A Girly Cake for a Baby Girl

Sugar and spice and everything nice. That is what little girls are made of.

Cake too. Especially when the top tier is spice cake, and the other two are white with raspberry and chocolate with more raspberry. And dark chocolate ganache. Smothered in cream cheese frosting and almond buttercream respectively.

This is one of my favorite cakes I have made. Ever. Like ever ever.

Why? Because of my emotional connection to it, and because of this:

And this:

And how the whole thing came together as a whole.

My best friend just became a Mommy for the first time this summer. We threw her a girly pink shower this spring, and I made this cake (duh). We wanted it to be cutesy but not kitschy, pink, but subtle, and mouthwateringly scrumptious. This was one of those designs that kind of percolated in the back of my mind for a couple weeks before all of a sudden becoming glaringly obvious as the perfect idea, and for once, execution almost identically matched my expectations.

The new Daddy-to-be's favorite cake is spice, so we made the little top tier spice cake (with cream cheese frosting) for him - it was set aside at the shower, and was taken home to be eaten later (since this was a traditional no-boys-allowed kind of shower). The other two tiers were those always crowd-pleasing white with raspberry filling and almond buttercream, and chocolate with raspberry and bittersweet ganache filling (also with almond buttercream).

Here they are all ready to be stacked and decorated. Spice cake front and center, and white and chocolate right behind.

The ombré look was pulled off with a combination of roses and fondant. The top and bottom layers were smothered in simple piped frosting roses (the "cheating" kind that I posted about a while back). The roses faded from a pretty pink at the bottom to white at the top (OK, almost white, but I was plumb out of clear vanilla extract).

The striped fondant tier in the middle was made to match the middle pink tone of the ombré for a continuous look top to bottom (or bottom to top...glass half full? The chicken or the egg?). The fondant tier was simple too. I made my homemade marshmallow fondant, first in white to cover the tier (which was, of course, frosted lightly to give the fondant something to cling to).

Then I mixed in some pink food coloring until it matched the pink I was going for, rolled it out, used a ruler and a pizza cutter to make the stripes, and "glued" them to the cake with a tiny bit of water.

When I was laying the stripes on the cake, I started on the top of the tier (not all the way to the center, since another tier was going to sit on top of it), and glued them down the sides before cutting off the excess even with the bottom of the tier. To space them evenly, do one, then another on the opposite side of the cake, and then do the ones halfway between those, etc. If you do one, and then another right next to it, and so on around the cake, you are likely to end up with too much or too little space when you get back to where you started.

For some cakes, I would decorate the tiers separately to avoid damaging finished tiers in the process. However, since this cake would be finished on the morning of the shower and the roses are pretty easy to smoosh (totally a word, even if spellcheck doesn't think so), I stacked it before I piped on the roses. The fondant tier was the only one completely finished before stacking. The others were only crumb-coated.

I loved the finished product. Still do. It was so so pretty and so so yummy. It will be hard to beat in the future.

This fun cake was a fun way to celebrate the imminent arrival of a sweet baby girl. Now that she is here, I am madly in love with her, and I am thrilled to be her "Auntie Katira."

Here we are on the fourth of July (2 weeks after she joined us in the world). Her outfit even matches her cake (that I'm sure she enjoyed in-utero)!

Lemon Cupcakes and a 60th Wedding Anniversary

60 years is 21,900 days, which is 525,600 hours, which is 31,536,000 minutes, which is 1,892,160,000 seconds. Roughly. And that is how many seconds my grandparents have been married. They have been in love for even longer than that.

On August 15th, 1953, two people committed their lives to one another, and now, 60 years, 6 children, 29 grandchildren, and 1 great-grandchild later, they are still madly in love, and a great inspiration to us all.

A small portion of this family (the ones that could get time off work and who don't live scattered across the planet) gathered a couple weeks ago to surprise my wonderful grandparents in a celebration of their love. Their children took them to dinner, and while they were there, a small group of my cousins and I set out desserts and a couple decorations for when they returned. It was the last in a string of surprises that week, including spontaneous visitors and world travelers. Good times were had by all.

