My Cake Decorating hobby - trying to match a frosting color

It's messy, it's sloppy, but making frosting is just all-out fun.

I was challenged the other day to create an African safari theme. My host would be adding toy animals and zebra-striped wrappers, and she wanted a chocolate cupcake with a grassland frosting. This sounded simple; but nothing is ever really easy when it comes to cakes!

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First I made up a batch of basic buttercream, and added the raspberry flavoring. Only I had forgotten that raspberry flavoring will tint the entire bowlful slightly pink.

Not Pink! I didn't want PINK!!!* I was going for that dried hay and grassland color (kind of like this) which is definitely NOT pink.

I wanted to fix it but I was worried. I thought about adding color to the pink but I didn't want to ruin the whole batch with a mistake. So I took a cup or so of the frosting out of the main bowl to experiment with. The lady at the cupcake shop had recommended a light brown food dye, so I added a small amount of brown. Only what I didn't realize was that it was a red based brown. The result? This pumpkin-colored mess:

Not too appetizing, right? So I tried again, this time going back to the base pink and adding just yellow - ignoring the brown completely. That came out much better, it wasn't hay but it wasn't orange either. Here's the way it looked in the mixer:

And here's how it looked on the final dessert:

Look out, it's a rhino on his way to his watering hole! :)

I'm proud of myself for doing this; I was able to give the recipient what she wanted; a tasty cupcake that fit her party theme. I created something, and it feels good.

Have you created lately? What gets your pride going?

Janet

*This line is actually is a reference to a book called "Pinkalicious" by Victoria Kann. The story is all about a little girl who eats too many pink cupcakes and turns pink (her hair, her skin, everything). Her parents aren't particularly thrilled about this. If you are interested, you can check out the book yourself here.

Cake Decorating Practice

The other day, a friend of mine asked me to make the dessert for her daughter's 10th birthday party. I happily accepted a chance to make someone happy AND practice my cake decorating skills. For your amusement, here I take you through the process step by step. I do feel like I'm getting better every time, and I so love this. Making cakes is making edible art. Everything is gone at the end except the memories. Whatever I create will be destroyed, so it is temporary art. Kind of like sushi, I guess. Except no fish. :)

The Design

We met at a local coffee shop and talked about details. What kind of cake, what kind of filling, what kind of decorations. I borrowed crayons from my kids, and used a pad to sketch out ideas. Here's the result:

In case you can't read my handwriting she decided to do a 'springtime' theme; including bugs and butterflies and flowers. The cake would be cupcakes, chocolate with raspberry filling and raspberry icing. The icing would be purple, her favorite color. I also tried to show her in my drawing what the result would look like, hence the blue sketch in the lower left corner.

The Plan

I had done flowers before so I wasn't worried about that, and I had an idea for making caterpillars using a snow-man style method (stacking up balls and squishing down). I was, however, not sure about the butterflies.

In the cake decorating blogs and articles I've read, the hardest thing about butterflies is that you are either going super-realistic or cartoony, but not both. I would have to choose my method before I began.

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One way to do butterflies is to be realistic, say, by taking pre-printed edible rice paper and cutting out butterfly shapes. These shapes can then be bent and molded to look like butterflies have landed on your cake. Here's an example from cakecentral.com. I even went to the store and looked at options for edible paper; but in the end, I decided not to go that way. Firstly, it wasn't 'created by me', it would have been someone else's pattern or design. Secondly it wouldn't have worked with the other items I was doing, the caterpillars were going to be more cartoony than realistic. Third, it was for a kid's party and I thought that was leaving 'springtime fun' and moving into 'elegant' which didn't fit the theme.

So I decided to go cartoony. I even got candy eyes and decorated them with chocolate candy dots.

Several hours later.... here's my result.

The Finished Dessert

Again, I had an amazing time preparing this for my friend and seeing the final product come to life. The look on the birthday girl's face was something I'm not going to forget for a very long time. She wanted to know what she could eat (everything on the cupcakes) and which one she could have (I made a special daisy that she chose, you can see it in the center of the larger cupcakes). All the kids loved them. I can tell because they ate both the cupcakes and the frosting, and they came back for seconds. Usually that's a good sign!

Here's a few pictures of the finished product. Note that I included a few toy bugs as supplementary design elements, you can tell the difference because the toys are on the tablecloth/plate.

The mini cupcakes were also chocolate, but didn't have any filling.

Thanks for reading! Please add your thoughts below. Are you practicing a new skill too?

Janet

Self awareness - not feeling social

Not feeling social means to me that I'm tired of empathy, of sympathy, of listening. As rewarding as it is, sometimes I'm just DONE. I need to be in my own head.

This is a selfish place to be but it's also a comfortable, easy place. Like a favorite chair, well used in all the best spots.

This is, however, the worst place to be when I need to be social, for family or friends or work. I don't want to get out of that easy chair. And when I force myself out I can be mean to those around me. Resentful is probably a better word, since it reminds me of the behavior I see in my kids when I tell them to stop doing something. So consciously, I know that it's completely childish and yet I still do it.

Which is not the best thing!

So I guess acting this way is kind of like when I eat a lot of chocolate. It feels good to do but is not good for me. Mmmmm chocolate.

Thankfully for me (and for my family, friends and co-workers) these feelings often pass quickly. So my takeaway from this is to just ride it out. Once the feeling passes I'll be back to my old self again.

Another takeaway is if I see myself acting angry or resentful and there doesn't seem to be anything behind it, it means I probably just need some me-alone-time.

What do you do when you want to be alone? How do you feel?

Janet