Homemade Butter

Totally loving my new gadget, Chef'n Buttermaker!

When I make cakes, I always end up with left-over heavy cream. It's perishable, expensive and I can only consume so much of. Too much of perfectly good cream have gone down the drain...until now!

This tool is no bigger than a jar of peanut butter. Within 5min, up to 1 cup of heavy cream turns into butter, really. I have to be honest, I was a little skeptical just because I didn't know how it worked exactly. I had heard so many times not to over-beat the cream because it turns into butter. How can this little container over-beat cream?

Well it did, in a whim. All I had to do was shake the jar for a few minutes. In no time, cream started to feel heavy. Eventually, I was shaking really light liquid with consistency of water. Dump that or it's buttermilk, rinse with cold water. That's it! Look at this beauty!

Baby Shower Treats

Possibilities are endless at a baby shower!

It's going to be cute no matter how you cut it with pastel colors! So when my friend brought this up, I was so on board! It will be for a baby boy and she wanted desserts to go with Indian finger foods. So the menu is:

Cardamon cupcake
Pistachio macaron
Coconut mango petit four
Icebox cookies

Cardamon screams Indian Middle-eastern flavor. It seems to be gaining more attention here these days but I attempted in incorporate that into many baked concoction in my early days :). I like the vegan spice cake recipe with apple sauce and maple syrup. They nicely enhance the spice. Cardamon filled the kitchen while making both regular and mini cupcakes, mmm~.

I'm not big on buttercream so I made cardamon white chocolate ganache in blue and white. I wanted to make bubbly/foamy water for the duckies to sit on. Regular sized cupcakes with ducky were dotted with mini cupcakes with white nonpareils :).

Of course, coconut can't be missed. And when there is coconut, there is mango :p. I made mango puree to go between the sheets of coconut cakes. Press, top off with more mango puree and coconut flakes and cut into pieces, done!

Pistachio is another staple. Baby green macarons and pistachio paste are ready to go. I also wanted to make icebox cookies to add colors. I made three doughs; chocolate, matcha and blue-tinted. I made rolls and sliced like sushi rolls to make 3-layer bullseye. Putting it all together, a platter of finger treats are ready for a baby shower!! 

Treats are ready to depart to a better home of a baby shower! Everything was all packed except...cupcakes. That's why there are treat boxes dedicated for cupcakes. If it touches another cupcake, or topples over...oh no! I don't even wanna think about it >.<. Ok, kinda too late to bang my head for not getting those boxes. It was time to go, what to do, what to do? That's when Vinh came to rescue! He grabbed the apple container. 12 duckies snug in 12 bubbles like it was made for it, genius!!

Last but not least, Kake Fairy couldn't skip on a cake...a diaper one this time :D. Congratulations on a baby boy!!!

Macaron Tower

In Paris, macaron towers are in almost every patisserie window. Colorful and beautiful, complementing other fine tarts and cakes also on display. Here is one from Gérard Mulot in Luxembourg. Macaron towers seem to come in different shapes, sizes and construction. Time has come for me to step up to the occasion and make one of these extravagant display!

It began with a request for a birthday. Based on the headcount, there will be 50-some macarons. We'll do a pyramid with 10 on each face (4+3+2+1) and 4 along each edge. Flavor requests were vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and pistachio. A color per row? I think that'll be pretty :).

Love making chocolate macarons! Macaron flavors are almost always from the filling. But chocolate can be made by just adding cocoa to the dough. They smell and taste like a whole new entity.

The challenge for this "cake" is the mounting part. I opted not to make shelves for the macarons to sit on but rather held by toothpicks for a clean look. I guess the easiest thing would be to get a foam in the shape of the tower of choice. But the foam shape and size options are pretty limited. So to make a pyramid as planned, each face needs to be ~8". Material has to be punchable and thick enough to hold the toothpick. I bought a couple of foam poster boards and cut out the faces. I tripled the boards to give it that thickness I needed. Once the edges were secured, gaps were filled with foam wedges. Wrapped the whole pyramid in a cake board foil and voila, ready to prickle them macarons!

Besides the tower construction, it was important to have the macarons in an uniform size. Otherwise, the pyramid size planning will be off X(. Also, I made the filling pretty stiff so it won't run down at an angle. They actually hold pretty well on a toothpick :). Last but not least, I made a fluffy bow to add a woomph to the tower. I hope the birthday girl likes it!!

