Wow.
I wouldn't even know how to make a cake like that without hiring a pro. Wow!
Wow, well-done. The two other members of my family get into planning way over-the-top birthday celebrations for the younger of them; I try and keep my distance.
It did turn out nicely. Any Unfoggeders getting married in NY in the near future, and planning a small, elegant wedding, give me a call. I'm a not-many-trick pony on the cake decorating thing, but when it turns out, it turns out nicely.
w00t! that is totally kick-ass! fonDANT fonDANT fonDANT!!! I'm going to get divorced and remarried just so I can dragoon you into making a wedding cake for me. wait, that seems extreme. maybe I'll just dragoon you by the power of my rosy toes!! bake for me!! baaaaake!
I could not make a cake like that if my life depended on it.
I am impressed.
And alameida pulls off the latex mask, and reveals that she's been Giblets all along.
(The really silly thing about it is that it's enough dense, dense cake to feed about twenty people, and we weren't having a big party. The kids, my parents, Nancy, and the two of us managed to eat about half of the top layer. I sent Nancy and my folks home with a third of the bottom layer each in Tupperware to feed to various family and co-workers.)
That's amazing, and you are completely insane.
Again, the sense of entitlement in this country...
That is a truly awesome cake. Like others have said, I wouldn't even know where to begin with that. I can barely manage buttercream, let alone fondant.
We had a tradition with birthday cakes in my family growing up -- my mother felt the need to make a homemade cake for me each year, because she felt that's what "real" mothers do, but she's the worst baker in the entire world and would inevitably burn the cake and end up in tears and questioning her abilities as a parent. Around the age of 7, I started baking my own cakes to prevent the inevitable meltdown.
9 -- that's ok, you can just drop the leftovers off to me the following day.
Baking is beyond me, but tiered cakes don't seem like they could be plausibly manufactured at all, much less by a civilian. I would be no less impressed if you told me that Newt really wanted a sword, so at 6 am last Wednesday, in a kitchen that was, literally, 106 degrees Farenheit, you forged a claymore.
(Or rather, you ought to have dropped the leftovers off to me the following day.)
That's a gorgeous cake, but as a kid it wouldn't have done much for me. At ten I always wanted my cakes in the shape of robots and fish and licensed talking animals.
When I was a wee lass, my cake was a giant cookie from one of those giant-cookie-companies and a gallon of lemonade. I think I am going to buy myself one this year, because it will be the Last Year of Being Twenty-something.
I would have loved that cake so much as a child I would have been unable to let anyone cut into it. It is beautiful.
Newt has finely honed artistic sensibilities. And the cookbook he was looking through didn't have any cakes in the shape of Transformers, or I would have been in real trouble. (I did make a Nemo-shaped paper-mache pinata last year, but fish are pretty simple.)
I have a pretty well-equipped kitchen, I thought, but I don't have half of the equipment necessary to make that thing. Wow.
Two springform pans, a mixer, and a rolling pin?
That is one seriously impressive frosting job.
Didn't you also use a frosting dispenser thingie? (And no, I don't have two spring-form pans. I have one, left by an old subtenant, and it's a really inconvenient size.)
Wow, that's fantastic! Although, yes I was thinking it was an interesting choice for a small boy.
My kids won't let me bake cakes for their birthdays, they ask for proper ones from shops. It's probably a good thing. I wouldn't mind knowing how to make a Chocolate Oblivion Truffle Torte though, just to impress people by saying it.
LB, you're trying to cover it with the Transformers talk, but this cake is pretty gay.
I did something like that.
once.
For my daughter's birthday, a doberge, which (in Louisiana) is 8 layers of white cake filled with vanilla pastry cream and covered in chocolate frosting. The pictures of the delighted child with chocolate smeared all over her face were worth it but I never did a repeat.
This cake is totally awesome, don't listen to Labs, he's just jealous.
