Win a Copy of "Cake Art"
March 3, 2008 by Deborah Ng
Filed under Cakes, Contests and Giveaways
I have a wonderful book to give away. “Cake Art” from The Culinary Institute of America – Designs and Techniques by Chef’s Kate Cavotti and Allison McLoughlin.
Anyone who has ever aspired to design cakes like the pros will be interested in this book. The illustrations are stunning and the directions are simple. I think the only issue would be finding some of the tools and ingredients, but I imagine any baking or restaurant supply house will have you covered.
To win a copy, just tell me an amusing party anecdote in the comments – something funny that happened at a party you attended, or a mishap from a party you planned. A winner will be chosen at random.
Good luck
Here’s a great recipe from “Cake Art”:
Chocolate Flower Cupcakes
Makes 24 cupcakes
Preparation Timeline
- § Up to 3 days in advance: Make the flowers
- § Up to 1 day in advance: Make the cupcakes (see Chocolate Sponge Cake recipe below)
- § Day of event: Decorate the cupcakes
Components
- Cupcakes
- Flowers
Equipment and Materials
- Dark modeling chocolate
- White modeling chocolate
- Oil-based food colors
- Large and medium flower cutters
- Tempered or coating chocolate
- Teacups or small bowls for shaping flowers
- Small circle cutter
- Hard ganache for glazing (recipe follows)
1. Roll out the dark modeling chocolate until is it 1/8-inch thick. Cut out the desired number of large flowers.
2. Place the flowers over the bottom of inverted teacups or inside the small bowls. They will need to dry for 12 to 24 hours.
3. Cut out as many small circles from the dark modeling chocolate as there will be flowers. These circles will be the centers of the flowers.
4. Tint the white modeling chocolate pink using the oil-based food colors. Repeat steps 1 through 3 with the pink modeling chocolate and the medium-sized flower cutter.
5. Once the components are dry, secure the pink flowers inside the larger chocolate flowers with a small amount of water.
6. Secure a dark modeling chocolate center inside each flower with a small amount of water.
Finishing
Dip each cupcake into the fluid hard ganache. Place a flower on top of each cupcake. Once the ganache sets, the flowers will be secured to the cupcakes.
Hard Ganache
Makes 5 pounds or about 8 cups
- 4 pounds dark chocolate, finely chopped
4 cups heavy cream
1. Place the chocolate in a stainless steel bowl. Bring the heavy cream just to a simmer. Pour the hot cream over the chocolate, and allow to stand for 1 minute, stirring until the chocolate is thoroughly melted.
2. The ganache can be used immediately, or it can be covered and stored under refrigeration, then warmed prior to use.
Chocolate Sponge Cake
- 1 1/2 cups cake flour
- 1/2 cup cocoa powder
- 6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 1 1/4 cups sugar
- 5 large eggs
- 5 large egg yolks
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Lightly spray 8- or 9-inch round cake pans with a nonstick spray and line the bottoms with a round of parchment paper. For cupcakes, prepare pans with cupcake liners.
- Sift the flour and cocoa powder together twice and set aside. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat. Remove from the heat, add the vanilla extract to the melted butter, and stir to combine. Set aside to cool.
- Combine the sugar, eggs, and egg yolks in the bowl of a stand mixer and set the bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Whisking constantly with a wire whisk, heat until the mixture is warm to the touch or reaches 120 degrees F on a candy thermometer.
- Remove the bowl from the heat and attach it to a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Whip the egg mixture on a medium speed until the foam triples in volume and just begins to recede, about 5 minutes. Stabilize the foam on low speed for 10 minutes.
- Fold the flour into the egg mixture using a rubber spatula. Blend a small amount of the batter into the melted butter, then fold the tempered butter back into remaining batter.
- Fill the prepared cake or cupcake pans about two-thirds full. Bake until the top of each layer is firm to the touch — for 8- or 9-inch cakes about 30 minutes, for cupcakes about 20 minutes.
- Let the layers cool in the pans for a few minutes before turning out onto wire racks to finish cooling. The cakes are ready to fill and frost now, or they can be wrapped and stored at room temperature for 2 days, or frozen for up to 3 weeks.
I want the cake book – too bad I’m getting rid of stuff or I’d enter. Darn minimizing. That’s cool though, I don’t think I have any family-friendly party incidents to share anyhow. And that recipe is neat – I can try that.
Here’s one for you: My daughter was making cake – from a mix for Easter. She accidentally put in twice as much liquid as it called for and yelled at me in a panic, because it was a big liquid mess. So we looked in the closet pulled out a box of instant cheese cake mix the only thing we had, and threw it into the batter. The chocolate cream cheese cake was delicious. I cook without mixes too, but this was one time I was glad to have some box mixes to save me.
How about not having enough dishes for everyone? So some of us had to use dessert plates for our meal? And the hostess seemed to be “shocked” by this discovery.
