Almost there

Are you there cake blog?  It's me, Kyrie.

I am freaking out right now!  I am soooooooo close to graduating I can taste it - and it tastes stale.  Graduation is definitely long overdue.  Not that I'm not thankful for the experience college has given me...I have learned more about myself in the last four years than I feel I will ever, I have made some amazing friends and baked some KICK@$$ cupcakes!  I'm just ready to start my life!  I want to be able to experiment with recipes and work on my business plan and scout locations for the bakery and bake a million wedding cakes and - well, school gets in the way.  I LOVE learning, but learning and schooling are two completely different things.  I will put a disclaimer on this term however; I have had the best professors this spring than I have the last four years.  It's a shame it took me so long to find them!  They have instilled a new found hope that classes don't have to be all about the grade...as long as you take something valuable away from the class, you've learned.  

ANYWAYS, enough about that jazz - I have two finals on Wednesday and I'm done!  Woohoo!  Then I have two days to graduate, pack up my apartment, go out to dinner with the family, and fly to southern California for my summer job!  I can't wait!  

Here are a few things I've done recently:



Here are some mini chocolate chai cupcakes with vanilla frosting I made for my religions of India potluck.  They tasted like gingerbread, but were still yummy!  I've also been experimenting with flowers as you can see...



These were a bit of an experiment.  I got this recipe from this blog and was a little skeptical - but they turned out great!  These are dark chocolate cupcakes filled with caramelized banana rum buttercream and topped with Nutella frosting!  I didn't like the banana rum filling at first because I HATE the taste of rum, but once it went in the cupcake it was magic!  Yum yum.

Also, I have something to share with you all...at my bakery, we've started substituting other things in the pain au chocolat for the chocolate due to a shortage...

Can you guess what it is???  Yes, it's poo - JUST KIDDING!  It's a chocolate mixture, but doesn't it look disgusting???  My last day at Metropol I had to take a picture.  Yuck.

So, I'm also famous now.  Check me out here!  Next stop: Food Network Challenge!  lol haha

Lots 'o' pics!

I've been dreading posting not because I have nothing to say, but because there is just too much!  Where to begin?!?  Well, my 22nd birthday came and went - I did not make myself a cake, but my parents did take me to Pix and I got macarons!  I cannot for the life of me make them, but I can sure eat them!  Their salty caramel macarons are soooooo good!  Just look at all the tasty desserts!

Someday my macarons will be decent...sigh.  

In other news, I've been baking it up at work and here's some pics (Sorry for the horrible quality...camera phone...again):


This is my first mini multi-tiered cake!  I had leftover flowers, so I thought I'd give it a go.  At first I hated the colors, but it has grown on me.  The top has a hibiscus-type flower.  I had a lot of fun making this!


Here are some cookies inspired by Cake Journal.  The edges of the actual cookie are crap because I used a template and not a cutter, but I absolutely love Antonia's Royal Icing!  It's really easy to use.   

What else?  Oh yeah, I've made about a million cupcakes...just experimenting, giving for birthdays, etc. etc.  Here are some:


So many different kinds!  The bottom two are the most recent: chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes with almond vanilla buttercream (tasty!) and red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.  I love the color of red those turned out to be.  I think I'm crazy for baking so much.  Oh well, it's getting me closer to my goal!  I'll be back soon with more pictures and stories - stay tuned!

I graduate in 35 days!

Oh my goodness, I am so bad at keeping updated!  Let me tell you...life is rough going to school full-time and working full-time as well.  I cannot wait until I graduate, because then I can bake ALL THE TIME!  Except I'll be in California this summer working as a camp counselor (without a kitchen!), and then going to France and various countries for about two months (no time to bake then!)...oh my goodness, this is going to be hard.  Oh well, I will post a lot of pictures of yummy parisienne desserts and such.

So the wedding cake sampling went well, I was too flustered and short of time (and a working camera battery) to take pictures, but all the flavors were pretty good.  We'll see which one the bride picks!  I'll keep you updated.

And this last week I did a few things - cupcakes and mini-cakes.  I took pictures of two of the mini-cakes I did (which sucked), and then someone ordered one for Mother's Day and I did a GREAT job on that, but of course I didn't take a picture.  Here are the poopy ones, with bad lighting to boot:




The purple one is my first attempt at a cherry blossom tree, and the pink is my first attempt at the quilted pillow look.  As for the cupcakes, I made snickerdoodle cupcakes...a recipe I've been wanting to try for awhile.  And they turned out delicious!!!  They're cinnamon cupcakes with cinnamon cream cheese frosting, and I decorated them with fondant flowers and dragees.  The actual cake part of the cupcake was super moist, but almost TOO moist because it crumbled really easily (something to work on...any suggestions?).  And the frosting was to DIE FOR!  Enjoy!



I'm going to try and make cake bites (bakerella-style) again this week, as well as a cuter version of my monkey butt cupcakes.  AND, the last bake sale went really well - and I will post pictures from this one (note to self: charge camera battery!).  Adios!

Waiting to bake...

