1000 Cooks for the Cure

Whoa...check it out! Half Baked - The Cake Blog

Another blog to love...another giveaway...and a great way to give! Sadly, I've never heard of 1000 Cooks for the Cure (how could I have missed that?) and it's too late for me to pull something together this year but you can bet I'll be hosting a dinner party next year!

Fabulous blog...fabulous website...fabulous giveaway!

Hi! I can't believe it's been a month since I posted! there has seriously been nothing going on in the way of competition! Oh, well, soon enough.

Here's why I'm posting today. Check out the fabulous blog I just discovered! Paper and cake is currently doing a great giveaway. Just WAIT until you see the cake and cupcake stands feature in the post. Droolworthy!

Hurry, though, time is running out!

*UPDATE* I won the giveaway! Yay! A gorgeous, handcrafted cakestand that will be a wonderful addition to my collection...

...from Delightfully Lovely and a $50 store credit from paper and cake. Pretty sweet!

Branching out

In more competition news, I'm considering trying something completely outside the box for me. Tasting competitions! The Colorado State Fair has a few "Special" contests, including a Cupcake Challenge sponsored by C & H Sugar, a Chocolate Championship sponsored by Ghiradelli and a Great Cakes Contest sponsored by King Arthur Flour. It's definitely related to cake decorating...what's underneath the decor has to taste as good as it looks, right?

All recipes have to be original and unpublished and completely from scratch. Now, I bake from scratch all the time, and I've developed my own recipes for simple things like fillings and frostings, but never cake or cupcakes! I've been busy doing research and applying it to what I already know and yesterday made my first and second draft of my very own cupcake recipe! It does still need tweaking but I'm very pleased with both the cupcake and the icing. I had NO IDEA how fun this would be!

I have a couple of concepts in mind for the chocolate and the cake contests but I plan to perfect that cupcake before moving on to the next thing. Of course, all recipes and ideas are secret until I submit them!

Just for fun, though, here's a sneak peek at version # 2...

Thanks for reading! I'll keep you posted!

Another online contest

So, online contests being what they are, I still really don't favor them. I figure if my cakes lose something in pictures, I'm sure many others' do, too. However, all that being said, I caved, and once again entered an online contest. The theme is "Flowers, flowers, flowers" and I entered Katie's cake as it has some of my best flowers to date on it...

One of the positives about an online contest is that you don't necessarily have to make a cake; you can use one that you already have pictures of, as long as it qualifies.

The contest is hosted by an online cake decorating community. The judging is done by registered members, most of whom are cake decorators; cakes are ranked on a scale of 1 to 5. All points are tallied to determine the winner. I'll let you know how I do once the winners are announced sometime after July 5.



How I Met Two Food Network Challenge Competitors!

Since there's so little going on competition-wise at the moment I thought I'd take the opportunity to share about a recent class I took. I spent a wonderful day at Intricate Icings, Rechael Teufel's beautiful cake shop in Erie, CO taking a Make Your Own Lace Molds class with James Roselle. Rachael, along with her very talented assistant, Avalon, was a gracious and generous hostess. James was charming, exceedingly nice, and a great teacher! Mold making was something intriguing to me that I had never done before.

We started out by learning how to make silicone molds from our lace. It was really fun seeing what kind of lace everyone brought. Rachael graciously let us use her brooches to make additional molds. While the molds were setting up, we covered our cake dummies with Fondarific fondant. Very nice, I must say. James (and Rachael, too!) gave us lots of tips and tricks for covering cakes! Once they were stacked, it was time to unveil the molds. Here's mine:

My original lace and its mold

A mold of one of Rachael's brooches

We then used our molds and fondant to decorate our cakes! I made borders and cut-out blossoms with mine but I left with an unfinished cake.

I had brought the pink hydrangeas with me.

Here's all of us with our cakes:

People l to r: Molly, Erin, me, Renee, James
Cakes l to r: Renee, me, James, Erin, Molly

So, now I've armed myself with silicone plastique and went on a mini shopping spree at Mill Outlet Fabric Shop, the best fabric store ever, and purchased several pieces of lace, and trims, and buttons and can't wait to start playing!

Online Contest Update

As I stated a couple of posts ago, I really don't like online cake decorating contests. Even so, I decided to enter this cake into a contest featuring gumpaste flowers...

The contest was on a social networking site specifically for cake decorators. The format is that the photos are posted and site members vote for their favorites. After a pre-determined amount of time, the site mods cull the top ten vote getters for presentation to the judges, who then choose the winners.   

The top 10 vote getters were just posted. You can see them here.

As you can see, my cake didn't make the top 10. It did get several votes ("likes"). It also got several "favorites" (a favorite is when a member saves your picture for inspiration) and some lovely comments. Coming from fellow cake decorators, the favorites and comments are highly flattering and mean so much more to me than winning!

Wilton Cake Decorating Challenge, October 2010

My former Wilton instructor hosted another cake decorating challenge at Michael's in October, 2010. The cakes needed to be at minimum two tiers and "seasonal in design (specifically Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukah, or Christmas)". Cakes could be covered in icing and/or fondant ahead of time and up to 50% of the decorations could be made in advance. 

I decided to do a haunted pumpkin patch. In advance, I made gumpaste pumpkins, a trick or treat bag, witch's hat, a broom...and an over-sized spider...all really fun to make!

In addition, I made a pumpkin carved out of cake and covered in orange fondant for the top.

Making the deep purple for the night-time background was no easy task! Purple is a notoriously difficult color to work with. I used a lot of violet food coloring and added a very small amount of royal blue. Since purple also fades very quickly, I waited until the day before the challenge to color it and kept it in a ziploc bag wrapped in a dishtowel to keep it away from light. I covered the cake the morning of the competition. I also made and colored all my buttercream the day before. The black buttercream was even harder to make than the purple fondant!

I packed up all my stuff and hauled it, along wih the cake, to Michael's. We had an hour and a half to decorate our cakes on-site. I did all the piping, and hand cut my ghosts and bats and cut out my full moon while there. It was so much fun assembling this cake! I especially enjoyed piping the tree and the fence.

The concept for the cake was that a trick or treater (costumed as a witch, of course) was walking by the pumkin patch and was frightened away, dropping parts of her costume as she went.

There were four of us competeing and from what I understand, it was a really close competition...you can see why...here's the other finished cakes....they're all great!

 

Soooo....guess which one won?

Yep, mine! Both judges' and customer favorite, thanks to all my friends who came out to vote. The feedback that I got was about the vibrant colors and neatness of execution. That's the good news...the bad news is that I've been banned from future challenges as a two-time winner. OK, not BANNED, but I can't enter again. I may be able to help with judging but I do know that I'll definitely be at future challenges to cast my vote for my favorite cake!

I had a great day. I won great prizes. People enjoyed my work. AND my cake lasted through Halloween without fading! What more can a caker ask for?