All in Cakes & Bakes
Like most, we missed many a birthday and celebration to the pandemic. Lucky me with an early spring birthday, I had not one or two, but three pandemic birthdays. When it came time to celebrate a friend’s birthday this year, in person, it was only fitting we do it right with birthday cake.
With so much St Patrick’s Day confection inspo out there I couldn’t resist making something fun…. fun with tempering white chocolate! These White Chocolate Vanilla Cakesicles are made with vanilla cake colored with butterfly pea flower mixed with some cream cheese buttercream and dipped in white chocolate. Did you know how hard it is to find white chocolate without hydrogenated palm oil?
When friends lend you their beach house, you make those friends a cake. Even if those friends own one of the most successful bakeries in Canada. Even if! This is a 6” three layer chocolate cake filled with buttercream and fresh strawberries and finished with American buttercream tinted with a bit of beet root powder, more fresh berries, gold dragées, a couple of wafer paper butterflies, and some more gold gilding. Have I mentioned I love using gold?
It’s time to put this cake making to work for good and who doesn’t love a good old fashioned bake sale? This week I’m going to be raffling off cakes to benefit chef José Andrés World Central Kitchen that has been on the ground working with local chefs and restaurants to help feed refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine and at the Poland border. Read on for details on how to enter and what you can win…
Salted Caramel Cakes! This cake batter was so light and lofty I ended up with enough for not one or two, but three cakes! This is a caramel cake recipe adapted to be made gluten, dairy and refined sugar free, with layers of salted caramel American buttercream, and a salted caramel drip topped with some cake crumbles and a ring of dark caramel. The crumbles were a fun addition but I preferred the look before adding them. Also found myself wishing I had more salted caramel left to do a full pour over on one of the cakes instead of a drip, but c'est la vie. Next time.
Of course I had to make a Valentine's Day cake. This one's a classic for my chocolate lover – chocolate sponge with vanilla bean American buttercream. Want to make this chocolate cake yourself? Here’s my recipe and method. If you try it at home, let me know how it goes!
This is Royal Wedding Cake. Yes, those royals. A gluten and dairy free cake inspired by the cake eaten at Harry & Megan's nuptials – Lemon Elderflower Cake with Lemon Curd and Elderflower Swiss Buttercream. Recipe adapted with my gluten free cake flour blend and made dairy free with the use of vegan butter in the cake and buttercream…
And just like that... more cake! This is black sesame sponge filled with layers of matcha Swiss meringue buttercream and matcha colored American buttercream on the exterior, finished with matcha stained rice paper sails painted with edible gold, and finally some gold leaf.
If you’ve been following along I’ve been on a a mission to bake a cake a week this year and working on this weekend's cake. In the meantime, I made some paleo chocolate cupcakes to use up some chocolate ganache buttercream and the beet dyed American buttercream from last weekend’s cake to work on my piping. I wasn’t thrilled with the result until I realized I was using the wrong tip! Oy.
After making Mr Beer’s birthday cake last year, I realized cake decorating was curiously very relaxing for me, and decided I'd try to bake a cake (or cupcakes or mini cakes) a week this year to work on my gluten free, dairy free and sometimes vegan cake skills. So, here's this weekend's berry ombré cake inspired by last week's epic sunrises and sunsets...
When life (or a windstorm) gives you lemons (and limes, and oranges, and grapefruits) you make gluten and dairy free olive oil vanilla citrus cupcakes topped with citrus honey buttercream and a little lemon zest.
We thought we’d shelved Clean Made after we were unable to scale our national events the way we’d planned to in 2018 and 2019. Then a pandemic hit and I did a thing and made a gluten and dairy free birthday cake for my husband, Mr Beer. I usually bake bundt or sheet cakes (I’ve never met a bundt I didn’t love) but we had a few strange months here following his unexpected cancer diagnosis (and said pandemic and the loss of another business) and I found myself watching random cake making videos when I needed a mental distraction because that was a hell of a lot better than doom scrolling.
If you do British Christmas, you do British Christmas Cake. Its most akin to what we’d call a fruitcake here, but I wouldn’t want to malign this delicious, boozy tradition with that association. It’s taken some time to nail my gluten free method with homemade refined sugar free marzipan and a good fondant, but now that I’m happy with the results, I’m playing around with a new marshmallow fondant recipe, and fondant snowflake decorations for shippable cakes to send to family and friends. These cakes are typically made many weeks in advance, fed booze regularly, and then enrobed in a layer of marzipan and fondant and then decorated simply so that they can be stored on a cool countertop to be enjoyed throughout the season, but…