Here are some pictures to tide you over until Tuesday...








 

BIG NEWS!

Hello - it's been so long!  I have been very busy with school and work, work, work!  I have no pictures for you this time (where's my camera??), but I do have some news/updates:

1.  A couple of girls and I are having a bake sale for a friend who was diagnosed with leukemia recently.  Getting tested for bone-marrow matches is spendy, so we're going to be baking our little hearts out and selling it all at Gladstone High School's track meets on May 3rd, 15th and 16th...be there!

2.  I was recently interviewed by my friend Jessica for a food blogging article in Flux magazine - and I got some pictures taken yesterday for the article too!  Be on the lookout for those :)

3.  This is the big news:

I'M DOING MY FIRST WEDDING CAKE!!!

Yes, it's true!  A friend at work is getting married in August, and she wants MOI to do her cake!  I have a sampling with her next week to get down the flavors and all the little details, but I will be sure to post pics of sketches, sample cakes, etc.  I am soooooo excited!!!  I'm having her sample four cakes:

1.  Chocolate cake with chocolate gananche filling and an espresso buttercream.

2.  Tiramisu cake!  It's a light, fluffy cake with mascarpone and chocolate shavings filling, an espresso kahlua syrup and chocolate italian meringue buttercream.

3.  Raspberry chambord puree filling between a layer of white cake and cheesecake and frosted with italian meringue buttercream...yes, I said cheesecake!  The bride-to-be had this at her sister's wedding, and loved it so I'm going to give it a try...eek!

4.  Raspberry  mousse filling between a layer of white cake/cheesecake and frosted with italian meringue buttercream.  

Wish me luck...and I'll be back soon!

Dropped a little dough on the floor...

Busy busy!  Hey there, I haven't been able to do too much baking lately besides work-related stuff, but here's a picture of my first gumpaste flowers:

  

I think they're cute, but I don't like the shading of pink in the middle!  But thanks to some research on a VERY cute flickr site, I figured out I should be using powder color instead of shimmer dust to achieve the shading I want.  

While I have time, I have to mention my top 10 favorite baking blogs to read.  These blogs provide me with daily inspiration, and you should read them when you get a chance!

1.   Building A Bakery
2.   Cakespy
3.   Bakerella (recently on Martha Stewart!)
4.   MadBaker
5.   David Lebovitz
6.   Business of Cake
7.   Chockylit
8.   How to Eat A Cupcake
9.   Gigi Cakes
10. Pink Cake Box

AND...since I spend hours on the wilton.com discussion forum looking at cakes, I have to mention a cake I am absolutely in love with.  It's a tie-dye cake!  





What I love about it is that even the cake part is tie-dye.  I'm going to have to make this one soon for sure!  I'll post again soon - I'm making french macarons on Thursday at work!  

P.S.  I dropped 30 croissants worth of dough on the ground last night at work - oops.  lol

Eating sugar but thinking healthy!

Hello all!  I'm back with a post and more pictures!  FYI, the pics in the last post were my delicious pistachio cupcakes with vanilla frosting and PB&Honey cupcake with honey-roasted cashews - YUM YUM!  The pistachio is definitely going on my final recipe list once I get it a little more cupcakey and a little less muffiny.  So I've been looking at a lot of vegan/low-fat/gluten-free/low-calorie/low-sugar recipes for my bakery, and I found this short preview of a new documentary that is a lot like Supersize Me - but in reverse.  Five people go on a raw-food diet to try and reverse their diabetes - and it works!  Check it out, it's interesting.  

Now, back to the sugar:

Turtle Cupcakes: Take Two!
Aesthetically, these are a lot more appealing than the ones I made previously at the bakery.  This is a devils food cake with a rich cocoa frosting (too rich for me but everyone else liked it) covered in pecans.  There is a pool of caramel in the middle, which was a problem because it was literally
a pool - too liquidy and not caramely enough.  Do you see my dinky chocolate turtle on top?  lol needs work.  Soooo, I'm going to do take 3 soon with THREE different kinds of caramel: dulce de leche, a thick caramel 
sauce and a thick, chewy sauce using milk-maid caramels.  I'll let you know!

I worked on my sugar cookie decorating while watching ANTM (America's Next Top Model) and here is the result - better than before!  I realized that the royal icing is better for piping borders and letters when it sits overnight.  I made a thank you cookie for my french teacher (she wrote me a reccommendation for a study abroad program I'm applying for) and it turned out well!

This week has been super busy because I've been filling in for my boss at Mangiamo...I made 15 loaves of banana bread yesterday!  Five loaves of regular banana bread, five loaves of chocolate chip banana bread and five loaves of banana walnut bread.  It turned out really well because the bananas were really, really brown and on the verge of rotting (gives the bread a deep banana flavor), and I only mixed in the bananas so there was big chunks of banana in the bread!  Here is the recipe if you are interested.  For the chocolate chip version, I folded in 1/2 to 1 cup chocolate chips (depending on preference) after mixing.  For the walnut version, I folded in 1/3 cup crushed walnuts to the batter after mixing.  Enjoy!