I made my wife a cube-shaped cake for her 27th birthday (because 27 is the cubiest of cubes). It was something like 8-9 layers.
The next year, I bought a cake.
Holy wow.
Baking is beyond me
I can make brownies or chocolate chip cookies without resorting to pre-made mix. Otherwise, ditto. I've had to look up some of the terminology in this thread.
You mistake my meaning, sir: the cake is awesome, but in a way that says something about the child who wanted it. Is "Buck" really "John Roberts"?
I've seen a photo of a cake like that somewhere before. Is it in RLB's Cake Bible?
Oh and yeah, you did a kickass job. It's beautiful.
That's a beautiful cake. It also looks vaguely heraldic. I believe that to be per bend sinister vert, fleur-de-lis argent and or. Lizard family crest, is it?
Surely only soul-corroding envy could lead a 6'20" philosophy professor with window-treatments to call a five-year old child gay. For shame FL.
31: I think you dropped, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."
LB, you're trying to cover it with the Transformers talk, but this cake is pretty gay.
At eighteen months old, someone gave Newt a set of little plastic power tools for Christmas. He went straight for the chain saw, and started to style my hair with it. He's always been comfortable with a broad range of gender roles.
And 32: Nice catch. That's exactly the one.
25: It's the easiest possible recipe. Melt a pound of good dark chocolate with half a pound of butter. Put six eggs in a mixer, and beat the hell out of them for five minutes (untill they hold soft peaks. Whole eggs, not just whites.) Fold them into the cooled chocolate -- the first half thoroughly, and then gently with the second half -- and pour it into a greased 8" springform pan (greased parchment on the bottom too, so it doesn't stick) with the outside wrapped in foil to keep the water out. Put it in a bigger pan of really hot water, and bake at 425F for 15-20 minutes. It'll still be really soft when it's done, but firms as it cools.
That's one recipe's worth -- the cake I made is a triple recipe.
Hey, my mom has that cookbook! And I furtively copied the recipe LB provides above out of a copy in a bookstore 2 valentine's days ago for to make the cake, supplemented with maraschino liqueur and served with creme anglais.
Question for LB: when I made it it sort of caved in in the middle, which was fine since it wasn't being frosted or anything. But how did you prevent that?
37 -- a recipe that involves melting chocolate should not be classified under "easiest possible". Not that it's that hard -- just that you need to pay pretty close attention when you're melting good dark chocolate, to see it does not overheat.
"caved" is "sort of became a little concave"; it wasn't disastrous or anything.
LB makes such beautiful cakes. It just breaks my heart that she's wasting her life in that law office, involving herself in things that a lady shouldn't be involved with for the sake of "money".
Hey BTW any of you who do not regularly read 'Postropher's blog may have missed Meatcake.
Mine did a little, but they're on the plate upside-down, so the flat side is on top. If yours caved more than that, I'd guess that you either beat the eggs not enough or (less likely) too much, or you folded them in too roughly so you lost too much air, or there was too much noise or vibration in the kitchen. But if it wasn't too bad, then I think you just chalk it up to nothing being perfect.
37: Chocolate should always be melted in a double boiler. If you don't have a real one, you can make a makeshift one. Just be sure that the heat is boiling water and not a direct flame.
41: Do you know how much work, and cursing, that shit takes? Law is easier, and as a lady, I choose not to overwork myself.
45: You can also overheat chocolate in a double boiler.
Yeah, what I do is break it up pretty small, and melt until you can still see fair-size lumps. Then take it off the heat and stir until the heat of the melted part melts the lumps.
That's totally badass, LB. Bad. Ass. Congratulations, the other mom's will now hate you, you over-achiever. But you can't let this be the last time you do this! You've got the talent! I'd sell 2 grandparents for a slice of dense chocolate oblivion truffle cake.
Awesome job. Hungry now.
