The Roman Mosaic Cake - December 2012

My husband's birthday is in December and since I had started the tradition of making the family's birthday cakes, I wanted to think of something special for him as well. 

If I had to do over again now, the cake would probably turn out a little differently, but at the time I was struggling with both my inexperience and a little self-doubt. To be completely honest, I had no idea what to make, but he loves history (he is actually a History Professor) and we took this really wonderful vacation to Mérida one year and fell in love with the Roman mosaics we saw there. So, wanting to keep it simple and continue working with buttercream, I decided to make a Roman mosaic with the Roman numeral of the birthday he was celebrating that year as the decoration.

This time I perfected my chocolate cake and decided to give it an extra chocolate punch by using a chocolate buttercream frosting in the middle and on top as well! I piped the decoration using black piping gel and white buttercream with the #2 PME tip, and white and black buttercream frosting with the #27 Wilton star tip.

By the way, how well do you remember your Roman numerals? Do you know how old my husband turned this year?

A tribute to Real Madrid and my nephew Carlos' 9th birthday...

Ten days after I baked the Elmo cake for Diego's birthday, my nephew Carlos turned nine years old. As I was anxious to try my hand at another cake, I offered to make the cake for our family celebration and began to plan what kind of cake I could make for him.

He loves sports in general, and soccer in particular, and is a big fan of the Spanish Real Madrd, C.F. soccer team, so I began looking for ideas with this in mind. I probably prerused another 100 cakes, focusing primarily on the ones that had been decorated with buttercream frosting...you can't imagine how many Real Madrid cakes have been baked in the past! 

I felt I needed to keep the design fairly simple because I still felt pretty inexperienced and I wasn't sure about my capacity to create something very complex. The design I finally came up with consisted of a large round cake, which I decorated with green buttercream frosting to symbolize the soccer field, topped with a small half-dome soccer ball with the Real Madrid emblem on top. An added benefit was that I only had to buy two more icing colors, green and blue, because I already had everything else I needed for this cake. 

I knew I wanted to include the emblem on the cake some-how, but I also knew it was going to be complicated to draw it. I had never worked with fondant before, so I didn't think that was a viable option either. Fortunately when I went to the store to buy the gel icing colors, I found a Real Madrid edible wafer emblem and knew I had found the solution to my problem.

Since the family likes chocolate cake the best, I stuck with the chocolate cake and buttercream frosting recipe that I had used before. I used the 28 cm (11 inch) round Springform cake tin again to make two layers for the base of the cake, and to make the spherical ball protuding from the top, I used a small Spanish clay bowl that I had lying around in the cupboard. Once the 3 separate cake layers were baked, I "built" the cake by using some of the buttercream frosting in between the two bottom layers and then a little bit more to attach the sphere on top.

Now all that was left was the decoration! The first step was to frost it with the green buttercream using the same technique I used to make the Elmo cake (see Cakes - Frost Cake Layers using a Piping Bag tutorial) which, thankfully, was easier for me and went faster this time. Then I used some of the white buttercream that I had reserved to draw the base of the soccer ball, and I printed out a soccer ball template that I used as a guide to draw the black parts of the ball with piping gel that I had tinted with black icing color. Then I had to attach the emblem. To achieve the look I wanted, I carefully cut the edges off of the wafer following the outline of the emblem and gently centered it on top of the ball. Lastly, I made several borders with blue and green buttercream and the small star tip to give the cake a more "finished" look and I piped "Feliz Cumpleaños Carlos" around the side of the cake with the left-over black piping gel. 

Unfortunately, since I had no intention of creating a blog at the time, I do not have any pictures of the process, nor very many of the actual cake itself. I also have to admit that at that time, baking and decorating the cake was about all I could handle! I did not have any extra room in my head to think about taking step-by-step photos, which is what I hope to begin doing from now on. This cake was also extra-special for me as well because, like my nephew and everybody in my family, I am a HUGE Real Madrid fan! Hala Madrid!

The Elmo Cake Experiment

For Diego's third birthday (in 2012), the cake and cupcake decorating boom in Spain was well on it's way, so when a friend of mine told me about a website that sells and ships specialty cake decorating items anywhere in Spain, I just had to check it out. 

I had been researching the possibility of making him an Elmo cake, but I needed the Sugarflair Red icing color in order to do so, so I immediately went to check out the website, Maria Lunarillos' online store. When I discovered that, indeed, I could order it online, I was ecstatic! I set out to research everything I could find on making an Elmo cake. The options were endless. I probably looked at about 150 pictures of different types of Elmo cakes in all, but I finally decided to make a round chocolate cake frosted with white buttercream and decorated with Elmo's face and arms reaching up in a celebratory gesture.

As I had almost no previous experience baking cakes, I found the internet to be an amazing resource. I discovered that there are tutorials on just about anything you can imagine from crumb-coating a cake to using piping gel and waxed paper to make an outline of a picture that you can then fill in. You can find some of the tutorials that I used for this cake at the following links: Cakes - Frost Cake Layers Using a Piping Bag, Easiest Elmo Cake Ever. 

I bought all the specialty materials I needed from the online store (black, red, and yellow gel icing colors, disposable piping bags, 3 different stainless steel piping tips (#3, #10, and #27), and piping gel. I looked for transparent wax paper in many stores in Alicante and since I couldn't find any, I asked my Mom to send me some along with a couple of marshmallows from the U.S. to use for the eyes. Lastly, I bought a 28cm (11 inch) round Springform cake tin because I wanted a really big cake, and all of the ingredients for the cake, of course. 

Fortunately, I already had some materials at home that saved me from having to spend even more money, like the Lazy Susan my husband bought one day in Ikea and a straight spatula, which worked just fine for the height of this particular cake, so I didn't have to buy an off-set spatula like they recommended in the video. And both items turned out to be essential, not only for this cake, but for all my future cakes as well!

Then I set to work. I baked two separate layers and filled them with some of the buttercream filling. Then I frosted it meticulously following the instructions of the cake frosting tutorial included above. As it was my first real "work of art", it ended up taking me a long time to finish and, needless to say, I didn't get much sleep that night. But seeing the expression on my son's face when I brought out the cake made it worth every minute. Also, all the kudos I received from my friends and family along with the extreme sense of self-satisfaction I felt already had me thinking about my next cake the very next day!