Fancy 18th Birthday Entremets
For their 18th birthday, instead of a cake, my niece requested a triple layer (dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate) mousse that I sometimes make, but fancy enough to celebrate such an important birthday.
For their 18th birthday, instead of a cake, my niece requested a triple layer (dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate) mousse that I sometimes make, but fancy enough to celebrate such an important birthday. This is what I came up with.
Inside, there is almond genoise, dark chocolate marquise, milk chocolate mousse, and white chocolate mousse. The outside is mirror glaze, with colors inspired by Acheron, a new character in Honkai: Star Rail that my niece is excited about. The decorations are a caramel almond, a candied orange rind heart, and a gold leafed maraschino cherry.
I served them on a custom two-tier heart-shaped stand, designed to fit 18 entremets for 18 years. It looked nice, but I should have made it slightly less sloped because I got scared that they would slip off so I used double-stick tape to hold them in place.
Castle Bowser Cake
For his birthday, my nephew asked for Castle Bowser from Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
For his birthday, my nephew asked for Castle Bowser from Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
Most of the detail is modeling chocolate, with isomalt accents.
Inside, it’s chocolate cake with bright green mint icing.
Koraidon Cake
Koraidon is a Pokémon from the new Pokémon Scarlet game. My nephew wanted him in his battle form for his birthday cake.
Koraidon is a Pokémon from the new Pokémon Scarlet game. My nephew wanted him in his battle form for his birthday cake.
The cake is chocolate with chocolate ganache. The tire in his chest is chocolate cast in a donut mold, covered with gum paste. The feathers and horns are wafer paper. The eyes are isomalt with wafer paper pupils.
As usual, I made about four times as much cake as the occasion required, so we only got through the head at the party.
Rainbow Cake
My niece wanted a simple rainbow-shaped rainbow cake. I’m not very good at simple.
My niece wanted a simple rainbow-shaped rainbow cake. I wanted to give her what she wanted but I’m very bad at simple, so I made a rainbow-shaped rainbow cake on top of an isomalt cloud with rainbow isomalt supports surrounded by little isomalt bowls full of a rainbow of different fruit curds.
The fruit curds, from left to right, are grape, blueberry, kiwi-lime, lemon, kumquat, raspberry. They were all pretty good, but there is definitely a reason that citrus curds are the most popular.
Inside, it’s a pound cake that I baked in a ring cake pan. I poured the batter into the pan in rainbow layers, so that it was rainbow on the inside as well as the outside.
Julia’s Cake
It’s chocolate genoise, soaked with Chambord, with chocolate crème fraîche, vanilla crème fraîche, and fresh raspberries inside, with a chocolate glaze, decorated with more fresh raspberries and ruby chocolate hearts. I made it for my dad’s birthday.
The book I got this from, Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet, calls this Julia’s Cake. It’s chocolate genoise, soaked with Chambord, with chocolate crème fraîche, vanilla crème fraîche, and fresh raspberries inside, with a chocolate glaze, decorated with more fresh raspberries and ruby chocolate hearts. I made it for my dad’s birthday.
Meatloaf Cake
My sister had to make a meatloaf decorated like a cake for work, so I volunteered to do the decorating. The icing is mashed potatoes colored with beet juice.
My sister had to make a meatloaf decorated like a cake for work, so I volunteered to do the decorating. It gave me an excuse to get my flower nail out, which I haven’t used in years because I’m not usually a buttercream rose kind of cake decorator. The icing is mashed potatoes colored with beet juice, which piped better than I expected, though not as well as icing. Once I got down to the #2 tip, the texture really became a challenge.
The really unsettling thing was that, while it looked very much like a cake, it smelled not at all like a cake.
Sushi Pusheen Cake
My nephew loves sushi and he loves Pusheen, so his request for his birthday cake was Pusheen wrapped up in a California roll (otherwise known as Susheen).
My nephew loves sushi and he loves Pusheen, so his request for his birthday cake was Pusheen wrapped up in a California roll (otherwise known as Susheen).
