Velvetin

February was an exciting month for me and I'm especially proud to have launched a long-awaited project - Velvetin Cake - my little adventure in red velvet cakes.

There is no other cake I love more than the luscious red velvet. I first fell in love with the crimson cake when I spotted it on joyofbaking.com. The red layers separated by cream cheese frosting made my eyes hungry. My first few attempts at making this cake resulted in a cake that was a bit dry, as with a lot of red velvet cakes I've tasted at cafes and cake shops, and depended way too much on red food colouring. After experimenting with a few recipes and ingredients, I was finally happy with a red velvet that is moist, flavourful and didn't require a whole lot of red food colouring.

Classic Red Velvet

I took the Velvetin brand to Loewen Farmer's Market at Dempsey on Valentine's Day and it was a sell out! Admittedly it wouldn't have been such a success if not for the love of my family and friends. You guys made it a whole lot of fun! I'm now looking for the next popup stall to peddle my red velvet so please do stay tuned. Go to Velvetin's Facebook page for updates.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to order a red velvet cake, Velvetin has them in 3 ways - The Classic (cream cheese), Red Velvet Fudge, Kitty Kat (signature KitKat red velvet) - you can do so at velvetincake.com

My Little Pony Mania

October was the month of My Little Pony cakes! It seemed like every mummy who got in touch with me requested for the pretty ponies for their little ones. I think the rainbow coloured ponies must be enjoying some kind of resurgence in popularity because even McDonald's is packaging their Happy Meals with My Little Pony toys.

I was very happy to make these MLP cakes again as I really enjoyed my first effort for a friend's daughter some time back. I made a total of 4 MLP cakes, with one special order for sisters who were celebrating their birthdays together so I made two cakes with a connecting rainbow! A bit of fondant engineering challenge there.

Here are the 4 cakes...

1. Giselle's 1st Birthday

Simple and Sweet

This cake ordered by Mummy V is a bit of a rehash of my first MLP cake. She didn't want 3D fondant nor toppers so I went with this 2D version of 'Sweetie Belle'. I love make the My Little Pony this way as it stands out enough to make an impact on the cake. I especially love the flowing mane! This was a simple orange sponge cake for a small party.


2. Matilda's 1st Birthday

Field of ponies

A friend wanted the MLP theme for her daughter's first birthday. They had the party decorated with all things pony from the banners to the goodie bags, piñata and even labels the drink bottles! Naturally, a MLP cake would complete the celebration. Mummy M is a busy busy lady so she picked up some toppers and came by to discuss the cake with me. We decided on a rectangular cake - always good for cutting and serving up with a standing rainbow. A couple of days before the party, I went by to McDonald's to get a drink and saw the Happy Meal giving away My Little Pony figurines. It was my first Happy Meal in ages.


3. Kaira's 6th Birthday

Just add ponies

Kaira was going to have a pool party for her birthday so her mummy was a bit hesitant about a fondant cake being out in the open for some hours. Hence, they requested for a cream cake instead. Now having made fondant cakes for most orders, I was suddenly a bit lost as to how to make a standard cream cake. As you all know I don't do buttercream because I don't use shortening and butter alone won't hold in our weather, so I turned to cream cheese. This is a chocolate cake where the sides are frosted and the border piped with sweetened cream cheese that is coloured. I left the 'lane' exposed as chocolate with some green grass frosting on either side. Ask me for this if you'd like a fondant alternative.

4. Lauren and Shauna's Birthday

Little twin cakes

This cake combo is for two sisters whose birthdays are quite close so Mummy K thought to combine the celebration. Big sister Lauren gets a rainbow cake with a stream running through it, while Shauna meimei gets a elevated cloud cake. The two cakes are connected by a gum paste rainbow that straddles both cakes. The challenge here is that Mummy K had to do the assembling herself. For ease of transporting the cakes, the rainbow was not inserted and the cakes had to be assembled on site. I provided all the necessary 'tools' and here's the result of Mummy K's handiwork. Well done!

