Paulchens FoodBlog?!

Disclaimer: this is a lengthy post with lots of pics. If you do not have the patience to read all this you can simply jump to the recipe part by clicking here!

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Once upon a time there were two women (of the crazy type, I might add) and a little baby boy approaching his first Birthday…

Darian at his 1st Birthday

So these two (crazy) women began to discuss how they would organize the very first Birthday Party for the Little One:
Where to celebrate? Who will be invited (Grandparents, Uncles, Aunties,…)?
What do we cook for all those people? The presents… oh and of course we need a Birthday Cake…!

So there! That’s where this crazy crazy story began…

Google is your best friend, right? If you don’t know the answer, ask Google – yes? Ok, Flickr is nice too for this purpose…

That’s where we turned to for the answer of our question: What cake to bake for a One Year Old? Searching high and low through the images of children’s Birthday Cakes we ooh’d and aah’d and began to whine about our less then sufficient decorating skills.

So many lovely ideas – alas no idea of how to make them at home. Second problem: most of those we really liked used fondant and sugarpaste for decorating – but no one likes  that overly sweet fondant in our families, neither does the boy!

So we searched some more on Google and Flickr and found some lovely and basic cake ideas like this cubes on the left.
This gave us the final idea how to approach the cake baking challenge and also gave us the opportunity to satisfy all the different cake likes and dislikes of the family members…

First Birthday - little colorful cubes...

So that’s what we made for his 1st Birthday: Little colorful cubes with different cake fillings decorated with colored curd and whipped cream. They were a success and everyone loved them as far as I remember…

For his second Birthday we went a little further and tried to cover the cake with fondant for the first time…

Second Birthday - A Cars Cake

Little did we know about working with fondant and that’s what you can see in this pic. But in the end I think we managed to end up with a decent result. And the Boy was satisfied, so we must have hit the general right direction…

The following year for his third Birthday we went back to icing the cake with curd and whipped cream. We bought some additional decorations like little candied dried fruits that looked like stones and some other sweets to build some rails for Thomas the little Tank Engine who was residing on top of the cake.
This one was a blast and The Little One really loved it – tho I think what really mattered to him was the little Thomas that was on top of the cake rather than the cake itself…

Fourth Birthday - Another Cars themed cake

As time goes by you tend to forget the troubles you experience in life and Mrs Q and I still wanted to make one of these gorgeous, stunning looking cakes we saw all over the www. So we decided to invest in a cake decorating course we attended earlier this year to properly learn how to work with fondant.
I think it really helped us to understand the very basics of working with fondant and helped us to avoid the mistakes we had made in our earlier approach (like you need a lot of fondant to cover a cake, you don’t want the fondant to be rolled out too thin, …)

I personally have to say that I am  quite satisfied with the result we achieved this time. Of course there is always room for improvement…
What you can’t see in this pic is the little Mater car figurine that was on the street when we served that cake because I did not have it on hand when I snapped the pics. Oh and honestly the picture quality of all the pics I shot is not  that perfect either because well, you see the main concentration went into actually making the cake rather than snapping stunning pics *sigh* – and after a rather sleepless short night the night before the Birthday Party I really didn’t have the nerve to set up a proper styled shooting scene either – sorry!

Here are some more work-in-progress snapshots of the cake making scene - to see lager pis simply click on the image:

Cake with it's underpants: almond paste

Already in it's final clothes: white fondant

cutting Little black cubes...lots!

halfway there: checkered flag design for the sides

Nearly there: dusty street and name plate finished

name plate and finished street

Design detail: grass and little stones

Finishing touches: big fat yellow 4

Cake with Mater on top

This little toy car fitted perfectly on the street we made for him to drive on. Isn’t it just too cute?

The big Birthday Boy checking out his cake (and toy car)

I think he liked his cake. Tho some asked us why we’d put so much work and so many hours in decorating a child’s cake I can tell you the looks on his face and fun he seemed to have was the best payment one could wish for!
He has been talking about his Birthday and the cake weeks before his actual Birthday, of course all the presents did rock too!

cutting into the cake...

Looking inside the cake...

The inner parts of the cake were: Sacher cake (the dark parts) and sponge cake (the light one on top) filled with custard.

For the cake baking itself we thought we’d go easy and Mrs Q. bought a customized cake form which would allow us to bake a cake that we could easily fill with custard without having to do the cutting part ourselves.

