Mickey Mouse (Christmas) cookies

I made some really cute looking Mickey Mouse cookies the other day. Mostly because I have to do something while sitting out the last weeks (days??) of my pregnancy, but also because they are fun and yummy!

Check out the recipe here, it's from Disney.

It does look like they might have coated the bottom of their cookies in chocolate. I considered doing that if the ears weren't sticking but they turned out great so I left them plain.







I also made an English Sticky Toffee Pudding out of a Disney World cookbook:

 

It's made with dates and put in the oven where it creates a nice chewy top with a pudding like center. Over the top came the toffee, which I totally screwed up by letting it overheat. It became really hard candy so we scooped it off. And adding custard, made from scratch which is ten times more yummy and just as easy as custard made from powder.

It looks a little unappetizing in this picture but I can assure you it's not!

Dora and Boots cake - how to

I made this Dora and Boots cake for a friend of mine who's daughter turned 3. It wasn't necessarily hard to make but it did take a while! It was like making a puzzle!

I started with a 24 cm round vanilla cake which I filled with strawberry flavored butter cream. I also thinly coated the outside with it. Usually I use ganache to make the cake straight and easy to work with but the roundness of the cake was already pretty perfect so I didn't feel it was necessary.

I then coated the cake with pink marzipan and let it harden overnight. This way I could trace my Dora and Boots picture into the cake so I would have a good reference for adding all those puzzle pieces.
The picture I took from internet. It was really tiny but I have an easy way of making it exactly the right size.

I open the picture in microsoft picture viewer and zoom in until it's the size I need. I then take some sturdy paper and trace the picture right off the screen. It saves the hassle of having to blow up the picture with a copier or something and printing it out.
After the marzipan had hardened a little I took the picture and placed it on the cake. I then used a thin pointed cake decorating tool (a scriber I guess) to trace over the picture. You have to press a little so the lines go into the cake, but not too much that it goes right through the paper.

After this I cut out all the different pieces of the picture so I had little templates. And then it was just a matter of cutting them out of fondant or marzipan. The hassle was really coloring all the fondant and cutting all those little pieces. Because the picture was scribed onto the cake it was very easy to put the pieces in the right place.

I placed the eyes on top of the face because I thought it would make them stand out more, as they also do in the animation. Dora's mouth I pressed down a little to create depth, and Boots' mouth I actually just painted on (except for his tongue) because I found it too delicate to try and cut it out properly with those extra lines. The noses are also painted on.
Boots' hair stands up a little and Dora's hair rests partly on her forehead, just for a little added depth. I also scribed some of the lines into the fondant pieces (like the collar of Dora's shirt) and painted some too (like Boots' hand). 

I added some big flowers from corresponding fondant colors to the side and the name plus age on top, just to finish it off.

I think it turned out really sweet!

Cheese platter cake

I made a cheese platter cake for my dad's birthday a while back.
Everything is cake and all are different flavors.

Lawyer cake

I made this cake for a friend who is a lawyer.
She sent me pictures of the law books she uses and I made those. I also added some judge hammer cake pops.
The cake is chocolate with raspberry jam. The pops are vanilla.

Pink Floyd The Wall cake

I made this Pink Floyd The Wall cake for my hubby's birthday.

I painted the picture of the Professor on the cake. I started with the background colors and let them dry overnight. The next day I painted all the details and lines over the top making for a pretty accurate Professor!

I added vinyl record cake pops and some tiny music details to make it look just that bit better :)

On the inside it was a chocolate cake with Dulce de Leche and lemon curd filling. Yummy!

Winnie the Pooh cake

For my birthday in April (woops, that's a while back) I made a Winnie the Pooh decorated two-tier cake. It was my first time sculpting with modeling fondant. I didn't make it quite right because it kept cracking but nevertheless Pooh turned out pretty nice. My niece recognized him, and Piglet too :)
The honeypots turned out really cute.

For my dads birthday I made a cheese platter cake. It was a platter of cake shaped like different types of cheese and each had its own flavor. I'm still waiting on the pictures of that one.

For my BF I'm going to make a musical cake, because he has a super huge record collection :)

Starting a decorated cake shop

Ok so it won't really be a shop. I'm just starting a business in decorated cakes, and just plain yummy pies. I've made quite a lot and since I can't seem to find a decent (or any) job, this is a good time to start my own business :)

I haven't quite figured out what it is going to look like but I do know I am not including the color pink in my name, logo or website. All cake stores here seem to be pink, and not a little pink, very very pink! Any guy wishing to make a nice cake (and lets face it, with Buddy on tv I'm sure there are a lot of men out there), is never going to want to go into a store that is so extremely frilly.

Well I have thought of the name, which is translated is Cake and Art. Though in English it doesn't sound wonderful, in Dutch it is nice and it makes for a nice logo because the word art is part of the Dutch word for cake (huh?? you say...: taART)

So I'm hoping to get the business going sometime soon and then I'll happily link you to it. In the mean time check out this fabulous fabric I got for the nursery (yes I said it, I'm pregnant woohoo!): World of Susy Bee

Sharing some treats

Just wanted to share some of my recent treats.


