The Princess Project

My baking soul mate is in town! Dawn is back for the summer school holidays and although she's declared that she's on a baking break, it didn't stop her from galavanting with me to Phoon Huat, Bake It Yourself and Art Friend for supplies. And of course, we baked!

We took on an order together - the first official collaboration. It's a princess cake that includes the full works - ruffles, tiara, bows, flowers and it's got to be pink pink pink! We spent 2 full days together planning, baking and decorating while the kids watched copious amount of TV (we had our hands full!) and ate levelled out cake!                  

I baked my trusty moist chocolate for a two-tier cake with ganache filling. Dawn planned the cake design and showed me how to make fondant ruffles - a repetitively therapeutic thing to do on any given afternoon. We moulded fondant in many shades of pink for the ombre ruffles and had to resist introducing some other complementing colours because the recipient insisted on a pink cake. In the end we used some white for contrast, we just had to.

Here are some scenes from the making of...

The ball tool is essential for ruffles

Here's the ombre skirting

Stacking the pinks

Dawn putting in the finer details

Dawn had made the pretty tiara with gum paste and it sat wonderful atop the cake, making it fit for a princess birthday celebration. When we finally added in the final details, I couldn't imagine how anyone could bear cutting into this cake. It is definitely my most professional-looking cake to date.

The Princess

Happy Birthday Kara

Dawn bakes in Shanghai. If you'd like to follow her amazing cakes, check it out here - Cakes from D'Heart

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.