Mountain Bliss!

So, after working for 42 years, my father-in-law is retiring and my family and I decided to throw him a little party to celebrate his long successful career. Mom and Dad enjoy hiking and a couple years ago they did their first major hike to the Annapoorna base camp, in the snow capped Himalayas. I wanted to commemorate that hike with this cake because I know, it was the start of a new passion for Dad, one that will dot his retirement with many a snowy peak. Happy Retirement Dad!

A little bit about the cake. It is not a double barrel, but a triple barrel! There are three 8" cakes stacked one top of the other to form this 11" tall barrel cake. It is covered in a blue ombre buttercream. I have to give my husband props for doing all the buttercream color mixing because my hands were tired after a lil while. After I started the project I realized I had run out of blue food gel! Yikes! I had to mix black, purple and cyan to get the blues you see on the cake, so it took a lot mixing to getthe correct tones. But it resulted in a variegated blue with black streaks that I LOVE !

The painting on the cake is made using palette knives, one of my favorite painting techniques. I used 3 different shades of white buttercream. The trees are off white, the mountains are a medium white and they have a touch of bright white to give the look of fresh snow. Hope you like the cake. Let us know what you think!

Happy Easter!

Easter to Easter, it has been a year since we started Grace Cakery. Yay!
So, here's this year's Easter cake - A 3 tier barrel cake with chocolate bark and butter cream flowers. I'm generally a fan of pastel shades, but I just had to try my new electric gel color set by Americolor. I am loving it! It is a very refreshing color palette. Every time I look at the colors I feel like I just had a swig of minty lemonade on a hot summer's day. I could go on forever about the colors, so lets move on. :)

The cake had 2 tiers of carrot cake and a tier of brownie cake, because my nephews and nieces are huge chocolate fans. Last time I made a cake without a chocolate element, there were a lot of big tears. :( The chocolate bark was interesting. I found this amazing tutorial on pinterest. The melted chocolate on my brushes would harden in minutes. I finally switched to piping it on and using a palette knife to smooth or rough it up as needed.

For the buttercream I tried the easy Swiss Meringue Butter Cream (SMBC) made with pasteurized egg whites. This eliminates the need for cooking your egg whites over a double boiler. This recipe is really heavy on butter and quite thick, but it seemed quite stable and well suited for covering a cake. For piping, I mixed it with a little bit of piping gel to get it to pipe smoothly. This also gives it a slightly translucent appearance, which I like. Another technique I adopted for getting the right color variations, was using the bag in bag method. This is where you place your butter cream in the color combination you want, then wrap it up and put it in your piping bag with the tip. This method is described in detail in the book 100 Buttercream Flowers by Valeri Valeriano and Christina Ong and used by many others.

Hope you liked the cake and stay tuned for more! Happy Easter!