Sunday, November 22, 2009

Awesome Blossoms!


Hey everyone!

So the fam got yet another Darbari! This one was for Friday (a couple of days ago).

We wanted to go with yellow and white. I always find that yellow and white is such a beautiful colour combination, so soft and cheerful! -- As you can see by the pictures, Awesome Blossoms is a very fitting name for this cake.

Awesome Blossoms is a decadent, triple-layer chocolate cake with a coffee buttercream as one of the fillings and a nutella/coffee buttercream as the other. We got the inspiration for these flavours from Brendan's coffee-toffee crisps in the blog before this one.

We weren't sure about the ribbon at first, but I think the polkadots add the perfect whimsy to this dream of a creation.

Here's a funny story about the transport of this cake. Here we all are in the house, totally jazzed about bringing these cakes to the mosque when we hear a loud boom of thunder outside, followed by a flash of lightning. It was like this the whole ride to the mosque and all I could think was, "well, I guess rain is what the flowers need to grow!" Fitting, eh?

As always, let me know what you think!

Till soon...I'm sure the next post will be holiday-inspired, so stay tuned!










Sunday, November 8, 2009

Birthday Bonanza!

Whew! Last blog of the day!

This has been a busy month for birthdays. Two of my very close friends recently celebrated theirs, so of course, my gift was baked goodies :)

Pictured first, are Brendan's Coffee Toffee Crisps! They consist of a chocolate coffee cake with nutella coffee frosting, topped with crushed almond and hazelnut toffee bits!



















For Kathryn, I made a plain cake with fresh cranberries thrown in the mix. It was a triple-layered concoction with a fudgey chocolate frosting in between each of the layers!

Kathryn is like me: you can't go wrong with something ultra girly. So I decided to go with a design similar to the Darbari cakes in a previous blog and added a lovely heart border on the bottom.


Happy Birthday, you two!
May the year bring lots more goodies!

Wedding Bells!

Back again to report about one of the most exciting cakes I've ever done!

My very first wedding cake! Well, actually it was a 35th Anniversary Cake for Sheila and Jack Watson -- Congratulations!

Sheila and my mum used to work together and are now very dear friends so we were over the moon to be able to do this cake for her.
The cake is a coconut cake, layered with a pineapple frosting (the same as those pina colada cupcakes a couple of blogs ago.

Sheila had requested a snowflake theme for her cake,

and so we came up with the idea of making a sweep of
snowflakes coming from the top of the cake all the way down to the bottom. What you see here, is the "front" of the cake and since the sweep takes a 360 around the cake, the back of the middle tier is where it continues.

Jack is fond of yellow roses so we decided to finish off the cake with a lovely yellow satin ribbon. We thought that the silver dragees added just the right amount of sparkle to this cake without taking away its delicate look!

That's what we thought...so what do you think?
I am very happy to report that Sheila, Jack and the whole family loved it! (And we're so happy they did!)


Purple Rain


Guess who's ba-aack?
This is one of the twin cakes we made for A and S's mijalis Darbari.
We wanted to make the cakes whimsical and what better way to do that than to make them purple?
These are lemon cakes and they are filled with raspberry jam! The icing is also lemon flavoured. And the answer is yes: they do taste as good as they sound and look.
We made a little batch of cupcakes with these same flavours to try out and if I do say so myself, they were pretty scrumptious!
Onto the next post!
Till very soon!



Oh, Snap!

Hey all!

So today is going to be a blogging extravaganza. It looks like I have been stockpiling baking pictures, lately...I have been baking (really! I have!) but I just haven't had time to blog about it (curse you, exams! curse you!)

I baked these cupcakes one day, when I just decided I needed to exercise my creative right to avoid studying for a bit! First, we have Mehnaz's Ginger Snap Cupcakes! These are for my sister since she's so spicy, herself!

I adapted these cupcakes from a recipe for ginger snaps from Alton Brown . These babies are so special because instead of just the usual powdered ginger, we've got candied ginger pieces in them, which give a lovely bite! (Very Christmas!)

The second batch was pina colada inspired. It is a coconut cake with a pineapple buttercream and a little candied pineapple on top, placed just so.

If you are looking for a quick trip to the tropics, these cupcakes will surely do it for you!

That's it for this blog, but i will talk to you all again in about 30 seconds! Till then, I hope these tide you over!