Finished Chocolate Butter Cake

Luckily, thanks to yesterday’s baking, I just happen to have a chocolate cake handy! From several other projects, I just happened to have some leftovers to use so I could ice the cake fast. The refrigerator spilled out both chocolate icing & chocolate marshmallow filling. Yum. So I stuck the 2 cake layers together using the chocolate marshmallow filling & frosted it with the chocolate icing I had. The icing was Chocolate Syrup Icing & has a deep chocolate flavor, but is a soft icing. But I wasn’t interested in doing roses on the cake so that was ok. Later in the evening, Sarah & I properly celebrated National Chocolate Cake Day with a slice of the cake.

This was the Chocolate Butter Cake from Whimisical Bakehouse Cookbook. It’s a very lovely chocolate cake for everyday usage. The recipe is definitely a keeper & I have no doubt I’ll be using it again. Probably for a friend’s cake later this week.

Mixing up the chocolate glaze.

After icing our cake, I turned my attention to the small heart cakes. I didn’t want to ice them. When I had been drooling over all the lovely things in my book, Whimisical Bakehouse Cookbook, I had noticed a Chocolate Glaze they say they use a great deal in their bakery. I can see being able to do all kinds of things with it so naturally I had to try it. Turn to page 39 for this delicious chocolate glaze.

I followed the directions carefully, but I did leave out the step of straining it before using it. I’m not expecting perfection in the smoothness of the glaze because of skipping that step, but I’ll get a good feel for making it & even more importantly the taste of it.

As you can see, even without straining it, the glaze covered the cake nicely.

Even without straining it, it poured very nicely over the small cakes. I had a couple of uniced cream cheese cookies left & poured the glaze over one of them. The cookie was not a success. First of all, the glaze did not set up well enough to be used on a cookie. Cakes are eaten with a fork; cookies are not. Secondly, the heat from the glaze softened the cookie too much. If you bake your cookies crisp, it might not be a problem. Mine are on the soft side so being softened more did not give a good texture taste.

Just a few frills.

I melted a few candy melts in a baggie in the microwave & quickly added a few finishing touches to the small cakes. Easy peasy as the saying goes. Naturally, I was curious about both the cake & the glaze. Gave the glaze approximately an hour to dry. Then Sarah & I tasted them. I miss Jim’s help as he was my best taste tester, but right now sweets don’t get along with him. I liked the glaze; Sarah did not. Now Sarah is a VERY picky eater so I don’t worry about it if she doesn’t like something. However, I know I have a huge hit on my hands if she DOES like it. <G>

Hello Cupcake! should be in your cake library.

It blew me away with how cool looking the butterflies she made were. This looks VERY doable. I have a birthday cake I’m going to be doing for my father’s birthday coming up January 18, 2009. This is perfect! I have a wonderful excuse to make butterflies. Ok, maybe butterflies aren’t the most masculine thing, but Daddy’s getting one or more butterflies on his cake.

Candy butterflies as they looked on the wax paper.

The color scheme doesn’t take any time to work out. I’m going to make a Red Velvet Cake so red butterflies would go good. Yellow goes well with red out there in the world of nature so red & yellow will be the color scheme. An artist I’m not so drawing the template to use is totally out of the question. I give some thought to searching on the internet for a picture of a butterfly I can use as a template. Nope, that could take quite a while looking at all those images.

Remembering that I have 2 butterfly cookie cutters, I wonder if one of them would work. A pencil won’t give me a wide enough line if I trace the cutter so that’s not going to work. I can’t use a marker because I use these cutters to make cookies with so that’s not a good idea. Ahhh I wonder if I could manage to use one of the printers to make a copy of the cutters. It works so now I have my template.

Pull the red & yellow candy melts out of the rolling tool chest. A lot of my cake tools are in the rolling tool chest as I talked about in  the November 16 post. Get the wax paper & a couple of sandwich bags out of the cabinet and I’m ready to go to work. I have a small round table in a dining nook that I usually use for my cooking projects and that’s where I set up my supplies for this project.

Cut a piece of wax paper off the roll & cover the butterfly copy with it. Placed a handful of red candymelts in the sandwich bad & did NOT close it. Put the sandwich bag in the microwave & pressed it for 30 seconds. Checked the contents and they were soft but not melted so I put them back in the microwave & pressed for 15 seconds. I continued this process until they were thoroughly melted. Then I closed the sandwich bag & snipped a small hole in the corner of the bag.

A close up of one of the candy butterflies

Then I carefully squeeze the contents out of the bag following the outline of the template. I used a toothpick to spread it out to cover the design thoroughly. Then I moved the wax paper so I had a clear area over the template & did another butterfly outline. I also make the antenna for the butterflies out of the red candy. Not being sure how many butterflies I want to use & wanting extras in case of breakage, I decide to make 4 butterflies.

