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!

Happy Easter!

Hello Everyone!

Archana and I have been very excited about finally coming together to share our love for cake decorating with everyone. We both believe our talents are a result of God's Grace and not of our own making and so, the name for our blog was a no brainer - Grace Cakery.

And what better occasion to post our first blog, but Easter itself, the Lord's Rising!

We were having a gathering at my sister's place and we decided to make Tiramisu for dessert. It was a large gathering, so we decided to make 2 six layered 8" cakes. Well we decided to have 6 layers but my 3 year old took a chunk out of one of the cakes and so we had to say adieu to one of the layers, Ha ha...

To cover the cakes, instead of the icing that the recipe suggested, I wanted something sturdier and so I used a combination of butter cream and mascarpone. The icing in the recipe is perfect for the filling though. And to give the appearance of grass, I used some edible apple grass, available at most hobby stores around Easter.

  

My favorite part about these cakes were making the fondant decorations. I loved making the little ornate love birds. I used paper embosser plates (like Cricut) to emboss the patterns on fondant. I then cut out the wings using fluted paisley cutters. For the body of the birds itself I used fondant that I kneaded with some tylose powder. I shaped it using my fingers and a cylindrical fondant tool that is pointed at one end. Sorry I didn't take many pictures as I went along. It is really difficult to stop what you are doing and take a pic, especially when there is a toddler hovering to take a swipe at things.

The other thing I loved making was the little carrots. I love applying a lot of details to tiny things, like the striations on the carrots that most people wouldn't even notice. It's like my little secret. The kids definitely didn't notice them as they popped them in their mouths at the speed of light :). I found the tutorials for the chubby little bunnies on Pinterest. I especially like the one burrowing into the ground for some carrots. Love its little paws.

Well, that's the first cake for our blog. If you want to look at pictures of cakes we have worked on before, please check out our Facebook page. If you like our blog, have any questions about the post, please leave a comment and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. See you soon!