Dark Chocolate Frosting

In case you aren't familiar with me, I like chocolate.

Well, that probably would be labeled a gross understatement.

Given the opportunity, I could probably exist on nothing but chocolate. And I'd start with good frosting, like this stuff. It has a lovely texture, the sort to hold its shape if you use it for piping and other decoration, and a flavor to die for.

I worked this down and adapted for my own use, from a recipe a friend found for me.  It can easily be doubled, but under normal circumstances, one single batch should cover a normal two-layer cake. Or a nice buche de noël.

Dark Chocolate Frosting


Ingredients:

3/4 pound (one 12 ounce package) good-quality semisweet chocolate morsels
1 cup (2 sticks) plus 2 Tablespoons butter
2 Tablespoons confectioner's sugar, sifted
pinch salt

1/3 cup unsweetened Dutch-processed cocoa powder

1/3 cup boiling water

2 Tablespoons orange liqueur

Directions:

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or by microwave oven (if microwave, begin at full power for one minute, then, in thirty second increments, stirring after each time, until nearly smooth, so you can stir the last remaining lumps out of it. Do not overcook, or it will congeal and be unworkable! Allow to stand until no longer warm to the touch, but still melted.

Combine cocoa and boiling water, stirring until cocoa is completely dissolved. Add orange liqueur and combine well.

With electric mixer on medium-high, beat butter, confectioner's sugar and salt until light, pale and fluffy. Reduce speed to low, add melted, cooled chocolate, scraping sides of bowl as needed. Add in cocoa mixture, beat in completely.

Wait until you've finished frosting your cake before you lick the spoon and spatula, but enjoy the beaters right away.

Birthday SOS! We're eating sand!

Seriously. We had a message in a bottle, and it read in large, splotchy letters, "S.O.S.*", and below, the parchment read, "*She's Older Still!"

It was the party for Asteroidea's eleventh birthday. 

For her and her brother, I've been building entertaining little cakes each year on their birthdays. If you go back through this blog, you'll find a TARDIS (with Dalek cupcakes), A sailbook with Swedish Fish-filled Jell-O seas, a marshmallow-robot-infested spaceship, a giant cheeseburger and fries, with cherry ketchup, and a circus tent filled with candies. Before I started this blog, I'd built a chocolate locomotive and coal car… and a couple more. 

I try to leave them guessing what I have planned, and then to give them something a little absurd and yet tasty. Sometimes I cheat. I use mixes and store-bought tubs of frosting when I know nobody with serious taste buds will be eating the thing (i.e, if it's for the kids' party, and I'm fixing another for the grownups of the family).

With this one, I really didn't cheat. The cake was a from-scratch banana cake, with cream cheese frosting, the "sand" was a special blend of crumbs, the shells were homemade candies, and the pebbles in the sand… okay, I cheated on those. I ordered them from Amazon. 

But I did make the punch from scratch, too. See that watermelon half? Scooped out, and all that stuff put through a blender, then mixed 2:1 with seltzer. No sugar added, and the kids gulped it down. So did most of the adults (my parents are not fans of watermelon, & I'm allergic, but everybody else had multiple cups of the stuff.)

But the cake.

The cake.

I stumbled across one of my mother's old chocolate molds, and started plotting to make seashells and a starfish cake, but somehow every way I looked at my plan, it wasn't coming together.

I had been teasing Asteroidae that planning this party was driving me bananas. Then there was this make-ahead recipe for banana cake. And then, there was this lovely post on Cake Wrecks…OY! the gears started moving.

Granted, I'm no professional. I do this stuff strictly for the romp in the kitchen, and to make a couple of kids' faces light up.  But I do try. I don't expect my cakes to look anything like the Sunday Sweets, and am happy if they look slightly better than the other things featured on Cake Wrecks' regular pages.  And eventually I accomplish what I was hoping to do.

Five little girls and one little boy consumed just about every last grain of sand. Three women and two men nibbled rocks all evening. And they all had a load of fun.

I made the candy shells and the sand well ahead. The pink sugar shells were made using the "extra strong sugar molds" recipe at the bottom of this page, but substituting strained lemon juice for the water, and, once they were hardened, they were stored in the fridge until serving. The sand, however, took finesse. I learned long ago that sand isn't really "sandy" when you look at it closely. So you can't just use plain old Nilla Wafer crumbs and think you're making realistic beach scenes. You have to add texture, color, and, mmmm flavor. So I'm including my sand recipe, below.

