Furry Furby

I know, I know...I've taken too long to update my blog. I've made quite a few cakes in the last week, entertained many requests for customised cakes and sadly had to turn down quite a few interesting orders. Yes, I'm in the Indonesian capital again, so while I won't be baking, I should definitely catch up on my updates.

One of the cakes, which I made for an acquaintance who had come to enjoy my red velvet fudge cake, is the Furby! I was really happy with how it turned out. Mummy J told me of how her girl loves the owl-eyed furball toy and wanted a birthday cake of her fave Furby.

She sent me a drawing with some modifications to a teal-coloured Furby to give an idea of how the cake should look like. So what Hasbro can't customised, I did just that in cake and cream :)

Furby of her dreams

I baked 9" round red velvet layers with chocolate ganache filling and had it cut out slightly around the sides to get the egg shape look for the Furby. It was simple enough to do. The features like ears, eyes, beak and feet were all made from fondant. Now the challenging part is to recreate the fur. As you can see, this Furby is mainly teal with spots of lime green. It also has these concentric pattern that I was studying on how to pull off.

The best frosting to achieve this is buttercream or the like. As you all know, I'm not a fan of buttercream, largely because of our weather. So a fluffy meringue cream will do the job. I whipped up a batch and had it coloured in teal, light turquoise and lime green. The cake was first treated to a generous ganache covering, then heaped on with teal coloured frosting. After that, the lime green frosting was spotted on and finished with a circular swirl of lighter teal. Here's the result...

Yummy Furby

Happy Birthday Ashley

This technique is the same as what I have done with Elmo and Cookie Monster cakes. I simply love making furry characters, and eating it too. Yums!

Me Want Cookie!

Aha! Finally, someone's asked me to make a cookie monster cake! I was absolutely delighted as I love the Cookie Monster as much as I love Elmo and since I wanted to add to my Sesame Street characters in cake collection, I couldn't wait to do this!

It's pretty much the same as making Elmo, except Cookie Monster does not have a nose... he is however, a very distinct blue, which could easily achieved with Wilton's Royal Blue gel colour but the frosting has to be absolutely snow white! There is only one super white frosting I'd make – a fluffy meringue frosting. The result: a gorgeous blue and it looks perfect on a chocolate fudge cake.

Cookie Monster Blue

The frosting went on quite nicely, I was able to make little furry swirls with this fluffy meringue frosting. However, as it sat on the counter waiting for pick up, it started to become a little soft and was a bit too melty :( Funny thing when I did Elmo some weeks back, I didn't have this problem with the meringue frosting. It was admittedly a very humid day today but I suspect it could have something to do with the frosting having been in the fridge for a while before I added colouring.

The hubby felt my pain as I lamented at the effort wasted in creating the furry swirls, that's when he suggested adding something that would hold up in our heat! Well, the simple answer is shortening, it is the one thing that would not change no matter how hot or humid... well, it holds up in the heat for a reason and trust me, you wouldn't want to eat the stuff or worse, feed it to your kids!

Anyway, enough of my ranting... here's Cookie Monster and of course, he would not be complete without some cookies for the gobbling ; )

Happy Birthday Tristan

I made some cookie monster cupcakes too, but those were a sadder melty mess - too much frosting, too little surface area. I hope the kids enjoyed it all nonetheless... om nom nom nom

Elmo Revisted

Despite the latest bad press surrounding Elmo and his voice over, you can't take away the fact that the furry red monster is still one of the most loved children's characters of all time, and for me, that won't change no matter what. So I was glad to have the opportunity to make an Elmo cake for a friend and her daughter who celebrated their birthdays together.

A year ago, I started my baking venture and Elmo was one of my first foray into novelty cakes. I made it for Jake's 2nd birthday and back then, I remembered the task to be daunting! I spent 3 days prepping and was thrilled with how Elmo turned out - check out my old post here.

This time, the task was more enjoyable than unnerving and it only took a day. I made three layers of moist chocolate cake, assembled it with rich chocolate ganache and frosted the whole cake with a red-tinted fluffy meringue frosting. Then I cut out a piece of baking paper for the mouth before covering the cake in red fluff, much like what you'd do when painting any special corners or spots.

Frost and peel

Always good for a smile

The eyes and nose were made with fondant. They were easy shapes - 2 round balls for eyes and an egg-like shape for the nose.

Eyes without a face

Then put it all together and there you have it... Elmo :)

Happy Birthday Isabel and Eunice

Doing the Ombre

As I was saying, it's a Rainbow week. One of the cakes is for Eve of thebottomsupblog.com  and she's been eyeing a rainbow cake for a while so her hubby's birthday was the perfect excuse for one. She requested for the layers between to have enough white frosting for the rainbow layers to stand out. Here's an amazing pic she sent me for an example.

Now I usually use cream cheese frosting, which doesn't give that distinct frosting layer but it's just enough to separate the colours. And although cream cheese starts out white, it somehow becomes pale yellow after whipping with sugar and some cream or butter. Still, it really taste the best among all the frostings.

However, for this purpose, I was going to abandon the cream cheese and try to make a super white frosting. I know I can achieve this with traditional buttercream made solely with shortening and icing sugar but it's just something I personally won't make - shortening is not the healthiest thing and it taste really synthetic. So I turned to my trusty meringue frosting (or fluffy boiled frosting). Made from meringue powder (egg white) and boiled sugar, it's whipped into a heavenly light marshmallow cloud that is perfect to achieve the above look. Unfortunately it didn't hold the layers as well as I would have like it to as it was a much softer frosting than buttercream or cream cheese.

Meringue frosting between layers

We were discussing how to decorate this cake when I suggested an idea to Eve. I've been wanting to try my hand at an Ombre cake – something that I came across while looking at the many baking blogs for inspiration. She liked the idea and off to work I went.

Ombre in the making

The textured look

Ombre means the multiple hues of the same shade of colour. It's a lovely technique that looks stunning and almost seems like a monochrome rainbow. I used cornflower blue for this ombre and made 3 shades of this blue finishing with the white. There's a great tutorial from thehungryhousewife.com that shows a step by step method on achieving this look. It's my first attempt and it was not as difficult as it looks at all.

Here's the completed cake...

Happy Birthday Alf

Sadly, I was told the cake had slid during transportation and the frosting was somewhat ruined :(  I'm going to work on the cream frosting again for better holding power and maybe I should also deliver this cake myself. Nonetheless, I hope the rainbow inside made up for it.