The rice is marshmallow piped over top of a chocolate cookie structure. I made the Pusheen cake separately, inserted it into the middle of the rice tube, then filled in the space between the rice and the Pusheen with marzipan krab and avocado and fondant cucumber. The nori is fruit leather, painted with green food coloring. The wasabi is also marzipan and the ginger is just thinly sliced candied ginger. The base is covered with royal icing and is supposed to look like a slate serving tray.
When I made my Rainbow Unicorn Pusheen Cake and my Valkyr Pusheen Cake, they were rainbow colored inside, but the layers of the cake were still flat. This time I decided to make the inside rainbow shaped as well as rainbow colored.
Nectarine Bavarian
I made this for my Mom’s birthday. I’m delighted by how much it looks like something you would see in a magazine in the 1960s.
I made this for my Mom’s birthday. My nephew kept pointing out that it’s not really cake, it’s more like a big pile of whipped cream, which is not far from the case. It’s mostly bavarian cream, flavored with chambord, with little bits of genoise and nectarines soaked in chambord embedded in it. The center is a big mound of whipped cream. I’m delighted by how much it looks like something you would see in a magazine in the 1960s.
Jason Cake
My niece’s 15th birthday cake features Jason, a character from an expansive world of her imagination.
My niece’s 15th birthday cake features Jason, a character from an expansive world of her imagination. Jason is a Voidspawn, so the cake has a black and purple mirror glaze with silver luster dust to suggest the Void.
Jason is made of gum paste, as is the Casting Circle on top and the spectral hands floating around the cake.
Valentine Treats
These are little heart-shaped mousse cakes that I made for my family on Valentine’s Day. I was hoping that they would be extremely elegant versions of my Bleeding Heart Cake, but when we first cut them, the raspberry was too frozen to bleed and when we cut another one later, too much of the raspberry had seeped into the mousse, and it still didn’t bleed. So I still have that to work on.
These are little heart-shaped mousse cakes that I made for my family on Valentine’s Day. They are almond sponge and lemon mousse with a raspberry center and mirror glaze and dehydrated raspberry powder on top. I was hoping that they would be extremely elegant versions of my Bleeding Heart Cake, but when we first cut them, the raspberry was too frozen to bleed and when we cut another one later, too much of the raspberry had seeped into the mousse, and it still didn’t bleed. So I still have that to work on.
These hearts were the culmination of an entire day of heart-shaped food that I made for Valentine’s Day, which included heart-shaped raspberry pancakes, heart-shaped pizza with heart-shaped pepperoni, heart-shaped deviled eggs, heart-shaped strawberry gummies, heart-shaped mozzarella pockets, heart-shaped meat pies, heart-shaped beet salad, and heart-shaped cheesy breadsticks.
Relatively Successful Entremet
I made this cake for my dad’s birthday, from a recipe in one of my cookbooks from The Great British Bake Off.
I made this cake for my dad’s birthday, from a recipe in one of my cookbooks from The Great British Bake Off . The layers, from bottom to top, are almond sponge, lemon curd, honey custard, and blackberry gelée. It all tasted good, but I think I put too much gelatin in the custard and the gelée because they were a little rubbery. The recipe was in leaf gelatin and I only have powdered gelatin. Also, the lemon curd wasn’t set enough, so it squooshed out a bit when the cake was cut and later in the refrigerator the top half slide off of the bottom half.
Hollow Knight Cake
In keeping with our Hollow Knight Halloween costumes, Sam wanted a Hollow Knight cake for his birthday this year.
In keeping with our Hollow Knight Halloween costumes, Sam wanted a Hollow Knight cake for his birthday this year.
For reference, this is the image, from Hollow Knight: Voidheart Edition, on which the cake is based
The back is fondant over foam core, painted with food coloring. The rocks on the base are fondant as well, which is good because Sam loves eating fondant and enjoyed eating the rocks as much he enjoyed the actual cake. The cape is wafer paper, coated with gelatin, and the sword is gum paste.
The body, the horns, and the soul totems in the background are made of rice cereal treats covered in fondant.
The soul totems were not in the image the cake is based on, but Sam seemed to think they were important. The one on the left is full of soul energy, hence the little white bits.