The structure of the cake, by the way, was built by baking two 4x9" loaves and eight cupcakes – the cupcakes being four large (Texas Muffin sized) and four small (well, standard) cups filled to just above the halfway mark, and then, after baking, stacked small upon large to form the truncated cone "towers". The loaves were sliced lengthwise and crosswise, then their corners trimmed at an angle so they could nest around the cupcake "towers". When you do your own version, you'll find this initially requires improvisation.

Once you have all the components gathered and ready to assemble, frost them, build the castle, and cover with pebbles, shells, and, finally, the sand. Lots and lots of sand.

Edible sand

Ingredients:

1 Tablespoon almond bark (or, if you prefer, white chocolate)
2 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
2 or 3 dark chocolate wafer cookies (like Oreos w/o the cream filling), ground to fine crumbs (but NOT to dust)
3 Tablespoons brown sugar
3-5 Tablespoons yellow-colored decorating sugar
1-2 Tablespoon red-colored decorating sugar
1 Tablespoon green-colored decorating sugar
1 teaspoon blue-colored decorating sugar
5 Tablespoons regular granulated sugar

Directions:

In a microwave oven, melt the almond bark on a notebook-sized sheet of waxed paper or parchment. Using a butter knife or spreading spatula, spread the almond bark as thinly as possible. Put into freezer.

Combine other ingredients, either in a blender or using a medium bowl and a whisk.

Remove almond bark from freezer and, while still very cold, break or chop into fine chunks and crumbs. Mix into bowl with other ingredients. Put in storage container, seal, and refrigerate until you need to use it.

DECORATE! DECORATE! Cupcake Cone Daleks

So, Monday afternoon I'm supplying the cake, the extra treats, and the decorations for a party celebrating a monkey-boy's seventh birthday. The event will take place at his grandparents' house, a few blocks from where I live and bake. The activities include watching an episode of Doctor Who and then building cupcake Daleks.

In order for a riot of boys to do something like building an army of alien killer robots

there has to be a lot, A LOT of preparation, or chaos is the only thing they will generate.  After all, we are talking about sticky foods, spatulas, and an enclosed area (forecast is for thunderstorms, so there will likely be no romping in the garden). At any rate, rather than let them do as much damage as the same number of Daleks would, I've assembled the parts ahead of time.

The first stage is to get ice cream cups.

I had wanted to find some chocolate wafer cups (to make all-chocolate Daleks), but, for some reason, nobody in my area had any of them. Dang it, don't people in retail know that chocolate is a necessity, especially in these uncertain times? Well! Instead of leaving in a huff, I bought a box of colored cups, 

and l left in a minute and a huff.*

Other than that, almost everything I needed was in stock in my own cupboards. I'm a regular boy scout, I am. 

In case you're not certain what you'll need to have in your kitchen cupboards for a project like this, here is a list of all ingredients:

• cake batter, either your favorite recipe or a favorite box mix.
• food coloring
• simple whipped frosting, either your favorite recipe or from a little tub†
• little pretzel sticks
• m&m minis
• helmets. 

That last one is the hardest to come by. I've considered using chocolate-covered cherries or other straight candy domes, but they all end up looking more square than rounded, so the Dalek doesn't look very… Dalek-y. At last, though, I found, at a Big Lots store, some of these chocolate-dipped marshmallow-topped chocolate cookies

Which looked a little less dented on the cover of the box,

but I decided I could live with it, and just let the boys pretend our Daleks had just been in a big battle.

Anyway, now to the construction of your invading army. 

The first thing you are going to want to do is to set out your ice cream cups. My box of ice cream cups had eighteen in it, but the recipe I use makes two dozen cupcakes. This is only a problem if you lack ambition. Either put set up some cupcake papers or those silicone cups, or get an eight-inch cake pan or brownie pan, butter it up or line it with parchment, and set it amid your workspace. Then stand your wafer cups up, either on a cookie sheet or each in its own cup of a muffin tin. 

Next, to make the cupcakes, follow your favorite recipe or the instructions on your box mix to make  a basic cake. If you're going with coloring the cakes as I did, stick with a white cake, because you want your colors to come out intense and cheerful. (But feel free to use your favorite chocolate cake. It won't be seen once you build the Dalek.) If adding color to a white cake, once the batter is mixed, divide into as many bowls as you have colors (the standard mix provides about 5 cups of batter, so do your math on that). Add food color until it reaches the desired tint. 

Spoon batter into bottom of wafer cups, until it nearly fills, to just under a centimeter from the top of the cup. When all the cups are filled, pour any remaining batter into the cupcake papers or the small cake pan (it will not be a thick cake).

Bake about 15-18 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of one comes out clean.  

Allow to cool completely.

Many of these will have domes upon their tops.

