Red, Gold and White Wedding Cake

After having made an Engagement cake a while ago I was yearning to do a Wedding cake someday. I did not have to wait long as our close friends announced they were getting married this year and that too in Minneapolis and yaaayyy, I just jumped at the occasion of making a pretty cake for them that matched with their wedding and theme. 

I'm so happy to say I was able to make a Three Tiered Wedding cake for them who got married this year in April and it was a beautiful ceremony and the first time I attended a North Indian Wedding. They decided to bring their immediate family over to MN to attend and bless them on this auspicious occasion. 
A lot of things had to be taken care of like food, photographer, venue, poojari, sangeeth and Mehendi night preps, decorating the venue etc etc . Trust me I never did nor think of anything of this sort for my own wedding other than getting dressed up, wearing makeup and sitting at the mandap ;-)

The bride and groom along with help from a bunch of us friends did all the preparations and organizing for the big day and it was a gorgeous event and one to remember and in the end a job well done ;-) 

They chose 'Love Marriage' as the theme for the wedding with decorations in colors of Red, White and Gold! So the colors for the cake was set. She also wanted some cookies to add to the favor bag for the guests as a Thank you for attending their auspicious event, so we decided to bake them at home itself and do some decorations with royal icing.

We first started with the cookies. My friend and her sis-in-law (who came from India) helped me with the cookie baking-decorating marathon ;-) 
We baked 85 Shortbread cookies in an aromatic Espresso flavor using fluted Heart shaped cookie cutters. We planned to incorporate the Love theme into the cookies so decided on doing a marbled heart effect using royal icing. I made two batches of red and white royal icing and we all had so much fun doing the icing decoration.  The whole cookie making marathon literally took us the whole day and here's how it looked :-)

The wedding was held at an elegant Indian restaurant here in Minneapolis and the entire decor was done such that it had everything to do with 'Love'. There were heart shaped red balloons, red and golden drapes all over the hall, beautiful fresh flower arrangements and elegant tea light candles floating in crystal vases filled with red rose petals at each table, golden chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and romantic indian music playing in the background....in all it was a glittery night and a beautiful wedding!

For the wedding cake after brainstorming quite a bit I decided on bottom and top tiers being Red and middle tier being White with the couple's Initials on it.
Thankfully the wedding was on a Monday, so I had the entire weekend to bake, frost and decorate the cake. We decided on these Cake flavors: 
Bottom Tier (10"d x 4"h) - Rich Chocolate Cake with Vanilla Buttercream
Middle Tier (8"d x 6"h) - Red Velvet Cake with Vanilla Buttercream
Top Tier (6"d x 6"h) - White Cake with Mango Buttercream

Everything from Cake to frosting to fondant was all made at home from scratch with the freshest of ingredients and the decorations took me almost 14hrs flat on all three tiers. Here's a look at how these beauties looked before getting draped with fondant.

I wanted to do a Mehendi design on the bottom tier, but as I'm personally not very good with doing free hand mehendi, I decided to use a stencil. I used the left-over Red Royal Icing (that we made for the cookies) and used the stencil for the pattern on the cake and I painted over the stenciled royal icing with Antique gold edible dust. This was so time-consuming and I had no room for mistakes with even a bristle going out of line, so it was very intricate work. This was done three times all around the bottom tier.

For the middle tier, I decided on a pleated look. I had recently bought an embosser rolling pin on sale and wanted to use that to create an embossed look on the fondant pleats. It was very faint but hey! you can see it if you look closely. The pleats took me quite some time with measuring each individual pleat to be of same thickness and attaching them one by one. I did a free-hand heart cut-out on fondant and wrote the couple's initials and piped a beaded border with white Royal icing and painted over both with Antique Gold Edible dust. 

For the top tier I had initially planned on making several sugar roses and placing them on top, as my friend loved Red Roses, but that din't work out, so finally I used my silicon mold to  make a giant rose and painted it with Antique Gold Edible dust. 
To give the cake more height I included a divider in between the middle and top tier using a styrofoam block that was 4" in diameter and 3" in height, that I wrapped fully in cling wrap and added fondant beads accents which again was painted fully with Antique Gold Edible dust.  

The cake was supported with wooden dowels for stability and placed on a pretty silver cake stand surrounded by rose petals and pretty candles in wine glasses. The florist suggested keeping some fresh roses on top of the cake and she promised that the flowers were organic and pesticide free, so we placed few roses on the top. So finally I was able to keep few roses on top of the cake as planned before and there you go!!!

