Bastille Day

Happy (belated) Bastille Day!! I know I haven't posted in ages. The boys and I are still with my parents, and while I have made a few things here and there, the majority of my evening time over these past two months has been spent hanging out with my mom and dad instead of sewing, baking or blogging. It has been such a long time since I have been able to just hang with them, that I am taking full advantage of it. My parents are amazing for a variety of reasons, but one of my favorites is that they are always looking for an excuse for a party. Enter Bastille Day. We are not French. We celebrate anyway.

A number of their close friends came, and everyone was instructed to bring a bottle of French wine as well as some "French" food item. I bought a lovely bottle of white and decided to make a cake that would have made Marie Antoinette proud. Last week my mom and I went blueberry picking and in an hour we amassed 18 pounds of blueberries. We froze most of them, but kept a few pounds fresh for eating, or in my case, for baking. I made a delicious lemon blueberry layer cake. Yum.

We only really finalized the party on Saturday. Then I worked out the cake I would do. Sunday morning my brother and I headed to the grocery store and as soon as we got home, I got to baking. Baby T slept from the time we left until 5 minutes after I got the cake in the oven - it was a small miracle.

Once the cakes were cooled and the frosting was made, I got assembling. Since I was limited on time, I ended up buying the lemon curd for the filling.

Then it was time to frost and decorate the cake. I started with a light crumb coat, put it in the fridge and after about 30 minutes got to business. My mom doesn't have a turntable or a cake spatula, so my edges were not going to get as gorgeous as I was hoping. Instead I just made it kind of messy on purpose. But, I finished the top with little frills. I love them!

Once the cake was on the platter, I piped little balls along the bottom edge. So sweet.

My mom suggested we finish it off with a little sign:

It looked so sweet when cut. Blueberries galore, but with a delightful lemon tang. Yum, yum!

My parents' friends know how to do it up. We had onion tart, cheese plate, fondue, ham and gruyere crepes, the French flag out of wafers and icing, cherry crepes, chocolates, and a whole lot of wine.

We started with the food inside, but it was a lovely day, so the party quickly moved outdoors. It was a wonderful night and I am sure that all the attendees would agree - if they can remember it!

K's Baking Party: Cookies & Cake

I've said it before, but I'll say it again - no birthday party is complete without cookies! At some point in the planning process of K's birthday party, the cupcake started to emerge as a theme. As a result, I decided to incorporate cupcakes into the cookies as well. Unfortunately, I don't have a cupcake cookie cutter, so I had to make do with what I did have - a scalloped diamond and a ruler.

I started by rolling out my cookie dough and cutting straight edge. Using the more rounded half of my scalloped diamond, I cut out the top half of the diamond. In case you want to make your own cupcake cookies, I think the same result could be done with a circle or oval cutter instead of the scalloped diamond. It might even be a bit cuter.

Using the ruler, I cut another straight line, and then a second one about 3cm above the first.

I cut that long rectangle into smaller rectangles roughly the width of the top cupcake bit.

Then I sliced them inwards slightly, to make them look like the base of the cupcake (note: the one on the right had not yet been cut).

On the lined cookie sheet, I placed the top and bottom as closely together as possible, but they didn't connect perfectly.

No problem at all - I just used my finger to smooth out the line a bit.

They ended up looking like this before baking.

Look at the little army of cupcakes!

I mentioned before, that I really didn't have a whole lot of time to spend on this party. Cutting and piecing together the cupcakes took a good amount of time and I assumed that decorating them would as well. To save myself some time, after about 16 cupcake cookies, I just cut the rest of the dough into scalloped circles.

Once the cookies were baked and cooled I wrapped them up and put them in the freezer for about a week. A few nights before the party, I got them out, thawed them and got to decorating. Just like the real cupcakes, I only used white and yellow icing. This seriously cut down on prep time and kitchen mess. I started with the "frosting" part of the cookie. To reinforce the line I wanted to try to cover most of it with one color of icing. I did a little swirl at the bottom and then went straight up and over the top, to make a rounded, slightly wavy triangle. Then I filled it in. For the first few, I put the sprinkles on right away, but I found that it looked better if I gave the icing a bit of time to harden slightly before putting on the sprinkles.

Once the tops were done, I went to the bottoms. These were done in yellow - again starting with the outline and then filling them in.

 

Once they were completely dried, I piped on vertical lines to mimick the cupcake wrapper. For the scalloped circles, I did half of them in yellow, the other half in white. Half of each color got sprinkles, the other half got a "4" on them. In a final detail, I piped tiny dots around the edges of the circles to highlight the scalloped edge. (I did a really awful job of taking photos for this party. So, yes, this is the exact same photo from above, but I thought it would be easier to see the final details if I showed this photo again.)

