Sailor cake

Christmas is almost here....But I still had some time to practice my decorating skills this year. Today I finished decorating a cake which I started making yesterday. This is the surprise cake for the birthday of a Danish sailor. His wife ordered it after I made a surprise cake for her (check out my post "Birthday cake for Jorge's friend)). I hope he is gonna like it.  It took me almost 6 hours to do all the baking,chilling the cream and decoration....I am tired but happy about the result :) I can proudly say that I haven't done anything close to it before.

 First, I baked 2 rum-chocolate sponge layers. I added chopped walnuts  to the first one and coconut flakes with raisins to the second one. The filling had 3 layer- 2 layers of raspberry butter cream with a meringue layer in the middle. The cut should remind a smile of an African man :D I covered the covered with marzipan and decorated it with waves, sea stars, stones and sailor in the boat made of fondant. I used Rolled fondant made by Wilton. It very much reminded my childhood. I spent endless hours shaping some animal figures from modeling clay. It is so much fun! My husband actually saw me jumping from happiness and screaming when I finished the cake!!!

 The cake is assembled and ready to be covered with marzipan

I'll sail away, it's time to leave
Rainy days, are yours to keep
Fade away, the night is calling my name

You will stay, I'll sail away

Marzipan and kransekager course' follow-up. Honningkager (honey cakes, similar to ginger bread)

My life tastes marzipan now! Christmas and New Year taste marzipan...whole Denmark has amazing almond paste's flavor... I am in love with marzipan, but who isn't? :P

Welcome to "Marcipan og kransekager" decoration course I took last week here in Aalborg. I was the only non-Dane who participated (later I discovered that there was also one Bosnian woman in our group). There were about 20 people of different age and gender (we had 4 or 5 men) there. We had two evening classes each of which was 4 hrs long. And we did a lot of things with marzipan- marzipan cookies, cakes and figures. We also worked with melted chocolate to make some decoration spirals for the cakes.

So, check out my progress, I did the horn-shaped cake :) Other guys did New Year clock, towers and hearts...

 Practice makes perfect. It was quite tricky to cover the bottom part of these spirals

 The horn ready for chocolate decoration

 

 Ready to be served

 

This is not my cake :)

 Marzipan New Year clock cake

 Marzipan figures

 Marzipan heart filled with marzipan cookies

 They allowed us to take home our creations. I wish I knew about this well in advance, I could have made much more :D

Marzipan cookies covered with chocolate

We bought metal forms for cookies recently, and I decided to try to bake Danish honningkager (honey cakes) for Christmas . They are not exactly the same as ginger bread well-known in North America , for which molasses is commonly used with the main spice, of course, ginger. Honey cakes have honey as a sweetener and different spices (cinnamon,cardamon, orange zest) but ginger (I put ginger anyway). They turned out really tasty. My honey ate more than 10 pieces of honey cakes at once before they even got glazed :D

This is how they looked like last Sunday:

 This is how they look today after I glazed them with whipped egg whites, confectioners' sugar and food colours

Merry Christmas to all my friends!!!

Bday cake for Jorge's friend

I am awaiting for my food colors to arrive soon... Meanwhile,I keep practicing with the same red-green ones I am stuck with :)

Today I've made a "Strawberry-butter cream symphony cake". I decorated it with marzipan topping and same marzipan roses, that I used for the Fruit cake. It was much easier this time and my hands were not shaking any longer. This cake has two layers of sponge sheets with a butter cream filling in between.  Whole strawberries are put into the cream in a spiral manner

I am so much looking forward to "Marzipan and wedding cakes decoration" course I am taking on December 7-th and 8-th!!! An update on what I've learned will be posted shortly after.

Palle's birthday cake and blueberry-orange muffins

This time I made a birthday cake for my colleague Palle. This cake has two dark chocolate-walnut layers with a tender and fluffy whipped+sour cream-strawberry jellified mousse in the middle. I chose a buttercream frosting to cover my cake, adding a little bit of red colour to make it tender rose. I draw some white buttercream scrolls on top of a fondant and finished cake decoration with marzipan strawberries and figure "40". Tillykke med fødselsdagen, Palle! 

 I also made blueberry-orange muffins with walnuts and cinnamon topping for the lunch with friends on Sunday.

