Avery's 6th Birthday Cake

Well, Avery wanted a ship with Ariel and Eric's wedding. So I hand-carved a ship from 3 cakes. I was really happy with how the shape came out considering I did it by hand and just eyeballed the shape. I hand-made and hand-distressed each wooden plank from fondant. It was definitely time-consuming, but it came out great. The color is a mixture of brown gel coloring and vodka. The vodka evaporates quickly and doesn't ruin the fondant like water would. Here I am placing each plank on the ship. 

Working on placing the sails.

I used a mold to press the floorboards, and I like how they came out. It was interesting getting them to fit together just right and then trimming the edges along the front and back. 

Sails made by my handy assistant (thanks Mom!) I gave her the design and the supplies and she put them together for me. She and my dad are always so great with helping me out with whatever I need and loaning me their kitchen for these cakes

The whole thing is placed on a cake board covered in blue frosting with fondant rocks. 

Close up of the wood planks. 

Sebastian and Flounder

There are 6 sparkling candles coming out of the canon portholes...3 on each side

Alfajores

Here's another new cookie I wanted to try. Alfajores (pronounced alfa-hor-ays). They are shortbread cookies sandwiched with dulce de leche. 

I started by making the cookie dough and chilling it. Then I started making the dulce de leche. It was a long process, but fun to watch the milk go through its various stages before becoming a thick sticky caramel-like substance. Here's some photos of the process and finished product.

It started out as a quart of whole milk, with some light corn syrup, sugar, baking soda, salt, and vanilla. After about an hour and a half, and a lot of stirring, it became about a cup of dulce de leche. A lot of people use a shortcut and make it by using sweetened condensed milk, but I wanted to make it from scratch. 

Here it is when it came off the stove. The next day, once it had cooled, it was very thick and sticky. YUM!

Here are the shortbread cookies.

And here is the finished product.

These are delicious and definitely worth making again. 

Chocolate Orange Hazelnut Checkerboard Cookies

I found a recipe for these online and they looked good, but time consuming. I figured I'd give them a try. They were good, but not SO good that all the effort required to make them would warrant making them again. 

The first thing I did was zest an orange using one of my favorite kitchen tools, the Microplane...(it works GREAT!)

Next, I made the dough by first making a plain shortbread cookie dough. Then I divided it in half and added chocolate to half of it. Then I added orange zest and toasted hazelnuts. Next, I rolled them out flat and chilled them. I also reserved a small portion of chocolate dough to use for wrapping the outside of the loaf.

After rolling and chilling, I placed the two pieces on top of each other, cut them into strips, and then alternated  the pieces to achieve the checkerboard look. Here they are before going into the oven. The pattern is far from perfect, but it works. It's VERY hard to get the pieces perfectly symmetrical. 

And here is the finished product. You can see the flecks of orange zest and toasted hazelnuts. They were certainly delicious, but I don't know if I'll go through all the effort to make them again. 

Chocolate Trifle for Avery's Birthday

After making Avery's big birthday cake for her birthday party, I had a lot of leftover devil's food cake. So, for her actual birthday, I used the leftover cake and made a chocolate trifle.

Here is the leftover cake:

 

I started with a layer of crumbled cake on the bottom. 

Then I made fresh chocolate pudding and folded in hand-whipped cream for the next layer. 

For the next layer, I sliced fresh strawberries.

Finally, I topped it with fresh raspberries.

And here is the finished product

Avery's 4th Birthday Cake

Well, here it is. Avery's 4th birthday cake. She requested the following:

Zebra Stripes
Hearts
Stars
Dora
Littlest Pet Shop

I wasn't sure how everything would come together, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out.

Here are the cakes: I baked 6 devil's food cakes total (2 6-inch, 2 8-inch, and 2 10-inch cakes).

Then I leveled them, which yielded a lot of leftover cake (see my next post to see what I did with it.)

I then stacked them with strawberry filling in between, made buttercream icing for the crumb coating, and made and colored the fondant. I covered the cakes, stacked them and called it a night.

The next morning, I made all the decorations and decorated the cake.

And here's the finished product:

Sarah's Birthday Cake

This was my first time working with fondant. I started by baking two round lemon cakes and leveling them so they were flat. I used buttercream icing between the two cake layers, and for the crumb coating under the fondant.  I made marshmallow fondant from scratch, then colored it, rolled it out, and covered the cake.

I cut out shapes from more fondant for the flowers. 

Here's the first layer of the flowers.

And here's the finished product. The bird is made entirely of fondant. 

Not bad for my first time working with fondant. This was a trial run for my next fondant cake...Avery's Dora cake for her 4th birthday. Stay tuned.