C.A.M. - February Cake

For my February cake I wanted to make a cake for Valentines Day. I looked online for inspiration and found lots of cheesy heart shaped cakes covered in hearts and roses but they all basically looked like a greeting card spewed onto a cake. I'm not really into that style of cake at all so I really didn't want to make one like that. Then when I was browsing Cake Central, I came across this ruffled petal layer cake from ChrisJack1.

I love the design of this cake, and it looked simple enough to recreate. However, I wanted the cake to have more of a Valentines Day feel to it, so I decided to make the petals a wine/rose red shade. I also decided to make a rose to go on the side instead of the flower shown on ChrisJack1's cake.
Then I decided to jump on the ombre bandwagon and have the petals go lighter as they went up the cake. I also wanted to make the inside cakes ombre as well BUT while I was baking them I completely forgot and didn't add the food coloring lol!
For some reason I'm not a huge fan of fondant ribbon's on cake, they just don't have enough detail for my liking so I ended up using a satin ribbon instead.

DH ordered a white chocolate mud cake to go under the fondant and since I was making the cake for him for V-Day I gave in and hunted for a white chocolate mud cake recipe. I'd heard a lot about how good the mud cakes recipes are from Exclusively Food, so I searched their site for a white chocolate mud cake and found this one.

I made 4 layers of Exclusively Foods white chocolate mud cake but had a little bit of trouble with my oven. We recently got a new fan-forced oven but I feel as though it runs about 10 degrees hotter than it should! I've found that I always need to reduce the temperature by at least 10 degrees and bake items for the minimum suggested cooking time. I know that you normally reduce the temperature for fan forced ovens anyway BUT I still have to reduce it from the suggested temperatures for fan forced ovens??? Very frustrating!
The recipe stated to bake at 160 (145 for a fan-forced oven) for 1 hour 10 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes. I reduced my oven to 135 and put the first two layers in for 1 hour 10 minutes and they still came out quite dark! Luckily the inside seemed fine so I just cut off the dark bits when torting the layers. I'm going to buy an oven thermometer so I can keep a better eye on the temp of my oven :(

I also made a white chocolate sour cream ganache, using the Exclusively Foods recipe (recipe for the ganache is under the recipe for the white choc mud cake) and used that to fill the layers and dirty ice the cake.

I used Orchard brand white fondant to cover the cake and Bakels Pettinice pre-made red fondant to make the petals. I was very apprehensive about getting the dark red colors; I did a lot of Googling to find out how to achieve it and most people seemed to agree that it was extremely difficult to get that dark wine shade. Putting together a few of the most common suggestions I ended up having no trouble achieving the right shades.

You'll have to pardon the graininess of these photos - I had my ISO set way too high! Oops!

To get the dark shades of red I added Americolor chocolate brown gel coloring and a touch of Americolor super black to get the darkest shade. The black gave it that real dark, burgundy shade that I was hoping for. To get the lightest shade of red I mixed white fondant with the red. I didn't actually end up using the super red gel coloring but had it on standby just in case.

 

I probably should have made the second lightest color slightly darker and probably should have mixed a little more white fondant through the lightest shade BUT I was lazy and gave up lol!

I used the Pettinice red fondant without any changes to make the rose for the cake.
The cake turned out perfectly, it stayed nice and moist under the fondant, the sour cream ganache helped cut through the sweetness a bit (although it was still super sweet - thinking of maybe cutting back on the sugar a bit next time!), I had NO issues with bulging this time (YAY!! I think it was probably because I used only ganache for filling and dirty icing and stuck to a mud cake which is quite dense), and I had no problems with covering the cake with fondant.

Criticisms:
The ribbon is crooked. I know. Just pretend you don't notice it and we'll all be happy. I also forgot to defrost the royal icing so I could 'glue' the ribbon and rose on, so I ended up having to use some pretty quilting pins I'd bought a few days ago. Since we were eating it at home I didn't really mind but I would NOT suggest doing this if you were giving it to others!!
The cake was really sweet. As I said, I think I'll cut down on the sugar next time.
The cake wasn't really high enough for all 4 layers of petals, which is why I placed the bottom layer so they lay on the cake stand. I really wanted to include all 4 layers for the ombre effect and still keep the ribbon, this was the only way I could see to fit them all on.
It would have been a bit prettier if I'd lifted the petals a bit before they had a chance to dry. By the time I remembered to do this they had already dried too hard.
I probably should have made the second lightest red petals slightly darker and the lightest ones slightly lighter. The two shades are too similar for my liking.

All in all I'm actually really really happy with how this cake turned out. Even with the few criticisms I listed above I wouldn't hesitate to make this again for a customer.

For next months cake I'm thinking of doing a new baby cake in honor of my baby nephew who is due on the 21st of March. Stay tuned to see how I go!!

C.A.M - Looking Back at the January Cake

Ok, so now that I've finished making the January cake and also eaten part of it I can start going over some of the mistakes I think I made and things I will do differently first time around.
So in my post from yesterday I showed pictures of the cake once I had finished decorating it. After writing that post I went out to see a movie with DH for his birthday and do some shopping, and when we came home 5 hours later disaster had struck. Once again my cake was afflicted with the battle of the bulge. This time was far worse than last months episode, the flowers had sunk down into the cake, it was bulging and rippling all over the sides, it basically looked like it had melted :(

Unfortunately I didn't take any photos (well I avoided taking any photos because I'm too embarrassed!) but I think I know where I went wrong and what to do next time. For starters, I don't think I'll use lemon curd in my fondant covered cakes again. I think it's just too wet, the very middle of the cake got soggy from soaking up the lemon curd which I think is the reason that the top of the cake sank. I think the cake's sinking let too much air escape which caused a lot of the rippling and bulging. It didn't seem to be so much from the dam not being stiff enough as that looks like one of the few areas where the cake actually held up. (Although next time around I'm still going to try an even stiffer dam!!)
I also don't think that I'll freeze my cakes before filling and stacking them again, next time I think I'll let them cool, put them in the fridge overnight, then level, fill and stack them the next day. Once that's all done I can put it in the freezer, but not before. From what I've read, this somehow has to do with the bulge occuring.
Another thing I'll do next time is compress each layer as I stack them. I've read online from other bakers who press a cake board down on each layer before placing the next layer on top, so they compress the cake and squeeze out the air as they go.
I don't know what more to say, I'm very disappointed by the cake bulging (again!), although I know I should be really proud of what I achieved considering it's only my 2nd fondant covered cake. I think I would feel a lot better about it if my in-laws hadn't seen it! They're pretty much like the perfect family so I always feel very inadequate compared to them; my whole life lately seems to revolve around being who I think they want me to be and constantly feeling like a failure. *Sigh* But that's a whole other post for another day!!! Lol!