Super Bowl XLV

The Super Bowl is this Sunday! Are you excited?! I'm not...not about the football part at least. I'm more excited that all my shows will be starting up again - Survivor, Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, etc.

But here is a football groom's cake I did a couple of weeks ago. I thought I'd post it in honor of the upcoming super bowl.

We're Having a Baby!

Well the news is out! We've called all our friends & family and even announced it on Facebook. Announcing it on Facebook was a little intimidating for me...once you say anything, EVERYONE knows! That's a little scary!

So, it's only fair to announce it here too...I'm pregnant! My husband and I have been trying to conceive for 15 months so the fact that there is a baby (currently the size of a blueberry, according to what I've read) growing inside me is a bit surreal. And since we'd been trying so long, we had to come up with a creative way to break the news to our immediate families!

I made cookies in the shape of onesies using this cutter & texture mat set from Country Kitchen Sweet Art. On each cookie, I hand-painted a special message for each family member.

These are the cookies for my Dad, Mom, and sister:


And these are the ones we gave to my in-laws:


And, of course, I made a little surprise for the Daddy-t0-be:


The doctor said I'm actually due Sept 22nd, but I was close! How did you break the news to your family and friends? I'd love to hear about it!

Fondant 101

It's time for a new tutorial! Today, instead of showing you how to do a specific project, we're going to talk about fondant.

What the heck is fondant, anyway?

Well, I like to think of it as edible play dough. Pretty much anything you can do with play dough, you can do with fondant!

You can purchase pre-made, ready-to-use fondant from a variety of sources:
Wilton
Satin Ice
Fondarific
FondX
Choco-Pan (actually an alternative to rolled fondant and made with white chocolate)

Or make your own from scratch:
Rolled Fondant Recipe
Rolled Marshmallow Fondant Recipe

The first think you need to know is fondant dries out quickly so you need to store it wrapped tightly in plastic wrap. I like to wrap mine in plastic wrap and then put it in a zip-top bag for extra protection against air exposure.


Working with fondant is very hands-on so you MUST wash your hands before you begin! Also, be careful what you wear. Any lint or hair particle on your shirt will show up in your fondant as you work. For this reason, knit tops and dark colors are usually avoided. Or just wear an apron!

When you first open your fondant, it won't have much elasticity. If you pull the fondant in opposite directions, it will just break as shown in the pictures below.




So you have to knead it for a while until it become stretchy and elastic.



Now, you're ready to work with it!

You can do so many things with fondant, including but not limited to:
Cover Cakes with Fondant
Decorate Cookies
Add Fondant Accents/Cut-Outs to Buttercream or Fondant Cakes
Make Fondant Bows
Make Fondant Pleats

For many of these applications, you'll need to roll the fondant out to a thin sheet. If you're just beginning, you may want to use Wilton's rolling pins with guide rings. On the rolling pin pictured below, the purple rings allow you to roll your fondant to 1/8 of an inch thick and the pink rings let you go all the way to 1/16 of an inch thick. Using these guide rings helps you get an even thickness throughout your fondant sheet and ensures that you get the thickness you're aiming for.


Before I begin rolling the fondant, I always "smoosh" it with my hand. Just flatten it a little so it's easier to roll.


Then start rolling! Roll from the center of the fondant outward. When you reach the end, go back to the center and roll the other way. Keep rolling until the fondant is so thin that the rolling pin is just gliding over the surface of the fondant. That means your guide rings have worked and you've rolled to the right thickness!


And now you have a sheet of freshly rolled fondant to use for whatever your little heart desires!

AutoFrost Demo Machine

How many of us hate writing on a cake?

The cake looks perfect...and then you have to write Happy Birthday or Happy Anniversary, praying that you don't misspell it or write on a slant.

Well, as part of their class project, engineering students at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering have created a robot to write on cakes FOR YOU!

Here's a picture of their creation:


Check out the video to see how it works.

It needs a little bit of tweaking...the icing comes out in squiggles and blobs. But I'm impressed! Aren't you???

Orange & Blue Gift Cake

I'm behind on editing my cake photos again so I'm down to slim pickings for posting...but I like this cake so I don't feel like you're getting gypped!


It's just a simple square cake covered with blue fondant, topped with a fabulous orange gum paste bow, and decorated with white polka dots.


What better way to say "happy birthday" than with a cake that looks as good as the gift pile! And it tastes SOOOO much better.

