Happy Mother's Day, It's Cake Bite Time!

This weekend I made a lot of food: my grandma's butter rolls, a summery fruit salad (mmm kiwi and mango!), locally grown steak marinated with teriyaki and ginger, and homemade ice cream! I made cake bites as the kick-off to this whole food festival. A cake bite is similar to a cake pop but isn't on a stick. It's like a truffle but is made of cake and covered in a candy coating. Like cake pops, a cake bite can be shaped into anything from a simple ball to looking like an apple, flower, duck, you name it!

For these bites, the balls were again made of crumbled cake and frosting. To make the ridges around the bottom half like a real cupcake, I poured melted cocoa candy coating into a mold that looks like a mini peanut butter cup. After pouring the candy coating into the molds, I placed the previously formed and cooled cake balls on top of the wet candy melt...

After placing the tray into the freezer for a couple minutes to let the candy melts harden, voila!

After forming the mini cupcake bottom for these cake bites, it was time to add some color! Remember the orchid purple from my basic cake pops? Well... deja vu!

This part was a bit tricky, you have to hold onto the chocolate bottom and dunk the top half of the cake bite into the melted purple candy melts. This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that the cocoa candy melt will start melting under your fingers... which means no more cocoa candy ridges for you! Instead, as suggested in Cake Pops (where you can get the full details of this recipe), if you wear cloth candy gloves the ridges will be A-Ok. Unfortunately, these gloves are on my wishlist and therefore... I became a wickedly fast cake bite dipper!

My transition from the purple to the cocoa candy melts wasn't the smoothest but...

The cake bites were still irresistible!

Now I realize I promised that I would make fondant this weekend, but one thing led to another and... well, you will hear about my fondant expedition by the end of this coming week! (ohh the suspense!)

Happy Mother's Day!!

The Start of a Cake Pop Romance

Time for a reunion! With summer drawing closer and closer every day, I am antsy to get back to my kitchen. I have some fun experiments and tasks ahead, so I suggest you grab on for the ride!

Wayy back when, in February actually, my friend Anna had a birthday. Luckily, I am better at making sweets and getting them to my friends on their birthday than I am about telling you about those sweets on time! I am currently finishing my last semester of college and therefore am in a house with a bunch of nuts-o people who are really good are talking like valley girls and never turning lights off (currently, one of them is confused by how the microwave burned her popcorn) Don't worry honey, small and easy steps, you are smarter than the microwave!!?

This is all besides the point though. My friend Anna, she had a birthday. I made these delicious cake bites and a mini cake...

Cute huh? I actually got the cake recipe from my sister. Genius idea. The cake bites surrounding the mini cake were so good that the owner of the five-star restaurant actually wanted my recipe! hmm, leverage... this is good when there's food and wine involved! The recipe is originally from Bakerella, the cake pop queen. Basically, you buy a bag of Oreos, eat seven, crumble the rest and pour them into a large mixing bowl, then mix and mash 8oz of cream cheese in with the oreos until you have a chocolaty heap of deliciousness, and then form into balls, cool and dip.

Anyway that was February, this is May. The beginning of a new month! A glorious month I might add; I will graduate in May and can't wait to get back to the cities where my boyfriend, cat, and kitchen await me... another summer of homemade bread is just around the corner, I can smell it.

I had the opportunity to get a brief glimpse of summer recently while away from my studies for the weekend... I made cake pops! -and it was a success I might add, thank you very much (my first attempt at cake pops was a complete flop, check out my first post). The difference is that I tried to make the pops without Bakerella's Cake Pops book, now I have a copy. I recommend you don't try this without the book, it's bad for your self esteem and anyone near you.

I chose the color "orchid" for my candy coating. I thought it was fitting. The cake is a vanilla funfetti (yes, I used a box cake, I was ashamed to even walk up the the register with it. But it's what Bakerella recommends on your first try, so I followed command and look what I made! Proof that Bakerella knows best. There's also vanilla buttercream frosting mixed in with the cake - that's how you are able to form the round cake ball. Super tasty but not the best aesthetically. I was curious if the funfetti sprinkles would still show up after i created the cake balls... they don't. You just end up with a brownish vanilla cake. Oh well, I tried.

So these orchid-colored cake pops are my tribute to the almost-start of summer. Yay! I am anxious to jump into some of the more complex cake pop designs, so stay tunned for that!

Also, I have been working on my cake decorating skills and am anxious to put them to the test in a month when I will be making a massive high school graduation cake! The designing is currently under wraps. I can guarantee that it will be awesome though so stay tunned as i will be doing some test runs on the fondant (yes, I am braving that road again!) now that I have glucose syrup and glycerin.

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!