American Baker in Germany

As I've mentioned in a couple different blogs now, I've recently started making Swiss meringue buttercream. Let me just vent some frosting woes. I've always made American style buttercream. The first time I made it, I thought I must have done something wrong because I hated the taste. Hated. I gifted the cake I frosted with it and those I gave it to loved it. Were excited. Enthusiastic. And I thought, well, maybe I didn't mess it up after all. Over time I've gotten used to using it, but I still scrape off the frosting before I eat the cake. I just don't care for it. It tastes like powdered sugar and not much else. It was time for a new standard frosting. Yolanda Gampp from How to Cake It only uses Italian meringue buttercream. I almost decided to try it. But I'm missing two major elements needed for Italian meringue buttercream: a candy thermometer and a stand mixer. I hope I'll get a stand mixer some day, but until I can afford it, I'm stuck ...

I thought it would be appropriate to let everyone know who my biggest inspirations were and with which YouTube channels I learned the most helpful tips and tricks from. I started out watching Jenn Johns at Cookies, Cupcakes and Cardio. I learned not to be afraid of a piping bag from Jenn. I learned how to model some simple things out of fondant. I learned how careful planning can allow you to make things that otherwise look too difficult. But most important I learned to experiment and keep trying if it doesn't work out the first time. After a year or so, I started looking for more inspiration and started watching Elise Strachan from My Cupcake Addiction. Elise is amazing at making things look easy. Every video I thought to myself, "I could do that." I really love her tutorials and she was a big inspiration that helped me to gain the confidence to really try more ambitious cakes. Things I never would have considered without seeing it done once. Today, I really love Yola...

This cake didn't quite end up how originally planned. I was going to use the candy canes in the peppermint chocolate Christmas cake, but the candy canes were strawberry flavored. I was also going to cover it in fondant and really decorate it, but I got the message from those it was meant for that they weren't concerned about it, so I finally decided to save myself the work. The consensus was also that they wanted strawberry buttercream, so I decided to use the candy canes on this cake. I really wanted to make a checkerboard pattern inside, which I had never made before. So I started out with vanilla cake baked in layer pans. Two layers were left white and two were colored red and green. I filled the pans all the way to the brim in the hopes that these very shallow pans would yield a slightly deeper cake. Totally backfired. I put enough batter for 8 cupcakes (according to my cupcake scoop), but enough for 6 would have been plenty.  I leveled the cakes, wrapped them ...

I love making cakes for friends or activities because it gives me a chance to try out new things and it doesn't have to be perfect.  This time, I decided to try a different Swiss Meringue Buttercream recipe. The last one tasted very strongly of butter and I had the feeling that the ratio of egg whites to butter wasn't quite right. This recipe had much higher egg to butter ratio. I almost felt like it was too high. It was quite liquidy after adding the butter.  I just kept beating it and maybe 5 or 6 minutes later it finally came together.  I liked the taste better and I think I'll go back to this recipe. It tasted almost like marshmallows. Until, of course, I added the peppermint flavoring. Then it just tasted like candy canes.  I colored about a quarter of the buttercream red and filled the chocolate cake with a spiral pattern. It should look like a candy cane when it's cut into.  I added the second layer. I'm experimenting with big, thick laye...

So this is a journey post. Recall that I learned to decorate cakes in order to make my daughter's birthday cakes myself. So, I used her cakes as practice. They get progressively better. First birthday was mildly butterfly themed. I didn't want my baby to have too much sugar, so I used whipped cream instead of frosting to ice the cake. I tried to mold the marzipan and discovered that I CANNOT mold anything. I have zero talent in that department. How do I get around that? I use cutouts. So I bought my first set of butterfly cutouts for this cake. The cake was white cake, one layer dyed red, with strawberry jam in the middle. It was covered in whipped cream and topped with marzipan dyed red and store bought chocolate letters.  I was happy with the result considering that it was my first layer cake I had ever really made. For her second birthday,  she was really obsessed with ducks, so I wanted to make her a carved duck cake. Recall this was my first carved cake and my f...

I've been excited to write this blog post since I first came up with the idea for the cake for my dear friend's going away party. I'm American living in Germany, so I have some friends who are only here temporarily. It happens pretty frequently. But this friend and her family are very dear to me. I'm going to miss them. So what is the perfect going away cake for them? I spent days and weeks thinking about it. I scoured google images and pinterest hoping to get some inspiration when I saw a picture of a cake Up themed. The dozens of balloons clicked in my head. And an idea was born. I mentioned my experiences making this cake on my post about experiments with cake, filling and frosting. All of those experiments were for this cake. So the bottom layer was my vegan chocolate cake and the top layer was the Dr. Oetker box cake. They were filled with lactose free chocolate ganache and covered with Swiss meringue buttercream.  Instead of covering the layers in fond...

This cake was an effort to use up some extras we had lying around. We were given 8 Kitkats for St. Martin. My 4-year-old can't have chocolate. We needed to get rid of them. Then there was a call for cake donations for a homeless shelter Christmas party. That's perfect. I stacked, filled and iced two layers of vegan chocolate cake. They are filled with chocolate ganache and covered in Swiss meringue buttercream.  I put the cake on a piece of cardboard covered in aluminum foil because I'm donating this cake and won't be getting the board back. I cut the Kitkats in half because my cake wasn't that high. I used the rest to cover the top... and ran out before it was done. I put a few crumbs in the middle to make it look like it was on purpose, but I didn't feel like it looked done.  In fact, I had a hard time deciding when it was done. I added some colorful sprinkles for color, placing them between the Kitkat pieces.  I then felt like it needed one more ...