34: FL wishes he was 6'20" and killin' for fun, but uh... not so much.
if I can't pay attention to the chocolate, i stick it in a bowl, cover with a tea towel, and put it on a heating pad. If i can pay attention, I don't bother with a double boiler. It's really not that difficult to just use a plain pan, and a off-and-on technique.
This chocolate-melting stuff is making me realize, all my experience with melting chocolate has been in the context of making candy, where a particular temperature of melted chocolate is desired to make it set up correctly and without separating. Maybe it's easier when you are making cake?
It is -- you don't need to worry about tempering (which frightens me. I've never made chocolate candy). All you need to do is not scorch it.
53 -- I wouldn't let it scare you -- all the times I have made chocolate candy I have never gotten the tempering exactly right, and the candy has always still been tasty and acceptably pretty, if not of the professional grade of beauty to which the people for whom you make dessert are obviously accustomed. If you over-temper the candies will come out with discolored spots; if you under-temper they will be a little melty (this latter works interestingly when used to coat caramels which have not been raised to a high enough temperature, and so are a little runny). Neither is a fatal flaw in chocolate candy.
As we speak, my sister-in-law's pies are being featured in the Portland Oregonian. Her recipe came West on a covered wagon three generations ago.
Her mother hated making pies and tried to keep her from going into the pie trade, but it was in her blood.
Making pies is a pain in the ass. Fafblog is trading in human misery with their glorification of pie.
Or was, before they sublimed on us.
No way, man. People love making pies. I can tell because I hold Pie Contest every year and get dozens of entries. It is enough of a project that people are proud of it, but still totally do-able. Someone who has never made a pie before places nearly every year.
LB, that is one seriously great cake. You son has great taste and is lucky that at least one of his parents can do something like that. Wow.
As I said, it is a beautiful cake. Unfortunately, fondant just doesn't taste all that good.
I'm so totally laughing, because I, too, do the insane homemade birthday cake thing, as did my mother before me. Mine definitely turn out more "homemade" looking than yours, but I am firmly convinced that that is part of their charm.
There's also the homemade halloween costumes (check), the occasional homemade toys (Mr. B. made PK a wooden sword out of leftover wood strips from a new window frame just last week), the homemade goddamn Xmas ornaments, etc. etc. etc.
These are the things that await Brock once the new baby starts sleeping through the night. You *can* sleep, but you have to stay up to finish the fucking cake.
homemade halloween costumes
Haven't done that one for a while, but I should post a picture of 2-year-old Sally dressed as a homemade cow.
And Mitch is right -- the fondant is not particularly nice. But it does look good. When I make cakes with real icing, they look pretty ragged.
Is there some correlation between going to law school and baking highly decorated cakes for one's offspring? Or reading RLB? Could we get a grant to study this ?
Pretty early on, my kids got cooperative about making costumes. We do Halloween, although my greatest successes were Purim costumes. The indoor venue, more like a party than trick-or-treating is, was conducive to more fanciful schemes. I had to use lots of cardboard for my son's proclivity to go as inanimate objects: an imac one year, a candy bar another.
56: Someone who has never made a pie before places nearly every year.
The experienced pie-makers are all too destroyed to compete. Ever-new victims must be found to feed the Pie Monster.
I keep telling my sister in law that she's almost as good as Sara Lee. She loves that.
I've never made a fondant cake, but the key to pretty buttercream is icing the cake all over with a thin layer of buttercream to catch all of the crumbs and make a smooth surface (not caring what that layer looks like) and then putting the cake in the fridge or freezer for that layer to harden. Then, you ice the cake for real on the hardened, smooth buttercream surface. Works like a charm.
65 - Yes! Everything I learned about the domestic arts, I learned from America's Test Kitchen.
64: Huh. I've done the crumb coating, but not the refrigeration. So basically what you're saying is in order to have a pretty frosted cake, you need to add a couple of hours to the time dedicated to preparing it?
Screw that. It tastes the same if the frosting's a little ragged and homemade = charming, I tell you!
Frosting, pretty much all of it, is disgusting.
