Cooper's Fire Truck

My 5-week cake hiatus is finally over! This week I got to make a fire truck cake for my co-worker's nephew, Cooper, who is having his 3rd birthday party tomorrow.

I broke out a new toy for this cake - a brick-patterned impression mat that I bought at a craft store. I stumbled upon it in the copper tooling section, of all places! 

I'm starting to learn that craft stores are a great resource for caking - a lot of the clay tools work just as well as fondant tools (e.g. my handy dandy Makin's Professional Ultimate Clay Extruder, that I use for everything!)

My handy dandy Makin's extruder

I'm told Cooper had been asking for a fire truck cake for months, ever since he saw someone make one on Youtube (apparently this 3-year-old shares my pastime of watching cake tutorials on the internet?) His mom sent a picture of the cake he wanted, and I set off to find some guidance on building the structure of the cake. Here's a video from Betty Crocker Kitchens, and here's a link to instructions I found at Disney Family Fun magazine online - it has has nifty graphics showing how to cut and stack your cake.


The cake was rainbow inside. Here's a picture collage showing how easy it is to make a rainbow cake (except for the lots of extra dishes, as shown in the last picture.)

Et voila!

Caking for a Cause

One of the "issues" I'm constantly up against as an amateur cake artist: not always having someone to make cake for! Friends and family have been more than gracious in accepting my unclaimed projects and more than generous with their praise, but there's nothing like knowing my hard work is going to light up the face of a child... especially when the child could use something to smile about.

After coming across it a few times on the Cakeb0t blog, today I finally applied to get involved with a non-profit called Icing Smiles.

 



Click on the picture to visit the Icing Smiles website


Bakers of all skill levels are invited to sign up to make custom cakes and treats for critically ill children and their families.

The homepage reads, "We understand that the simple things, like a birthday cake, are luxuries to a family battling illness.  Our goal is to create a custom cake for the ill child or their sibling that will provide a temporary escape from worry and create a positive memory during a difficult time."

This picture from the website sums it up:

It's genius - hobbyists get to practice their craft while making a difference, and professionals get to give back to the community. I can't wait to hear back and get my first assignment.

Tart Art

Several of the new malls that have cropped up since my last visit to Singapore feature entire areas designed around the Japanese food hall concept. Tonight I visited one that had a Japanese tart shop that my mom had been raving about, Fruit Paradise Cafe.

The tarts were so artfully decorated with fresh fruit, they shellac'd a whole bunch and lined a wall with them.
 

But the real oohs and aahs come when the tarts are cut. Look how the perfect layers of sponge cake and bananas have been carefully inlaid in the tart below, creating a precise pattern suspended inside the cream filling.

These pictures really don't do them justice - I was trying to be fast and sneaky with my camera lest they tell me to stop taking photos like they did at the Icing Room.

 I read somewhere that when the chain first set up shop on the Island, they attracted such long lines of food-crazy Singaporeans, orders had to be limited to a maximum of 4 slices per person.

Green Grape Tart



The Japanese really do take their love for cute food very seriously. I'm wrapping up my trip to Singapore with a renewed desire to visit Japan, if for nothing else, the food art.

Pumped for Pumpkin

My sweet husband got me a gift certificate to Baking Arts for my birthday this year. They offer classes on everything from scones, to macarons, to a 4-day series on wedding cakes. 

I've been checking their class calendar since June and finally found an opening in a class that's right up my alley.

 

How to make a 3D pumpkin cake! I'll be learning how to cover a carved cake with fondant, and more importantly, I'll get my hands on an airbrush. Stay tuned for pictures from the class next month.

$6 Cupcakes and Delightful Designs

It's been 3 weeks since my last cake and I'm really fiending for some QT with my KitchenAid. But until I'm back in SF, my cake-centric escapades in Singapore continue.Tonight, I got to check out Marina Bay Sands, a glamorous waterfront megaplex that combines luxury shopping, the arts, a casino, a hotel, and food of all kinds, including $6 cupcakes!

Edible gold leaf was a prominent feature of the fare at High Society, which is actually a local record company that has expanded into the business of food and drink. Apparently the market for super premium products and prestigious brands is still robust in Singapore. The pretty two-bite-sized cakelets that adorn the pastry case ran anywhere from $9 to $12.

