Special Edition: Cake!

My friend Leslie (who you may remember from the White/Brown Sugar-free tartlets) came over Tuesday to make a wedding cake with me! It didn't turn out how we'd planned - but it was about ten hours of fun!

We made a three-layer red velvet cake (I'm going to try to make it less allergenic - it was DELICIOUS), which was a lot of fun, except for the occasional dye spills (sorry mom!).
Here's Leslie making the batter, and the cake sans decoration:

We had planned to cover it in fondant, but we ran into a little bit - actually, about four hours' worth - of trouble in making it, given that we weren't sure how to adapt the recipe to use Agar powder instead of gelatin (vegetarianism isn't usually this hard!). We ended up covering part of the cake in the fondant...stuff... and I painted that, as you can see in the first picture and in some of the following pictures.

After realizing that we just hadn't made the fondant pliable enough, we opted to make buttercream frosting, which we did our best in neatening around the fondant. It was late by that time, and it had been about nine hours, so we were a little tired at this point - but the result was pretty and it was delicious!

It's a cake! The painting was done in black food dye, and yes, those are painted fondant cufflinks on the top!

I would definitely love to give this cake another try in the making, but next time, we need to be sure of how we're going to make and set everything up, and have thicker cake layers. I'd love to do more cake painting - not surprisingly, if you know me, I love details like that - and I think that it would be fun to do that on more of a large canvas. Next time, though, we'll do a different fondant recipe, or maybe marzipan, so that we can actually cover the cake in it - something more pliable! No matter, though, it came out nicely.

It wasn't the most successful experiment I've done, meaning that it didn't go according to plan, but it came out rather prettily and it was absolutely delectable. I brought it out to the block party, where it was a hit, and my other friend Riley downed her slice of cake like it was do or die.

If anyone has suggestions for vegetarian fondant, I'd love to hear them! I'll leave you off here with a close-up of the painted parts. See you at the next challenge!

July 30: Gluten-free Cake Truffles!

This one wasn't a challenge, but merely born out of curiosity and boredom, but it was fun!

As usual, a rich chocolate desert - but it would work with any cake, this is just a lovely, rich dairy-free and flourless cake. For the record, the cake would be FABULOUS on its own - it's a prize of a fudge cake.

For the bottoms:
2/3 cup chocolate chips of your choice of chocolate


For the cake:
1/3 cup margarine
2/3 cup sugar
3/4 tsp vanilla
2/3 cup cocoa
1/2 tsp baking powder
Two pinches salt
A little less than 1/3 cup cold water

For the covering:
1 cup chocolate of your choice
1/3-1/2 cup milk (I used nonfat Lactaid)
Vanilla extract to taste

To make the bottoms:
For the bottom, melt your favourite kind of chocolate and pour onto parchment paper in small semi-rectangular spots, a bit bigger than the cake cubes. Freeze to harden.

To make the cake:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Grease a cake pan - the larger, the better - you want the cake to be about an inch, maximum, in the end.
In a bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs and vanilla (and a dash of almond extract if you like it), and beat well. Combine the flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt separately and add alternately with the water. Beat well. Pour the batter into the pan/s and bake until a toothpick inserted in various points comes out clean. Let cool completely.
Once cooled, cut into medium-small cubes (just under an inch) and then place them on the bottoms and cover them (see below).

To make the covering:
Melt and mix. Pour over the cake and freeze it all to let it set.

Refrigerate - the chocolate covering melts.