Constructing Cake

There's been quite a few enquiries in the last week or so and it's so wonderful to see mummies with creative ideas on cakes for their little ones. I'm so sorry that I couldn't take on any orders in June as we were spending time in Jakarta over the school holidays.

However, forward-thinking Mummy W had contacted me months in advance to create a cake for her boy's 3rd birthday. So when I got back, it was the first cake on my list! She had sent me many examples and ideas for a 'construction' theme party, it was really cool, check it out here.

We discussed over a few details and the birthday cake was to look like the scene of a construction site. Mummy W had sourced for a great-looking toy excavator that would dig the dirt (oreo cookie crumbles).

Build up to the cake

Her little boy loves strawberries so I incorporated that too, and it ended up looking like a dug-up pit of strawberries. Mummy W also wanted some kind of 'signage' like you'd see at construction sites and I made one with art paper that says "Xavier's 3". Here's the constructed cake...

Happy Birthday Xavier

The triple layer chocolate cake has oreo cream cheese filling and frosted entirely in oreo cream cheese, which looks somewhat like sand and earth. Mummy W also wanted another party candy favourite - coloured M&Ms, so we had it placed all around the base of the cake.

A creative effort that was entirely Mummy's good input! I was merely the tool.

Twenty Years of We Do

My brother and sister-in-law renewed their commitment to each other again after 20 years of marriage. In an age of so much brokenness - socially, politically, economically - keeping a marriage going for two decades is surely commendable.

So how did the happy couple celebrate the occasion? They booked a holiday bungalow, invited family and friends, catered a lovely feast, asked Fr Paul Staes and Fr John-Paul Tan for the renewal of vows, and got this sister to be in charge of cake and deco.

My brother wanted flower arrangements with a candle centrepiece for the dinner tables. He was quoted $80 - $100 per centrepiece from the florist, I balked at the price and convinced him to let me try out my hand at floral arrangement. At this point, I'll let you in on a childhood ambition of mine... I wanted to be a florist. I never acted on my interest (and I had many), but here's my chance, I had to create 8 centrepieces with a large candle block and red rose blooms.

Here's what I conjured for the celebration...

Wedding flowers

I love Ikea for the inexpensive candles that can be bought. I also have to thank Eileen from the Marine Terrace market for her lovely blooms and useful tips on arrangements. I bought 100 large red roses from her and those complementing hypericum berries and aster solidago.

And no I didn't forget that this is a cake blog, so here's the anniversary cake to go with the flowers. A deeply luscious red velvet with creamy cheese frosting topped with rose swirls.

Happy 20th Anniversary David & Rose

This is my cake of the month. I love the deep crimson and I make mine Miette style. I like assembling it this way as it shows the dramatic contrast between cake and frosting. I only realised this is similar to the famous Tomboy cake by San Francisco Miette bakery when my cousin who is in the baking business said 'Hey you make yours like Miette!' Here's Miette's version.

Rainbow Week

I'm having another great week of baking as most of my orders are calling for the Rainbow cake, one of my most favourite cakes to make (and eat).

My friend had organised a farewell school party for her daughter who is graduating from kindergarten. It's a great gesture as these children who have been fellow playmates for years will now say goodbye as they embark on Primary 1 next year. 

The cake to mark the occasion is a pastel coloured rainbow cake, with happy cloud decorations. It's a wonderful choice as the rainbow cake never fails to bring on cheers and smiles ; ) And it also symbolises good things to come!

This is the first time I'm adjusting the colour intensity to try and achieve a pastel-coloured rainbow. Usually, I would use enough Wilton food colour to produce an intense hue for each layer. By doing so, it also helps overcome the fact that the cake batter is originally yellow, so you'd need to add quite a bit of blue colouring anyway to make sure that the batter is really blue and not green (blue + yellow). So in the case of a pastel rainbow, a bit more colour mixology is required. For the blue, I used cornflower blue plus a drop of turquoise to make it a muted blue, even the violet requires a bit of tweaking. The result was not bad, but upon some reading up, I could have made a super white cake batter by leaving the egg yolks out. The only thing I don't like about that is, what am I to do with 12 egg yolks? 

