American Baker in Germany

You knew it was coming. My baby is turning one and it seemed most appropriate to make a rainbow cake.  I've already written about the baking process in a seperate blog, so this will be the creation process. First of all, I thought it would be helpful to see the process of making Swiss Meringue Buttercream.  First, you heat your egg whites and sugar in a double boiler in a metal bowl. You can also use glass, but skip the plastic. Heat it until the sugar is no longer grainy and the mixture is hot to the touch. Then take it off the heat.  By the way, it's helpful to prepare your butter beforehand by cutting it into about tablespoon sized chunks. The butter should also be room temperature.  After you remove your eggs and sugar from the heat, mix it for between 7 and 10 minutes until it basically turns into 7 minute frosting and is 100% room temperature. It should not be remotely warm anymore. And it should look something like this.  Then add your butt...

This month, I'm making two different rainbow cakes for two different children's birthdays. So I'm feeling like a pro in the whole making a rainbow cake department, so I thought I'd be efficient and just talk about baking the rainbow cake itself. I had help, as you can see. But even without help, the first step is to mix up a batch of vanilla cake. This cake took 3 recipes of my vanilla cake and I had enough batter left over for a dozen very colorful cupcakes.  I made these one batch at a time and split each batch in two and colored them two different colors of the rainbow. I started with red and orange.  Then yellow and green.  And finally blue and purple. For whatever reason, the Wilton food coloring makes a very dark purple.  My leftovers made exactly a dozen cupcakes.  Don't worry if your cakes don't look that great when they come out. The carmelization actually alters the color of your cake. It will be beautiful when we level it. These ar...

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...