The famous used salt instead of sugar in a pie mess. Yep, I did it. {hangs head in shame}
When I was a teenager, back in the “old” days, I loved decorating cakes. I would make little roses etc. Looks like a beautiful book!
I LOVE CAKE DECORATING!!
I’m not a cake decorator but I know a few. Maybe I can do a trade – book for cake — it would be worth a shot.
What a cool book!
Anyway, my sister and I were baking cupcakes for a small party. She had this frosting recipe and we wanted to make half of that recipe, so we started to halve all the ingredients. We finally made it and saw that it was a bit runny. We thought that was normal, so we figured we had to harden it in the fridge.
However, no amount of fridge time would “harden” the frosting – it seemed that we halved all the ingredients, except for the milk!
So the party ended up with a runny, milky cupcake frosting.
Thanks for the great giveaway!
My sister was making a birthday cake for a party and instead of adding sugar, she accidently used salt. Needless to say the looks of surprise on the faces of all the guests after their first bite were priceless! It was funny…good thing we had enough cupcakes to go around:)
I’ll be trying my hand at cake decoratingin a few months…that book would be great! Thanks for the chance to win:)
Oh, I LOVE cake decorating – and cookies for that matter! My mom & I used to do it ALL the time when I was little… Now just every so often… Still fun though!
Story time – nothing really embarrassing about myself, but my nephew’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago, and he managed to STEP ON THE CAKE! Kid you not! It wasn’t as bad as it sounds though. The lid was still on the box, and he was light enough that he didn’t even totally crush the box. the cake just had one little piece on the side where you could tell there was an imperfection. It was really funny though!
Thank you so much for letting me take part! Love to everyone – take care and God Bless!
One year my mother waited until my nephew arrived at her house so that he could have the fun of putting sprinkles on top of his father’s birthday cake. He dropped the open bottle in the sink … not having anything else, Mom decided to have him put cocoa on top of the cake instead … he put on alot.
As it was my brother’s 50th birthday, he received alot of kidding that he didn’t have “enough air left in him” to blow out the candles. To prove everyone wrong, he blew out with such force that the cocoa rose off the cake and formed a brown cloud that flowed across the table to the other side. Seeing that brown cloud form … and then watching relatives wipe cocoa off their faces … was one of the funniest things I have ever seen.
The first time I tried to make my (new at the time) husband a birthday cake I failed miserably! It fell all to one side of the pan and the icing was lumpy… it was brutal. Then I tried to write happy birthday on it and ran out of room so it went all sideways.
It’s funny now but at the time I was horribly distraught!
On my 6th birthday my mom had thrown me a birthday party at our church. A bunch of us kids were playing at the creek behind the fellowship hall and were throwing rocks in to see who could make the biggest splash.
My best friend threw a really big rock, but instead of hitting the water, it hit me in the head and knocked me out cold. My mom ended up taking me to the hospital and I missed a good bit of my party! It’s funny to me now, but man, was I mad about missing most of my own party back then.
I see a common theme that I will have to take part in.
Being terrible at math, I once had to use a pen, paper, and calculator just to triple a recipe for Cyclops cookies for a high school party. I even double checked. Yet being very early in my baking life, I didn’t question why the salt was measured in as cups rather than tsp or tbsp…
My poor mother came home from working evening shift as a nurse, tasted a cookie (I hadn’t had any myself – also something I learned) and had to redo the whole batch at 1 am for me. I still feel bad.
We lived in an historic part of our town. The homes were pretty close together. A very nice divorced woman moved in next door. Her and I soon became friends. She was so artistic! She painted, stenciled her walls and kitchen cabinets and made beautiful cakes. She made a few for our birthday celebrations. One time she was commissioned to make a huge cake for a wedding reception. It turned out beautifully. The only problem was it wouldn’t fit through her back or front door!!!!! My husband and I went over to help her out. We decided we would take a huge window out to get the cake delivered in time.
All was going well, until the cake was dropped. The three of us cried so hard, we ended up laughing hysterically. While we stayed behind to clean up the mess and put the window back in, she took off somewhere. I never knew how she resolved the wedding cake issue and I never asked…..Thanks,Cindi
That looks like a beautiful book. Since the prize is about cakes, my anectdote will be about a cake. For my son’s third birthday he wanted an Elmo cake, so I made one. As the cake was cooling, I went to take a shower. After I got out of the shower and went to check on the cake, I noticed that my son had eaten part of the cake. He had eaten half of Elmo’s head. I didn’t know what to do. The party was coming up and I didn’t have time to make a new cake. So I wadded up some aluminum foil and molded it to fill the space in the cake. After the cake was frosted, nobody could even tell.
Love the book. I hope if I don’t win I can find a used copy.
