Happy Birthday Chip!

 Mmmm....truffles.....nothing like home made truffles, filled with one hazelnut, nutella spread, and rolled inside of a dark chocolate ganache, rolled in chopped nuts....mmm, mmm.  I must admit, those Ferrero Rochers are pretty darn tasty too!  And the reason for these yummy truffles??  Chip's birthday!

Evo, one of my friend from back in the days, had contacted me about baking up a cake for her boyfriend's birthday.  The both of them live in the Bay area and would be in San Diego during the holidays, so she thought it would be a great idea (and it was, in my opinion) for me to bake her a cake.  The only criteria for the cake is that there be tons and tons of chocolate, as Chip loves chocolate!  No problems there!!  I love chocolate too, but I ran into some problems with the overall look of the cake.  Unfortunately, the figments of my imagination just doesn't work that well.  I know, unfortunate, huh?  That, and also because I've been making a lot of baked goods for the ladies in my life, so, you know, lots of flowers and ribbons and fu fu stuff going on.  But strictly for a guy??  I'm not so sure Chip would appreciate pastel fondant flowers and ribbons!  I mean, I'm sure he will appreciate the work that goes into fondant, but it's so, well, girly.  So off I go, figuring out ideas for a more "manlier" cake, but making it festive enough to be a birthday cake, and not just a boring 'ol chocolate cake.

I played around with a lot of different ideas.  One of them was to use chocolate fondant...but I feel that fondant is just so not tasty, even if it was chocolate.  Another option was to make chocolate plastique, which I've never made before, but heard that it tastes like a tastier tootsie roll.  My last option was to dabble with ganache.  Ganache is always yummy, so I decided to go that route, and seeing that chocolate was the order, I thought: why not??  The whole cake will be chocolate everything!  So, the cake was supposed to be kind of like a "mother-load" cake.  It was supposed to be four cake layers and three cream layers.  Somewhere along slicing the cake in half and filling it in, I seem to have lost a layer of cake.  I know, right??  HOW does that happen?!  I was pretty surprised myself, too, because I almost put buttercream on top of a cake layer and reached over to get the last cake to top off the cream, but reached at nothing instead.  Shocked myself for a second there.  But ah well, I made do with three cake layers and two cream layers.  Inside, I made chocolate cake and layered them with a light chocolate buttercream and a raspberry buttercream, in which I also sprinkled freeze dried raspberries to give the taste some tart, opposed to all that sweet!  I then crumb coated the cake in white chocolate ganache and let it set, while I whip up the rest of the white chocolate ganache to spread over the cake.  I must say, whipped gananche is pretty darn tasty!  It tasted like a light, whipped chocolate...well, I guess that's because that's what it is...The only thing is, it slightly hardens once it sits.  So, I spread the white chocolate ganache over my cake and then poured dark chocolate ganache on top, letting is spill over the sides to create the "spilled" (?) look.  Although, my spilled look didn't make me happy.  It spilled wrong.  I'm beginning to think that the side "spilled" look is actually contrived and real bakers do not actually let it "spill" uncontrollably over the sides.  Doh!  Lesson learned...And because it wasn't a cupcake, I had to make do with the cake as is too.  I did put some ribbon around the bottom of the cake ( I actually layered up the ribbon, but the previous picture only shows the one layer of ribbon.)

I was able to find a box that was somewhat tall enough for this cake...I couldn't exactly close the box, but it worked.  I took the cake with me and met up with Evo and the birthday "princess" for dinner that night, along with a bunch of other cool people.  We ate at a cool restaurant in Hillcrest, and for those of you who know about Hillcrest, knows that the parking is horrendous there.  Of course it was a Friday night too...I found parking about one huge long block away.  And let me tell you, this cake was pretty heavy!  I actually felt like I had an arm workout just from carrying this cake to the restaurant!  I had decided not to bring my fancy camera...as it's big and obtrusive.  And since I just got the new iPhone, I decided to just use my phone to take pictures of the cake with the birthday boy.  But lo and behold, it totally slipped my mind.  I must blame Evo for this, as she made me forget because we had to have one of those Asian arguments about her trying to pay for this cake and me not wanting her money.  Yep...totally her fault that I forgot to snap a picture of Chip and the cake.  We even put in one fun candle too...in which our poor waiter had to do a "show and tell" kind of sharing of the cake, and walked around the table (there was 12 of us, so it was a big table!), holding a 20 pound cake, and then letting Chip blow the candle.  Super fun times...suffice it to say, our waiter was tipped very well!

I had a great time making this cake and seeing Evo and Chip and the rest of the gang again.  It's always fun maddness with them!  Thanks for being my guinea pigs!

Cheers!

Happy Birthday Jenni!

So, another gloomy, rainy day is upon us here in San Diego.  And yet again, what better time than to blog another post?  Today, I'm going to bring some sunshine upon us!  Yes, it's another birthday, but once you see these pictures, you'll be just as tickled as I was!  My cousin, Jenni,  had celebrated her birthday earlier this month.  She actually shares the first part of December with her brother, whose birthday was two days before hers!  They had planned a birthday dinner for that weekend, but since I was not able to attend, I thought I'd  bake her a cake and visit her and her kiddos for an evening.