66 -- everything I know about personal grooming, I learned from the Unfogged happy fun kitten.
67: You make a profit on it with just ten minutes or so of chilling. The bottom layer doesn't have to be rock-hard, it just needs to be firm enough to hold the crumbs down.
Yeah, 10 minutes in the freezer or 30 in the fridge.
68: What? No way! Frosting is YUMMY!
71/72: Okay, maybe I'll give that a try next time, thanks.
67 -- Hey, well if you can't be bothered to make a beautiful cake for your son's birthday, don't worry about it -- we've all got priorities, you know...
Yeah, like I hear some of us take our innocent little daughters to bars!!!
73-- Let me put it this way. No matter how much time you spend hardening the first coat, smoothing the second coat, or decorating with pretty colored heraldry, I'll be that guest who scrapes off the frosting and leaves it a nasty soggy mess on the side of the plate.
If I ever get married, we're having unfrosted, dark-chocolate cake. Maybe I'd accept a raspberry topping.
We had spice cake with cream cheese frosting and seasonal glazed fruit as decoration. Tell me you wouldn't eat that.
I can accept that as a cake, JM. Send me a topless photo and I'll let you know if the wedding's on.
(Our wedding cake: a lovely golden thing with orange zest in it, frosted with ganache. Rasberries may also have been involved.)
Mine was ghastly. Mom wanted a responsibility, so we told her to buy a nice cake. Dry as dust flavorless pound cake, iced with Crisco whipped with confectioner's sugar. Ick.
Luckilly, we didn't care. By that point in the reception, we were just trying to sneak out and get on the road.
Thesis: People who are good in the kitchen are either natural cooks or natural bakers. Those who are natural cooks should have little sisters who are bakers, so family functions can have dessert.
Ours didn't show up until the reception was over. We'd ordered a croquembouche (conical tower of cream puffs, basically, a traditional French wedding cake) which we were then going to cover with edible flowers. But the chef fucked up, got lost or something, and almost everyone had left by the time he appeared. We laughed about it, which is a testament to how well everything else went.
Hmm... gives me an idea for what I should do for our anniversary. Speaking of which, congratulations, Bitch.
little sisters who are bakers
sexist!
No raspberries, Ben?
The ganache looks acceptable, although I'd have to make sure that the recipe renders a true chocolate, not that watered-down fluffy chocolate that some people seem to think sophisticated.
I don't know about the glazed fruit, B. The cream cheese frosting would probably end up in a sodden puddle bunched up disgustingly to one side.
Like w-lfs-n's sheets when he wakes up alone.
A friend had a ginormous wedding cake with three tiers on the central cake, with the tiers supported with little plastic columns, and then, two side tiered cakes with a diagonal ladder of tealight candles that led up to the top tier of the central cake.
And I forgot to have a piece because I was too busy dancing and mainlining vodka tonics.
84 -- one of these? I repeat what I said in 78.
You don't have to leave so soon, JM. Stick around; I'll make breakfast.
83 is completely right.
I am a cook. I can't bake to save my life. I think it's because I dislike following instructions precisely, and you can't just do whatever you feel like when you're baking unless you have lots of practice.
My disdain for recipes is also why I did not do so well in chemistry labs.
I was really good at chemistry, but I'm a pretty lousy baker. I think it's because I learned to cook by watching, and you can't do that with a cake with lots of little steps.
92 -- you ought to try bread-baking -- it is done best by somebody who does not rely overmuch on recipes but goes with his/her gut.
89: Yup, one of those. It was mind-blowingly delicious -- the guy was the real deal, a super-talented French pastry chef -- but it never got adorned with flowers, since we basically tore it apart as we were cleaning up. If I do it next month for our anniversary, I'll be sure to take a picture.
92, 93: If you want to bake, try the Berenbaum cookbooks. She's bizarrely detailed -- it's like working from someone's lab notes. If you obey her recipes exactly, they do not fail.