While the idea really was good, the actual baking with the form wasn’t at all.  The cake came out with a very very thin bottom, as you can see in the last picture of the cake on the right and so we  had our problems with filling the cake and moving it afterwards. The bottom broke and a lot of custard escaped – it had to cook another round of custard to fill it up again.

After 3 attempts of using the cake pan and three very disappointing results we decided to send the form back because it is not working for us! Oh well there is always something new to learn, huh?!

If you are interested in the basic dough recipes here they are;

Sacher cake

50 gr butter
250 gr sugar
2 eggs
3 tablespoons cocoa
250 ml milk
300 gr flour
7 gr baking powder

Method:

1. Beat butter, egg yolks and sugar until creamy.
2. Add cocoa. Gradually add flour with baking powder and milk.
3. Beat egg whites until stiff peaks are forming.
4. Carefully add the egg whites to the batter.
5. Fill in your cake form and bake at medium heat (about 180°C) for one hour or until a picker comes out clean when poked into the cake.
6. Let cool on a wire rack.

Sponge Cake

1 yolk
1 egg white
20 gr sugar
20 gr flour

Method:

1. Beat yolk and 2/3 of the sugar until creamy
2. Add remaining sugar to egg white and beat until it is forming stiff peaks.
3. Add egg whites and flour to batter.
4. Pour into cake pan and bake at medium heat until  a picker comes out clean when poked into the cake.
5. Let cool on wire rack.

Custard

570 ml milk
55 ml single cream
1 vanilla pod or ½ tsp vanilla extract
4 eggs, yolks only
30 gr caster sugar
4 level tsp cornflour

Method:

1. Bring the milk, cream and vanilla pod to simmering point slowly over a low heat.
2. Remove the vanilla pod (wash the vanilla pod, dry and store in jar with caster sugar to make vanilla sugar).
3. Whisk the yolks, sugar and cornflour together in a bowl until well blended.
4. Pour the hot milk and cream on to the eggs and sugar, whisking all the time with a balloon whisk.
5. Return to the pan, (add vanilla extract if using) and over a low heat gently stir with a wooden spatula until thickened.
6. Pour the custard into your prepared cake.
7. Let cool down completely. Preferably put in fridge for about 1 hour.

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You will also need:
150-200 gr jam of your choice (we used apple-apricot)
300 gr rolled out marzipan (almond paste)
some tablespoons of vodka
shortening
cornstarch
about 1 kg fondant
food coloring powder (we used red, yellow, green, black and brown)

Assembling the cake:

1. Once you have filled your cake with the custard and it is cooled completely top it with the sponge layer glueing it together with some jam.
2. Warm the jam in the microwave for some seconds – you do not want it too hot but a bit warm and sticky.
3. Carefully apply the jam all over your cake. You will need this to glue the marzipan layer onto the cake.
4. Roll out your marzipan (not too thin otherwise it will easily break when putting on the cake) just as big enough to cover your cake or use already rolled out one. Smearing your work surface with some shortening will help to roll it out and prevent from sticking.
5. Apply marzipan on cake, making sure that there are no holes and bubbles.
6. Roll out about 2/3 of your white fondant and make sure it is thick enough to cover your cake. Don’t be shy use enough fondant, if you are working very clean you can always use the left overs for the decorating bits. Using some cornstarch on the work surface will help you with the rolling and prevent the fondant from sticking.
7. Wet your hands with enough vodka and smear all over the marzipan covered cake. This will glue the marzipan and fondant together.
8. Quickly apply the fondant layer on the cake and smooth it all out cutting off all excess fondant once you’ve made sure there are no holes and bubbles left!
9. Finished! now you have a cake proper covered with fondant. You can go on and work on the decorating bits.
10. We colored the remaining fondant with yellow (for the name tag), red (for the plate), black (for the checkered flag design on the sides and the street on top) and green and brown for the grass bushels…
11. Now go on cut out your letters, squares and whatever else you want to decorate the cake with and put them on the cake. Use some glucose (be careful not to use too much you only need very little otherwise it will run down your cake and make it look somewhat ugly….) to glue them on the cake.
12. Stop when you are satisfied with the looks of your cake or when you are just too tired to work on it any further . whatever happens first!

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cutting the cake - carefully!

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