This weeks cake was a chocolate monster with blue buttercream icing.

Just a word of advice to all of you cake bakers out there… Listen to the instructions… Mine told me to split my batter up between to cake pans, but I wanted a giant monster cake, so I didn’t listen. This led to me having to cook the cake for an extra 20 minutes and it was still gooey in the middle. I eventually gave up on it and took it out of the oven and the middle sunk in a bit.. It wasn’t the prettiest of cakes, but I knew I’d be covering it with icing so I just stuck with it.

I started off decorating my cake by making a mouth for my monster out of fondant and some eyes made from marshmallows and fondant colouring.

After this I whipped up my first batch of buttercream icing (I’m not sure if its supposed to legitimately taste like butter, but mine did… might need to tweak the recipe a bit). I began piping on small dots of icing onto the cake which soon turned into a disaster. Icing started coming out of the wrong end of the icing bag, it was all over my hands, the counter, the wall and the floor. Not to mention, these icing dots were pretty tedious work that led to a few hand cramps.

After what felt like days, I had finally covered all of my little monster… time to put that bad boy in the fridge…. Easier said than done. Its safe to say the about 50% of the items in the fridge are now covered with bits of blue icing… But at least my little monster found a happy little home where he could bide his time until the brain surgery…..

Well let me tell you… it was not that easy at all. Crumbly cake corners are quite difficult to ice (though that might be my fault, I cheaped out and bought the $1 cake mix…) I finished a square and a half before I got mad and decided to give up on the cake for the night and throw it in the fridge.

I did some brainstorm at work the next day with a coworker about how I could work with my crumbly cake. After establishing that I was too lazy to bake a new cake she suggested I freeze the cake. She’s a brilliant girl.. it worked quite well.. much less crumbling and falling apart.

I iced those bad boys and stuck on my fondant squares. I ended up making two of the cakes because they were so small, and the second one ended up turning out much nicer than the first.

I don’t know if I will be making such a small, finicky, square cake in the near future….   Even blogging about this cake is bringing back my feelings of anger towards it….

I decided to decorate cupcakes with coloured fondant. I also invested in a standing mixer, and it was probably the best 100 dollars I spent (well, my dad spent it, but either way it was a great purchase). 

Thanks to the new standing mixer, the greatest difficulty in my cupcake baking was trying to find the muffin tins. Apparently my sister has a tendency to lend them to her friends, so I had to borrow from the neighbours.. it really helps to have a baking guru living across the street. While the cupcakes were moist and delicious, I should have listened to the instructions better when they told me to only fill up the tin 2/3′s of the way. I ended up with a few sumo-sized cupcakes after they rose in the oven…

Being the lazy baker that I am, I ended up just buying a can of Betty Crocker frosting this week, as my focus was on the decorating and not the baking. Let me tell you, icing a cupcake is not as easy as the bakers on TV make it look. The piping bag leaks, you run out of icing mid-cupcake, and somehow you end up with icing all over your hands, face and sweater. Okay, maybe thats just me and my first experience with the piping bag, but deepest apologies to my mother and the disaster I created on her kitchen table. While most of my cupcakes look like they were iced by a five year old, I had a few that turned out pretty nicely. 

After the icing was done, it was time for the fun part… creating the fondant decorations. I had scoured pinterest for hours at time looking for ideas of what to make. I many different flowers, but the highlight of my searching was when I found instructions on how to make a fondant t-rex (If you didn’t already know, I’ve got a bit of a t-rex obsession thanks to Pasta Prima).

With my fondant I created roses, polka dotted flowers, striped flowers, a fish, a really ugly bow, a caterpillar, and of course a couple of t-rexes. I used store bought fondant, so it was pretty easy to work with after a lot of kneading. I coloured it with gel colouring instead of liquid food colouring which gave the fondant a richer colour while using very little gel.

I think the biggest challenge for me this week was piping the icing onto the cupcakes. It was a lot more difficult than I had imagined and required a lot of frosting for each cupcake. I also struggled to attach my fondant decorations to the cupcakes because I ran out of icing so had no ‘adhesive’. Instead I had to creatively toothpick most of my decorations onto the cupcakes.

Now I just need somebody to come to my house to eat these things so I don’t negate every minute I spent at the gym this week….

After my long trip to the grocery store,  (who knew it would have been so hard to find marscapone cheese..) I began my baking. Things went pretty well, aside from a few comments from the peanut gallery that my red velvet wasn’t “red” enough. After copious amounts of mixing, my black pants were coated in flour and I was able to pop my cakes into the oven. Twenty-five minutes later, my toothpick came out clean and I was able to take my cakes out. Note to self: always let your cakes properly cool before you try to pop them out of the pan. I learned this lesson the hard way after not once, but twice losing the bottom of my cakes to an uncooled pan… nothing a little icing couldn’t fix though. I scraped the bottoms off of the pan and stuck them back together, problem solved!

Now that my cakes were complete and cooling it was time to work on the icing… simple enough, right? Not when your hand mixer breaks in the midst of your preparation and you have to whisk the rest by hand. Lets just say that the icing was a wee bit runny this time around. (Also if anyone has 500 bucks laying around and would like to buy me a standing mixer, I wouldn’t object… If it came in purple I wouldn’t hate that either)

After an evening in the freezer to let the icing harden up, my cake was complete! Nothing like a little red velvet for breakfast in the morning. I’d say that overall, my first ‘from scratch’ cake was a success.

