As a fan of baking, I collect cooking magazines...Actually, I can't stay away from them! I try not to go to the bookstore, because I want ALL of them, and then I end up spending tons of money, on something I'm probably never going to use! Why not use? Well because I have soooo many magazines and cookbooks, that if I were to cook 1 new thing every day, I'd probably turn 70 and still be cooking from what material I have at home. Therefore I decided to try something new from the magazines I already have for a while, until I get bored of the same ol' pictures, and then I can treat myself with a new magazine!

So this past week, I baked something out of GoodFood: Peach, Pistachio and White Chocolate Pound Cake. I saw the picture, forgot it's not really PEACH season just yet, and read the reviews. I am a sucker for bad reviews. I always want to "fix" the recipe. Or pretend that I did. If I ran across a not-so-good-recipe, I always try it twice! Just to make sure that it wasn't me, it was the recipe.

This is how the story went:
I looked for peaches. EVERYWHERE! There aren't any at the moment, duh! So I broke my most basic rule: The first time you make the recipe, follow it EXACTLY! There goes that. I went for nectarines. See, once I had picked out the recipe, I couldn't let it go for a later month. Nope! I had to bake it NOW! So I found some really expensive nectarines that were imported from Africa and started out my recipe.
The reviews on the website keep repeating that this was a very VERY dense cake. I thought to myself...maybe they didn't beat the butter until it was really fluffy? Or maybe they measured wrong? So I made sure I beat my butter until really pale and fluffy, I made sure I measured everything precisely.

I baked to the last second according to the instructions of the recipe. And voia-la!! A good looking cake! I let it cool, and while it was cooling, I beat the frosting. Yogurt with white chocolate and pistachios sounds just like heaven slathered on a cake!
Meanwhile, my husband was smelling all the good smells and whining "Must I really wait until it COMPLETELY cools to eat?" So I gave in...I told him we could have some.
As soon as it was safe for the frosting to go on top of the cake, I spread it and sprinkled with the pistachios.

Looking goooooood!!! Aham. It also tasted great and not dense at all! I was happy with the results...only...the next evening I tried to eat a slice? Well, that's when it was dense. Like, SUPER dense! My husband ate the rest of the cake within the week, but I found it too dense. The reviewers were right, but I still had to give it a try!

I also must mention that I don't see the point of the grated white chocolate INSIDE the batter. It was completely lost by everything else.

But what I will tell you is that the icing of the cake tasted great. What I will do is use that as a dipping sauce for fresh fruit. I think that is the best use I could get out of this cake!

Catching Up! -Cont: Happy Birthday Fairy Cakes.

Hi Everyone!!!

I figured my last 2 posts were long so I waited a couple of days before I posted so you can take a break from reading :)

Today, I am going to tell you a bit about September 2012. It was interesting. In a good way.
First of all, September 3rd, is Fairy Cakes' Birthday!! We turned 1 Year Old! Yeih!!!
In the 1 year I've been baking as Fairy Cakes, I took on more than 170 orders!

(A little birthday Clip Art won't hurt to set up the mood...even if it's been over a month since we celebrated!)
Also, I realized, that the best selling cake for my business is my Carrot Cake. I call it "The BEST Carrot Cake." If you live in Cyprus, you MUST try it! If you don't, then sorry, but how am I going to send it to you? It's a good enough excuse though to visit Cyprus. It's a beautiful island...with a great tasting Carrot Cake ;)
You can see pictures of it at this post: More Cakes Coming Up.
So because of the birthday AND realizing which cake is the top selling one, one thought came to mind: Promote my Hummingbird Cake (for those that don't know, it like a Carrot Cake, really, but instead of carrots, it has bananas). For those who like bananas, it's a very similar cake to the carrot one, with the same frosting. So I posted the following picture on my Facebook Page and asked people to try and GUESS what it is. The ones who guessed right would be in a draw to win a FREE Hummingbird Cake.

 

 

 

Just to help everyone out a bit, I clearly said it wasn't a Carrot Cake. I had a guess of a Walnut Cake (which put me into thinking...hmm... Walnut Cake, I should try to bake one of those), I did have a guess of Carrot Cake, but mostly, people called and asked because they didn't want to be "wrong." I even hinted that it was one of the new entries in my latest menu. I had one right guess, and that's where the cake will go. Yes, WILL go, because the girly who won is a student in England, and I have the same deal as the Carrot Cake. SENDING it is NOT an option! So I will wait until she returns for Christmas so I can bake it for her. She was actually one of the first people who tried my Banana Pudding.