So anyway, I stacked the layers starting with the lavender (violet), then blue, green, yellow and pink. It's all held together with cream cheese frosting and then crumb coated with a layer of buttercream for where the fondant meets the cake. 

Frosted cake layers

I like how it looks like a snow white cylinder. After this, I applied a layer of white fondant. While it's a regular 9" round cake, the height stacked up to about 5.5cm, this means a sheet of fondant about 20cm wide is required. I always have trouble rolling a large piece of fondant, which means I'll always have problems with the edges when covering the cake.

Sweetheart Coulds 

Here's the completed cake. One thing about rough edges is knowing how to cover it. In this case, I plastered pink fondant hearts in different sizes for the border and added marshmallows for the cloud effect, though I wished the marshmallows were round instead.

Soft colours make a sweet cake

For the Class of 2012... good luck kids!

I'm definitely more confident now with sculpting pieces especially since I've learnt to use gum paste. For the rainbow featured here, I made it with gum paste as it would dry hard enough to stand on the cake. I can't wait to try other 'upright' designs soon.

Somewhere over the rainbow...

And there were cupcakes too!

Rainbow revealed

I was told the kids went "Wah" when the cake was cut into... and I can imagine the smiles on their faces too.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

When my elder boy Jake was a wee tot, I introduced Eric Carle's Hungry Caterpillar to him. The book was first published in 1969 and has since become a mainstay in children's libraries and preschools all over the world. Eric Carle, the author and illustrator, has a great artistic style that is immediately recognisable and the stories are fun to repeat! The Very Hungry Caterpillar is definitely one of our favourite books. Jake used to chuckle at the greedy caterpillar as I read the story to him and got amused at all the things the caterpillar munched through in his week-long feast toward becoming a butterfly.

Now my little boy is a little more grown up, Nursery 1 to be exact, and for his year-end concert in school, I was absolutely chuffed to find that his class was putting up a concert on The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Jake was one of three caterpillars and his friends were a variety of yummy fruits and a pretty butterfly!

It was the perfect opportunity to bake something for the children and I decided to make cupcakes with the hungry caterpillar on it!

I whipped up some Hummingbird cupcakes, full of sweet ripe bananas and tangy pineapples that no caterpillar could refuse. Then tinted the cream cheese leaf green and swirled it lightly on the cupcakes. Then I made a darker green buttercream for the caterpillar's body and a little red M&M for the head. The eyes and smiley face was drawn in with my Americolor gourmet pen and rice chocolate stuck in for feelers - easy peasy!

Hummingbird cupcakes featuring a hungry caterpillar

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

My little caterpillar

Hello Kitty!

I knew it was a matter of time before the famous Japanese bobtail kitty cat finds me and my baking adventures. A friend recommended a mummy to me for a heart-shaped banana cake with Hello Kitty on it. The cake is meant for her little girl's birthday celebration in school, so I made a double layer heart-shaped cake and 12 cupcakes for the kids.

I love heart-shaped cakes and I've got a great silicone pan that consistently produces beautiful heart-shaped cakes. It's not often that I get a request for it, so I was delighted at this order.

This was going to be a fondant / cream cheese challenge again but because it was going to be picked up the night before the party, I was afraid it may have to go into the fridge because of the cream cheese. There is one thing worse than cream cheese for fondant and that is REFRIGERATION. Fondant doesn't do very well in our weather but putting it in the fridge just makes it sweat and weep its colours so don't ever put it in the fridge. And since we will NEVER have Californian weather , I always just recommend air-conditioning.

