Jungle Animals themed Cake

I'm so excited to share my first cake this New Year....a super fun, extremely cute and bright Jungle Animals themed tiered cake. Ridhaan's mom is my very good friend and she had asked me to do his birthday cake many months before. Although I wasn't sure if I would be able to make it (due to some other matters) I finally decided to go ahead. Her only request was for a Mango Mousse filling and some animals to go on the cake to match with the Animal themed birthday party she had in mine. Rest all was left to me and sky was the limit....

I'm proud of this cake for several reasons.

(a) This is my first non-fondant tiered cake with a smooth fondant-like finish. It took a lot of time to get the sides smooth and edges straight but it was worth it. There were some imperfections but let's say I decorated over them...hehe :-P These are very important factors in the word of beautiful cakes so it mattered a lot to me as well and I'm glad it worked well.

(b) This was my first tiered cake with a creamy Mousse filling. Mousse fillings are generally very soft and people don't recommend them for tiered cakes or even for cakes that need to sit out for a long time. But I tried it and it worked fine. Maybe I should thank the freezing temperatures here in Minnesota for that!

(c) My first cake with actual sugar figurines that you can eat! :-D

The Cakes were Vanilla White Cake with creamy Mango Mousse Filling covered with color tinted Vanilla Buttercream with marshmallow fondant accents for decoration and figurines. 

Until now I've never really tried making edible figurines, except for the Clowns I made for Lil'Appu's 1st Birthday Cake. Usually I just keep a plastic toy topper or a themed candle topper and just decorate the rest of the cake. But this time I felt with the animal theme it would be great to have some cute looking animals on the cake, so I went ahead with making them.

I made a Giraffe, Zebra, Elephant and Lion. I wish I had made the giraffe neck longer, but other than that I was happy with the rest of the animal figurines. These were made almost a week in advance and they hardened perfectly. 

My son used to come back daily from daycare and go stare at the animals...he just loved them. He is so used to me making cakes for friends that he doesn't touch or disturb my 'cake stuff' and for some reason he thinks he can go for the party anyways and eat the cake and decorations there (which is usually true)...so after the cake is cut its a whole different story, he wants everything first ;-D 

He kept requesting that I make a Monkey as well and I told him we'll make one directly on the cake. I don't know if he understood, but he kept waiting for the monkey every single day :)

The Tree toppers were a last minute addition. After I placed the animals on the cake with the Lion on top I just felt it needed something more...I thought about placing a Sun, but then the colors of the Lion and sun would be almost same (yellow-orange) , so finally decided to place the same trees that I had placed around the cake. Well, you can call them Coconut trees although the leaves should have been longer ;-) It's all in the imagination....hehe! If you notice I even gave small scale like texture to the stem of the tree to give it a proper 3D tree look. I decorated the cake board with chocolate buttercream to give it a muddy ground like appearance and it looked pretty good.

Then there were vines, some grass, more leaves, coconut trees and flowers to complete the overall look of the cake. I wanted the Monkey to be hanging from the tail on a vine and that's how I did it.

My fun animals :)

My friend had already bought the candle that would go on the cake so we placed that at the venue. Here are some pics of the beautiful Cake Table and cake cutting :)

Here's how the cake slice looked like! It really was yumm if I may say so.....ahem!

I'm still waiting for some more pics that the photographer at the party had taken....I'm sure my friend is waiting for those more than me :-P 

The party was super fun, the decorations were perfect and colorful and the food was awesome and not to mention how lovely the cake was...hehe! 

Lil'Ridhaan happily ate up the sugar Elephant and lil'Appu went for the Lion, but I don't have pics of any of that...hopefully the photographer took some :)

Will share more fun cake stories in upcoming posts...until then take care and bye bye!

-Manju

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