Enjoying cake at their wedding...

...and cupcakes at their 60th.

I made these lemon cupcakes as a sweet summer treat, in a cheerful, festive hue, bedecked with (all together with me now) cream cheese frosting. And plus, have you seen these Paper Eskimo cups yet? Holy cuteness! Like 12 on a scale of 1-10, if cupcake papers had a cuteness scale.

See? Holy moly.

These lemon cupcakes are easy to make, delicious and tangy and moist, and can be made as a cake if you don't want to do the cupcake thing.

************************************************************

Lemon Cupcakes
From Martha Stewart
Makes about a dozen normal cupcakes, or an 8 inch layer cake

Ingredients

2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon lemon zest
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 large eggs and 3 large egg yolks
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 cup buttermilk

For the frosting:

1 lb cream cheese, at room temperature
2 sticks (1 cup) butter, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4-6 cups sifted confectioner's sugar

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350ºF.
Line baking tins with cupcake papers (or butter and flour two 8" pans).
In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and lemon zest. This smells absolutely heavenly. I believe lemon zest is made primarily of angel wings. Or fairy dust. Zesting lemons will make the whole kitchen smell absolutely fantastic.
In the bowl of your mixer fitted with a paddle attachment (or in a regular bowl, if you feel like kicking it old school), beat butter and sugar until light, fluffy, and gorgeous.
Turn the mixer on low and then add eggs and egg yolks one at a time.
Beat in the lemon juice.
Alternately add the flour mixture and buttermilk in batches, starting and ending with the flour. Don't overmix here, just combine until the flour is incorporated.
Portion the batter into baking cups (about 2/3 full)

and bake 20 minutes (or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a cupcake comes out mostly clean.
Let cool 10 minutes in pan, then remove and let cool completely on a rack before frosting.
You will notice that these stand on their own and don't need a muffin tin. Awesome.

**Note: In Martha's original recipe, she made a lemon simple syrup; while the cakes were still warm, she pokes holes in the cake and brushes on the syrup. I omit this step for cupcakes, and they turn out wonderfully moist and scrumptious. I have made this in cake form (for this adorable puppy cake), and I did the syrup. It turned out great. Your call.

Frosting:

Beat cream cheese, butter, and vanilla until smooth and creamy.
Add sugar in 1/2 cup to 1 cup increments, beating well in between additions. After the last addition, beat 3-5 minutes until smooth, light, and fluffy.
Pipe or smooth onto cupcakes (I used a 1M tip).

Lemon curl garnish
These cupcakes are so lovely garnished with a simple lemon peel twist.
These are super simple to make. All you need is a zesting tool. I use this one. Any zesting tool with a channel knife (the part in the middle, not the little holes at the top) will do the trick.
Make sure the fruit is clean, since you will be putting the garnish directly on top of the frosting. You can totally eat these too, although they are too bitter for some people (this also depends on how much pith (the white part under the skin) comes off with the peel).
Hold the fruit firmly, and, applying even pressure with the channel knife, peel the top layer of skin in a spiral around the fruit. Try to get mostly the yellow part and not the pith.

Like so.

Take the length of peel that you cut and twist it around something round (I used a wooden spoon handle). The tightness of your curl will depend on the size of the round thing. For tight spirals, use a skewer. For larger spirals, you could even use your finger.

Let it sit for a couple minutes to hold the shape, then gently slide the curl off the spoon.

Cut into little twists, and bedeck each cupcake with the sunny yellow goodness.

Enjoy lemon cupcakes, and enjoy love.

Congratulations to my amazing grandparents!

Here's to many more years of joy-filled memories!

...

Oh, and a few plastic party cups and a car seat were all that was needed to transport some of the leftovers safely to my cousins who couldn't make it.