Check back sometime next week for some fondant decorated cupcakes… hopefully!

Last semester I was able to learn to play the guitar and receive school credit for it. This semester I have to do a similar project for my EAES 201 class and I have chosen to learn how to decorate cakes.

As a food network addict, I love shows like Cake Boss and Ace of Cakes. Ever since I started watching them, I’ve been telling people that cake decorating will be my “backup career” if education falls through. I suppose in order for this to be true, I should actually be able to decorate a cake — and bake one for that matter.

Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines have always been good friends of mine when it comes to baking. When I have to make a cake, it tends to be rainbow bit and comes from a box (though I have been known to make a mean strawberry cheesecake from scratch if I’m feeling adventurous). It is my goal to not only be able to decorate beautiful cakes, but to be able to bake delicious ones from scratch. I also want to learn how to make my own fondant and buttercream icing.

Since I decided to embark upon the cake decorating journey, I have been scouring pinterest and stumbleupon for cake recipes and decorating inspiration. For my first task, I think I am going to try to bake a red velvet cake with a cream cheese frosting. Eventually I want to learn how to make fondant flowers and have come across a few awesome cake designs, but you’re going to have to wait for my spin on them!

 This little kitty is a cake I made for my friends birthday last year. As you can see, there is a lot of room for improvement and elaboration when it comes to my cake decorating.

Keep checking back here for more delicious updates on my cake decorating journey!

This year, as with many people, I have resolved to ‘get in shape’ … normally I wouldn’t make a resolution like this, but I do pay that monthly gym membership fee, and money doesn’t grow on trees! Also, the christmas cookie belly just doesn’t seem to be going away with all my laying around, no matter how hard I wish it away.

Along with the get in shape resolution comes the ‘eat healthy’ resolution. I don’t think this would be nearly as hard for me if I didn’t work at a pasta restaurant with possibly the best alfredo sauce around. I’ve recruited the help of my coworkers.. they have been told to yell at me if I order any chicken parms or baked tortellini.. Heart Smart platters, whole wheat linguini and greek salads should be the only things coming my way at pasta prima. I know this resolution probably won’t last long.. I make it many times throughout the year and it always falls through… but a girl can try!

One part of the healthy revolution I’ve been trying to enforce in my life that has actually been semi-successful is my water consumption. I’m trying to meet my daily ‘required intake’ of water, which is actually quite easy for me to do. When at work I tend to just designate and entire pitcher of water for myself with some lemon and lime wedges that I can usually kill before my shift is over.

The ‘healthy revolution’ is my resolution that I see as my flaky one.. the one I will give up on in a matter of time… Its a horrible way to look at it but its probably true… Maybe I can prove myself wrong this year… if you’re reading this, feel free to comment and just say “stop being so fat and lazy” and maybe it will motivate me to get to the gym for a run, or replace my peanut butter cup with a carrot stick…

Just tonight I made another resolution for myself that I am pretty confident that I can tackle. For my ECMP 355 class I created a ‘photostream’ page for my blog and I have decided to expand upon it. It is my goal to participate in the 2012/365 on flickr this year, posting one photo a day.

I really loved this idea from the moment Alec introduced us to it in class. Its an awesome and easy way to document daily life. I intend to do this not only for this year, but to continue on with it for as long as I can. When the time comes that I am married with children (in a world far, far away!) I think these flickr albums will be a great way to document my family. I also think it will be a cool thing to show family members how my life was before they were a part of it. I would be so interested to view a ‘photostream’ from my mom, dad, or grandparent from when they were my age. It is amazing how technology has allowed us to document and share our lives!

If you would like to check out my 2012 photostream, click here!

When you google “Alec Couros” you will literally come up with pages and pages of results.. and not those weird ones that aren’t really about him, or that are about “Alex Coros from Texas”. Seriously… I got to page 9 of the google results and just stopped looking because I knew it would probably go on forever.

When I google my own name, the first result to come up isn’t even about me… It is about another “Randi Coons” on facebook.. not until page 3 do I actually come across myself on facebook (maybe because of the severe changes in privacy settings I made when applying to ed…) There are a few results that are actually about me… My twitter account, a couple Prezis I made, and apparently I have a myspace account, who knew!

I spent some time tonight updating my “google profile”… another thing I didn’t know existed… I thought it would be a good idea to update this because after all, when you google someone, something google made is bound to show up, right?

What I think I am trying to get at with this post is that ECMP has taught me the importance of becoming an active online citizen, but I still need to put that plan into action.

I hope that one day my google results will be even a small fraction of what Alec has today.

Here is my final guitar video. I recorded it on garage band so that I could edit out the bad parts and re-record things if I needed to. I decided to draw a little picture to go along with the song to keep everybody awake while watching the video, and I edited the audio and video together on iMovie. The picture/quote that I drew came from another Johnny Cash video, “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” which is one of my favourite videos. (If you skip to 1:40 into the video you will see the image.)

In case anybody needs a new hair do, or you’re looking for that last minute Christmas gift.. check out Vrata, they do great things! Check out their facebook page here or check them out at 1751 Broad Street in Regina!!