New Year's Eve Cake Party!

The cake decorating birthday parties at Ms Debbie's Sugar Art have really been picking up lately!
Here are pictures from one I did on New Year's Eve:


These girls were very organized. I showed them how to make ribbon roses, fondant bears, zebra print, and various piping techniques. As usual, I brought a bunch of different sprinkles for the to use, but the party mom really got into it and purchased a bunch more so the girls had lots to choose from!




I loved her bright orange finger nails!


And the girl who created this cake has a passion for cake decorating. She brought along a plethora of her own tools and cake decorating books. In one of the books, she'd already picked out which cake she was going to make - one with 4 teddy bears eating a picnic. Her bears were sitting on couplers - how creative! And she hand-made all the food, plates, birthday cake, etc!



When the girls finished their cakes, they moved on to decorating cupcakes the party mom had baked. Yum!

With all that sugar, I don't think the girls had any trouble staying awake until midnight.

Successfully Entering and WINNING Cake Decorating Competitions

Well, the 1st Annual Florida ICED Cake Competition is only about 2 months away now! If you're planning to compete (which you should), you're at least beginning to think about your entry.

At most cake decorating competitions, the competition pieces are actually completed ahead of time. Typically, the competitors decorate "cake dummies" which are Styrofoam pieces in the shape of cake tiers. And then they decorate them using edible mediums like buttercream, royal icing, fondant, gum paste, modeling chocolate, etc. There are many places to buy cake dummies, but I buy mine from Dallas Foam. In fact, if you use another source, leave it in the comments!

Here are my 10 suggestions for how to successfully enter and WIN cake decorating competitions:
1. Know and Understand the Rules

• Competitions come in all shapes and sizes with very different rules. Read through the rules a few times, making notes in places that are unclear or raise questions in your mind. Don't be afraid to ask the show coordinators your questions! If something is unclear, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to help you understand.
• Don't be disqualified or lose points in the competition because of a simple rule misunderstanding!
  

2. Know Your Judges and Their Likes & Dislikes

• The judges make the ultimate decision of who wins and loses so please them with your entry. If you know one judge is particularly fond of stringwork, use it! If you know one judge absolutely hates "elephant skin" on cakes, be careful to avoid it at all costs.
  

3. Think Outside the Box

• Most cake decorating competitions have a theme. Go above and beyond the theme with your entry! Make people think, "Wow, why didn't I think of that?!" Draw the eye to YOUR entry and impress both the public and the judges with your creativity.
• For example, the FL ICED Cake Competition theme is Romantic Wedding Dresses. Think crazy! Do a wedding dress from the Victorian Era, or one from the future, or one made entirely of peacock feathers!
  

4. It Must be Your Original Work

• It is OK to draw inspiration from other cakes or works of art, but you need to change them to add your own twist. You cannot and will not win if you are merely copying what someone else has already done.
  

5. Make Your Entry Visually Appealing and Appetizing

• Use appropriate color combinations. That's not to say you can use black and hot pink - as long as it looks nice and goes with the theme. But don't use colors like black, orange, and red if it's a Christmas-themed competition!
  
• This is a tricky thing to do correctly. In the long run, you're going for a design that has mass appeal. It's ok to go funky at times, but there has to be something in it that everyone will like. For example, if you go with the peacock feather wedding dress: Not everyone would like that kind of dress. But you'll appeal to the masses because they'll be impressed with your use of color and your talent in pulling off a difficult technique like that.

6. Demonstrate a Mastery of Techniques

• You must use precision, uniformity, and (near) perfection on your competition entry. You have to demonstrate that this is NOT the first time you've attempted a technique (even though it may, in fact, be). You need to make the techniques look very cleanly executed and as if they were easy for you to complete.

7. Demonstrate a Number of Techniques

• This is another tricky one. The judges will want to see that you are well-versed in many different cake decorating/sugar art techniques. Can you cover a cake with fondant? Can you make fondant figures? Can you do stringwork?
  
• However, there is a fine balance between demonstrating that you can do many techniques and overloading your cake with "over decoration" just to demonstrate the techniques. Choose your favorite techniques - ones that go with the theme, fit your cake design, and show the highest level of difficulty - and use those.
• A cake decorating competition is not typically where you want to try a new technique for the first time, unless you are confident that you can MASTER it (see #6).
  