Here are some more precious moments :-)

Photography credits for the Cake: Kristin McCarthy Photography
Cake cutting and decoration pics : Kushal Paudyal Photography

Please do share all your valuable feedback on the cake which was my first three tiered cake as well. It still has plenty of room for improvement but I'm hoping to learn as I go. 
I want to thank the bride and groom who are our close friends from the bottom of my heart for letting me make the cake for their special day and I wish them a very happy married life.

Next on the blog, I will be sharing the recipe for the gorgeous Espresso Shortbread cookies and will also show how we did the marbled heart effect with Royal icing, so don't go anywhere ;-) 

-Manju

Classy, Simple yet Elegant Mini Cakes.....

I've always been in LOVE with Cakes. Party cakes, tea cakes, tiered cakes, small cakes, big cakes, tiny or tall cakes...all kinds and varieties - you name it and I love it! My craze for cakes started from all long as I can remember. Along with the taste of the cake I've also had a good eye for noticing cake presentation in details like edible sugar pearls, buttercream decorations, flowers, fondant figurines etc and what excites me is the fact that its all edible.

Off-late I've been very fascinated by modern and elegant designs for cakes. Single colored cakes with some simple designs like a ribbon border or swirls or large centerpiece flower or chevron patterns or lace pattern etc that makes the cake look simple, yet classy and elegant. I've been watching a lot of video tutorials wherever available and also reading a lot of cake related blogs to know of various techniques and ofcourse to drool over the master creations they come up with.

Now coming to mini cakes, I just love this concept of making a miniature version of a full sized cake with almost the same kind of decorations and cake flavors and I've always wanted to try it. My ex-colleague inviting a few of us friends to her new home for a simple get- together proved to be the perfect occasion to take such pretty cakes.  

For the each mini cake I went with these simple yet elegant designs (as pictured below) 



1. I wanted a simple pattern with just the focus on a big flower so that's how I came with this pretty pink pompom cake neatly finished with a ring border that's slightly embossed. The pompom took me a whole one hour to make but it was so worth it. I felt this one was my neatest cake of the lot.

2. I wanted another simple and almost similar pattern with yellow too, so made three mini yellow pompoms and placed them on top and neatly bordered the bottom with a yellow fondant ribbon again mildly embossed with a different pattern

3. The upside-down hearts was an idea that just instantly came to my mind (I love ♥s ;-) ) and I had the perfect sized heart cutter for it. I placed a pretty pink Daisy over the cake centred with a sugar pearl for a simplistic finish.

4. The Offset Chevron is a design I've always wanted to try and my favorite color combo is yellow and white so went with that.  I tried the ever famous wax-paper transfer method to get this pattern around the cake. I placed a pretty Yellow daisy on the top for a final touch again centered with a sugar pearl....Afterall Pearls are a girl's best friends ain't they....or was it diamonds? :-P 

There were few imperfections in the cakes. The untidily covered cake boards (my first try) and a few air bubbles within my fondant was what bothered me the most. But my friend's saw none of it.  The cake was a yummy Chocolate cake with rich chocolate buttercream and it tasted great! The cakes were 3" in diameter and around 3.5" in height.

I neatly placed each mini cake in individual treat boxes, all taped up and asked them to pick any box. They were all so surprised and all of them got completely unique and individual mini cakes. It was the perfect dessert sized cake and their kids just loved the marshmallow fondant and was simply happy that they could eat the flowers :-) 

The concept for making mini cakes is simple. I made a regular quarter sheet sized chocolate cake (can use any flavor) and used a small steel vessel of 3" diameter with sharp edges (had no cookie cutter of right size) to cut out circles of cake and stacked two circles together with chocolate buttercream, coated the sides also with buttercream and wrapped them in marshmallow fondant and kept the decorations simple yet elegant.

Mini Cakes are also a perfect way to practice multiple designs on different individual cakes without having to make a whole different cake for each decoration you want to try and practice on. So hope I've given you a new idea and inspired you enough to give it a try.