The one on the right has been corrupted, hence the Void tendrils. All the Void tendrils are made of gelatin.
The Knight’s head and the thing he’s standing on are made of cake, which is much more cake than we needed for the five people living in this house.
We did Zoom the grandparents in to the party, but unfortunately, they couldn’t help us eat the cake.
50th Anniversary Cake
We couldn’t celebrate my parents’ 50th anniversary in person, but that didn’t stop me from making them a cake!
We couldn’t celebrate my parents’ 50th anniversary in person, but that didn’t stop me from making them a cake! I tried to make a nice small cake that would be a reasonable size for two people. As usual, despite my best efforts, I made four times as much cake as the occasion required.
The outside of the cake is a blue, white, and gold mirror glaze with golden star sprinkles.
The swans at the bottom are marzipan with gold leaf on them because there were little plastic swans on Mom and Dad’s wedding cake 50 years ago.
The 50 on top is made of caramel and around the perimeter are almonds dipped in caramel.
The platter that the cake is on was (we believe) used in the wedding of some of Dad’s ancestors back three or four generations. We think it dates to the late nineteenth century. My sister and I had it repaired and replated specially for this occasion.
On the inside, the cake is alternating layers of almond cake and chocolate cake with cherry swiss buttercream between the layers. It’s meant to be reminiscent of a gelato bar that was served at Mom and Dad’s wedding, which is half chocolate, half almond with cherries in the middle.
Valkyr Pusheen Cake
Another cake celebrating my wonderful niece! It’s Pusheen dressed as Valkryr, one of Alex’s favorite frames from Warframe.
Another cake celebrating my wonderful niece! It’s Pusheen dressed as Valkyr, one of Alex’s favorite frames from Warframe. For reference, this is what Alex’s Valkyr looks like.
Pusheen is a very simple shape, but Valkyr’s outfit is quite complicated. To figure out what gum paste pieces I needed to make, I began by making a full-scale model of the cake out of newspaper and masking tape.
Using that as a guide, I made paper patterns for all the pieces of her outfit and from those paper pieces I made templates and forms to cut and shape the gum paste. The amazing thing is that I actually managed to carve the cake enough like my model that all thirteen pieces of the crown fit together on the cake more or less the way that they were supposed to.
Inisde, Val-kitty-sheen is a beautiful lemon-flavored rainbow.
Raspberry Charlotte
Not as neat as I would have liked it to be, but it does look kind of like a brain, which is a plus in my book.
Not as neat as I would have liked it to be, but it does look kind of like a brain, which is a plus in my book.
Big Time Bake
I’m back on the Food Network! You can watch me in the “Fantasy” episode of Big Time Bake.
Grapefruit Sandwich Cake
This very delicious cake is from The Great British Baking Show: The Big Book of Amazing Cakes.
Tribute Cake
The recipe for this cake is from Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet. It’s chocolate cake with whipped chocolate ganache filling, chocolate glaze, and chocolate decor. My nephew and I made it together.
The recipe for this cake is from Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet. It’s chocolate cake with whipped chocolate ganache filling, chocolate glaze, and chocolate decor. My nephew and I made it together.
Rainbow Unicorn Brownies
Rainbow Unicorn Brownies for my rainbow unicorn angel!
Rainbow unicorn brownies for my rainbow unicorn angel!
Ana Northstar Cake
My niece has made up a marvelous imagined universe that centers around the mythical heroine Ana Northstar. For her birthday, she asked for a cake featuring Ana Northstar’s wings.
My niece has made up a marvelous imagined universe that centers around the mythical heroine Ana Northstar. For her birthday, she asked for a cake featuring Ana Northstar's wings. Here's the cake I came up with, along with the inspiration drawing of Ana Northstar.
The outside of the cake is chocolate jaconde. Inside is mango mousse with a jaconde rainbow heart inside, which represents Ana Northstar's soul.
The hearts are fresh lime gummies. The orange wings are white chocolate. The green and purple wings are modeling chocolate. The blue webbing on the green wings is homemade pineapple fruit leather.
