Subscribe
Previous Post
I have a wonderful book to give away. “Cake Art” from The Culinary Institute of America – Designs and Techniques by Chef’s Kate Cavotti and Allison McLoughlin.
Anyone who has ever aspired to design cakes like the pros will be interested in this book. The illustrations are stunning and the directions are simple. I think the only issue would be finding some of the tools and ingredients, but I imagine any baking or restaurant supply house will have you covered.
To win a copy, just tell me an amusing party anecdote in the comments – something funny that happened at a party you attended, or a mishap from a party you planned. A winner will be chosen at random.
Good luck
Here’s a great recipe from “Cake Art”:
Chocolate Flower Cupcakes
Makes 24 cupcakes
Preparation Timeline
- § Up to 3 days in advance: Make the flowers
- § Up to 1 day in advance: Make the cupcakes (see Chocolate Sponge Cake recipe below)
- § Day of event: Decorate the cupcakes
Components
- Cupcakes
- Flowers
Equipment and Materials
- Dark modeling chocolate
- White modeling chocolate
- Oil-based food colors
- Large and medium flower cutters
- Tempered or coating chocolate
- Teacups or small bowls for shaping flowers
- Small circle cutter
- Hard ganache for glazing (recipe follows)
1. Roll out the dark modeling chocolate until is it 1/8-inch thick. Cut out the desired number of large flowers.
2. Place the flowers over the bottom of inverted teacups or inside the small bowls. They will need to dry for 12 to 24 hours.
3. Cut out as many small circles from the dark modeling chocolate as there will be flowers. These circles will be the centers of the flowers.
4. Tint the white modeling chocolate pink using the oil-based food colors. Repeat steps 1 through 3 with the pink modeling chocolate and the medium-sized flower cutter.
5. Once the components are dry, secure the pink flowers inside the larger chocolate flowers with a small amount of water.
6. Secure a dark modeling chocolate center inside each flower with a small amount of water.
Finishing
Dip each cupcake into the fluid hard ganache. Place a flower on top of each cupcake. Once the ganache sets, the flowers will be secured to the cupcakes.
Hard Ganache
Makes 5 pounds or about 8 cups
- 4 pounds dark chocolate, finely chopped
4 cups heavy cream
1. Place the chocolate in a stainless steel bowl. Bring the heavy cream just to a simmer. Pour the hot cream over the chocolate, and allow to stand for 1 minute, stirring until the chocolate is thoroughly melted.
2. The ganache can be used immediately, or it can be covered and stored under refrigeration, then warmed prior to use.
Chocolate Sponge Cake
- 1 1/2 cups cake flour
- 1/2 cup cocoa powder
- 6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 1 1/4 cups sugar
- 5 large eggs
- 5 large egg yolks
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Lightly spray 8- or 9-inch round cake pans with a nonstick spray and line the bottoms with a round of parchment paper. For cupcakes, prepare pans with cupcake liners.
- Sift the flour and cocoa powder together twice and set aside. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat. Remove from the heat, add the vanilla extract to the melted butter, and stir to combine. Set aside to cool.
- Combine the sugar, eggs, and egg yolks in the bowl of a stand mixer and set the bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Whisking constantly with a wire whisk, heat until the mixture is warm to the touch or reaches 120 degrees F on a candy thermometer.
- Remove the bowl from the heat and attach it to a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Whip the egg mixture on a medium speed until the foam triples in volume and just begins to recede, about 5 minutes. Stabilize the foam on low speed for 10 minutes.
- Fold the flour into the egg mixture using a rubber spatula. Blend a small amount of the batter into the melted butter, then fold the tempered butter back into remaining batter.
- Fill the prepared cake or cupcake pans about two-thirds full. Bake until the top of each layer is firm to the touch — for 8- or 9-inch cakes about 30 minutes, for cupcakes about 20 minutes.
- Let the layers cool in the pans for a few minutes before turning out onto wire racks to finish cooling. The cakes are ready to fill and frost now, or they can be wrapped and stored at room temperature for 2 days, or frozen for up to 3 weeks.
1508 days ago
[...] the last time to enter to win a copy of the cake decorating book “Cake Art”. Please see this post for [...]
During a period in our lives when my parents really had to watch their money, my mother baked a cake for my brother’s birthday. The cake turned out just beautifully – the large panda bear that appears to sit up, exactly what my brother wanted. However, my brother’s birthday is in August and we didn’t have air conditioning and the icing kept melting so my mother ended up taking out two shelves in the refrigerator and knelt on the floor in front of the fridge to pipe tiny stars to cover the bear. I still remember sitting on the floor beside her while she frosted that cake. I also remember my dad’s yelp of horror when he opened the electric bill for that month….
