Thanksgiving Turkey Cake!

For Thanksgiving this year, I went with my friend and co-cake maker John to his family's Thanksgiving celebration.  We decided to make a turkey cake to surprise his family with.

We started by making the cake and cutting it into the appropriate rounded turkey shape.

This is the final frosted body (not a brown baseball hat).  The front of the turkey is the left and the back is leveled so that we would have something to stick the feathers into.  We used chocolate cake and chocolate frosting, which helped hide any little errors or crumbs getting into the frosting.  The frosting smelled delicious and I got to smell it all the way to John's family's house as it was sitting on my lap for the car ride.

After the body was done, we made the feathers.  We tried to use a cookie cutter as a stencil to pour the hot sugar into, but it didn't work too well and as a result we got this interesting layer of sugar to come off with the cookie cutter.

Instead of the cookie cutter, we poured the sugar onto a silpat and added food coloring and texturing with a tooth pick.  We then used the toothpick as a way that we could insert the feathers into the cake.

For the turkey's head, we made some rice krispies and molded it into the shape of a turkey's head.  We then covered it with chocolate and gave it a walnut for an eyeball.  We put it into the freezer to let the chocolate set up.

We assembled the cake on the back of John's car once we got to his family's house.

The feathers went into the cake alright and looked better than we hoped for.  The only problem was the ones we put too close to the back pulled at the cake and threatened to fall down.

We just moved those feathers closer to where the head was going to be and that seemed to solve the problem.

Next we added the head to the turkey to finish it off.  We were happy that the head didn't fall over, but after a little while the head slowly drooped backwards.  Luckily by then, John's family had seen the cake and how it was supposed to look.  There was much delicious feasting with it in the end.

Adam's Record Player Cake

For Adam's 21st birthday, I decided to make him a record player for a cake.  Unfortunately, I had little time to make the cake, so it didn't turn out nearly as neat as I wanted it to and you probably won't recognize it as a record player.  It pretty much looks like a circle on top of a square.  Also, with my limited time, I couldn't figure out a good way to make the arm with the needle on it to make the record play, so I just left it out.

I melted chocolate and poured it into a circle to make a record.  I put it in the fridge so it would be hard and easier to transfer to the cake.

Once I put the chocolate on the cake, I iced some lines on to try to make it look more like a record.  It would have been easier if I had some sort of lazy susan to help make the circles evener.

And here's what the final cake looks like and unfortunately, Blogger doesn't want to upload my picture the proper way and wants to make only this one be weird, so I apologize for the awkwardness of it.

Upcoming: November

Well, this October was somewhat unsatisfying as far as making cakes go.  I was planning on making a Halloween themed cake, but you kind of lose the time to do those things when your boyfriend gets into a bike accident (he's fine by the way).  Instead, I'm looking to November to make some cakes or at least one cake for a birthday.

Hmm, I guess I'll ask you few followers of my blog if you can think of any reasons I should make a cake this next month that isn't for a birthday or Thanksgiving-related.

White Chocolate Chocolate Raspberry

I made a chocolate cake with raspberry filling and white chocolate frosting for a birthday celebration.  The celebration didn't go quite as planned, so I have a slight idea of what this cake tastes like based on the scraps and leftovers, but I did not get the pleasure of trying a slice of it.  I started by making a chocolate cake mix in my 9 inch round cake pans.  I let those bake and cool while trying to catch up on my work and chores.  I then received a text saying that the celebration was going to start at six, and looking at the clock and seeing that it was 4 already jolted me into action as I had no idea where the time had gone.

My room mate was kind enough to offer help, so I had her make up the raspberry filling for the cake, which ended up being a sort of homemade jam.  While she did that, I made up the frosting, which I barely had enough of, because I was low on my supply of powdered sugar.  I made my basic butter cream frosting and added half a bag of melted white chocolate chips to it to give it a white chocolate flavor.

To assemble the cake, I first cut the cake rounds so they were level on the top.  Next I cut each round horizontally, so it turned the two layers into four layers.  In between the first two layers, I put the raspberry jam filling.  Next I put a layer of the white chocolate frosting and finished with the other two layers of cake with raspberry filling in between.

I covered the whole cake with the rest of my frosting, and in my speed to get the frosting on, the super moist cake decided it wanted to break off causing a crummy mixture of frosting and cake around the edges of the cake.

I took some leftover raspberries and decorated the top of the cake to finish it off.  Upon reaching the destination, I discovered that the celebration was cancelled, so I left the cake for the birthday girl to enjoy when she got the chance.

The Golden Snitch

My roommate finally turned twenty one and as with all birthdays, she needed a cake.  I decided for some input from friends of hers and after getting a suggestion to build her a replica of Hogwarts, something I didn't feel like attempting yet, I got a suggestion for a golden snitch.  This I believed to be more doable after having accomplished both the saturn cake (for sphere cakes) and the narwhal (for sugar design).  After an intense design session with my fellow birthday cake maker John, we sketched out some ideas and got supplies for the big day.

This was our inspiration.

I worked on the cake part of the cake.  The bottom is Styrofoam that we poked lollipop sticks in to make it easier to put the wings in later.  I layered the cake over the sticks as well.