Salvaging Apples

Picked up a bad batch of apple, grrr. After giving the benefit of the doubt, we were left with 10 apples that wasn't gonna be eaten...raw, that is!

There are myriad of things apples can turn into. But I didn't want to be stuck with a whole pie. I didn't trust my discipline to not consume excess :p. So...I made apple sauce. No grease, just spicing it up :).

First, all that apples had to be peeled and chopped.

Add spices combo I love - cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and clove -, squeeze lemon and add sugar and cook until apple pieces collapse and reduces. It takes ~1-2 hrs. All that flavor gets concentrated while emitting an amazing scent throughout the house, mmm~~

Vegan Ombre Cake

We're going to celebrate recent events with friends this weekend; a wedding and a birthday! I'm absolutely delighted to be the cake person for this doubly special occasion. 

I've been seeing a lot (I mean A LOT) of ombre cakes. Ombre is color gradation or colors that shade into each other. It gives modern, art deco kind of look. I think this might be the time to bust out an ombre cake. But more importantly, the cake will be vegan.

First thing I wanted to do this time was to upgrade the vegan frosting. Previously, I used Tofutti cream cheese with Earth Balance margarine. It turns out fairly close to cream cheese frosting. But I've noticed Tofutti ingredient list looking pretty scary. It lost me after water. I've been wondering if there is a way to make it further away from the chemistry lab. It turns out...pretty simple! Food.com and other sites have been sharing vegan sour cream recipe. If I adjust sweetness and tanginess, it should come close to be similar to cream cheese. So what does it take? ~~drum roll~~ Blended tofu, that's it! Rest is adding vinegar, lemon juice and sugar. Hint of beany flavor is there but considering, I must say that creamed tofu is pretty good.

Vegan chocolate cakes were baked and it's ready for assembly! Since the entire cake will be covered in ombre frosting, I used strawberry jam and almond meal to balance it out. 3 layers were stacked. Next is crumb coat. This is application of thin frosting coat to keep the cake crumb in tact. Not so perfect but that's ok.

I divided the frosting in 3 portions; purple, blue and white. From bottom to top and out to in, one petal at a time. It's tedious but it's worth it :). Here is the end product. I hope everyone likes it!

Macarons ~strawberry & pistachio

Now that I'm back on track with macarons, I'm moving on to making strawberry and pistachio macaron requests. Naturally, the macarons will be pink and green :).

Since I’m not big on buttercream, I made white chocolate ganache for both flavors. For strawberry, I used strawberry preserve. It added flavor as well as pale pink tint. I left the color at that instead of adding food coloring. I think it’s nice like that.

For pistachio cream, I made pistachio paste by grinding the nuts. Pistachio is mild in nature. But in ganache, I could taste the flavor that was intensified by the paste :).

 

Putting it all together...

Maca-wrong! ~getting intimate with a new oven

AHHHHHHHHH!!
What in the world happened! I can't make macarons all of a sudden? I mean look at this mess :'(

Macarons can be such heartbreaker. It's either good or ugly...no in-between. But don't dispair. It can be fixed :).

Macarons are so finicky because what has to be right is hard to control. It doesn't realy on chemical reaction, unlike pound cake for example. If the ingredients are right amount, they're more-or-less forgiving to the surroundings. Macarons, on the other hand, are purely physics. Pressure and temperature are what make or break them.

Pressure is generated by moisture in the batter. It becomes steam during baking. But moisture here is part of egg white. It's not what I measure and add, grrr. And temperature? It's not just the knob on the oven. It's also heat distribution within the oven >.<. Eeee! Sometimes macaron god is kind and like the oven in my previous place, it worked right off the bat. But other times, we just have to find the sweet spot ;).

For my case, the biggest change between good and ugly was the heat source; from gas to electric. Though my oven thermometer registered the same temperature (ya, seriously), bottom of the uglies did look slightly brown. Is bottom being heated more than top?

I baked the next batch on the higher rack. Not good enough but no eruption - going in the right direction :D.

Looks like I have to protect the bottom even more. Another common trick is to double up the pan to give a heat cushion. Finally! Just to make sure this is the optimum condition, I tried the top rack, double pan in the middle rack, yadi yadi yada. It turns out, this oven has an extremely small success window for macarons. Should the second pan stay hot in oven...explosion again!

