A Big THANK YOU! Also a Royal Icing Tutorial

So, I've been meaning to share with you all how to make the kind of royal icing I use for cookies like these, and these, and especially these, but there's something very important I have to say first:

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!

Thank you to everyone who clicked a link and came to say hi, thank you to everyone who liked the webcomic cookies or the flower pot cupcakes and decided to stay around, thank you to everyone who saw something they liked here and shared it with their friends and internet buddies.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I've been absolutely overwhelmed with the pageviews and feedback, and being featured in places like Comics Alliance and Webcomic Overlook and even the front page of a popular Cheezburger Network site! And how could I forget all the kind webcomic creators, artists and writers who shared my TCAF cookies post? (By the way, if you haven't looked at that post yet, and you have any love for comics at all, go look at it and click every dang link. You're welcome.) Of course, I must mention my super-supportive co-workers, friends, and family members who demand I bake on a regular basis. Y'all know who you are, and y'all know I love you!

I'm sure I'm missing someone, and whoever it is: thank you!

So, yeah, the English language is sorely lacking in ways to express gratitude, is what I'm finding here.

Thanks!

Now, to get back to sharing recipes and techniques: Royal icing!

A lot of people think that making royal icing is really hard. I was once one of those people. It's true that it can be a cruel mistress - too hot or humid out, and it may refuse to come together at all, a drop of fat in your bowl or stuck to your beater, and it may never stiffen.

So, uh, it's really not so much that it's hard to make, it's just that the correct conditions can be tough to achieve.

It's best not to make this on a hot, humid day. Make sure your beaters, bowl, spatula, and anything that will touch the icing is 100% clean. It's best to use glass or metal bowls and instruments since plastic tends to bond to fat and hold onto it more.

I, uh... I still used plastic. Gotta work with what you've got, you know.

So on the left, we have meringue powder and cream of tartar, and on the right, slightly warm water. I very precisely measured and weighed these ingredients, because another thing about royal icing is you need to follow the recipe pretty dang exactly.

Step one is simply to mix the meringue powder, cream of tartar and water together with a whisk, until foamy.

Like so. Then start adding your powdered sugar, a bit at a time until it's all in there, mixing all the while with your hand mixer (or if you're one of the lucky ones, your stand mixer) until the sugar is all incorporated.

Scrape the sides down with a spatula to make sure you don't miss any of the sugar. Once it's all combined, keep mixing for 5-7 minutes, until the icing becomes rather firm and loses some of its shine.

You'll know you're done if you pull your beaters out of the icing and they do something like this:

Those are stiff peaks, and the icing is hardly shiny at all. You're ready to add your favourite colours and start decorating your cookies! Have fun!

See? That wasn't really so hard. Though if, like me, you had to use a hand-mixer, you may need to massage your wrists a little. That's a marathon of mixing, isn't it?

If you want to try it out and decorate your own unique cookies, here's the recipe:

Royal Icing
Recipe & instructions adapted from McCall's School of Cake Decorating

40 g meringue powder
5 g cream of tartar
190 g warm water
1000 g icing sugar

Note: Yes, it's all in weights. You do need a decent kitchen scale for this, sorry. Due to the nature of the powdery ingredients, volumetric measurements just aren't good enough here.

Mix first 3 ingredients with hand whisk until foamy. Using stand or hand mixer on low, beat in sugar about a cup at a time until well-combined. Continue to beat for another 5-7 minutes on low or until icing is firm.

It's a good idea to cover your bowl with a damp cloth or towel and let it sit for 10-15 minutes before using, then give it a gentle stir with a spatula to remove any large air bubbles. Then you're good to go!

Be sure to keep any royal icing covered with a damp cloth while not using to keep it from going rock-hard when you don't want it to. To learn more about how I outline and fill cookies, refer to the Send-Off Cookies Post.

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Thanks (yet again) for reading. I'll be sure to fill y'all in on what I baked up for my own Mom on Mother's Day later this week, so keep an eye out for that.

Until next time!

Flower Pot Chocolate Cake

Recently, my Mom turned the big five-oh. I'm not sure how happy she is that I'm telling the entire internet that, but the fact stands!

In any case, I wanted to make her a super incredible cake, because hey, you only get one 50th birthday! So I asked what kind of cake she wanted.

"Oh, you know. Something chocolate, chocolate frosting... and oh, make it purple and pink!"

I was awful happy to hear this, you see, because I'd been just itching to try my hand at a cake like this!

Now, if you have a look at the cake sold through Williams Sonoma you will notice some key differences between the inspiration and my final product. Many of these differences are due to the fact that their cake serves 4, mine serves 12 to 16.

Want to make your own? Check it out:

First, bake up 3 6-inch layers of your favourite chocolate cake. (You want to avoid anything very crumbly or soft for this, firmer cake is better when you're stacking multiple layers.)

Cool 'em, frost 'em & stack 'em, and get a thin chocolate buttercream crumb coat all around your little cake tower.

If you want your cake even taller, try splitting and filling each layer cake as you go. The bonus if you go that route, of course, is that you get a lot more frosting on this baby. I was happy with the height though, so I left it as is.

Next, you'll need to apply your fondant. I started with an ivory-coloured, store-bought fondant and used a combination of red, yellow and brown gel colours to get a terracotta shade.