After frosting the heart with cream cheese (mmmm), I placed the carved Hello Kitty on top and decided to frost it in a whiter shade of sugar icing. Then I outlined Kitty's face with royal icing to give a definitive look. The birthday girl loves the colour yellow so the cream cheese was tinted buttercup yellow for the border piping. The result is not too bad but you can see why fondant is still a favourite when you want to achieve that clean and neat finish.

Hello Kitty

Happy Birthday Joie!

I have another Hello Kitty order coming up soon and will be trying the fondant approach next.
Stay tuned for more!

Little Red Corvette

Ok, not exactly (a red corvette). But it's a little red car nonetheless for a little boy who turns 2.

A friend had referred a mummy to me - she was looking for a healthy treat to be shared in school for her little one's birthday. She was keen on a fruity cake with reduced sugar and fancied the Hummingbird Cake... it couldn't be a better choice! She didn't favour the pineapples in the original recipe, so I had it replaced with mangoes. It was a yummy substitute and because mangoes are naturally so sweet, I easily reduced the sugar in the recipe by 50%. The resulting cake was also very moist - banana and mango is such a great combination, who'd have thought ; ) And in place of sour cream, I added fruity yoghurt, which is way more healthy!

Little Keith must love cars since his cake requirement was simple - a little classic red car on a rectangular cake. That's the best shape cake for school since it makes for easy cutting and serving.

I made a double layer cake measuring 13" by 9" and another smaller layer for carving into the shape of the car. I went with the Volkswagen beetle shape car just because it looks cuter and had it covered in fondant for a neater finish. The rest of the cake was generously frosted in light cream cheese.

Delicious ride

Happy Birthday Keith!

The style of this cake is like the penguin cake I made some months back, though there is one huge challenge to this - fondant and cream cheese do not like each other at all. While I love cream cheese frosting more than any other frosting, it is just not possible to apply fondant to it. Fondant breaks down when it comes into contact with cream cheese and becomes a total mess! Still it is possible to be creative and incorporate the two popular ingredients. The trick is to create a barrier for the fondant - in this case, I used a royal icing-like frosting where the fondant car is sitting on.

This is having your fondant and eating it with cream cheese ; )

The Pinks and Blues of First Birthdays

I had my hands full of pink and blue fondant over the weekend. I made TWO double-tiered cake, over two days for two cutie pies turning one year old!

My nephew Baby T had a blue cake – his mama had planned a Blue colour theme party and I proposed a layered cake with varying shades of blue!

Happy Birthday Tim

And a good friend's daughter Baby M had a pink cake - her mama planned a Minnie Mouse party and I created a delicate pink cake with Minnie mouse accents.

Happy Birthday Mere

That got me thinking... how did we come to determine gender-specific colours? While I know of some parents who rather give their kids gender-neutral clothes and toys, and I'm personally indifferent about such signifiers, there is quite an interesting background to this pink and blue business for girls and boys.

According to a Smithsonian magazine article, "The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” 

And did you know that around the time of World War I, it was generally accepted that boys wore pink and girls wore blue. Time magazine in 1927 published a sex-appropriate colour chart for boys and girls and it was pink for the boys and blue for the girls! That wasn't so long ago.

Then somewhere along the way, there was a colour swap. Maybe it was the feminist movement in the 60s that rejected any gender-defining norms, or maybe some boy really liked his sister's blue dress? Ok ok, I know all this has nothing to do with baking but it's really interesting to read, if you want to know more, check out this article at Smithsonian.com

Ok, so back to the cakes...

For Baby T's blue cake, I made a Vanilla Butter cake in layers of blue hue with cream cheese frosting in between. Both cakes were covered in fondant and I love how clean it looks.

For decoration, I tried those springy wires and made fondant stars with his name on it. They make really great cake toppers and I love how it bounces around when you move the cake.

Tim's stars

My hubby's precision dotting

A Blue Rainbow Cake

For Baby M's pink cake, I made the perennial favourite Moist Chocolate cake and the mama suggested an oreo cream cheese frosting! What a great combination it turned out to be.

