Baby Cakes

It's been a while since I was hired for a Cake Job. Part of me is like, "Damn, I need some extra cash!" and part of me is like, "I really need the practice!" but yet another part of me spends WAY too much time on Pinterest and I'm all "I wanna make those awesome cakes too!" But having no Jobs, I have no way to do fun pretty cakes. I suppose I could randomly make the 5 tiered superhero cake just 'on accounta becausa' or I could try to construct the Death Star out of cake and fondant for the sole purpose of taking pictures and letting my nearest and dearest shower me with compliments and 'Oh My Goshes', but who's paying for that? Let's face it, that's a lot of cake and a lot of fondant (as well as a lot of money, time and effort) just to put up a blog post that only 3 people are going to read! And no one is eating that much cake, even my delicious from the box goodness!

But I did get a bit itchy to try being cutesy with no particular theme in mind and I love a chance to play with the fondant. I decided the easiest way to do this would be to figure out how to make some mini cakes and play around with them. Why not, right? So what had happened was this:

I couldn't decide how I would actually bake the cakes. I thought about making a whole cake mix, doing a square one and cutting to make several layers, using leftover batter for cuppies I could freeze for later use, but this seemed way ridiculous. I thought about doing cupcakes and cutting off the tops, but I wasn't a fan of that one. So instead I used a recipe for 2 cupcakes but I doubled it. Now, the recipe itself calls for 1 egg white (it's white cake) and a whole teaspoon of vanilla (WOWZA) but reviews all said it was a bit eggy, which I have always thought too much vanilla could cause that problem flavor wise. So I doubled the recipe, but made 1 egg white into one whole egg, not two. I also kept it just under a teaspoon on the vanilla but included almost a teaspoon of strawberry extract for a strawberry vanilla flavor. Worth it!

 And for the vessels I went with ramekins. I wasn't 100% sure this would work out, mainly because I have never baked cake in a glass or ceramic pan before. But I went for it anyway.

I put the four ramekins on a cookie sheet and divided the batter among them all.

 

And they came out looking like this:

They were a little tough but that is likely due to my playing with the ingredients. This is why I like sticking to box mix... Anywell, I froze them for a bit, sliced off the tops and made two stacks. I covered them in a crumb coat of regular frosting, rolled out some fondant and played with the cookie cutters. Simple as that. I have a bunch of fondant stored up in various colors so there was little effort to put forward here. The only thing I ran into that I didn't like was trying to smooth down the sides of the fondant on these round little cakes. If someone out there can tutor me on that I would love you forever!

For this one I had been thinking of all those pretty layer cakes I see with the polka dots on them, but as I was rolling out fondant and cutting out circles all I could see was bubbles. So this is Bubble Pop.

Being a BIG lover of fall I decided to do something fall-ey (it is too a word, I just made it up). With no actual leaf cookie cutters in my arsenal (hint hint Christmas prezzies!) this is what I ended up with...

And there you have it. Baby Cakes!