This is the cookie test I did when I moved. Looks pretty uniform right? I went much deeper into the oven profiling this time. We're going to get along so well now :D

Lamington

Lamington is an Aussie treat that I haven't seen in the U.S. It's odd, especially considering my first encounter in, of all places, China. I found them in Starbucks and even at McCafe. It's sponge cake squares coated in chocolate and coconut - hard not to love! July 21 is National Lamington Day in Australia. I wanted to pay homage to this delectable in hope to, one day, I get to have one in Australia.

First step is to bake the cake, similar to pound cake. They're cut into squares when cool.

Squares are ready to be dunked in chocolate syrup...yum! Roll it in a bed of coconuts and voila, enjoy!

Chic Cake

I had the opportunity to make two elegant cakes last week; one for multi-purpose celebration and another for a birthday. Both were quarter sheet cakes with half chocolate cream and another half strawberry cream. The birthday cake was to have fresh strawberries inside.

In order to make half-and-half cake, I had to have both creams ready at the same time. When the upper cake layer gets put down, both creams better be placed already. Neither of them could be made ahead of time. It can't sit outside too long because whipped cream will lose its volume. It couldn't be kept in fridge because it settles without having been shaped. This meant mise-en-place was more important than ever!! Construction was safely done and it was ready to rest in the fridge.

Next, I needed chocolate plaques for the sides. They will be gold dusted. There is nothing like gold dust for accentuating elegance. 

It's time to put everything together. Cake surface was coated with blackberry jelly. It adds a thin layer of fruitiness that cuts the chocolate. It's also for dark burgundy sheen which goes well with gold...like nice glass of red wine kinda prestige y'know ;). I wanted burgundy ribbon to match it too. The final touch was dark-colored fruit topping. Luckily, figs were in season. Cherries were also popping up in stores. A little gold dust to tie the cake together and they were ready for celebrations!

Chocolate Cake with Sugar Substitute

Even a simple cake can add so much to the special occasion. I hate to see dietary constraint take that away from anyone. Sugar free cake, coming right up!

General rule: Semi-sweet chocolate can be substituted with unsweetened chocolate and sugar (1oz:1tbsp). This isolates added sugar in the cake. Rest is replacing it with sugar substitute according to the sweetness & manufacturer's recommendation.

First thing first, I made the chocolate plaques for the sides. Unsweetened chocolate + Splenda melted together (^^)b. Chocolate cake was also baked with Splenda. Cream would normally consist of heavy cream + semisweet chocolate. In this low-carb version, cream was made with heavy cream + unsweetened chocolate + Splenda.

Assembled with fresh strawberries and rest.

Finishing touch was cocoa to avoid jelly that's loaded with sugar. Sugarless jelly could be an alternative too :). Last last step was to surround the cake with gold dusted sugar-free chocolate plaques and top the cake with fruits.

I did my best to limit the calorie but with chocolate, flour and what not, I think it still hovers carb and calorie. So please be mindful if you're sensitive :).

Brooks Cookies

Our fabulous Brooks rep asked me to make some Brooks Cookies. So awesome! 

It's always fun to make logos. They have a lot of messages already. To make them represent, I wanted to use Brooks blue and white. Myriad of colors can take away from the message y'know? ;). So here they are; Indulge and Run Happy!

Sorbet Watermelon Cake

It's finally summer! Clear blue sky and blazing sun put this cake in my head. I wanted to make this vegan so I could share it with my vegan friends :). 

Side and bottom of this cake is lined with green-tinted vegan cake. Rind is coconut milk-based ice cream. Last but not least, it was filled with strawberry sorbet dotted with non-dairy chocolate chips.

Stay cool everyone! Enjoy!

Princess Ball Cake

This weekend, my friend's older daughter will have a princess ball with Princess Belle and Princess Snow White.

To signify both princesses, I made red roses and apples.  They both started with the base formed by Rice Krispie treats. After holes were smoothed out with white chocolate, deep red gum paste covered them. 

I wanted to make the ballroom from Beauty and the Beast.  It's elegant and beautiful! I especially love the royal blue drapes. Gum paste worked beautifully here.

With shiny glaze on the dance floor and golden marble walls...voila! Happy birthday princess ♥

Decorated Cookies