You do not want this lovely effect, because you are going to invert the cupcakes, so, take a sharp, serrated knife and cut away the extra cake tops so that there is a nice, flat surface. Set the cupcake down on parchment or waxed paper. (The dots you cut away may be saved for a later project or just nibbled the heck out of.)

Once it is on its paper, it is now ready for little hands to mess with it. 

Let them slather frosting around what would have been the base of the cup, but is now its top (this means the sides and the top). Have them stick a helmet on it. Then, it's a matter of setting in rows of those m&m minis (each Dalek will need at least 18 to 24 dots, depending on how tightly the child arranges his rows of dots.

Then they can dip one end of a pretzel stick into the remaining frosting, attach a weapon arm, break another pretzel in half (or bite a couple of them off so they're the desired length) and dip ends of those pieces into frosting, and attach them so they look, more or less, like this:

Admire, and then INGURGITATE! INGURGITATE! INGURGITATE!


*Thank you, Groucho Marx.

†I made a several batches of white "buttercream" frosting, combining 1/3 cup water (plus a little extra as needed), 1/3 cup solid vegetable shortening (Crisco), and 4 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar, then added most of a packet of unsweetened Kool-Aid plus matching food coloring to make some frosting for the party. It's tart and tangy and probably not for adult taste buds. But I love the stuff. The Demonstration Dalek, though, is, as you can see, made from pre-fab frosting.

Birthday Burger Cake & Fries

This week marked the ninth birthday of my... ummm... technically, I guess, there's no kinship, but because of the closeness of our families, we'll call her my niece. Anyway, I don't need to go into any details about the family, just suffice it to say, we all love her, and wanted her to have a very special day. Ergo, I spent a bit of time mulling over how best to do my part.

Last year, I built her a carrot cake somewhat in the shape of the Great Sphinx (complete with neighboring pyramid to hold the candles). I made a cocolocomotive, and then a circus tent (filled with runts and sixlets) for her brother, these last two years, respectively. Naturally, they've come to expect the unexpected.

In other words, I had to build a better mousetrap.

Initially, I looked through books and online for ideas. I had considered getting crazy with fondant, but that's such an uninteresting flavor, I tossed that notion. And then, I found the trend du jour -- fabulous fakes. Make your cake look like some other food. "One ha!" said I.

And I set about planning this lovely beast.

It's an ice cream cake. As if you couldn't figure it out by looking. But here's how it was assembled.

What you will need:

2 layers white cake

1/2 gallon (or a close approximation) chocolate cake

1/3 cup shaved coconut, colored green

1/4 cup (approximately) chocolate jimmies candy

6 ounces (approximately) yellow rolled fondant

pearl cake sprinkles (optional)

cherry ketchup (see recipe below)

Start with your favorite white cake recipe (I cheated & used a French vanilla mix, mostly because I had time & money constraints, & the local grocer had those mixes on SUPER sale. It was pretty tasty, as pre-fab foods go).

So, anyway. Make two 8" or 9" round layers according to your recipe or mix instructions. Allow to cool. Remove from pan, wrap & freeze.

Now, for the ice cream. Select your favorite chocolate half-gallon, allow to soften on counter or in refrigerator until easy to scoop. Take cleaned cake pan, line with plastic wrap. Press ice cream into pan to form patty. Cover. Freeze hard.

Add green food coloring to about 1/3 cup shaved sweetened coconut (Mom helped me make our own -- she cracked the shell, I picked out the meat, she worked the slicer. Then we simmered the shavings overnight in lowfat milk, which we shall use in short order for coconut cream pie, I'm guessing. Anyway, the last stage was to strain away the milk, add sugar, then add color. But you can probably buy shaved coconut and save yourself a few steps... just add the green food coloring). Now, you have lettuce.

I opted for taking a large knife & shearing away the domed top to one layer of the cake, so as to make the bottom half of the bun (a) more level and (b) look more realistic.

Roll out fondant to approximately 12 inches in diameter, trim into even square.

Once that is set up, you have to be ready to work fast, if your kitchen, like ours, is the hottest room in the house. Set a plate out and pour your chocolate jimmies into it, spread around. Remove ice cream from the freezer, then from the pan, and, using the plastic to keep your hands clean, roll the edge of the disc in the jimmies. Set it on top of the cake. Sprinkle your leftover jimmies from the plate onto the top of the ice cream layer. Top with fondant, cherry ketchup,

second layer of cake, and finish bun with cake pearl decorations as sesame seeds (optional).

