These days, the first question that pops up when I bake is ‘how I can use my 3D printer?’
Not exactly the conventional way of baking, but it opens up a lot of possibilities! This time, I 3D printed a skull, and was trying to plan around what to do. I had a few ideas, but one of my neighbours gave me the idea for this pentagram cake. To make it look more legit, I googled and iced in some Wiccan symbols (sorry, Wiccans).
The cake itself was not terribly exciting - I used a Betty Crocker Butter Pecan cake and some cookies and cream icing.
I went to a coworker’s house for Halloween, and his daughter has a lot of allergies. I’ve made something similar for her in the past and she always asks for it, so I stepped it up a bit this time!
I made a pretty significant amount, so this recipe can definitely be halved. Also, it’s super easy - you just stick all of the ingredients (except the chips) into a food processor and process away, and then mix in the chocolate chips. The nice thing with food processing is that you can always add things to adjust the taste. You could definitely cut down the sugar or add some kind of milk to adjust the sweetness or texture.
I had a going away to bake for recently, and after an unforeseen work trip popped up, I did not have a lot of energy to bake. I wanted to make red velvet something, but cupcakes seemed like so much work and so many dishes that I couldn’t muster up any motivation. I found these Red Velvet Brownies from Sally’s Baking Addiction and they seemed much more efficient! I feel like it’s redundant to mention the cream cheese swirl; obviously, there is going to be cream cheese involved.
Note: Efficiency is not usually a key factor for my baking, but I was tired.
There was a very positive response to these brownies. One person said it was the best red velvet anything he had eaten!
RED VELVET BROWNIES (9 x 13″ pan) - from here
INGREDIENTS
4 eggs
224 g (1 cup) unsalted butter
400 g (2 cups) granulated sugar
20 g (4 tsp.) vanilla extract
42 g cocoa
1/4 tsp. salt
2 tbsp. red food colouring
7 g (1.5 tsp.) vinegar
190 g pastry flour
2 x 8 ounce blocks of cream cheese
100 g (1/2 cup) granulated sugar
2 egg yolks
5 g (1 tsp.) vanilla extract
DIRECTIONS
Line a 9 x 13″ pan with parchment paper. Preheat oven to 350 F.
Beat the eggs together into a small bowl. Set aside.
Melt the butter. Stir in the sugar, vanilla, cocoa, salt, food colouring, and vinegar. Mix well.
Whisk in the eggs, and fold in the flour.
Level the batter into the pan, leaving 1/4 cup set aside.
Make the cheesecake swirl by mixing together the cream cheese, sugar, yolks, and vanilla with a hand mixer.
Spoon the cheese mixture in globs on top of the brownie mixture. Spoon the rest of the red velvet mixture on top of the cream cheese globs.
Use a knife to swirl everything around.
Bake for 30 - 50 minutes (or until a toothpick comes out clean).
Notes:
Next time, I would not use melted butter. Rather, I would cream the butter and sugar together to make a less grainy texture.
My good friend Marcus was visiting Vancouver and staying with me for a few days. We’re both sort of ridiculous and encourage that in one another, so obviously we decided to bake a dragon cake with a 3D printed egg and baby dragon. And we did a lot of chin ups. Either way, we decided to just commit to this ambitious idea, and were both super happy with how it turned out!
As this was mostly an art project, we were not terribly concerned with the recipe details. We made double this eggless vanilla cake recipe in a jelly roll pan so that we had a thin layer that we could stack and work with. I also had some leftover swiss meringue icing, so we just used that.
After carving out the dragon, we did a base icing coat. We then used a circle tip and a small spatula with black food colouring on it to get the multicoloured scaled look. We made the eyes, horns, and claws out of fondant. The egg and baby dragon were scaled appropriately and 3D printed. And obviously, you can’t have a dragon without treasure.
I believe that I’m now the annual Golf Tournament cake baker! Two years makes this annual, right? Now that it’s a thing, it’s forcing me to be creative. Last year’s cake looked like this, so obviously I needed to do something different this year.
It’s a company tournament so I went with pretty safe flavours (chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream icing) but I was pretty happy with how it all turned out! Everyone seems to enjoy this chocolate recipe, so I think it’s a winner!