For the love of goodness, be sure to add your colours bit by bit until you reach your desired shade. Yes, your arms will ache from kneading it over and over. Yes, the fondant will grow sticky and you'll need to dust it frequently with icing sugar to keep it workable. Yes, the frosting on your cake will set while you're doing this, but that's okay, just add another thin coat before you put the fondant on.

Trust me though, it is well worth the trouble to take your time on the colour, rather than to use far too much of the dye and ruin 2 pounds of fondant. This stuff ain't cheap!

And yes, I know 'ain't' ain't a word. I like to get colloquial up in here sometimes. So sue me. Side note: isn't it kind of funny how the word 'colloquial' is so formal-sounding? Oh, yes, I know you came to a baking blog for grammatical irony humor today, don't deny it.

Oh, wait, we were making a cake, weren't we?

I used a couple of actual terracotta pots to compare until I got a close enough colour. This was as dark as I could get it before my poor arms began to give up on kneading, and I still had much to do, so I had to call it close enough.

I rolled the fondant out to about an eighth of an inch thick, and wrapped a big rectangle around the cake. I used a paring knife to cut away all the excess. This technique did leave a seam on one side of the cake, but it also used less fondant than simply draping the whole cake, and I didn't want the top covered anyway.

I also cut a long, skinny rectangular strip of fondant and, after dampening the top inch or so of the side of the cake with a damp paper towel, stuck the extra strip on to make the lip of the pot. Somehow, I completely neglected to get any pictures of that process.

Next up, creating the flowers. These. Are. SO. Easy! Use a cutter (or candy thermometer protective cover, as I did, since I didn't have a cookie/fondant cutter small enough) a bit smaller than the size you want your petals, and cut circles out of coloured fondant about an 1/8 of an inch thick.

Then, work the circles with your fingers, flattening and stretching them a but until they resemble rounded flower petals.

I'm sorry this pic is so blurry - it was right around this time that I ran out of memory on the camera and had to change the SD card... and forgot to get a better shot of this. I swear, I ought to just hire a photographer to take care of this part!

So, once you have your 5 round petal shapes, arrange them into a flower shape, carefully having one petal overlap the next slightly. When you've arranged the petals to your liking, use a tiny, tiiiiny bit of water to 'glue' the petals together where they overlap. Repeat until you have enough flowers to cover the top of your cake.

If you want your flowers to curve upwards, place them into a lightly icing-sugar-dusted flower form. Or, if, like me, you can't clutter up your kitchen with a billion specialty flower forms, simply put them in tiny little bowls, or make little concave nests out of aluminum foil. Whatever works!

In any case, let your flowers sit in your mold of choice for at least 1-2 hours until the fondant firms up enough to hold its shape.

In the meantime, make your leaves:

Pretty straight forward here. Green fondant, rolled out 1/8 inch thick, cut into leaf shapes with a paring knife. Ideally, you can add the veining with an actual veining tool but again, I don't quite have every cake decorating gadget, so I simply used the wrong side of my paring knife blade to make the leaf details. It worked out quite well! If you want to give your leaves dimension, let them set on curved surfaces, or draped over a spoon handle. I did a bit of each for variety.

Now here is why I didn't want to cover the whole top of the cake with fondant - it would get between the cake and more frosting! Slather on a generous amount of chocolate frosting, being careful not to smear it over the outer fondant lip.

Then - and this is my favourite part! - cover every inch of the frosting with Oreo cookie crumbs. You won't get that at Williams Sonoma!

Oops, did I just type that? Guess I did. Well, no going back now.

Once your cake top is deliciously coated with Oreo crumbs (remove the Oreo filling before crushing them up, by the way. I know, it seems a waste of good icing guck, but this is for the greater good!) add dollops of your chocolate butter cream and press your fondant flowers on them one by one.

I made the centers of these flowers ahead of time - they're simply daubs of royal icing sprinkled with a bit of sugar and left to harden overnight. Once they're set, they'll last practically forever until you're ready to use them. Whenever I have leftover royal icing, I make flower centers of all kinds. You never know when you'll have a serious, five-alarm, cake decorating emergency, so be prepared.

Once you've arranged all your blooms and leaves, you'll have something that looks like this. Now, it's tough to see in the pictures, but as an extra detail, I took a pastry brush and some powdered sugar, and made sugar brushstrokes horizontally around the cake. I was trying to replicate the look of the terracotta pots, and though it is hard to see in the pics here, I assure you it was a lovely, subtle detail! 

Sliced and served, this cake had everyone in the room - most importantly of all, the birthday girl - in smiles. The cake was so tall we split each slice into a top and bottom. There may have been minor riots over who got the Oreo-crumbiest pieces. Perhaps in future I will create a middle Oreo crumb layer to prevent such senseless cake-induced violence. (Okay, there was no violence, I'm just being dramatic again. People did argue for the top pieces though.)

So as you can see, it's not all that hard to make your very own fancy flower pot cake! It is, however, quite time-consuming. I'd say I spent a minimum of four hours on this baby, all things accounted for, so don't start baking the night before you need it! I spread the work out over 2 days, plus the morning of the party, when I attached the flowers. Of course, if you use a cake mix or buy frosting from the store, you would save a lot of time.

I hope you're inspired to try something new yourself! Putting this cute little cake together gave me such a confidence boost, I felt like I could do anything. Maybe even bake a pie! With a home-made crust! From scratch!

But, no, that's madness. Pie crust and I... we have a dark history. Dark, and tough. And a bit chewy. But that's really for another post! I've rambled on long enough for now.

Until next time!