beachy, wedding edition

Last year I made a beach-themed cake for a couple's engagement party (check it out here). This year, I applied the same design to a scaled up cake for their wedding reception. 

Like the engagement cake, all three tiers (12", 9" and 6") were made from a rich chocolate cake with mint flavoured swiss meringue buttercream. The outside of the cake was covered in vanilla buttercream. It's notoriously difficult to get a non-crusting buttercream smooth as glass and I had to make a few passes to get it looking sharp, but overall I'm very happy with how the finished turned out! Even more so when the dark chocolate interior is considered. Totally covered.

The details were the most fun. Buttercream was piped to create corals, gumpaste was used to create pearls and frangipanis, and the shells are made from white chocolate. To finish everything off a turquoise satin ribbon was wrapped around the base of each tier.


Congratulations to the newly married couple!


-Danielle

rubi

A short while ago I celebrated my anniversary with the better half; he gave me a beautiful bouquet of yellow and pink gerbera daisies (one of my favourites) that I later wanted to emulate as cupcakes. I happened to pick up blackberries and golden raspberries from the store one day and knew they would be perfect. 

I've baked with blackberries before; they're tart and sweet and oh so pretty. The golden raspberries were something new. Until I'd bought them I had no idea they existed. They're a rarer variety of raspberry that's slightly sweeter and milder than their traditional red counterpart. 

 To cut the tartness of the berries, I paired them with a not-too-sweet buttermilk chocolate cupcake base. 

Buttermilk Chocolate Cupcakes
(recipe yields 18 cupcakes)

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups flour

1 1/2 cups sugar

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 eggs

3 tbsp olive oil

3/4 cup buttermilk

3/4 cup water

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

pinch of salt

Directions:

Heat oven to 350F. Whisk together the flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Slowly add buttermilk, followed by water, oil, vanilla and lastly eggs, one at a time. Mix on high for 2 minutes. Pour batter into cupcake liners (about 2 large tablespoons per cupcake) and bake for 15 minutes, or until toothpick inserted comes out clean. 

 The buttercream topping is a standard Swiss meringue buttercream using this recipe. The berries were then (separately) pureed with a little bit of boiling water and added to the buttercream once cooled. 

And then the cupcakes were promptly eaten.

-Danielle

the big one

Wedding season is now upon us and to ring it in this weekend I prepared the largest cake I've made yet:

This cake is made of 160 servings, with a 14" bottom, 10" middle and 6" top for the bride and groom. I made this cake a little bit taller than usual (5.5") to make sure the servings, while slim, would still be generous. Each tier was made of lemon cake with different buttercream fillings - strawberry and vanilla in the 14", chocolate and blueberry in the 10", and strawberry and chocolate in the 6".

The bride and groom requested a swiss meringue buttercream finish in gray (to match the chrome theme of the reception) with brightly coloured gerbera daisies as accents. Because swiss meringue buttercream doesn't form a crust, it's nearly impossible to achieve a fondant-like finish - but this was close!

It was a tremendous undertaking but I'm very pleased with the final result. Hopefully you agree!

-Danielle