A while back we had a couple over from our church for the first time. I made an apple cake and some lasagna. Both pans looked the same when they were covered with tin foil. I asked my husband to preset the oven before church and to put the lasagna in. Needless to say he put the wrong one in. Our guests who became our very good friends enjoyed picking on us about it. I have to say if you are going to make a mistake with cakes and cook it to long my apple cake recipe is the one to do it with. It still turned out great! We ate the cake while the lasagna was cooking.
1514 days ago
[...] Win a copy of the beautiful cake decorating book “Cake Art” at She Knows Parties. [...]
1514 days ago
[...] Win a copy of the beautiful cake decorating book “Cake Art” at She Knows Parties. [...]
1515 days ago
[...] still time to win both a copy of the wonderful decorating book, “Cake Art” or the Magic Bullet Platinum Plus. The “Cake Art contests ends March 31st, and you can [...]
When my daughter was 8, we made a beautiful molded dessert with jello and fruit. I successfully got it out of the mold and onto the serving plate. My daughter was standing on our kitchen step-stool so that she could reach the counter and help. She was so excited to serve our guests that she asked to carry the plate out to the dining room. Smiling, she picked up the plate, turned around on the top of the stool and took the first step down and tripped. She went down, the jello flopped off of the plate and the glass plate shattered all over. After we made sure that she was fine, we all laughed at the sight of that red giggly jello blob skidding across the floor. To this day I don’t know why I let her pick up the jello plate before she was off of the darn step-stool.
Well for a Thanksgiving Party I made a “Sweet Potato Pie” Unfortunately I got the Turnips and the Sweet Potatoes mixed up when I was making two separate dishes in a hurry…and ended up with a Sweet Turnip Pie…it was SO embarrassing and I hid out in my house for a few weeks until I was brave enough to venture out into the real world again!
I tried to make a veggie burger recipe for about 12 burgers. What I ended up with was a bowl full of burger mash that would make about 50. To this day I have NO idea HOW??
1524 days ago
[...] Win a Copy of Cake Art at She Knows Parties. [...]
I hope I’m not too late to enter. My sister had a birthday party recently where they were going to do karaoke, play dance video games, and eat snacks. It was during the summer.
Well, around the time the party started, the power went out. So the party goers were in the dark, sweating in the heat, without anything to do or eat. Luckily, the power came on after a while. (Our neighbor worked for the power company, so he got right on it!)
Ohhh how neat! I would love to know how to make things look so amazing, and this book would be perfect!
We went to a Thanksgiving gathering one year. My oldest daughter had been in charge of making the sweet potato casserole. At one point during the party, the hosting was dipping out a serving of the sweet potatoes and said, “what’s this?” On the serving spoon was what looked like a big chunk of hard-boiled egg.
In my daughter’s haste she had failed to stir the egg up into the casserole, causing this embarrassing scenario.
I had baked a pie for Easter at my grandmothers. When I got to her back door to take it in “I dropped it.”
No one will let me carry the pies anymore.
It was the first Christmas dinner in my new husband’s and my marriage (second marriage, you understand, so already lots of bonus family for both of us).
Trying to sidestep any family traditions that both of our kids and parents would have been used to, I went with a completely new and different menu. I was thinking, “start a new tradition!”
So, I prepared Cornish Game Hens. Too many, it seems, for our small oven. All the other food was done and served up on time, along with my lovely glazed hens, which were completely NOT done inside.
Disaster.
Just this month my oldest daughter and I made a “Groovy Blue Jean” cake for my 7 year old. When she saw it she said “Why did you make me a V cake….my name starts with a C…… We had to turn it around for her….nice laugh!
I’m sorry folks, I forgot to put the end date to this contest. It ends at the end of the month on March 31st.
Thanks for all your wonderful stories!
I have no funny anecdotes to share with you. I am usually the one organizing parties and taking care of all details, that I don’t even join the fun of the party. At the end, I am so happy everything is perfect that I can’t eat anymore, and my friends tease me because of that.
When does this giveaway close?
I decided to bake a pomegranate cake…heard sighs, murmurs, and no ways all around the house..didn’t care much for that…went ahead and added pome juice to the basic sponge cake recipe..waited with abated breadth at the lovely pale pink i was expecting…to my surprise…it turned a pale green…I still have no clue to this day on why the colour was green…
The funniest cake story we had was sad at the time. We put re-lighting candles on our sons birthday cake one year and he cried everytime the started burning again. We finally had to drown the candles to keep the child from having a meltdown. Of course it’s funny now YEARS later