So which one is your favorite? :-)

Pompom flower tutorial : Rumana's blog

Offset Chevron pattern : Inspired by Jessica Cakes

-Manju

Cars themed Birthday Cake and Cupcakes

Hello all…sometimes when you almost temporarily stop doing something that you’ve been doing for long time it takes a while to get into the ‘Start’ mode again :-) I guess that what’s happening these days with blogging as well…though I miss my regular postings, I kinda like it to not having to sit in front of my lappy both at day (in office) and at night (at home) and for time being I have the excuse that my laptop is too slow and won’t type well. My new laptop is on its way, but I’m still gonna share something today, again it’s something that I haven’t done for a looooooong time now and was initially scared if I could pull it off.  Yes, a fondant cake and a theme cake at that.  It’s a long post, I hope you will read till the end and enjoy the pics along the way :-)

Well, the last Fondant cake I made was in March and it was this pretty Carousel cake. After that we got all busy with moving to our new house, getting settled, made a simple buttercream cake for my lil’Appu’s 2nd b’day  and though I did make several cakes over the summer, most of them were cakes without any frosting, that’s how my family prefers it unless it’s a special occasion.

So anyway when my friend invited us for her son’s 2^nd b’day party I was more than happy to jump in and offer to do the cake. You can say I was just itching to do one ;-) When I asked her the theme , she said Arjun loves Disney Cars and apparently he does have a lot of Cars themed toys as well. And she was very nice and said you can do whatever you want, any flavor, size etc. We decided on making a cake and some cupcakes considering the number of guests, Oh and her only request was to write Happy Birthday on the cake…isn’t she sweet :-)

Now Me being Me, I din’t want to do a simple themed cake. I wanted the theme to be in and out. Confused? Let’s continue reading….

First let me begin with the cupcakes. I just kept them simple, used my all time favorite Red-Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheesefrosting recipe and used race cars themed cupcake liners and race flag toppers. My friend got the Cars themed cupcake stand and they were all neatly placed on the stand.

Next, the Cake. For a Cars theme the race-flag black n white checks combo seemed to be quite a highlight, so I decided to include that in the cake deco.

I also wanted some sort of a cake topper. Now, I’m horrible at modelling any figurines and the last time I tried that were to make Clowns for my lil’Appu’s first b’day cake and I decided I won’t try it again unless really needed. So I went the easy route and just bought a toy McQueen and toy Mater, atleast lil’Arjun could play with them.  

Then came the final touches like the flags, stars, name board and the orange traffic cones, which was a last minute addition just for some burst of color. Oh! And of course the race track was shaped like the number 2 to mark the age and my lil’toys were on the track vroom vrooming away…. ;-) 

The Cake was 10” wide and 4” tall. And with frosting in between it gets a bit more taller. The biggest challenge was to drape this gigantic cake in fondant (it may not be gigantic for cake decorating experts, but for me this was huge).  I have always stepped away from draping such tall cakes , for instance : Appu’s 1^st b’day cake which was same size (bottom tier), I did a pleated pattern 'coz the when I tried to put fondant over the tall cake, it literally slipped and created a huge mess. For his 2^nd b’day (again same cake size) I decided to do buttercream (much easier ;-))

For a cake this tall and wide, you need to roll out fondant to atleast 16-17 inches round…heck I can’t roll out a small chapathi also properly, then imagine rolling out to such dimensions. But for the deco I had in mind, no simple work around was there but to fully drape the cake in fondant. 

I made two batches of my homemade Marshmallow fondant (white color) and rolled it out nice and steady until it was approx 17” round, took a deep breath and carefully placed it over the cake and phew, it stayed, it din’t tear or slip or anything… Thank God! I did not want to make black fondant so I just bought it from the store. With remaining marshmallow fondant I colored some orange for the traffic cones and some red and blue for the stars, name board etc. 
(Btw, Wilton’s Christmas Red gel color is horrible, it gives a pinkish hue than a red) At that moment I wish I had bought red fondant also from the store.

Just a note: The cupcake race flag toppers, the flags on the cake and McQueen/Mater are non-edible 

Now to another fun part where I wanted the theme to also be inside the cake. I decided to make a Chocolate and Vanilla Checkerboard Cake (made from scratch and shaped out) with Chocolate buttercream frosting to match the race flag's black n white pattern and this is what a slice looked like :-)

And it definitely added a wow factor and all the guests at the party loved it. Some of my friend’s guests, who said they never eat cakes at birthday parties actually went for second and third servings and said that the aroma of the homemade cake itself was simply divine. **BIG WIDE SMILE** :-D

Psst:  I should also add that I made this cake half asleep as I had to stay up two whole nights which wasn't planned btw (one night black friday shopping, the next night cake decorating) with no naps in between...Phew!! 

Thanks to Manish for always helping me clean up and keeping lil'Appu away all night, who apparently has a thing for Cakes and gets super excited about it (I wonder where he gets that from) ;-) 

So there you go my dear friends, my version of a Disney Cars themed Cake and Cupcakes.  I hope you enjoyed it and I really enjoyed writing all the details. 

-Manju