 

 

But anyway, the BEST present I have to my Fairy Cakes, is a LOGO!!!!! I was looking around for one for so long, and I was always picky with it. I found this girly, by mistake of course, just browsing on Facebook. She is Purple Scrunch, and she doesn't charge an arm and a leg for doing your logo. I picked something I could build on later. For now, I just wanted something to go on my menu and my stickers and bozes and such.

 

 

What do you think? I love it!! Thank you Laura! I especially like the little wings on the cupcake!

I will leave you with my lovely logo for now, and I will tell you about some pirates on my next blog post :)

Thank you for reading, and please, like my page on Facebook. Fairy Cakes

 

Red Velvet...Anything!

Hi Everyone!!
I hope you're all doing well. I'm doing great. I have a wonderful assignment I'm excited to talk about, but without pictures yet. So I'll just show you some Red Velvet pictures to go with the post :) A post with no pictures is no fun at all!!

So a girlie I know called me and asked if i can bake her some healthy cookies with low calories. So I came up with some ideas, found some recipes from my trusted books, and this weekend I am hitting the kitchen. I have 5 recipes I want to try, but I'm not sure I will bake them all. I mean...I will get stuck with dozens and dozens of cookies. I was thinking of maybe baking 2 of them, see how she likes them, and then try another 2, and then keep the 5th one for later? I guess we'll see :)
But don't you love this whole expiremental thing? I feel so much better if I'm doing it for a customer rather than just baking in the kitchen to try new things on my own (with my fiance as a test subject, who eats everything anyway!)

But anyways, who likes Red Velvet?? I remember the first time I ever say a Red Velvet recipe I was amazed. I mean...a RED CAKE?? I did give it a try.. it seems like forever ago. I wasn't selling my baked goods back then, I was only doing it for special occations. That's when people started telling me that what I baked was too yummy to go to waste.

This is my 25th Birthday Cake. The inside is a Red Velvet, and the frosting is a Marshmallow frosting I found online. Let me tell ya! Even though people loved it, I found that I had over baked the cake so it was a bit on the dry side, and the Marshmallow Frosting wasn't the greatest match. But i had some cousins visiting from England, and they tried this and LOVED IT! They even told me they found a bakery they go to just for this cake. Btw...the flowers are real. I didn't know where I could find sugarpaste to make sugar ones...speaking of, that's a whole different story, but the first thing I ever did in my life that has to do with confectionary, was the sugar paste roses! I must've been 5 or 6 years old.
What do you think? Not too shabby eih? It was the very first time EVER I had frosted anything!

2 Years after the above picture, I decided I wanted to give it a try to go a bit more pro on this whole baking thing. I made a pricelist, added some of my best recipes on there, downloaded a software that helps you price cakes, and started giving out my menus. I had a tasting event (paired with a birthday party) and my 2nd order was a Red Velvet Cake. Remember this one? That was a whole lot of chaos!

Then I baked one for my neighbor, of which a have a picture of what the inside looks like (but during the cutting of the cake, the picture wasn't all that great) Here it is.

And then, I baked some more Red Velvet Cakes :) But it doesn't stop there. We have all heart of Red Velvet Cupcakes (or most of us). I baked some of those, too. One time, I didn't have enough color, so they seemed like they stayed out in the sun and faded out.. I don't think I have a picture for that (like I'd post it!) Then some other time, I baked them...and I photographed them as if they were models on a catwalk!!

Don't they look pretty? I think they do :). And even though you see it's a Red Velvet on the Cupcake Liner, I had to cut it up so you can reeeeally see the inside.

You know what happened next, right? Well I couldn't take it to the customer like this! So I just had to eat it! (I actually only had 1/4 of it, my fiance the other 1/4 and we took the half to my brother-and-sister-in-law to-be (that's a long word!) so they can try it. Well the rest were for the order I had so I couldn't take them a whole one. It's ok, they understand :)

BUT, the most versatile Red Velvet anything I ever baked was...Red Velvet (drum roll please....) BROWNIES!!! I KNOW, RIGHT? So moist with Cream Cheese Frosting on top.. yumm!!! I baked these for my Valentine's Bake Sale, but I hadn't taken a picture before I put them out on the table. My aunt remembered these and ordered them for a meeting she was having, so I took the chance to photograph them. They are how you see them: moist on the inside, crispy on top, covered with Cream Cheese Frosting. AND, they are Brownies! So there's melted chocolate inside there!

This is it you guys. Many pretty pictures for you to look at until next time :)

Don't forget to like Fairy Cakes on Facebook, too.

