Super Crafty « Cutie Cake Café

3Aug/100

CMYKake

Some of you may know what a big fan of colors I am. In fact, I even have the additive and subtractive color spectrums tattooed on my backs on my wrists. So it should come as no surprise that I was inspired to create a CMYK cake!

My plan was something like this:

But, as usual, my plan didn't come to fruition as fabulously as I hoped. However, it did turn out better than I expected, after a few setbacks.

The cake is entirely gluten-free and has SO MANY components that it actually took me three days to complete. And I had to re-bake the lemon cake because I didn't put enough baking powder in the first batch. Darnit! My process went something like this:

DAY 1

raspberry curd
lemon curd
blueberry puree

DAY 2

lemon cake
raspberry cake
blueberry cake
chocolate cake
chocolate ganache frosting (yes, the black is chocolate!)

DAY 3

re-bake lemon cake
blueberry Italian meringue
assemble and frost cake

By the end of it, I have to admit that I was rather exhausted, which would explain the not-perfectly-evenly-cut cake layers (resulting in the angled top) and the not-perfectly-smoothed frosting job. In the end, it looks cool, but it could have used a lot more filling in between the layers to make it taste better. Darn.

Tagged as: blueberry, cake, CMYK, colors, dark chocolate, Gluten-Free, lemon, raspberry No Comments

18Jul/100

WoW Cooking Hour: Tasty Cupcake

Sometimes you just want a delicious pastry, you know? It was on this rainy Sunday afternoon that I decided I was in the mood for a cupcake. A tasty cupcake. Well, isn't it lucky, then, that WoW has a recipe with that exact name?!

And look! The cupcake makes you happy! Such fantastic luck that I sh--

WTF is this? Ingredients: simple flour and an egg? Flour. Simple flour. And an egg. That's it? And this is going to make a tasty cupcake that will make me happy?

I have to admit that after my last WoW baking adventure, I was slightly optimistic, yet also a bit leery about these in-game recipes. Certainly there was some magic involved in turning two gooey spider legs into a delicious pie! But folks, I just couldn't bring myself to believe that any kind of Blizzard magic would turn simple flour and an egg into anything tastier than the most boring "bread" anyone's ever tasted.

Because I always give the benefit of the doubt, I decided I'd at least try this "recipe".

Mise En Place

Well, there's not much to it, is there? Simple flour and an egg.

(I actually added a little water to make it a somewhat decent consistency, but don't tell anyone.)

What do you know? It made enough for TWO cupcakes! Maybe this will turn out all right after all...

The Finished Product

I don't know about you, but I don't think this looks much different than it did before I put it in the oven. (In case you're wondering, it was hard as a rock, and I couldn't even bring myself to taste it.) Well, let's see what the final product looks like in-game.

Okay, this looks nothing like that. And on top of that, it's supposed to yield FIVE cupcakes, not two! What a rip-off! I found this whole thing rather unacceptable, friends. So unacceptable, in fact, that I decided to let Blizzard know about it.

Ahhh.... After letting off some steam (even though my message got cut short, god damnit), I decided to make myself a cupcake that was actually tasty.

A Real Tasty Cupcake

And since I'd been looking at, and expecting, a cupcake that looks like the one in the picture, I decided to make mine look like that. Once again, it's a chocolate-looking cake and a berry-looking topping. Well, I deviated a slight bit; hope you don't mind.

Rich Brownie Cupcake with a Red Buttercream Rosette

: A REAL Tasty Cupcake (excuse the poor image quality; my camera's battery died so I had to take this photo with my phone.)

I used this Best Cocoa Brownies recipe, using my own gluten-free flour mixture as usual, and baked it in mini muffin tins instead of in a brownie pan. I made a pretty typical American buttercream, colored it red, and piped little rosettes on the top.

These are so effing delicious, it's a good thing I made them in miniature size so I can ration them out!

I also made some with a fresh banana buttercream glaze (which doesn't look that pretty, sorry), which you can see here.

Tagged as: brownies, chocolate, cupcakes, Gluten-Free, WoW No Comments

22May/100

World of Warcraft’s Gooey Spider Cake

People often like to draw correlations between WoW and real life, and I'll have to admit that I am no exception. While a lot of gamers like to compare video games to things like war, strategy, and real-life interactions with other people, I prefer to take a slightly more sociopathic route. Being a reclusive pastry chef, I like to stay in my kitchen and bake~!

My newest endeavor is taking recipes from World of Warcraft and attempting to recreate them in my own kitchen. If you missed my first experiment, go see how my [Delicious Chocolate Cake] turned out. This time around I'll be doing another cake, but with more sinister ingredients: the [Gooey Spider Cake].

Recipe Assessment

Things to note about this recipe:
- It only has one ingredient: gooey spider legs
- Its result looks more like a pie than a cake

Mise en Place

With only one ingredient, this should have been pretty easy to prep. I'll tell you what, folks. I must have killed two dozen spiders (which takes a while for a holy paladin who doesn't do much damage) before I got enough [Gooey Spider Leg] drops to complete this recipe. Luckily, the last one I killed yielded exactly two [Gooey Spider Leg]s.

You'd think that it'd be easy enough to get what I needed after only one spider, since they have eight legs and everything. I guess sometimes they're just not gooey enough. Or something.

On to the Baking

That wasn't so bad! And now, just to bake the cake.

I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical of this recipe, having only one ingredient, but I figured Blizzard wouldn't let me down so I decided to forge on with the baking.