American Baker in Germany

I made a cake for a dear friend of mine who has a few food intolerances. She doesn't have any life-threatening allergies, but she gets stomach cramps and migraines from gluten, dairy and soy. I took on the challenge of making vanilla cake gluten, dairy and soy free. You can find my original vanilla cake recipe here: https://americanbakeringermany.blogspot.com/2018/05/my-new-favorite-vanilla-cake-recipe.html It all begins with the ingredients. I substituted the milk with almond milk, the butter with dairy-free and soy-free margarine, and the flour with a gluten-free flour mix. If you are looking to take on a similar project, please read all the ingredients on the margarine. Margarine often contains small amounts of dairy and soy. Sometimes even large amounts. That's the hardest ingredient. You can use any milk substitute you prefer. Almond milk is just my friend's favorite. Also, read the ingredients on your baking spray before you use it, as well. The most important...

This cake was actually for a friend's 40th birthday party. I asked if I should bring a cake and they said sure, but didn't want anything specific, which to me meant that it wouldn't be the only dessert. So, I planned on a smaller cake with free reign for the design. I decided to try out a trend that I had been wanting to do. The Sprinkles Drip cake. Now, I have made this family a cake before and I happen to know that they are all fans of chocolate. I decided to make this cake a death by chocolate kind of cake. So, we're making a seven inch chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream and we're making the drip out of dark chocolate ganache. We're only using light-colored sprinkles so they all show up really well. I started out by making my ganache and buttercream. I added a lot of baker's cocoa to my American buttercream. It was super chocolatey and creamy. It was divine.  The ganache was an equal amount of dark chocolate and heavy cream. This was right a...

This cake was for my own daughter again. We always have two parties for our kids' birthdays because with our large family, it would be too much and overwhelming to the child to have everyone at the same birthday party. This one was for the more adult-oriented family party. So, we decided to tone down the Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck theme to bows and daisies. The cake is a ten inch chocolate cake with Swiss meringue peanut butter buttercream. The same buttercream we used for the other cake. It's a bit soft, but sets up beautifully in the fridge. For this and another project at the same time, I made several bows out of purple and pink fondant using my entire collection of bow cutters, plus a couple I made by hand since I didn't have a bow cutter large enough. I put tissue in the loops of the bow to help it keep its shape while it dried.    I let them dry for two days. After the first day, I removed the tissues and they didn't have any trouble holding their shape. ...