Cricut Cake

My Brother, Sis-in-LOVE (that's what my mom calls her), Mom and Dad all pitched in to get me a Cricut Cake for Christmas. I had seen the product before, but was a bit on the fence about it.  But since I got one.....I had to figure out some way to use it!  The perfect occasion was my Mom's 70th Birthday.  I had some time off work so I decided to try a few new techniques on the cake....well I definitely bit off more than I could chew on this one!

For this cake I tried a new recipe I got from Cakecentral.com which was the White Almond Sour Cream cake (WASC).  My  Mom wanted a lemon cake and luckily the recipe provided instructions for converting this cake to a few different flavors. I made half the recipe as suggested on the message boards, but I still felt that the cake was too crumbly. Next time I think I 'm going to try to make the entire recipe and then tweak some things on the "half" recipe to make it a little more moist.

However,the flavor of the cake was absolutely FABULOUS!! My family said it was the best cake I had ever made!!  :-)  It was a Lemon cake with Raspberry filling covered in White Chocolate Ganache!!!

 

Here's a picture of the cake covered in ganache!  YUM!

So just to recap, the cake recipe was new and covering and filling a cake in Ganache was new to me too!! But the "newness" didn't stop there.... one of my student's sisters (she's actually a friend)....gave me an airbrush machine that she was not longer using!! Yay!!!

I decided that it would be a good time to try out the airbrush technique on this cake too.  I wanted to make it light pink for my Mom...but as soon as I turned on the machine and loaded it with color...I made a huge splash of color on the cake!  Yikes!  I had to cover it up by making the cake HOT PINK instead. All in all the color worked out great because my Mom loved it!  :-)

  In the picture above you can see the lace/doily work that I did using the Cricut Cake.  OMG...It was my first time using this tool and I was not a happy camper!!  It is NOWHERE near as easy as they make it look on TV!  The machine itself is easy to use...but getting the gumpaste at the right thickness and making it stick to the feeder sheet is a whole different story!!!  (Did I mention that I had to make my own gumpaste too!!)  What was I thinking???

 See the "Happy Birthday" that I desperately tried to cover with flowers??? Well it took me 5 tries on the Cricut Cake to get that done.  It is way too large to lift! The "Happy" and "Birthday" are connected so it was a horrible to pick up!  I used a spatula and even tried freezing it before lifting it...but this was the best I could do!!  I wasn't happy with it at all!!!

Now that it's done...I estimate that this cake of "firsts" took me over 20 hours to make....SERIOUSLY!!!  Good thing it was for my Mom, and not for a customer because I could have never made my any money on it if I had sold it!!!  FYI: The flowers are store bought because at that point...I just wanted to finish the darn thing.

Holiday Treats

December has always been known for it's holiday treats....and as usual I did a TON of baking! I didn't take pictures of everything but believe me the "goodies" definitely made an impact (on my butt & thighs!!!) LOL!

I made cookies and a popcorn munch for my co-workers, parfait cups for my family on Christmas night (Thanks Tammy!) and experimented with bread pudding, and a fiew quick breads.

I also tried to make a Matcha Green Tea cake, but I found that the Matcha is WAY too expensive  at $29/oz., so I ended up using regular green tea as my liquid and just used food coloring to make it "green".

O' well... it looked pretty and tasted good too, so that's all that really matters.  Oh...and I tried my first attempt at cake balls!!!  They aren't the prettiest....YET!!! But I will definitely keep practicing because they are oh...so...good!!!

This was the Green Tea/ Chocolate  Marble Cake (inspired by Bakerella)

This was the Bread Pudding....so Delish!!!

Cakes Balls....chocolate/strawberry cake with cream cheese icing...dipped in white chocolate and sprinkles!!!

Apricot, Pecan, White Chocolate Quick Bread....Everybody loved it!! I definitely need to make this again!!