“Lapis Surabaya”, Our wedding anniversary cake!

It is called “LAYER CAKE” in English. I have wanted to make this cake for so long but something always comes up therefore I am not able to spare time to bake this cake.

In order to celebrate our 7^th anniversary, I decided to make this layer cake, a small and a simple cake just for three of us. I decorated it with melted chocolate and chocolate wafers along the side. I put three flowers made from fondant on top and touch it up with sprinkles.

This recipe is taken from FITRI, her blog name is RUMAH MANIS. Many great Indonesian and Iran recipes are available there.

For this recipe, you need:

Ingredients:

15 large eggs (you only need 3 white eggs)
125 gram of all-purpose flour
1 tbsp of chocolate powder
185 gram of granulated sugar
150 gram of melted butter
1 tsp of vanilla essence
½ tsp of salt
Strawberry jam for gluing between the cakes

Directions:

Wisk eggs, sugar and salt until white and fluffy. Pour in flour, stir with wooden spoon to mix the flour to the eggs mixture. Add in melted butter, keep mixing. Divide the mixture into 3 parts (2 parts stay as white part and 1 part; you mix it with chocolate powder). Pour the mixture to the Lapis Surabaya pan that has been grease with butter and flour.

Bake in the oven at 350 F or 180 C for 30 minutes.

There will be 3 parts of cakes (2 white parts and 1 chocolate part). You can bake the cakes separately, beginning with the white parts, then chocolate part.

Wait until the three cakes have cooled, pile the cakes together, start with the white, then glue it with the jam then pile it again with the chocolate and do the same with the rest of the cake. Serve !

WEDDING Cake for Sinar

WHAT! I had never expected that my friend, Sinar, would ask me to make a wedding cake for her. I tried to refuse and the excuse I gave to her eventually didn’t work because she still insisted that I make her the cake. I thought, ”she was insane if she wanted me, an unprofessional baker to make her a wedding cake, the most important cake of her life!”
Anyway, I said “YES”. Hiya, that answer almost shocked me. I couldn’t believe I said YES! But it was happening… I was going to make her “THE WEDDING CAKE”.

I have done some simple cakes just for simple occasions before but not for a real wedding. I am not sure, I am so NERVOUS!
I thought very hard on how to make an elegant and an easy wedding cake. I planned to prevent making too many mistakes, so I simply chose white color for the iced surface, pink color for the roses and green color for the leaves. The roses and the leaves were made from fondant. They were made from “ready to use fondant” by Wilton product.

AND, of course, mistakes happened even though I did plan everything a head of time. A special thank you to Sinar and Shawn for your faith on me. I couldn’t imagine what people in your wedding said about that cake – I guess the hottest topic of that day was “how marvelous and delicious the wedding cake was” LOL

BABY SHOWER Cake for Roossy

Another person was expecting, Roossy is my close friend who lives not far from me. And she is from Indonesia too. Some of Indonesians were throwing a baby shower for her and I was in charge of making cake. In the beginning I didn’t have any ideas of what kind of design I need. Well as always, WILTON was my rescue. I looked through my entire Wilton book and got some of ideas here and there.

Finally, I decided what design I use for my cake decoration. Yippee! A lot of pink color of course, as she was expecting a baby girl. A CLOWN! Aha I have been dying to practice making a clown and this was a good time for it.

I have learned some techniques to make a CLOWN:

1.Squeeze out icing with steady even pressure to cover an area about the size of 50 piece.
2. Begin raising the tip, allowing icing to build up, but keeping the end of the tip buried in the icing.
3. Stop at desired height, pull tip away
4. Insert tip at base of body for leg, squeeze to draw leg out. Relax pressure, pull to a point for foot. Repeat for other leg and foot.
5. Insert tip into body at shoulder, squeeze as you draw arm out.
6.Relax pressure, pull to a point for hand. Repeat for other arm and hand

MY First Wedding Cake

The class that day was about making a very basic and simple wedding cake. In the last class students were required to bring 2 different sizes of cake, flowers made from royal icing, and a heart shape for a cake topping made from fondant.

It was quite a challenge to make 3D flowers from the lily nail. We used royal icing and it was made couple days before the class started. So it allowed the flowers to dry up and get hard.

When the class started we learned the technique of assembling tiers, and glue flowers on the cake. Also, in this class we learned how to cover the cake not only by useing regular butter-cream icing but also use a fondant.
I myself don’t’ really like the taste of fondant, But it looks neat and beautiful for wedding cake.

Here I am humbly present my FIST wedding cake, not quite enchanting in my opinion but it’s not bad for a beginner like ME.

MOTHER’S DAY Cake

I baked a chocolate cake for my mother in law, Julie. I baked it in a 9 inch pan using regular white butter-cream icing. WILTON is always my best choice for making icing and Wilton also has many decorating tips and recipes.

On this cake, I am learning to make Sotas. A sota is made by simply holding the bag of icing just above the surface of the cake, squeeze to allow icing to drop in a random pattern. I love making sotas, I think this is very easy and the result it looks very good and it is also a good way to cover up any imperfections in the cake. My favorite and probably the easiest thing to do in cake decorating are making the trim along the top edge and bottom edge. I have many options for making the trim including using a shell design with sweet pea flowers by placing 1 flower every 3 inches. I used a Forget- Me-Not flower for the top decoration. It comes with different sizes from small to bigger. I was also practicing how to make leaves.

So this simple cake for mothers day is not bad after all for a new beginner cake decorator.

BABY SHOWER Cake for Myrna

I would say this is my first attempt of making cake decoration for my beloved friend Myrna. She was having a baby boy! As I am a very beginner cake maker I tried to do decoration base on my skill. I have chosen 4 different kinds of colors. Used white color as a basic then followed by dark blue, light blue and yellow. I did not want to do experiment too much by doing all kinds of different flowers. So I chose star flower and swirled flower by using decorating tip size 106 and 225. The basic shell was decorated along the cake trim – the color was white. Now let me explain about the writing, ups I was not very happy about that. You can easily tell that I was a cake decorating beginner. Trying so hard to follow what the book told me but oh well I guess I need more practice in this matter.

I used regular butter-cream icing with medium consistency. WILTON is where I got the recipe.