Saturday 30 April 2011

Cake!


Ever since I got pregnant with my daughter, who is now almost 10 months old, I have had a 'thing' for cake. Ok, maybe it's more than a 'thing' than I'd like to admit. Perhaps something more like an infatuation. I love baking it. Seeing something go from a gooey mess to a beautiful, spongy treat is quite simply an amazing chemical reaction. I'm no science geek but baking never ceases to amuse me. The obvious other reason to love cake, it's freakin' delicious! When I was pregnant, I just HAD to eat cake. I craved it so badly all the time. I ate so much cake during those 9 months. My body thought it would be funny to give me a muffin top. After all, you are what you eat, right?!? Small price to pay to have such a delicious morsel in my mouth.

Anyways, I love watching Ace of Cakes and all the cake making contests on FoodTV. It looks like so much fun. Spend all day being creative and creating masterpieces for people to OoOoOo and Ahhhh over.

After years of watching, I finally decided to give fondant a whirl. I used a recipe I found online for Marshmallow Fondant.
4 cups mini-marshmallows
4 cups icing sugar
1 tbsp water.

Throw the marshmallows & water in the microwave for 30 second intervals until smooth. Add icing sugar. Knead until smooth. Done.

Sooo easy. My first batch I added too much icing sugar and it was super hard. Apparently we don't have the humidity here that everyone complained about in the recipe's comments.

I baked off four round cakes. Carrot cake. Set them aside to cool. Next I decided to work on some pretty little roses. I found a great how-to video on youTube. The roses were really easy to make but tedious. They took a few hours.

I'm sure it could have been quicker had I not had three children under foot but I got them done and even managed to have dinner ready on time.

After dinner I iced my cake with a thin layer of cream cheese icing. I then rolled out my fondant and covered my cake the best I could. I ended up with quite a few wrinkles and lumps in the fondant due to my inexperience but it turned out all right. I topped it off with my roses and it looked pretty darn good for a first attempt.

I am not naturally creative by any means. I find I really have to "learn" how to do things. This is definitely something I will be spending more time with. I just need to find some friends who love to eat cake as much as I do....

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