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!!