struggled to comprehend that the buttercream was going to give the cake less of an elegant effect and more of a "I want to eat this cake right now" effect).

And of course, no job is ever finished until it has been attacked with cake pops...

(and no, those are not peanut butter cups, I used a candy mold to make the ridges and there's chocolate cake when you bite through the chocolate)

Then after using chocolate to glue the chocolate tops to the chocolate bottoms...

...and some lemon licorice tassels...

The graduation cap cake pops were finished!

Then since this graduate is a track and cross country athlete, I drew each sport's symbol in dark chocolate. Below is the track symbol and you can see the cross country symbol in the last picture of this post.

Lastly, I baked an extra chocolaty mini cake for the graduate. His favorite cake is dark chocolate. All of the cake that I had made up until this point was marble since that's something more people at his party would like. I figured that since this graduate was willing to sacrifice getting his favorite cake at his own party, I could make him a personal, extra moist, extra chocolaty cake.

Once I stuck the cake pops into this cake, it really looked nice. Everything pulled together and everyone was happy with the results.

Congratulations Andrew!

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!!

The Three Rules of Eating in the Twin Cities

Who loves scrumptious cupcakes, cookies and cake?! How about ice cream?! Local meat?! Yep, that's what I thought. Mee too!

Now that I have been living in the twin cities area for a little over a year, I have discovered a couple rules to eating well...

Rule number one: If you want local meat (which is the only kind of meat you will ever see me eat), Clancey's is the place to go. Located in Linden Hills near the quaint little coop and a Great Harvest, this is a fun place to go for an afternoon (or day!) of good eats. Not only does this place bring in fresh, local meat but everything is seasoned in store with some of the most mouth-watering concoctions you can imagine. Some of the best in my book are: pork sirloin with mustard and fennel seed and German-style bratwursts; then there's beef seasoned with blue cheese and green onion, mushroom and swiss, or even bacon and cheddar. This place even has a rotating menu and makes sandwiches on the spot so you can have a hardy lunch while picking up meat for later. (Image courtesy of Heavy Table)

Rule number two: If you want ice cream, either convince my boyfriend to share some of his homemade ice cream with you or take yourself over to the Grand Ole Creamery on Grand Avenue. If you haven't been to Grand Avenue, then I suggest you take yourself there the next warm sunny day! There are tons of cute little specialty shops lining the street, with the Grand Ole Creamery on one end. You'll know when you're getting close to this place though because you'll smell their made-from-scratch sugar waffle cones on the waffle iron (my favorite part!). The awesome factor gets kicked up a notch when you go to take that last bite of your cone - there's always a little whopper in the bottom of your cone to keep the ice cream from running out if there's a tiny hole. I like to call this the ice cream cone hole-plugger! (Image courtesy of CBS Minnesota)

Rule number three: The absolute best place to get lunch, dinner, and dessert in the twin cities is at Yum! This place has the most amazing veggie sandwich I have ever had (and I've had my fair share of veggie sandwich concoctions!). I know it's basic, but this sandwich is just so darn good when you are sitting in the dinning area and you know that after you finish your amazing sandwich, you are going to go over and pick out an amazing cupcake... or cookie... or cake... or all of the above! There is also a full-service coffee bar here which makes things even better. I have yet to visit this restaurant in the morning, but it's definitely on my to-do list once I graduate.

This first cupcake is a moist chocolate with angel fluff filling and a fudge layer of chocolate amazingness on top...

Next was my boyfriend's pick - a ginormous cookie... wait no, TWO ginormous cookies with what I think was a buttercream filling inside? Can't be too sure... that one disappeared too fast. P.s. this picture does NOT do justice to the size of these cookies - they were larger than my hand!

...and last but by all means, NOT least (drum-roll)... the moistest chocolate cupcake EVER with an incredibly fluffy raspberry fluff on top (so jealous... if only my fluffs were so fluffy!). Oh, and let's not forget about the fresh raspberry on top!

Yum indeed! During my most recent visit I also had a lemon meringue cupcake - a vanilla cupcake with lemon meringue filling, lemon buttercream fluff, and a lemon-head candy as the cherry on top. As you can see by the lack of a photo for that one... I ate it without thinking to take a picture. I could not resist!

Now that I have shared my favorite places to get the goods, I want to know where your favorite place is to fix that sweet tooth, have a veggie sandwich, or to just get some all-around good eats!

What is your favorite eatery?