1personPizza

 First up is this 1 person pizza. Yummy! Pizza is so easy to make. I generally use wheat flour to make the bottom so it's good for your digestive system. As a sauce I just use tomato puree, adding garlic and Italian herbs. I like the puree because I hate runny sauce on my pizza. Then some nice serrano-ham, some cheese and after it's baked, top it off with rucola lettuce. Yum!!




Plum Strawberry Pastries

 Plum season has started again, or at least they are selling them in the supermarket again. To make these sweet treats take a square of puff pastry and cut out two opposite corners. (Take a close look at the picture if this confuses you.) Prick a few holes in the pastry between the two cuts. Cut your plums in pieces and add some cut up strawberries. Sprinkle with sugar. If your plums and strawberries are really sweet you won't even need this, unless you like your pastries really sweet. Put a bit of the fruit lengthwise between those two cuts. Now fold the loose corners over the fruit. Lay all the pastries on a baking sheet on a wire rack. Scoot into the middle of the oven which you preheated to about 380 degrees (190 celsius). They'll stay in there for about 20 minutes. With 5 minutes to go you can sprinkle some coarse sugar over the top.
After I took them out of the oven I glazed the fruit with a bit of diluted raspberry jam. Just to make the top fruits a bit moist.

Plum pie (which tastes surprisingly like rhubarb pie)

I had a few plums which were threatening to turn bad so I made a pie. The crust is cookie dough, easy and yummy. I rolled it out and pushed it into a small tin (about 6 inches/ 16 cm) using the leftovers to make the wire top. The filling contains mostly plums, a handful of cranberries and a few blueberries. I added about a teaspoon of cornstarch just to bind those juices. You have to adjust this amount when your plums are really juicy and/or when you make a larger pie. I also added a crumb topping under the wire top. It's made of a handful of crushed walnuts, the same amount of oatmeal, some sugar (depending on your sweet tooth, I'm not a great sugar eater) and a bit of butter to bind the crumbs. You could add a little bit of juice if you have it, that will give it a little more fruity flavor but it's no biggy if you do not.

Bake temp is about 360 F (180 C) and bake time ?? hmmm don't really remember. I think it was 35 minutes. Just check once in a while. Fruity pies like these are done when you see some of those juices boiling up thickly at the edges. Take it out of the oven and leave it on a wire rack to cool. You need it to cool down considerably so the juices will set. If you have a hubby like mine, who wants to eat everything the moment it's made (flattering but not always handy ;) try to make it when he's not home hahaha. Or remember to put a deep enough plate or dish under the pie when you cut into it. If you are able to wait, wait until it is lukewarm. That will give you a pie that can hold itself but is still that nice warm out of the oven taste. And otherwise eat it at room temp, also very nice!

How to make wood pattern fondant and scones :)

I love baking :)
I just made some scones. It's been 15 years since I did that. The last time was in middle school and they tasted awful! My friend and I got the amount of salt wrong, yuk! I decided to make these because as I already said I love baking, and because there's a pot of lemon curd in my fridge which just screamed SCONES! The recipe wasn't the best in my opinion so I'm not posting that. You can google and find much better.



Btw if you read my last post, the cake turned out fine. Actually better then I expected and everyone loved it. Plus it tasted great, or so I heard. That's the only downside to making cakes for other people, you can't taste them ;)
It was my first try using buttercreme instead of ganache. I'm not wildly thrilled. It works a lot easier and quicker but jeez that has trouble with temperature fluctuation! Every time it got a little warmer bubbles started to appear and I hate it when a cake doesn't look absolutely neat. For this cake it was ok to see the layers but generally I want those to be invisible. Maybe I wasn't using the right recipe buttercreme, it was nutella.
I did spend a while trying to find out how to make fondant look like wood. Eventually I just winged it. It worked out really well!


To make fondant look like wood:
You need a base color (I used chocolate brown). Take enough to cover the whole cake, because you're using just a little of the other colors.

Now take about a sausage roll of a much darker color (I used black) and the same amount of a much lighter color (I used white). You need these colors to deviate enough from your base so when you're kneading all of them together they don't vanish into your base color.

Now knead your base fondant a little, push it down so it makes a rectangle the same length and a little broader than your two sausage rolls (the other two colors). Lay the two sausages on your base, not touching each other. It's very important not to start kneading like you're used to or you're just going to mix everything together. Instead fold your base lengthwise in half with the sausages on the outside. Pull it apart and fold it the same way again. It's like pulling taffy. Repeat this about 5-10 times, depending on the amount of fondant. Don't make the lines of dark and light too thin because you also have to roll it out so they'll get even thinner. If after you rolled it out, it doesn't look right, you can just start afresh with two new sausage rolls of dark and light fondant.

I hope it's clear. If not, don't hesitate to ask in the comments!