Next, I carved the cake into the sphere shape and made a mess all over the table.

I then frosted the outside of the sphere starting with the cake and then moving to the Styrofoam to prevent the Styrofoam from getting into the cake, while allowing glue for the fondant to stick to both cake and Styrofoam.

 Since we could only find white fondant, I had to knead in food coloring into the fondant to get it closer to the golden color.

I rolled out the fondant to cover the cake.  Luckily, we had just enough to cover the whole thing, but the fondant was a little thinner than I would have preferred as a result.

Next, I covered the cake with the fondant.  Note: the funfetti in the foreground was a back up in case one of the layers turned out funny.  I did use yellow cake box mix for the actual cake, however, I would recommend using a cake that doesn't say "moist" in its description to make it easier to carve.

Next, we smoothed down the fondant to make it nice and spherical.

We added rolled up pieces of fondant for detail and pressed other details into the fondant.  Then John steamed it with his iron to make all the extra sugar melt to make it nice and shiny.  We added some luster dust to get it closer to its intended gold color and to also hide some tiny flaws in the fondant.

While I was working on the cake, John was making brooms and an owl out of chocolate to put on some cupcakes.

We used a blue food color spray to give the cupcakes a sky-like appearance for the brooms to fly riderless in.

He also got to do the sugar work.  He used two lollipop sticks to make it stronger and poured a sugar outline of the wing.

Next he drizzled sugar over the outline to make the filling of the wings.  This also helped keep the wings lighter.  After it cooled, we snapped off the excess sugar.

We assembled everything except the wings to make transport easier.

Here is the final product which delighted my roommate immensely.

Threadcakes

Threadless, my favorite t-shirt place, had a contest to make cakes based off a design for one of their shirts.  As a result, my friend and I assembled a cake based on their shirt "The friendly narwhal."  Here's the link: http://www.threadcakes.com/entries/view/945

The winners are in, and well, I didn't win, but I was beat by some truly amazing cakes.  To see for yourself, go here: http://www.threadcakes.com/winners

But for those of you who want to see all the pictures of my cake, I decided to post them here now that the contest is over.

Here is John molding our sugar into the narwhal's horn.  Also, working with sugar can be difficult, because it will cool quickly, which is why we had to work it over a stove to keep it pliable.  Also notice the gloves.  Sugar is really hot and it will give you really bad burns if you aren't wearing gloves.  As it was, John and I had some trouble holding on to the sugar.

Carving the cake.

The cake is all carved and we added a gum paste tail.

Then we covered everything in fondant.

Next we painted the whale, no nar at this point, and made some sugar waves.

We made the creatures out of fondant and painted them with food dye.

Then we made the little hearts so we had a friendly whale.

Here's a better picture with the table all cleaned up.

Next, we added the horn to transform our whale into the lovely narwhal.

Unfortunately, the horn immediately fell down.  Our narwhal, with its sagging horn, next to our model, the avenging narwhal playset.

As part of the contest, we had to show the cake being eaten, so anyone up for sushi?

Here's the original design for the cake and even though I didn't win, I got to make a cake to honor nature's unicorn, the narwhal.

Travis's Birthday/Return from the Jungles of Indonesia

When Travis finally returned from spending four weeks in the jungle in Indonesia, working on biological conservation and other such stuff, it also happened to be his birthday, so we decided to throw him a joint "you survived" and "happy birthday" party.  To go along with the theme of being in the jungle, I, with the help of Travis's girlfriend, decided to make some cupcakes with insects on them to remind him of the jungle and how he survived by not getting malaria, which was my idea of what was going to happen to him.

We used some tracings from my cupcake book to start out with some insect shapes.

Next, we piped melting chocolate into the shapes that we traced on some wax paper.  We also added our own mosquito design to go with the malaria theme.

After the chocolate was piped on, we added candy pieces to make the insects' bodies.  I would recommend putting more chocolate than just a trace, because even after being in the fridge for a while, the insects were easy to break when removing them from the wax paper.

To continue the malaria theme, we got some jam and injected into the cupcakes that we were going to put the mosquitoes on.  I saw the large needle at the grocery store a while ago and I was planning on making something with cream filling, but this came first, and it worked well.

It was kind of hard to inject jam, because it is so thick, but it worked well.  I injected in two spots close to the middle to disperse the jam.

Here's the final cupcakes from above.  All the mosquitoes had jam filled cupcakes and we made pinkish frosting for Travis's pasty white skin with black licorice hairs on them.  The rest of the insects were put on a green background.  Also, we made some cupcakes into spiders by making chocolate mandibles that look like mustaches with licorice legs sticking out the sides.

We also added some written cupcakes.  These ones say "I'm not dead yet," "welcome home," and "you survived"

Close up part two.  Also "the boy who lived" which Travis seemed to appreciate the most.

Last close up of the cupcakes.  Also including "happy b-day"

And for those of you who were curious, this is what the jam filled cupcakes looked like.  I didn't get to try one, because Travis took all of them home with him, but from the people who did get one, they said that it tasted really good, which makes me want to do some more flavor experiments.