Rich fruit cake and wholewheat beer bread

This morning I woke up from a strong sound of rain hitting the windows....I love this weather when you don't have to go work...it's Saturday, thanks God it's Saturday! This rain has changed our plans a bit today as we wanted to do some shopping for our guinea pigs and also search for the food paints. So far I have only red and green :) I was hoping for a better weather till about 2 pm when it stopped raining for a little while,but I had already lost my shopping mood. I told myself that it might be a good chance to try a new recipe with some decoration :) 

I love one book called "Grandma's best recipes" which I bought in Canada.  It has so many old traditional recipes you can always rely on. I must admit that I tried just few recipes from the book, but it always inspires me with its colourful pictures. I thought "Christmas is coming in about a month...more than a month actually" . But they start all this X-mas euphoria so early here in Denmark so I couldn't help but find something nice and warm... RICH FRUIT CAKE. It's known to be an ideal Christmas celebration cake. NICE! I had to do extra shopping as I didn't have all the fruit I needed. The recipe is quite simple, but you need about a cup of each of the following dried sugary fruit: dates, prunes, dark and golden raisins, currants (I couldn't find these ones) and, finally, cranberries. The cake turned out nice according to the top that I cut off to make it horizontal before putting an icing. My husband has already tried it and was satisfied. I used an icing as a base for the marzipan roses which, as you can see, required just 2 of those food colours that I had.

Ah, another thing. I have already found my dream decorating set with all the tools from Wilton (http://www.wilton.com/store/site/details.cfm?image=2109-0200_l.jpg ). The price is $199, plus I need to buy also a rotating cake stand, colours and some other things...but this set has almost everything needed to start up my decoration adventure :) I hope to please myself next month and buy it...it's a bit tight now with all the Christmas expenses. In any case, I will have my "Marzipan and wedding cake decoration" 2-days course in December!!!

To finish this post up, I also keep practicing with my newly bought bread-baking machine. I've tried 2 recipes so far and today I tried a "Wholewheat beer bread with sesame seeds" recipe from the manual which came with the machine. It's a very nice recipe with a crispy crust...Too bad that I tried it alone, when my husband was working....I hope he'll forgive me :P It was just a slice!

It's 9 pm now and it's still raining. . It  turned out to be a nice weather for creativity. So glad that I am staying home though!

What I've accomplished so far

I was thinking the other day trying to figure out how many cake recipes I've actually tried out...and I couldn't count all of them. Simple math tells me that it's something about 500 recipes...maybe more, maybe less. I am not very organized in keeping track of them as I had a cook-book with many printouts, which eventually got lost, given away or trashed.

I remember weeks which turned into years of non-stop baking :) My parents and friends were very happy about that as I was a person who always invited for a cup of coffee/ tea with a freshly baked slice of cake. Some weeks I baked 2 or 3 new different cakes or pies....I didn't like to repeat myself and kept experimenting with a dough and various fillings. Any birthday or invitation was an opportunity for me to BAKE. I can't say what was even more exciting- baking a cake or actually seeing the happy faces of those who tried it. But I was always thrilled even when I just started thinking about BAKING :)

But enough talking. I asked my mom a couple of days ago to find some nice photos of my creations. Most of them are from those sweet days in Russia and were stored on my parents' computer. It wasn't actually easy to find many nice pics, sometime we didn't even bother taking them.  But anyway, let's consider these ones as my starting point towards an exciting process of cake decoration!

Chess-board cake (also see above) which I made for my friend's birthday in Canada

Cake with cherris

Apple strudel

Chocolate-nut cake

Don't remember this cake :) Maybe with cottage cheese?

Strawberry-chocolate ice-cream cake

Cake with pumpkin and cherries

Why I decided to keep this blog

Danish buns (danske boller)

Serbian cheese-spinach pie (pita)

Witches' fingers for Halloween

Spanish bread with olives

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The strongest impression from my childhood was the cake  my best friend's father baked for her 5-th birthday. I remember a tiny room full of excited kids waiting for the birthday cake...and here it comes- all big, colourful, decorated with some animals, trees and candles. It looked like a cake from a fairy-tale! I was stunned and in love with the cakes since then. My mom and my grandmother were always baking something sweet and I used to  watch them anticipating to try a first slice of their creation. I started taking initiative at the kitchen when I was around 10 - first baking simple cakes, pies, tarts, experimenting with various types of dough and flavours. The uttern pleasure for me was to cook for my B-day and then invite my teenage friends to try it out. They were always excited about dessert, just like I was at that friend's birthday. I tried at least 500 different recipes since then and I still can't get enough of it. My weakest link so far is professional decoration. That's why I decided to start keeping this blog. I have a strong desire to learn several decoration techniques while also mastering my baking skills. The first step will be taking "Marzipan and wedding cakes' decoration" course next month. I am also going to buy all baking accessories quite soon. And here starts the journey....