I decided to do a vanilla chiffon cake, since it seems they were fond of those Asian cakes bought from a certain Asian market here in San Diego.  I almost did a taro flavored chiffon cake, but seeing as I didn't really have time for any mess ups, I decided against playing with the cake flavor and went with good old fashion vanilla.  And unfortunately, that day, I ran into more problems and "coulda, shoulda, woulda...but didn't" more than shoulda happened!  (I know, try saying that 10 times fast!).  The first of the "coulda, shouldas" was the whipped cream!  It was a bit softer than I usually make them (these I stole from the donut shop....), so my first instinct was to re-whip the cream to get a stiffer cream.  But I had this bright idea that the almonds would camouflage any unseemingly-ness of the whipped cream.  When I first started icing the cake, it seem to hold up just fine.  But as I iced more and more...I ran into some squishy problems...But there was nothing else I can do.  It wasn't until I had to pipe the border of the cake that I decided to just re-whip the cream.  Lo and behold, the cream actually got stiffer and was something I shoulda done the first time around!  Darn, why do I never listen to my first instincts??  Secondly, when I first started this cake, I was home by myself.  I had a pretty relaxing time, preparing this cake.  It wasn't until I put the ribbon on that my mother came home and all of a sudden, the relaxed atmosphere was gone.  I was suddenly in a rush to get things done and be out of the kitchen.  (Hrmm, my mother has that kind of effect on me...).  Anyways, there was no way to clean off that icing on my ribbon, unfortunately, and so, the cake went with a slightly iced ribbon :( But no matter, when I arrived at Jenni's house, the kids were in awe of the cake.  It was super cute!  Her three boys were so excited about celebrating their mom's birthday and that there was a cake just for her!  Check out Jared:

If that's not excitement, I don't know what is!!  He sat on top of the island and was just shaking with excitement!  Thank God their island is huge and there was no way of him falling off!

We had to do the cake blowing twice.  Jacob got a little carried away and forgot to share the blowing experience with all his siblings and Justin (the kid on the far left) carried on a tantrum because he was too slow in blowing out the candles!  See Justin's tantrum?

Although he was pouting, Justin was just too cute!  If only I had taken a video, you would see that he was just a tad too slow in getting any candles blown off!  And he could see that he didn't blow out any candles either!  So, we lit the candles again and he had another go at it!

Here's Jenni's oldest, Jacob, smelling the flowers that was on the cake.  What a darn cutie!

And, of course, Jared wanted to join in on the fun too...except he decided he'd rather have a lick than a smell!  The kid's enthusiasm really brought out my sense of pride in what I'm doing.  And although this wasn't the perfect cake I had in my  mind, it was perfect, as is, because these kids were soo excited and in awe of a made-from-scratch cake, made especially for their mommy.  And to see that, it really touched my heart, both their love for their mama, and their amazement of my cake.  Don't tell anyone, but I'm making myself #1 auntie with these three ;)

 Cheers!

Gobble, Gobble

Oh rainy day!  It's a perfect day for a new blog post!  We are finally getting some much needed rain here in San Diego!  It's one of those ugly, dark, rainy days...perfect for sitting in a cafe with the laptop open!  And what do you know, here I am, with my laptop open, ready for a new post.  Ok, ok...so I know I've been slacking off a bit...and I was on such a roll too!  Well, I can only blame it on the holidays!  This year's festivities really snuck up on me!!  I blinked and Halloween came and went...next thing I knew, Thanksgiving and black Friday came and went...all of a sudden, we are looking into Christmas now!  So, to backtrack and to get back on track, I am writing about Thanksgiving today!  This year, we decided to do Thanksgiving up really nice. I brought out the fine China and the crystal glasswares and just decided to put on a feast!  I went as far as getting nice cranberry red chargers and making up name place cards with red pears.   I loved how the red pears went beautifully with our table colors.  See, we're a pair of pears :)

We also decided to do a kid's table for the little kiddos.  I thought pears are just a bit grown up for the kiddies and thought hard about what to adorn their table with.  In the end, I decided to make little turkeys out of cookies and candy corn.  They were super adorable and my customers at the shop got a kick out of them.  It was, surprisingly, very hard to find candy corn at that time of year!  I went to all sorts of stores and no one had candy corns!! Yep, I was just as surprised.  Alas, I did find candy corns and the time I spent looking was well worth the outcome.

This is the kiddie table!  The kid's really enjoyed their turkey...both the deep-fried turkey and their candy turkey.  I thought it was super fun and actually quite simple to make.  And just for next time, I'll be sure to buy those candy corn right after Halloween!  I'll leave you readers with this super cute picture:

My little baby, napping after Thanksgiving dinner!  Doesn't she look satisfied?  Until next time, readers!