Strawberry Margarita... Cake?

I wanted to make something fun to celebrate my parents' birthdays this year. They like to order Margarita's when they go out and my roommate had once made Margarita flavored cupcakes so that's where the idea began.

I started with a Margarita Cupcake recipe from recipegirl.com and altered it along the way to come up with this delicious Strawberry Margarita Cake w/ Lime buttercream icing.

Here's what I came up with. Pretty simple and very yummy...

Cake:
9 oz liquid Margarita mix (a little more than 1 cup)
3 oz tequila (a little less than 1/3 cup - I used Patron)
3/4 oz Grand Marnier
1 box Strawberry cake mix
3 large egg whites
2 Tbs vegetable oil
1 Tbs lime zest

-Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease two round or oval 8"-9" cake pans.

1. Whisk together the margarita mix, tequila & Grand Marnier in a small bowl. According to RecipeGirl: Measure out 1 1/4 cups for the recipe and drink the rest over some ice ;)

2. Blend cake mix, egg whites, vegetable oil, lime zest & 1 1/4 Margarita mix from step 1 into a large bowl. Blend on low for 30 seconds and then medium speed for 2 minutes.

3. Divide the cake batter evenly into 2 greased cake pans and bake according to cake mix package instructions. (About 20-25 min.) Let cakes cool in pan for 10 minutes then remove them to a rack to cool completely.


Lime Buttercream Icing:
(crusting/medium consistency)
1 cup vegetable shortening
2 Tbsp fresh lime juice
1 Tbsp water
1 Tsp grated lime zest
1 lb powdered sugar
1 Tbsp Wilton Meringue Powder
1/8 Tsp salt

1. Cream shortening, lime juice, water and lime zest in a large mixing bowl.

2. Gradually add sifted powdered sugar, meringue powder & salt and mix on medium speed for a few minutes - until all ingredients are thoroughly mixed together.

Yields about 3 cups of icing... plenty to ice and decorate a 2 layer 8" cake!

I used the Cricut Cake machine to cut the Happy Birthday decoration.

Gymbo the Clown

Some people really hate clowns - mainly because they can really look creepy or because of the scare factor associated with a certain murderous character in a movie... but I find it hard to not fall in love with this cute little Gymbo the Clown character. Gymbo is a cute fun-colored clown used at Gymboree play centers which was the perfect setting for my friend's son's very first birthday party.

Her only requests were that the cake matched the party's Gymbo theme and that the Birthday greeting be written in Albanian.

I couldn't find a very clear image of Gymbo on the internet (he's not yet a celebrity) so I printed out the best one I could find and used it as a template to cut out the fondant pieces. It was tricky yet fun putting the pieces together like a puzzle.

I made coordinating polka dots to put around the sides of the cake and a matching rolled fondant border. My friend ordered super cute sugar cookies from the Sugar Bakery which looked awesome displayed with the cake!

I cut the birthday greeting from fondant with my Cricut Cake machine in advance... when I went to assemble the letters I was missing an "n" (even though I checked the spelling 100 times). I scrambled to cut another one free-hand and I bet you can't even tell which "n" was cut by me!

The cake was a 12" double layer chocolate Devil's Food cake with milk chocolate filling covered in vanilla icing and topped with rolled Satin Ice fondant.

Spirited First Communion

I can hardly remember the day I made my First Holy Communion. I think the only memories I have of that day are through pictures I recall seeing. I know it was a nice day because I went to my best friend's house and we took pictures together on her back deck in our pretty white dresses. I also took pictures with all my family out in front of our house but I have a hard time digging up the details in my mind... after all it was almost 20 years ago!! Whoa, I'll pretend I didn't mention that and move on to this year's Communion season.

I was asked to make a cross-shaped cake for a very special young lady in my life. I decided to make my own pattern since the store bought shaped pan would only serve 12 and this needed to serve more than 50! I made two double layer 8" square cakes and cut them according to this model:

I shaped the corners to give it a nice dimension and slathered it in buttercream.

Now comes the hard part - rolling out the fondant to cover this big cake. I've never covered a shaped cake in fondant before... and never one this large. I don't have a lot of space in my small nyc-apartment-sized kitchen so I resorted to the glass-top table in my dining area. Turns out, a little cornstarch does not go a long way... I kneaded and rolled out some ivory fondant nice and thin but couldn't remove it from the glass! I had to re-knead the fondant, throw down some more cornstarch and try again. The second time was better because the cornstarch now had a tacky surface to stick to but the fondant was starting to dry out so I got nervous and didn't roll it thin enough. The thickness of the fondant was good to shape the cross with but I created a HUGE mess:

At least the finished product shows no sign of struggle!

If I had better resources I would have made it a bit larger to accommodate all the servings but I did the best I could and definitely learned a lot...

(like maybe I need a better fondant roller and non-stick mat)

This pretty cross idea comes with instructions from Wilton. I just improvised a little to accommodate the larger cake size.

Super Mario (Michellio) Birthday

My co-workers and I decided to have a video game themed birthday party at our office for a fellow co-worker's 30th birthday. We like to poke fun at her for being a gamer although no one is excused from being teased at our office. She had liked some Super Mario Bros. cupcakes she had seen on flickr so I took the idea and made a special cake for her milestone occasion.

After researching some ideas, I found a cake design I liked made by sncakes on www.cakecentral.com - which really is as addictive as the site claims it to be. I thought the idea was super cute and cleverly used a lot of the classic Nintendo game elements. I rendered it with my own version of Mario on top.

The Mario character on top was initially a concern but it made me take my first plunge into making figures out of fondant!

"It's-a-Michell-io."

I used Wilton's rolled fondant primary colors multi-pack to make the figure and the cake decorations. I didn't use a gumpaste mixture which is probably recommended when making sturdy figures - therefore the fondant was soft and my little gal kept getting more and more squashed as I put her together. I'm still proud of the way she came out for my first try!

Everyone got to enjoy this vanilla fun-fetti tiered cake at work (except me - I was out on jury duty - bummer). I used an 8" round cake base layer and a 6" cake for the second layer. The warp pipe was made out of rice cereal treats, wrapped in fondant and all the other accents were fondant as well.