8. It's All in the Details!

• Make people stop at your entry and try to get closer to examine all the fine details on your cake. Give them the impression that they need to admire your cake for hours to get a full appreciation of everything on it.
  
• You want to impress the judges and the public with your overall design...draw them over for closer inspection...and blow them away with the little details!
  

9. Prepare for the Worst During Delivery

• Things happen - bumps in the road, bad drivers, etc! Prepare an "oops" kit so that you can repair ANYTHING that gets damaged upon delivery to the competition. At this point, you've spent hours on your competition piece. If something breaks, take the time to repair it!
• Similarly, take advantage of the set-up time the competition organizers have allowed you. If they give you a 3-hour block to set up your piece, get there early! If you have time leftover, great! But you never want to run out of time setting up.
  

10. Please Yourself

• At the end of the day, YOU are taking the cake home again. Are YOU happy with the design? Are YOU happy with the effort you put into it? If YOU aren't happy with your competition piece, how can you expect anyone else to like it?!
• Please yourself and learn something from your competition experience. Talk to other competitors about their experiences and techniques they used.
  
• AND HAVE FUN!
  

Scientific Groom's Cake

This is the groom's cake that sat alongside the Mango Calla Lilly Wedding Cake at Sweetwater Branch Inn.

Jeremiah & Megan are in the same doctoral program I was in at the University of Florida. Jeremiah specifically studies pain receptors and uses an apparatus that looks a lot like this one (and is technically called a Thermal Preference Apparatus):


So the goal for the groom's cake was to replicate it! Here's the cake:


The yellow is all buttercream. The walls of the apparatus were made of gum paste that was allowed to dry for 1 week. The other decorations are fondant, and the numbers are hand-piped with royal icing.


Oh, and the little rat was made out of modeling chocolate.

Hershey's Baking Pack WINNER!

Wow, you guys must LOVE Hershey's! This is, by far, the most comments I've received during a giveaway - 421 eligible comments!

And the winner is...

cstironkat said... 160

1/7 tweet #2 http://twitter.com/cstironkat/status/23420656339132416

January 7, 2011 11:49AM

Thanks for entering, everyone! And keep baking!

My Sugar Cookie Recipe

People keep asking, what recipe do you use for your rolled cookies? It's no secret. I got it from Cooking Light Magazine (my favorite, by the way)!

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (about 11 1/4 oz)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup granulated sugar
10 tablespoons butter, softened
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 large egg whites

Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt, stirring well with a whisk. Place granulated sugar and butter in a large bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until light and fluffy. Beat in 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla and egg whites. Gradually add flour mixture to butter mixture, beating at low speed just until combined. Divide dough in half. Shape each dough half into a flattened disk; wrap each disk in plastic wrap. Chill 1 hour.

To bake: Unwrap 1 dough ball and place on heavy-duty plastic wrap. Cover with additional plastic wrap. Roll dough, still covered, to 1/4-inch thickness. Repeat procedure with remaining dough ball. Chill dough 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Remove one dough portion from refrigerator. Remove top sheet of plastic wrap; turn dough over. Remove remaining plastic wrap. Using a 2 1/2-inch cutter, cut dough into 18 cookies. Place cookies 2 inches apart on baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Bake for 10 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool on pans 5 minutes. Remove cookies from pans; cool completely. Repeat with remaining dough half.

Ok, that's the recipe straight from Cooking Light. But, now here's how I do it:

-Prepare the dough as directed, but I like to chill mine overnight.
-Spray a Silpat with Pam for Baking spray. Set the dough on the Silpat and spray the top of the dough a little. Roll dough to 1/4-inch thickness, and cut cookies with desired cookie cutters.
-Remove excess dough. Rewrap it in plastic wrap and place in the freezer or refrigerator to stay chilled.
-I work on 3-4 Silpats at a time so that I have one loaded with cookie cut-outs and ready to go in the oven.
-Each cookie shape will bake a different length of time so I just keep an eye on the first batch. I remove them JUST BEFORE the edges start to brown. It's tricky...that part takes practice.
-The key is to keep the dough chilled while you work with it. If it becomes too warm, it will stick to EVERYTHING. If that starts to happen, wrap it back up and stick it in the freezer for a few minutes.

When I decorate my cookies with Royal Icing, I use Wilton's recipe. And, for fondant, I like Satin Ice.