(Indeed most recipe books will hinder rather than helping -- the sole exception in my experience is the Amy's Bread Cookbook which is no longer available. And probably there are some good recipes in Tassajara as well.)
I found chemistry excruciatingly boring, but I like baking. I am also a good cook. So there.
Traditionally, the croquembouche is served by hitting it hard with a sword, with the bridesmaids catching the pieces in a tablecloth.
Too awesome.
Dr B breaks the mold!
I have tried to make bread and it's always crunchy on the outside and gooey on the inside. I have given up. I am destined to be a bakery patron and not a baker.
Sniff! Such a terrible lot in life.
Indeed most recipe books will hinder rather than helping
Are you on crack? I have at least a dozen that I think are indispensable.
Thesis: People who are good in the kitchen are either natural cooks or natural bakers. Those who are natural cooks should have little sisters who are bakers, so family functions can have dessert.
While I do know plenty of people who are either cook or baker, and it does usually come down to whether that person is into precision, I also know people, including myself, who are both good cooks and good bakers. And I'm a "follow your intuition, not the recipe" type of cook, but I can be precise when it's called for.
Also, unlike cake baking, bread baking doesn't require that much precision. And even in cake baking, precision isn't any sort of guarantee, as things like humidity, the size and freshness of the eggs, the fat content of the butter, etc. are all variable. Having experience and a feel for when things look and feel right it much more important.
96- I have her celebrations book! It is awesome.
101 -- that comment was made in the context of talking about baking bread. It was in no way intended as a slam on recipes in general.
Our wedding cake was a white layer cake, soaked in orange liquer, filled with a rasberry jam and coated in buttercream, from this">http://www.buttercream.info/>this place.
Yum.
Joe Ortiz' book "The Village Baker" may be the greatest guide to making bread -- very grounded in fundamentals, and includes directions on making a variety of traditional styles. He and his wife also wrote a pastry cookbook that's said to be quite good.
104--OK then. Wouldn't want to have to smack you upside the head with Jaque and Julia at Home.
The photos of your cooking have been pretty tempting, Ben, but not that tempting.
I'm a chemistry major, and can both cook and bake.
And this gets it right.
Having experience and a feel for when things look and feel right it much more important.
One of my other favorite areas of "chemistry as art" is this.
I'm the cook, and my sister, whom we used to call "Anal Baker Charlie Mouse," is the baker.
108: JM, you're making me feel cheap. I totally told Ben I'd fuck him if he'd fix me dinner.
gswift: You might then especially enjoy fireworks as art.
Anal Baker
That's the milder version of the Rectum Ripper Hot Sauce.
Now that I actually enjoy cooking and dabbling incompetantly with oil paints, I really wish I could take high school chemistry again. I did okay in the class but didn't care about the subject at all and couldn't see the point of learning it. I'm going to ask for the McGee book on the chemistry of cooking for my birthday and am looking for something sort of similiar for paint.
I cook, but don't bake. Pretty much anything involving flour and eggs goes badly for me, although I did make some delicious crepes last weel.
Well, B, I just don't know what to say to that.
You might then especially enjoy fireworks as art.
That's fantastic.
117: Well, you could whore yourself out to make me feel better. Or you could make fun of me. Either one.
Cala -
The Kid is a chef, but says baking is "too boring", altho' he's quite good at it. He prefers cooking, where one can experiment wildly and generally save a dish if something goes wrong. Our deal is that, should he open his own restaurant before I get too old to bake, he'll cook, I'll bake.
That said, the baking gene skips a generation in maternal side my family - my mother can't bake [or cook, ftm], my grandfather was a baker [grandmother was a cook], his father was a ship captain/mother couldn't bake and my great-great was baker to the King of Norway.
It's in the genes, all right.
It just skipped me. My dad and sisters can bake, but I have to really concentrate. All those things, and all those steps! And needing to own measuring spoons. What the fuck is up with that? When you cook you just go by scent.