Next up was the cake. Ahhh, the cake. I was so super dissappointed in it. I wanted it to be a huge cupcake, but it ended up looking like a pot of white flowers. Boooo. The good news is that once it was cut and plated, it looked adorable and tasted even better.

I don't have a giant cupcake tin, so I just did what I could with round tins and a knife. I started by making a full vanilla cake recipe and a half of a chocolate cake recipe. Then I sliced each of the cakes in half horizontally to give me six rounds to work with. I started with the bottom of the cake, stacking the layers one on top of the other, vanilla, chocolate, vanilla. Then I put a small bowl on top and using a toothpick sketched out a line about 1cm away from the edge of the bowl.

Following my line, I sliced down and out diagonally to give the cupcake base the correct shape.

Then I took the layers apart, separated them with the buttercream and re-stacked them, upside down. I did the same idea for the top of the cupcake, but I cut the shape so that it was rounded at the top and then went straight down. This was a mistake. In my head it was much better than the pointy cupcake top the pan bakes into, but I was wrong. The pointy top would have been way better. Live and learn, right?!

Then it came time for the crumb coats. I did the top and bottom separately since the six layers would have been too tall to fit into my fridge.

Once the bottom half's crumb coat was hard, I busted out the yellow buttercream for the base. I first just focused on getting a fairly even coat on the bottom.

 

Then I dragged an offset spatula from the bottom of the cake, up to the top to create something that looked like wrapper folds. As you can see, I left a tiny space between each vertical drag. I love how the bottom turned out.

 

Finally it was on to the top. :( After the crumb coat was dried, using the biggest star tip I own, I piped stars all over the cake. I left about 5cm from the bottom empty to make it easier to move the cake onto the base the next morning.

Instead of using the same white buttercream to join the top to the bottom, I made a delicious ganache. I thought it would add a bit of visual interest to the cut cake. I also thought it would kick up the tasty factor a bit - I was totally wrong on the shape of the cake, but I was so, so right about this decision!

 

Once I put the top onto the bottom of the cake, I finished up the piping. I didn't even take a photo of the finished cake. I totally forgot. I think had I been more proud of how the cake looked, I would have remembered, but what can you do? On top of the finished cake, I put a yellow "4" candle, but I moved it to K's cupcake for the blowing out of the candle bit. The main reason that I moved it, was because I knew the cake would take a good amount of time to cut - there were 17 adults to cut for. I thought it would be pretty lame to have K blow out his candle and then 30 minutes later, finally eat the cake. 

 

So, about 30 minutes before singing the old "Happy Birthday Song", I got to cutting the cake. I LOVE how it looks cut. I think the black and white stripes look so super cool. Good thing, because I was seriously bummed by how the cake looked pre-cutting. Many of the guests commented on how beautiful the cake looked (post-cutting), but even more commented on how good it was. Wahoo!!

 Seventeed slices of cake? Don't mind if I do!

K's Baking Party: Activites

 

K's baking party was actually not a baking party at all - ha! It was more of a decorating and mixing party, but baking sounds so much cuter. For the party, since there were so many people, we rented out a big room in our complex and held the party there. Y's mom blew up TONS of balloons the night before, so we took about 8 garbage bags full of balloons to the room the morning of the party. The balloons were the only toys. I also set up three food stands, which were the "baking" portion of the party.

 

Remembering how much K and his friends loved the brownie decorating at his Halloween party, I figured we could do the same for this party. Instead of brownies, however, the kids would decorate their own cupcake that we all ate together after singing Happy Birthday to K. Most of the kids really enjoyed this and spent a good amount of time on their cupcake. A few weren't as into it, and instead were pretty set on running around the room, playing - just as well!

 

 

A week or so before the party, I baked a dozen vanilla cupcakes, using my standard vanilla cake recipe. Then I wrapped them individually, put them into freezer bags and threw them in the freezer. Two nights before the party, I pulled them out and frosted them using (a huge batch of) Magnolia Cafe's buttercream recipe. I used a minimal amount of powdered sugar, but it was still, of course, quite sweet. I divided the buttercream in half, and colored one half of it yellow, leaving the other half white (these were the colors for the main cake as well, which is also why I made a huge batch of it). Half of the cupcakes were frosted in yellow, the other half white. Then I put them in tupperware and stored them in the fridge until game time.

 



 



For the party, I set up a different table for each of the three food stations. The night before the party, I made a little sign telling what they were supposed to do and also drew little pictures, hoping that the kids could look and work it out on their own. They didn't really, but whatevs. In addition to the sign, I also had all of the ingredients out on the tables. Here is the cupcake table, minus the cupcakes. The table in the back had a plate with each kid's name on it, so as not to confuse the cupcakes come eating time.