CHOCOLATE CAKE (from Sweetapolita.com)
INGREDIENTS
145 g dark chocolate
260 g unsalted butter
24 g (1/4 cup) cocoa
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
315 g (2.75 cups) cake flour
4 eggs
200 g (1 cup) granulated sugar
220 g (1 cup) brown sugar
1.5 tsp. vanilla
475 mL (2 cups) sour cream
DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease and line 3 x 8″ cake pans.
Melt the chocolate and butter in a bain marie until smooth.
Sift together the cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and flour. Set aside.
In a mixer, beat together the eggs, sugars, and vanilla until fluffy.
Mix the melted chocolate into the sugar mixture at low speed.
Alternating adding in the flour and sour cream in three batches, starting and finishing with flour. Don’t overmix.
Spread the batter into the three pans. (I weigh them to ensure even layers).
Bake until a toothpick comes out clean (25 - 40 minutes). Don’t open the oven door before 20 minutes.
I used a pretty basic buttercream, and then put white chocolate into a golf ball mold. The flag was made with fondant and a pocky stick.
To recap, my friend Gina asked me to make her wedding cake last year, and of course I said yes. Her and Alex wanted a three tier lemon raspberry cake with a “messy” buttercream finish. I’m not all that confident with my fondant skills, so this worked for the best. I did a few prep cakes to get the cake down, and then took a few days off work to actually bake the cake.
The final cake was 3 x 6″ pans, 3 x 8″ pans, and 3 x 10″ pans. I did some math, and made three times the recipe shown below. I did the 8″ pans with the first batch, the 6″ pans + a 10″ pan with the second batch, and two 10″ pans with the third batch.
To make things efficient, I greased and lined the pans at the start. I also measured out my butter + sugar + lemon zest into three bowls at the start.
LEMON CAKE (adapted from Layered )
650 g cake flour
3 tsp. baking powder
1.5 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
340 g unsalted butter (room temp)
600 g granulated sugar
20 g lemon zest
1.5 tsp. vanilla
2 eggs
6 egg yolks
1 tsp. lemon extract
2 tbsp. lemon juice
485 g buttermilk
DIRECTIONS
Preheat the oven to 350 F. Line and grease the cake pans.
In a stand mixer (with paddle attachment) mix the butter, sugar, and zest until smooth and fluffy. It should go to a white-ish colour.
While butter is mixing, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in another bowl.
Add the vanilla to the butter mixture. Add in the eggs one at a time. Add the lemon extract and lemon juice.
At low speed, alternate adding the flour mixture and buttermilk to the butter mixture, starting and ending with the flour mixture.
Using a scale, evenly divide batter between the cake pans.
Bake until a toothpick comes out clean (>20 minutes)
Let the cakes cook for 20 minutes and then invert onto cooling racks.
Notes:
I did my calculations to simplify things, but they are a little off. Basically, I considered the 3 x 6″ pans to be a single batch, the 3 x 8″ pans to be a double batch, and the 3 x 10″ pans to be a triple batch. Technically, if the 3 x 6″ pans are a single batch, the 3 x 8″ pans are a 1.8x batch, and the 3 x 10″ pans are a 2.8x batch. I decided this was close enough, and just cut more off the tops.
To make things efficient I just got batter prepared while the previous cakes were baking.
I used a lot of lemon since the first cake I made barely had any lemon flavour.
Each cake (after torting) ends up at about 5.5″ (14 cm) tall
I left the butter out overnight which got it to the perfect temperature (in Vancouver summer)
I made 2.5 batches of buttercream to ice the cake. I didn’t actually need as much since I used jam inside the cake. I tried to make raspberry icing, but I couldn’t not get the flavour across. Gina didn’t want seeds in the icing, but it seems like the straining process strained away the flavour as well. I decided to bypass adding any raspberry to the icing and to just let the jam impart the flavour.
SWISS MERINGUE BUTTERCREAM (adapted from Layered )
240 g egg whites
400 g granulated sugar
675 unsalted butter
1 tbsp. vanilla
DIRECTIONS
Put the egg whites and sugar in a stand mixer bowl and whisk together immediately.
Put the bowl over a bain marie (making sure it doesn’t touch the water)
Whisk the mixture until it reaches 72 C.
Remove the bowl and place it into the stand mixer. Mix with the whisk attachment on high speed until the bowl is room temperature (8 - 10 mins).
Switch to the paddle attachment and add in butter a few spoons at a time (at low speed). Add in vanilla once butter is added.
Increase to medium speed and beat until the buttercream is silky looking.
Notes:
Again, the butter being left out overnight allowed for the perfect consistency.