Looks like giant oreo cookies

There were 3 layers at the bottom tier and 3 smaller layers at the top tier. It was covered with fondant again and decorated with Minnie mouse cutouts and pretty pink bows.

Pretty Pink

Minnie Mouse in the house!

Happy 1st

Bananas About Penguin

Two friendly mothers who are (Singapore Mom) bloggers gave me the opportunity to bake for their children. I always look forward to baking for kids partly because I have 2 of my own and I know how a cake can light up their world!

My friend Eve (thebottomsupblog.com) recommended Motherkao (motherkao.com) to me to create a penguin cake for her little girl who turns 2. She gave me ample notice (thank you) and we discussed about how the cake should be – not too sweet, healthy for young children and must have a penguin! So we went with a banana cake with cream cheese frosting. 

We tried to stay away from fondant, so definitely no 3D cakes with upright penguin ala "Cake Boss" style. Instead, it was to be a easy to serve cake for school hence a sensible square cake with a 2D penguin design.

I really thought I could keep it simple, but those images of cute penguins made it easy to get carried away. PLUS, I had the willing hands of my good friend Dawn from Shanghai who is in town this month so she came by to help me with the cake. Dawn is amazing with cake designs and runs her own home business in Shanghai (lucky me and lucky you who ordered).

So we got to work and decided that it was necessary to use fondant, not too much but enough to create a penguin that we can place on the square cake. 

Making of a penguin

I baked a large square cake that is 12" by 12" and covered it in rich mascarpone cream cheese frosting. The banana cake is such a wholesome cake for kids as it is naturally sweetened by ripe bananas so it needs only about two-thirds of the sugar that is required by the recipe. Bananas is also high in potassium and dietary fibre. The cream cheese covering is also great as it's got calcium for strong bones and requires a whole lot less sugar that buttercream! 

Dawn also contributed something special to the cake by showing me how to do chocolate transfers! So we made some snowflakes using white chocolate that could be used as accents for the cake (even though it was an unbearable 32 degrees today).

Each is unique and painstakingly piped

Here's a peek at the penguin...

Penguin pretty in pink

The completed cake

Dawn and I got a bit obsessed with embellishing the cake and had to stop ourselves as we were running out of time to meet the delivery! But the result just made us smile. I was particularly pleased as it was definitely more than what I had set out to do for the cake.

Happy Birthday Rebekah!

I was told the kids enjoyed the cake and the birthday girl loved her penguin. This is exactly why I love to bake, happiness ; )

Oh and one last thing. So where is my hubby's contribution to this cake you might ask? As the fondant covered penguin was quite heavy, we were afraid it might sink into the base cake creating a dent, so B came up with an ingenious idea. Usually, dowel sticks are used as support for cake upon cake but for this, we inserted oreo cookies in an upright position to hold the penguin up, and it worked! Motherkao, if you're wondering why there are oreo cookies in this banana cake, well now you know ;p

Courtesy of B the cake builder

* Email me for price

Rainbow Cake

Rainbow Cake

This cake never fails to put a smile on my face no matter how many times I bake it. A light and moist cake layered in the colours of the rainbow and frosted with sweet mascarpone cream cheese, it holds a special surprise for the one who cuts into it.

Variation: This cake can be made in an array of colours. Pick a colour theme - pastels, primary colours, or try various hues of your favourite shade.

Carrot Cake

Carrot Cake

This is one of my most favourite cakes in the world. The warm cinnamon smell that wafts through the kitchen as this moist cake bakes is incredible. Made with quality baby carrots, healthy walnuts and a special cinnamon spice from Alsace, this yummy cake is a real tea time treat - I highly recommend Earl Grey tea with this!

Topping: Sweet and tangy lemon cream cheese made with Philadelphia cheese, covered with more walnuts

Options: Add pineapples and/or peaches

Variation: This cake can be made with organic wholemeal flour and organic carrots. For any special dietary needs, the ingredients can be substituted accordingly. Just let me know!