Of course, what's NOT optional with a burger, is fries. For ours, I bought two pound cakes (I rather like the WalMart bakery pound cake, but made do, this time, with Sara Lee, and found that, while frozen, they slice very nicely). Preheat your oven to 375ºF. Trim away all the cake crusts, leaving bare the lovely creamy-looking cake centers... With a very long knife, cut pound cake loaves lengthwise to 1/2" to 1/3" thick sticks (I do not recommend a serrated knife for this task). Arrange on baking rack over cookie sheet. Brush top & sides of each stick with egg white. Sprinkle with large-crystal decorative sugar. Bake about 5 minutes. Remove from oven, allow to cool enough to handle. Carefully flip each stick, coat with more egg white, sprinkle remaining side with decorative sugar. Put back in oven for about 3 minutes, or, until golden-brown on edges.I printed my own accessories on card stock & went a little crazy, but you can take a sheet of white wrapping paper & cut it, fold it, & glue it to look like a small serving bag for fries, rather than a jumbo cup/box thingy. Let them "tumble" out (carefully arrange them to look like the pouch has fallen over). Or, you can put them in a basket or a bowl, or a large paper plate... go ahead, be creative.

Of course, French Fries are incomplete without ketchup. Do NOT use tomato ketchup (as if I had to tell you that). Use my simple cherry ketchup... but have fun, and put it into a clean ketchup bottle for serving.Make sure you label it carefully, if you're making it in advance. But for best effect, don't apply the ketchup to the fries until the whole thing is on the table in front of the guests. After the initial shock, they all want to snitch the fries... (watch those little fingers).

We had a happy birthday.

Cherry ketchup

In essence, this is a simple, slightly liquid cherry pie filling run through a blender.

Ingredients:

1 quart frozen pie cherries

1/4 cup water

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/2 Tbs. butter (optional -- it just makes the flavor a little richer)

2 Tbs. corn starch

Directions:

In a medium saucepan, heat cherries and water until all cherries are completely thawed. Run through blender until you have a pureé. Return to heat, bring to steady simmer. Add sugar, cinnamon and butter. Stir until completely mixed and sugar has fully dissolved.

To add corn starch, either carefully sift into cherry mixture, or pre-mix with enough cold water to make smooth liquid (if you do this, you may need a pinch extra starch to help thicken the sauce). Add a little at a time, stirring until completely mixed in and the sauce begins to thicken. Remove from heat, cool and put into bottle for the table.

Squirt like crazy all over the cake fries, right in front of guests.

Have a great party! I know we did!

In line for a decoration

I cheated, this week.

You see, there was this boy, and his sixth birthday, and his expressed interest in chocolate cake, and my having a few other things going on (including preparation for hosting a doll club meeting this coming Tuesday evening -- it's open to anybody who has an interest in dolls/doll-related collectibles). But anyway, I took shortcuts.

I made a cake from mixes, used tubs of pre-fab frosting, and otherwise cut corners (literally, as well as figuratively). But I don't know if anybody will complain, considering all...

I had a set of candle holders in the shapes of circus performers, and, well, things sort of went from there.

This required two packages of identical brand-name, pudding-in-it dark chocolate cake mixes, baked in three pans: 1 angel food ring pan, a standard 8" layer cake pan and 1 form for making taco salad bowls (it was the best I could come up with on short notice to make the cone-ish peak of the tent, & I had to trim away the "wings" all around it). It also used one full standard tub of chocolate whipped frosting to hold the layers together and to hold the colored sugar grass on the plate; the exterior required nearly two full double-sized tubs of white whipped frosting, and a surprisingly small amount of Wilton's icing color to get the white frosting to go all yellow, red and orange. In each case, though, I added a small amount of powdered vanilla, because nothing should ever go straight from the box... and, besides, I like the extra little kiss of flavor of vanilla, in many sweets.

The scariest part of this is, because I used the angel food cake pan, there was this nice, big hollow section in the middle, just right for filling with candy. Naturally, there will be a surprise when the monkey-boy cuts into it. The Bat opened a mess of little packets of hard-candy-coated, chocolate-flavored Sixlets and I mixed them with a handful of sour Runts, and poured them into the unfrosted gap before attaching the peak with chocolate frosting. (I reckon the youngsters will enjoy the candies, while the rest of us have a sip of something a little more adult in nature, because candy is dandy, but....anyway.)

The ropes and trim are made from pull-apart candy whips (wild cherry flavor). The (sadly misshapen) front gate to the tent is made from a brand-name store-bought fruit leather supported by toothpicks, since, even at doubled thickness, the stuff is far too flexible to hold its own shape (no foolin', huh?). I think that, if I choose to do this again, I'll make a frame for it out of white chocolate, first.

The lettering (such as it is) was scribbled using one of those pre-fab icing tubes with the cut-your-own-size tip attached to it. In other words, I cheated. A lot. But I had fun. And I think a birthday boy might be happy with it, too.