Have a great day :!) -xoxo-

Holy Cow Cake

Hi everyone!! As promised, this is the picture of the complete cake from this post. I'm hoping to have the professional picture emailed to me soon by the photographer at the baptism so I can show you :).
As you can tell the theme was "Cow" and I decided that instead of making a 3 tier cake with a cow print, to make the top one a little different. Like a cow in a medow.

Everything is edible on the cake exept the cow. I thought it would be nice for the mum of the baby to keep the cow as a souvenir from the baptism, plus it was too cute of a cow to bypass!
The inside of the cake is a round version of my hedgehog bars, what many also call "fridge bars" or what we call here in Cyprus "doukissa."

If you can sneak a peak in the back of the cake you can also see the book I used as inspiration for the giant daisy where the cow is sitting "The Art of Cupcakes."

I also baked some Vanilla [medow] and some Chocolate [cow] Cupcakes to match the Cake:

I received good reviews for the Cake. It was a great experience..one I would deffinately like to go through again.

Holy Cow!

Goodmorning Everyone!!
So there's a couple of days left for Easter, and also 3 days left for a baptism I'm doing the Cake and Cupcakes for. So I thought I should give you a sneak preview and let you guess what the theme is:

Stay tuned for the picture of the completed cake :)

Test Kitchen

Goodmorning Everyone!!
I hope you all had a GREAT weekend. Mine was the usual: Work on Saturday, bought some birthday presents after work (I get off at 5, shops close at 7), went to my friend's house for coffee Sunday morning, had some good-tasting lunch at my in-laws' to-be, and spent the afternoon in my kitchen testing recipes :!)

First of all, I have to tell you. I do NOT like coconut. Not the smell or flavor itself, but the texture. I try to omit it from my recipes. But see, my fiance? Well that's his FAVORITE flavor!! So he's been asking me to make him some Coconut Cupcakes since...forever! (Especially after our Christmas Cake was a Coconut Cake really). I had never made them before, so I thought I'd give it a try.

He LOVED them! Especially the Cream Cheese Frosting (I added a bit of almond extract this time - since I was testing - to see the difference from it being plain. My conclusion: Too strong of a flavor).

So, since I made him the Coconut Cupcakes that he REEEeeeeAAAlly liked, I should make something I REEEaaally like too, right? YEAP! I'm a sucker for Strawberry desserts! So the other day I bought some strawberries from this girl (you know, those that sell fruit on the streets, or come by your work? Well she came at the shop where I work and they looked really good, so I grabbed a pack). I had them in the refrigerator for 3 days and didn't know what to do with them. So I asked my friends on Facebook, and they suggested the Strawberry Mousse (it was either that or Strawberry Cupcakes with Orange Frosting-recipes I've made before and love, I just couldn't choose all by myself).

 

After I took the pictures, I realized I never left a strawberry behind to decorate! I haven't had one yet. They needed to set and cool in the refrigerator, so I will have one today. I'm pretty sure that they are reeeeeeeeally tasty :) Because they have strawberries in them! You can tell from the picture that this is homemade and not the packaged kind: You can see the strawberry bits!

Other than testing in the kitchen and making yummy gooods, I also baked a Red Velvet Cake for an order (I also baked brownies, but I didn't take a picture of those for you).

This also falls under Test Kitchen because I had many people try it and tell me what they think. Everyone said it was reeeally good...I wasn't all that pleased with it. I think it's because I like the cupcake version much better....due to the fact that cupcakes have a higher cuteness factor!

So, what did you guys do this weekend? Anyone baked something new??

Chocolate Blackout Cake

No, I haven't forgotten about you. It's just that I've been super busy with life and baking. I thought while I have a Cheesecake baking in the oven, I'd share with you what's up with me.

First of all.... I took the biggest step EVER for my career. I. Quit. My. Job. That's right! It was really hard for me to do, but I have given my resignation letter, and as of February 1st, I will be a full time baker! Yeih me!!!

Then, I baked a LOT of Carrot Cakes. Apparently, that's my forte. Everyone LOVES my Carrot Cake. You've seen it before right here. I baked 2 of those today, 1 yesterday, and after I'm done with the Cheesecake in the oven? Yeap, that's right! I'm baking yet another cake for a delivery tomorrow morning. I also had a girl ask me if I can turn it into her Engagement Cake. That's how much she liked it! So I'm working on some ideas for that. 200 people. Wow! A Carrot Cake for 200 people that doesn't look like a wedding cake. Ok.. we'll see how that goes.