Exactly! And it being important not to put too much of anything in the mix is hard for me. If I like cumin and I put too much on my homemade pizza it just messes with the balances of the different tastes, it doesn't turn the pizza into a gross gooey mass of inedible yuck. But you can do that in baking without even knowing what you did wrong.
I can't make homemade pasta, either. I got ambitious once and tried to make homemade ravioli and it was so bad the dog wouldn't eat it.
122: Actually, you can use extra spice while baking, no problem. She says, being a snot.
No Chopper, you're thinking of '80's porn hit Commin' on Pizza
I eat the pizza while listening to Sex on The Phone.
It's ricotta, mushrooms, cumin, onions, garlic, green peppers and tomato pieces on pizza with no sauce.
123- You must have some strange power over the baking I will never have. Woe!
Really? How much extra spice do you add??? Like a quarter cup or something?
Oddly enough, there's a perfect amount, after which it becomes a disc of cumin with some irrelevant vegetable matter. The ideal amount is just a bit of the cumin, less than a half-teaspoon or so. But even if you screw up and the face of the pizza turns cumin-colored it's still edible. Not so with the cake I tried to make for work that looked like an example of when to give up in triage.
The pizza is really very good when it's hot like it is right now, because you can let it cool off and it's like an open-face sandwich sort of thing.
One thing that can be really helpful w.r.t. bread baking or pasta making or other things involving handling dough, probably especially if you feel like you don't have a knack for it, is to do it with someone who knows what they're doing. Then try to touch the dough as often as possible and pay maximum attention to how its texture changes and what it feels like throughout the process.
This is something that's very hard to describe in words so it can be hard to achieve good results just by following a recipe from a book if you've never actually gone through the process described.
Also, on the subject of bread books, Amy's Bread is indeed very good, as is Joe Ortiz's The Village Baker. The latter's wife also has a very good book on cakes and pastry called The Village Baker's Wife.
Daniel Leader's Bread Alone is also quite good, and I highly recommend anything by Peter Reinhart (The Bread Baker's Apprentice for beginners).
I just received a copy of Ruth Levy Berenbaum's The Bread Bible for my birthday, and judging by the quality of her Cake Bible and Pie and Pastry Bible, I'm assuming it must be good, but I haven't had the chance to delve into it yet.
But my favorite book about bread baking is The Bread Builders by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott. One of my future schemes, partly inspired by this book, is to start a community center, based around a masonry bread oven and small urban farm, that provides skills training and employment for at-risk youth and recently-released prisoners, keeps pallets and other untreated wood out of the landfill, and results in great bread and other food for everyone.
132: I just bought TBB, based on good results from TCB and TPAPB, and I have to say it scares me. I make perfectly decent bread, white or wheat ordinary sandwich bread, but Rose is all about carefully calibrated flour types and way, way complex recipes. I haven't tried any of her bread recipes yet.
Hmmm. I have a feeling TBB won't really suit me then. Still, a lot of cookbooks I read just for reference, and RLB's technical expertise is a nice thing to throw into the pile of experience and knowledge I've collected over the years.
If you already know what you're doing and are happy with your results, LB, I'd say don't be bullied by Ruth, just use her to enhance your understanding of the variables available for you to manipulate as you desire.
The thing is, that letting her bully me has worked so well with her other books. I've never been much of a hand with pastry, and her pie crust method is bizarre and insane sounding, and produces perfect pie crust, where more normal sounding recipes leave me cursing at a pile of crumbs. So at this point if Rose tells me to sacrifice a goat to my sourdough starter, I'll do it -- I just need to brace myself first.
I've flipped through some of Ruth Levy Berenbaum's "Bible" books, and they do indeed look very good. The problem is that I cannot bring myself to buy anything, on any subject, entitled the The ______ Bible. It's a matter of principle, and I will not bend.
M/tch, you know, I might be available as a baker's apprentice, for the right price.
Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose.