"Piece of Cake" Cake

Aaaaaaaaahhhhh.

That's the sound of me working on a cake after a two-and-a-half month dry spell. Between work and travel, and work travel, my cake supply cabinet was in a sorry state of neglect.

Cake supplies amid some cobwebs.

This week I finally had some time to dust off my turntable and rev up the KitchenAid, for not one, but two mini cake projects, just for fun.

One was a design I had been eager to try for a while: a "Piece of Cake" cake.

I've seen this concept on several Web sites, usually as part of a multi-tiered cake. Take the one below, made by CakeCentral user, "lilo_taart" who credits one of "The Whimsical Bakehouse" books. (I found these books at my local library.)

Just doing the top slice is a great way to make use of a single leftover cake layer, or to create something small that still makes a statement.

One layer, cut into 6 segments and stacked (I only used 4 of the segments)

As you can probably tell, I wasn't too concerned about being neat or mixing the right colors - I really just wanted to "flex my muscle", try some new things and practice some little-used techniques. Like making white chocolate ganache...

My ganache kept separating... 

... and ended up a little gritty.

... and working with modeling chocolate.

I had also been dying to play with one of my new cake toys, a KitchenAid pasta roller attachment that I got for Christmas.

I tried feeding some modeling chocolate into the roller but it just crumbled into a messy pile.

I wasn't discouraged, I just wanted to play and really hadn't taken any time to research this technique. My guess is the modeling chocolate was too dry to be workable. I have the "Wrapped Cakes: Extraordinary Stripes" DVD from Baking Arts, where they use the pasta attachment to  roll out the modeling chocolate. I'll probably give this another go after watching it.

Click on the video below for a sneak peek.

The second mini cake I made this week had a little more care put into it. More on that in a later post.