 



 

This was the "snack mix" table, I had a little glass jar labeled for each kid. They could put chocolate covered corn flakes, dried fruits, walnuts, wheat puffs, and M&Ms into the silver bowls, mix it up and put it in their jar to either eat at the party or take home. Most of the kids didn't do this until the very end of the party, but they all seemed to have fun deciding what to put in. It was quite funny, some kids loaded theirs up, while other put in a few dried fruits and called it a day.

 

The final table was a parfait station. The kids used clear plastic cups and layered in yogurt, sliced strawberries and granola. Most kids were too busy playing with balloons to be bothered eating, but a few did make parfaits, as well as a few of the moms. I had cut up a whole carton of strawberries and got three cartons of yogurt, but only about half of the starberries were used and only about one half of a carton of yogurt. Extra yogurt is never a problem in this house!

 I envisioned the kids all decked out in aprons carefully making their snacks and cupcakes. That didn't happen because they were all too busy playing and running around with each other. I should have guessed that would be the case given that most of them were three or four years old. Regardless, the party was still cute with them in their aprons and I think it was best to have the little food stations even if they didn't get utilized as I had envisioned, as it would have been totally random to just have kids in aprons for no apparent reason. In the end, while the "baking" bit wasn't as successful as I had hoped, the kids had heaps of fun at the party and that is what it should be all about anyway.

Chocolate Cake with Neopolitan Swiss Meringue Buttercream

As we will be leaving Japan in a few weeks, we have had a number of goodbye parties. One of them was with our two closest families in the neighborhood. We rented a room in our condo and all of us - six parents and six kids - spent hours together hanging out, talking, eating delicious foods, and watching our kids play. It's crazy how big they have gotten. The first time we hung out, K was about Touji's age and the oldest kid was only about two. Now K is almost four and the oldest will be six this summer.

For the party, I wanted to bring a cake. I started with my standard chocolate cake recipe, baked in two tins and then sliced in half giving me four cake layers. Since the actual cake was so simple, I wanted to do something kind of fun with the frosting. I went through about 10 different ideas before settling on a Neopolitan-style frosting. I started with a vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream. Then I roughly divided that into three and got my chocolate and strawberries ready. For the chocolate, I just melted it and for the strawberries, I just pureed them with my immersion blender.

Little by little, I added both the (cooled) melted chocolate and strawberry puree to the bowls of buttercream. I was shocked at how delicious the chocolate ended up being. The consistency changed a bit, but man alive, was it amazing.

I got the cake ready and put a thin layer of frosting between each of the cake layers - cake, vanilla buttercream, cake, strawberry buttercream, cake, chocolate buttercream.

Then I crumb coated the cake with vanilla.

 

Once it was hardened, I went to frosting the cake - starting with the vanilla at the bottom of the cake, then moved to the strawberry for the middle, and chocolate at the top.

Finally using the back of a spoon, I swirled the frosting a bit and mixed the colors together. I wanted it to be reminiscent of the pastel cake I made ages ago, but it didn't end up looking nearly as pretty as that one. 

That being said, it tasted pretty delicious, so I guess it all worked out in the end.

Yum!!

Happy Birthday, Y

Today my wonderful husband, Y, turns 34! Holy moly!! I could gush on and on about what an awesome husband and dad he is, but he knows that already. Instead I will write about his birthday cake.

Ages ago, I saw these strawberry cream-filled Oreos at the grocery store and have wanted to buy them ever since. But, I hate buying sweets because I also make sweets, which means I end up with TONS of sweets in the house and that is probably the last thing I need. If I use them for baking, however, I figure it's okay. Since Y loves cheesecake and I always use Oreos as my base in chocolate cheesecakes, the situation ended up being perfect - I get to buy my strawberry Oreos and Y gets his cheesecake.

I started by crushing up the Oreos. The cream is pink and looks so cute!

Then I mixed up the cream cheese cake batter.

Then my mixer's engine broke.

I had to mix in the eggs by hand. Bakers in the past must have had wicked muscles, because that was not easy.

But, it got done and I popped it in the oven. I knew that I wanted the top to be plain, so I was careful about rotating the cake and also baked it in a water bath. I think I ended up baking it for one hour and 25 minutes, but it might have been slightly longer.

It came out pretty perfect. I poked one hole in the middle to make sure it was done enough. I figured it wouldn't be an issue since I would put candles in it for Y. As it turns out, his birthday cake presentation was pretty lame. While his birthday was today, he leaves on a business trip tomorrow. I woke up, cut a piece of cake for him and put it in a tupperware, along with some whipped cream and strawberries, for him to take to work. No candles or Happy Birthday Song at 7 in the morning. I'll put another piece together for him for dessert, but then the rest is left over. Anyone need some??