Also, yesterday was one of my bestest friend's wedding. It was also the groom's birthday so the bride asked me to bake him a Chocolate Birthday Cake. So I did a Chocolate Blackout Cake. Have you ever had one of those before? It's strictly for Chocolate LOVERS! It's a Chocolate Cake basically, and instead of having frosting, it has Chocolate Custard.
I worte Happy Birthday for him in Greek, and then I closed the top of the box so I could deliver it to the hotel...and the cake was too tall and all the writing came off! So...since I was going to be late, I rewrote it with what I had on hand, and it came out looking a little bulky.

It looks all nice and innocent here, and look how it looks with the writing.

See the yuck-y "O" on the first word? (For all those wondering, it's Happy Birthday in Greek). Well..remember how I said "what I had on hand?" What I DID have on hand last minute, was some Cream Cheese Frosting that was left over from the Carrot Cake I baked in the morning. I mised it with some blue paste color and voia-la! It looks gooey, too, but the whole "birthday" deal lasted about 30 seconds, there was no picture taken of the cake and people just downed it! So other than this picture I am sharing with you guys, no one else will know!! It was a surprise so the photographer didn't get the chance to snap a picture. Thank. You!

Off I go to take out the Cheesecake from the oven. This is how my Cheesecake looks like:

I call it "The New Yorker." The ultimate New York Cheesecake.

Birthday Party Stress!

After a looooooong day (both in the kitchen and at work) I put something casual on and headed to my friend's birthday party. Her birthday cake was my Red Velvet Cake - for which I was prepared for this time with decorations.
I have to say that I think I mastered the art of "frosting." What I did differently? Well I smothered the cream cheese with the back of a spoon to start with, and once I added the powdered sugar, I beat the frosting for a bit over 5 minutes. With a free stand mixer of course!
Once the cake was frosted, I added some red food coloring to the remaining frosting and created a nice pink for the writing, and completed with some red sugared flowers.

The most stressful thing was sitting there, waiting for the cake to be served so I can see everyone's reaction! I wasn't there for the tasting for ANY of my orders. Everyone just called or texted me after they tried what I baked and told me comments (so far, only positive-cross fingers!) But WOW! I was stressing out so much I thought I was going to get up and leave! Finally we blew the candles and served the cake. Everyone wanted to know what it was because it is a bit strange to see a red cake. They all said they loved it and my friend sent me a message that most of it was gone! (I left a bit early due to the fact that I was super tired).

See, this time, I put some simple sugar syrup on the cake since I had the comment from my future sister-in-law that it was a bit dry. Or actually the comment was that it isn't as moist at my Carrot Cake. Of course there's more things in the Carrot Cake to make it moist such as the pineapple and the carrot. The Red Velvet is more simple. But still, I think it came out ok. Not great just yet for my taste. I need to find a nice glaze to add to moisten it.

I found the recipe for the Simple Syrup in :

Even though it was super simple, I needed the ratio of sugar to water.

SUPER EASY.

So now what?

Ok well my first order was completed successfully, and so was my event. Everyone loved everything blah blah...now? Now what? Do I sit and wait for someone to call? I already handed out my pricelist...and I'm actually breaking even on some of the desserts, but oh well. I love baking, so I don't mind much...yet ;)

But it all started to happen on its own. I had a call bright and early for an order of a cake. I had to bake a Red Velvet Cake, frost it, and write on it "Happy Birthday." I;ve NEVER written on a cake before...what do I do? FREAK OUT! Ok...relax. It's time to breathe sloooowly and take it one step at a time.

Shopping List: The only thing missing is the red food coloring. Ok the grocery store has some. No? Ok ok let's go to the next one? Nope! Not here either...ok now it's really time to freak out!!

Meanwhile, I have to say that I still have my full time job as a store manager (and I work overtime EVERY DAY). So...I had to find the red food coloring while I was on my lunch break, bake the cake...wait for it to cool so I can frost it, AND write on it! YIKES!

My supply store was too far for me to go get the coloring so finally I thought of a place that sells cake boxes, called and voia la! They had it! So I drove there, bought a plastic box for the cake, too and drove crazy fast home to complete my mission. Less than 2 hours left on the clock.

The cake was still warm when I started to frost it so the frosting was dripping, but it was ok. I added parchment paper strips under the cake so I can pull them out and have a clean round cake!


10 minutes left for me to have to be at work! Ok ok fast solution: add a small round tip in a ziplock baggie, add red food coloring in the cream cheese frosting that is left over, and keep a steady hand to write.

Boxed the cake, took some pictures and left to work, getting there only 5 minutes late! (My job is about 7 minutes from my house without any traffic, on my Vespa. By car I would've been at least 20 minutes late!)

Second order: COMPLETE!
Comment: Everyone LOVED the Red Velvet Cake. Phew!