One of my favorite things that we did with the bachelorette party was go to a cooking class at the New Orleans School of Cooking. It was a blast! We did a class where we mostly just watched and got to eat the food, but Mary got to get up behind the counter and help make the crawfish etouffee. The instructor was great and managed to be very funny and very informative at the same time. The shrimp and artichoke soup that she made was one of the best things we ate all weekend, and we ate a lot good things! If you ever head down to New Orleans, I definitely recommend taking a class!
Now I'm back to the real world in Kansas and psyching myself up to make 180 cupcakes for a wedding this weekend. Some time between now and then, Joe and I also need to build a cupcake "tower" for displaying them on the cake table. We'll be sure to take pictures of how we do it. For now, I'll show you some pictures of a cake I made probably a couple of months ago for a coworker's daughter's ballet recital. The requests for the cake were pink, purple and princess!
I thought it would be fun to make some candy gem stones, so I found a mold for them at my local baking supply store. Then I used some chocolate candy melts in pink and purple to make the gems. It was pretty easy to spread the melted candy into the mold, then I just refrigerated the molds and popped out the candy. Most of the candy had rough edges of extra candy around them after popping them out, so I went around and cut off the rough parts with a sharp knife. Then I sprinkled them with a little edible glitter.
 |
| You can see that a few of them had air bubbles where the melted candy didn't make it to the bottom of the mold. |
I had planned to make a tiara out of modeling chocolate, but a late start and a bad batch of modeling chocolate resulted in Joe making a run to Wal-mart for a plastic tiara. Oh well.
The base is my typical rose icing, but I thought it was fitting for a group of little princesses!
First of all...who is planning these bachelorette parties? I am jealous. I have never heard of doing a cooking class, but that's a great idea! Secondly, I am so jealous you get all these cake orders. No one at work barely ever asks me to do anything--I maybe get like 6 cake orders a year. I guess I need to bring stuff in more often.
ReplyDeleteSo I have been meaning to try the rose technique out for awhile now and I keep forgetting whenever I make a random cake. Are you using like a standard buttercream to make the roses or more of a royal frosting that crisps up? I was just curious because it looks like you have that top tier sitting on top of the roses and I didn't think normal buttercream would be able to handle that. Also, another question...what kind of cake board do you have that thing on?
Sorry I'm so obnoxious...I just like to see what does/doesn't work for my fellow bakers. :)
Hey Chase! Mary's friend planned the weekend and it was pretty awesome. We should do a girls weekend like that sometime! We went to Channing Tatum's bar and he was totally there that night! But we didn't know it at the time :(
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how I got lucky enough to get cake orders from work so often. Maybe it's because we have a really small office and everyone knows me. For the roses, I do just use a regular buttercream. The kind with powder sugar and butter and not the "Swiss" buttercream. On this cake, when I put the supports into the bottom tier to hold the top tier, I made them tall enough so that the top tier wouldn't smash the roses. The roses do "crust" but they're not hard like royal icing. The cake board is just 2 pieces of cardboard I covered in special foil I got at a cake store. I got a really big roll and one side is white and the other is silver. It has a little flower and leaf design all over it. Something like this I think: http://www.globalsugarart.com/foil-covering-c-869_871.html. It's nice to not have to use shiny silver foil. One roll has lasted me over a year and I don't think I've even used half.
I certainly don't mind talking about cakes so feel free to ask me any questions :) I wish you lived closer so we could bake and do cake things together! By the way, how is the house hunt going? There are some for sale in our neighborhood, just saying.