Chocolaty chocolate cake

This chocolaty chocolate cake was a practice over all. The purpose of this cake was to find the perfect chocolate filling to an upcoming order, and also practise some piping skills.


The base of the cake is Kinuskikissa's chocolate cake (available only in Finnish), with an added ingredient of almond crocant (which made the base very sticky, and perhaps half of the amount would have been sufficient). The base turned out to be quite dry, and we'll see if even after moistening it will be possible to slice through with simply a cake server.

For the filling of this cake I used (also Kinuskikissa's) chocolate filling with slight modifications. Instead of the 'whipping cream' I used the (unopened and still usable) double cream left over from the father's day cake, and instead of the vanilla quark product (which is actually closer to a cream cheese than quark), I used vanilla flavoured quark (the cheap kind), which I tossed in the whole pot (150g) because I had less cream (2 dl) than in the original recipe. We'll see if the result will be too sour and 'quarky'.

Because this was a practice version, I didn't want to waste expensive sugar fondant, so I decided to cover the rather rough looking cake with simply mocca butter cream (which is basically the same as in the chocolate-caramel Halloween cake, but instead of daim hot chocolate powder I used dark hot chocolate powder and instead of milk I used cold coffee (and the result is yummy!)). Because this was a practice I also decided to practise different piping techniques while I had the chance.

The basket technique on the side of the cake I really rushed, and it shows :)

And those roses still need practice (and the right consistency of butter cream).

RTG crane cake

Finished 2D-RTG-cake

This cake was also made to order. And all I can say is that I'm glad it's finished and I don't have to do it anymore! Phew! ;)

I seem to have difficulties saying no to challenging tasks. Oh, and RTG crane? Sure, why not! (Luckily the order wasn't for a freestanding 3D model...)



Under the black surface there's a chocolate-caramel cake already tried out on Halloween.

I almost cried making the plans for this cake -
the crane's so detailed

Happy Birthday Tuomo! :)

Father's day surprise cake

We have a habit of - or more like my dad has a habit of - wrapping presents up in the most imaginative ways so that it's not possible to guess what's inside. This has continued for a good few years now, and I've tried to do the same for his presents, for example one year wrapping up his present in a guitar shape.




Now, as this "cake mania" is at hand, I had the idea to this year wrap up my dad's father's day present inside a cake. And here's the result of that...










Happy Father's Day! :)

The filling of this cake is strawberry puré and strawberry-whipped cream (a strawberry puré and whipped cream mix, which unfortunately resulted in a partially melted ribbon and bow)

Grand piano cake

This time it was time for a made-to-order grand piano shaped cake.

Inside is a liquorice (a very big thing in Finland) filling made with liquorice toffee sweets I bought a couple weeks ago from a cruise ship.

The base - once again - is a basic sheet cake, which is just so easy to make these shaped cakes from. Under the black rolled fondant is a basic butter cream with an added "secret ingredient" of a few crushed salty liquorice sweets (also a big thing in Finland). The texts on top of the piano are made with melted white chocolate.

Here's another way to spend Wednesday evening ;) Some may notice that I left out some of the keys on purpose, otherwise they would have been too small to handle

I had the courage to pipe the text freehand directly on top of the finished cake

Halloween skull cake

Yesterday I asked my niece what kind of Halloween pastry she would like for today.

Her first answer was pancakes which have a picture of a skull on top. The second answer was a simple "cake that moves".

Unfortunately I wasn't able to make a moving cake this time, and the pancakes can be made later. So hopefully this "picture of a skull" is good enough...

Inside the cake is a sheet cake dyed green, and green vanilla, apple and cinnamon filling.

The cake might have been too scary if the mouth hadn't gone wrong :)

Sugar hearts

I have for some time now wanted to try making clear sugar decorations, but haven't yet come round to buying isomalt, which is used in making the clear decorations.

As a past time (and with some inspiration from Masterchef Australia and a gingerbread decoration tip from Confetti) I tried first a slightly cheaper alternative: hard candy (this time I used an orange flavoured Chupa chups lollipop).
As I only had one lollipop to work with, I couldn't make any large pieces of decorations. Therefore, after trial and error, I ended up making this kind of decorations:

Crush the lollipop to as fine powder as possible. Spread the powder evenly on a baking paper laid on a baking tray and heat up in the oven at about 175°C for a couple of minutes until the powder has completely melted.
When the sugar is still hot, press the desired mold (large uniform surfaces are less fragile) firmly into the mix and let the mixture cool for a bit.
When the sugar is still slightly warm, carefully snap the surrounding sugar off the sugar shapes. Left over sugar can be crushed and used again.