When I was growing up in the Midwest, our neighbors’ dog and our dog would casually wander into each other’s house with the gangs of kids that ran back and forth. One day our dog, who was several times taller than the dog next door, walked into our neighbors’ house to find the beautifully frosted layer cake that the mom had just finished for her parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. Our neighbor discovered our dog just as she finished licking the frosting off one side of the cake. She chased our dog out of the house, refrosted the cake, and didn’t tell a soul until she told my mom about it much later!
I woul dlove to win this book for my sister. She wants to be a pastry chef and would love this book!
The funniest cake story we had was sad at the time. We put re-lighting candles on our sons birthday cake one year and he cried everytime the started burning again. We finally had to drown the candles to keep the child from having a meltdown. Of course it’s funny now YEARS later
I decided to bake a pomegranate cake…heard sighs, murmurs, and no ways all around the house..didn’t care much for that…went ahead and added pome juice to the basic sponge cake recipe..waited with abated breadth at the lovely pale pink i was expecting…to my surprise…it turned a pale green…I still have no clue to this day on why the colour was green…
I have no funny anecdotes to share with you. I am usually the one organizing parties and taking care of all details, that I don’t even join the fun of the party. At the end, I am so happy everything is perfect that I can’t eat anymore, and my friends tease me because of that.
When does this giveaway close?
I’m sorry folks, I forgot to put the end date to this contest. It ends at the end of the month on March 31st.
Thanks for all your wonderful stories!
Just this month my oldest daughter and I made a “Groovy Blue Jean” cake for my 7 year old. When she saw it she said “Why did you make me a V cake….my name starts with a C…… We had to turn it around for her….nice laugh!
It was the first Christmas dinner in my new husband’s and my marriage (second marriage, you understand, so already lots of bonus family for both of us).
Trying to sidestep any family traditions that both of our kids and parents would have been used to, I went with a completely new and different menu. I was thinking, “start a new tradition!”
So, I prepared Cornish Game Hens. Too many, it seems, for our small oven. All the other food was done and served up on time, along with my lovely glazed hens, which were completely NOT done inside.
Disaster.
I had baked a pie for Easter at my grandmothers. When I got to her back door to take it in “I dropped it.”
No one will let me carry the pies anymore.
We went to a Thanksgiving gathering one year. My oldest daughter had been in charge of making the sweet potato casserole. At one point during the party, the hosting was dipping out a serving of the sweet potatoes and said, “what’s this?” On the serving spoon was what looked like a big chunk of hard-boiled egg.
In my daughter’s haste she had failed to stir the egg up into the casserole, causing this embarrassing scenario.
Ohhh how neat! I would love to know how to make things look so amazing, and this book would be perfect!
I hope I’m not too late to enter. My sister had a birthday party recently where they were going to do karaoke, play dance video games, and eat snacks. It was during the summer.
Well, around the time the party started, the power went out. So the party goers were in the dark, sweating in the heat, without anything to do or eat. Luckily, the power came on after a while. (Our neighbor worked for the power company, so he got right on it!)
I tried to make a veggie burger recipe for about 12 burgers. What I ended up with was a bowl full of burger mash that would make about 50. To this day I have NO idea HOW??
Well for a Thanksgiving Party I made a “Sweet Potato Pie” Unfortunately I got the Turnips and the Sweet Potatoes mixed up when I was making two separate dishes in a hurry…and ended up with a Sweet Turnip Pie…it was SO embarrassing and I hid out in my house for a few weeks until I was brave enough to venture out into the real world again!
When my daughter was 8, we made a beautiful molded dessert with jello and fruit. I successfully got it out of the mold and onto the serving plate. My daughter was standing on our kitchen step-stool so that she could reach the counter and help. She was so excited to serve our guests that she asked to carry the plate out to the dining room. Smiling, she picked up the plate, turned around on the top of the stool and took the first step down and tripped. She went down, the jello flopped off of the plate and the glass plate shattered all over. After we made sure that she was fine, we all laughed at the sight of that red giggly jello blob skidding across the floor. To this day I don’t know why I let her pick up the jello plate before she was off of the darn step-stool.
A while back we had a couple over from our church for the first time. I made an apple cake and some lasagna. Both pans looked the same when they were covered with tin foil. I asked my husband to preset the oven before church and to put the lasagna in. Needless to say he put the wrong one in. Our guests who became our very good friends enjoyed picking on us about it. I have to say if you are going to make a mistake with cakes and cook it to long my apple cake recipe is the one to do it with. It still turned out great! We ate the cake while the lasagna was cooking.
During a period in our lives when my parents really had to watch their money, my mother baked a cake for my brother’s birthday. The cake turned out just beautifully – the large panda bear that appears to sit up, exactly what my brother wanted. However, my brother’s birthday is in August and we didn’t have air conditioning and the icing kept melting so my mother ended up taking out two shelves in the refrigerator and knelt on the floor in front of the fridge to pipe tiny stars to cover the bear. I still remember sitting on the floor beside her while she frosted that cake. I also remember my dad’s yelp of horror when he opened the electric bill for that month….