If something looks wrong, it can probably be fixed. There are a ton of resources on troubleshooting SMBC woes.
If you have to mix this out of the fridge, it may change colour. The icing I brought with me to the wedding changed colour and I couldn’t use it on the cake.
ASSEMBLY
Once the cakes have all cooled, torte them. I used my cake leveler to do this. I suggest doing this after you’re done all of the cakes so that they can be cut to identical sizes.
After torting, I used a pastry brush to apply a simple syrup. I just did a a 1:1 sugar:water mixture with some cut up lemons.
Once the cake layers were prepared, I got each tier ready. I used my first batch of icing to create domes and filled the insides with jam. I also did a very thin crumb coat, and refrigerated the tiers overnight. I built each tier on its respective cake board.
The next day, I prepared a second and third batch of icing. I tried to get the first day’s icing close to the colour I wanted, but I wasn’t super concerned since it would all be covered.
I coloured the icing appropriately and iced each tier. Once iced, I stuck them back in the fridge.
I picked up some food grade dowels to place in the bottom two tiers. I used a hacksaw and mitre box to cut them to size (although I was really considering buying a bandsaw). I am pretty sure I gratuitously doweled, but better to be overdoweled than underdoweled!
I used some non slip mats to put the cake tiers in cardboard boxes for transportation, and then prayed that they didn’t move in the car.
Once at the venue, I stacked the tiers! My icing changed colour so I just used flowers and greenery to hide things that weren’t perfect.
A friend of mine had a Beach Divas themed volleyball tournament, so I volunteered to make a themed cake. It was a good opportunity to practice my wedding cake recipe too! I made some adjustments based on how the last cake turned out and was really happy with the final result!
There was a big Canada Day celebration at work, and I volunteered to bake a Canadian dessert. I actually don’t like Nanaimo bars; I don’t like coconut in desserts, and I really don’t like the overly sweet custard layer. I wanted to make these with a twist, so I decided to swap the custard layer for a creme patissiere layer. Several people told me that these were the best Nanaimo bars they’ve ever had, so I think it was a winning decision. You could make the argument that they aren’t truly Nanaimo bars anymore, but I’ve decided they’re objectively better.
I made a really giant amount of this (13″ X 18″ pan), so the recipe below is halved for a 9″ X 13″ pan. Parts of the recipe are adopted from this Nanaimo bar recipe.
NANAIMO BAR BASE
INGREDIENTS
225 g (1 cup) unsalted butter, cubed
100 g (1/2 cup) granulated sugar
62 g (1/2 cup + 2 tbsp.) cocoa
2 eggs
3.5 cups graham crumbs
2 cups flaked coconut
1 cup chopped almonds (optional)
DIRECTIONS
Line a 9″ X 13″ pan with parchment paper.
On a bain marie, mix together the butter, sugar, and cocoa until melted and smooth.
In a bowl, mix together the two eggs.
Pour a little bit of the hot chocolate mixture into the eggs and mix rapidly to temper the eggs.
Pour the egg mixture back into the chocolate mixture and mix until thick.
Remove from heat and mix in the graham crumbs and coconut (and almonds)
Press into the pan in an even layer.
CREME PATISSIERE
INGREDIENTS
500 ml full fat milk
100g granulated sugar
40g cornstarch
2 egg yolks
half a vanilla bean
DIRECTIONS
Pour ¾ of milk into a saucepan, and ¼ into a separate bowl.
Put the saucepan over medium heat, and add in the split vanilla pod and seeds.
Dissolve the sugar and cornstarch into the bowl, and then mix in the yolks. Whisk extremely well to get out any lumps.
When the milk comes to a boil, pour half of it on the egg mixture (and mix well) to temper the eggs. Then add the egg mixture back into the saucepan, and whisk hard!
When it starts to boil, take off heat.
After it has cooled for a few minutes, pour onto the graham layer.
Notes:
Use a whisk!
Cornstarch binds at 72˚C, but it’s a good idea to cook until boiling.
If you mix the heated custard in a machine until cold, you’ll get a very fine and smooth custard
CHOCOLATE COATING
INGREDIENTS
250 g dark chocolate
20 g butter
DIRECTIONS
Melt the chocolate and butter over a bain marie.
When it has cooled slightly, pour over the pastry cream and even out
Notes:
I chilled the pastry cream first, and this was a big mistake. The pastry cream completely set and the chocolate didn’t adhere at all to the other layers.