Once I have finished the outline & antennas, I repeat the process with yellow candy melts. I use the yellow to fill in the wings of the butterflies. They sort of blend together at the edges but that’s just fine for the look of butterflies. Slid a small cookie sheet under the wax paper & moved the butterflies to the freezer for about 10 minutes. After that, I pull them out & my butterflies are good to go. I carefully pulled them off the wax paper & placed in the middle of a stack of wire racks sitting on the table. That’s it. Just as simple to do as Karen Tack claimed in the video & in her book Hello Cupcake!

So I cleaned out the containers & put them in the give-away bag. Somebody else might have better luck was my thought. I pulled out bowls from our everyday dishes & melted the candy in them. They melted fine; however, they stayed melted a very short time. Made the experience very frustrating. I was successful enough to figure it would be fun with better equipment.

Wilton Chocolate Pro Melting Pot. Isn

Saw the Wilton Chocolate Pro a couple of months ago at KMart, but the budget wouldn’t allow it then. Read everything on the box & it sounded really good. A couple of weeks later was a different matter. Went to Michael’s with my coupon with the express purpose of buying something for melting chocolate. They had the Wilton Chocolate Pro! Brought one home with me.

Hoping it would work as well as the box claimed, I unpacked it. In December, I used it to make the suckers  (Dec.3,2008). I love this piece of equipment! It works just as well as they claim. Like it so much I felt it should have its very own blog entry instead of a sentence or 2 in another entry.

There are 2 settings on the pot. They are melt & warm. The candy melts melted like a charm using the chocolate pro. No lumps, no clumps, no need to add anything. Once the chocolate is melted properly, you switch it over to warm & it stays melted. No continual hopping up to reheat it in the microwave. It was wonderfully simple to use & did just it claimed to do. The pot itself is plastic & removable so cleaning it up is a snap. I would heartily recommend this for anyone that makes candies at home.

Christmas tree lollipops are what I’m making. I use the candy melt pens for the ornaments. Getting the hang of using them and they’re not bad to use for detail work. However, they are much too expensive to use on a regular basis. Unless I find a better way of melting and keeping melted the chocolate for the main sucker, it won’t matter.

I’m in love! You could not take this pot away from me. I’m open for a better method as I’m always looking for a better or easier way to do things. However, this Chocolate Pro Melting Pot is a winner. The candy melted smoothly, evenly & quickly. It stayed at the proper melt and never got a hint of a lump in it. I  can already see that if I do much working with suckers that I might need another pot or two to have multiple colors going at the same time.

Christmas Tree Suckers

Did the detail work, filled the molds and threw them in the freezer. Remove them a short time later and tap the candy mold on the table. Cute little Christmas trees popped out easily. Oh yes, I can see working in chocolate and candy melts. Mints, lollipops, toppers for cupcakes. The posssibilities are endless.

The candy molds are a different thing altogether. Besides the possibility of selling the candy, candy can be very useful for decorating a cake or cupcakes. Never have done this so figured this should be interesting. I’ve made taffy & fudge, but they’re an entirely different breed of candy.

Well, I was right. It was interesting. First, keep in mind that I don’t just jump into this. I read & research at several different websites including cakecentral.com before doing it. You want to know a way to do it? Can’t help you. You want 4-5 different ways to do it including contradictory ways? Now, you’re talking!

The molds I picked out of my collection to work with was 1 that had Christmas trees, snowman & Santa faces & a lollipop mold with 4 different designs. Not wanting to make things too complicated I nixed the idea of using Santa as he would entail too many colors. The only lollipop I wanted to use was the cupcake. Cupcakes are cute, cupcakes are “in” & would make a fun sucker.

Candy molds filled with candy melts. Notice the paintbrush used to paint the snowman

From all my research, it sounded to me that the easiest way to get the colored details would be to paint them with the colored chocolate. I have nice small brushes I keep only for my baking so that seemed doable. Well maybe not. Let’s just say painting with chocolate inside small molds is not that easy.

Melted my colors & poured them into the molds. Decided to go with the “let it harden naturally” crowd so left the molds on the table to dry. To say it was difficult to get the candy out of the mold would be an understatement. Took a lot of pushing to get the pieces to pop out. Did I mention, that my beautiful two colored cupcake broke in half. That made Jim happy as he is always glad to get the “mistakes” out of my way. So I’m thinking, these people are crazy to do this. This is too much like work. I can’t believe some people actually consider this fun! Thoughts like that crowded my mind before I finally conceded to myself that perhaps that was not the best method for making the candy.

I decided that painting the details was the problem as a thin layer of the candy melts was sticking to the mold. Carefully cleaned the molds & decided to try again. Only this time I would use the squeeze bottle method to do the candies. This worked a bit better. Still not satisfied with how the colors run, but suspect part of that is just a matter of practice. The trees & snowmen pop out this time without leaving much of a layer on the mold, but it’s still there. The result of that is that the candy pieces don’t shine.

Due to the amount of pushing I had to do on the candy pieces to get them out of the mold, I’m still thinking this is a pain. Better than the first batch & method , but it’s still a pain. Coward that I am I decided to leave the cupcake to deal with in the morning. I can’t bear the thought of seeing 2 of them break in half in one day.