I love this idea:

These chocolate cherry choux pastry concoctions come with a little squeezable vial of kirsch sticking out of the top. It looks like you're meant to inject the good stuff into the pastry before eating it - how fun! I have to figure out where I can find those vials.

My best friend picked up a cupcake and a cakelet to bring home to her husband and they were packaged in an exquisite box as precious as the pastries inside.

Next I wandered into a gift shop, where I stumbled upon a fun idea for a cake design.

I love the the intricate patterns and bright colors on these pieces of furniture. I covet a statement piece from the South African designer Thomas Hoffman, but a) my sweet husband would never stand for it (too loud) and b) a small cabinet unit like the one below runs about... erm... $2,000.

So I figure maybe I could just recreate this look on a cake instead, some day... complete with the feet! Or maybe you could. I'd love to see it.

Bake King

Next stop after The Icing Room on my cake shopping day in Singapore: Gim Hin Lee (Pte.) Ltd. - "For All Your Baking & Cooking Needs"

This shop, which is the retail outlet for Bake King supplies, brought me back to my early days of baking, and reminded me of all the different local sweets I grew up eating. Next to the Wilton decorating supplies were cutters for Nonya Kuih. Alongside the mind-boggling array of fancy cupcake wrappers, were molds for mooncakes.


Left: Nonya Kuih, a distinctly Singaporean variety of brightly-colored Straits Chinese cakes, often made from glutinous rice flour and steamed, heavy with the aromas and flavor of screwpine leaves and coconut. Right: Mooncakes are a Chinese pastry with a thin skin, filled with lotus or red bean paste, sometimes with a whole duck egg yolk baked in, traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

                      

 When I asked if I could take pictures, the store owner, Vincent, kindly obliged and we struck up a conversation. I told him about how I missed the flavors of home. I told him how many of the Asian markets in the U.S., even in San Francisco, only offered a fraction of the selection of oils and essences and emulcos that now lay before me.  

When I told Vincent how I had a barely-used bottle of pandan (screwpine) essence in my pantry, he excitably grabbed a bottle of Bake King pandan essence off the shelf, unscrewed its cap, shoved it beneath my nostrils and asked, "Is it as good as this one?!" It is not!



Durians: dangerous in every way

Before I knew it, Vincent was opening a bottlle of Bake King Durian essence and waving it before me. Those of you know know about durian know where this story is going. Those of you who don't, look it up and be glad you don't have the web version of smellavision. Let's put it this way: my husband once took me to get Durian ice cream, refused to let me eat it in the car and seriously considered making me sleep in the guest room that night.



I left the Durian essence behind, and made off with only 2 relatively unexciting acquisitions: gold petal dust and a paper pop-up cake stand, which I think I may have come across online before.




Thanks to my Aunty Vini for assisting with my cake stand photo shoot.



I got home and immediately checked out the Bake King website, and they have classes as well! If I were staying longer I'd be all over the Japanese figurine class. How cute are these?! 

Bake King, I'll be back!

The Icing Room

My first order of business when I'm back home in Singapore is usually to eat my way across the island, but not this time. Topping the agenda on this trip - cake shops! It turns out my mom has been squirreling away clippings of new attractions I'd be interested in, and among them was this place:

A cake decorating bar! Located in the food-focused basement level of one of Singapore's newest mega-malls, a row of turntables (not seen here) awaits anyone with a yen for decorating a pre-frosted cake for a fee.

The Icing Room provides a massive selection of sugar decos and pre-filled pastry bags of colored frosting, making it more of a fit for the novice decorator, kids or anyone just looking to add a personal touch to a celebration. What a novel idea, and super-cute as well, especially with the giant lampshades and staff dressed in tiny ruffled aprons to add to the lilliputian theme.


They wouldn't let me take any more pictures, so I grabbed the next one from the Icing Room website, which is here.

They also host workshops for kids, and sell adorable little cakes, like this one:

Hello!

Welcome to My Sweet Blog.

I'm Gitu Mehra, the best cake decorator to come out of my home kitchen in San Francisco, CA.

Me, not in my home kitchen, but inside a vintage trailer repurposed as a cupcake truck.

Baking and crafting were hands-down my first "real" hobbies as a child growing up in Singapore. Many years later and over 8,000 miles away, a break from my career as a broadcast news producer led me to take a basic Wilton Method class at Michael's. That opened the door to my new obsession with "caking", giving me the opportunity to reconnect with both neglected childhood pastimes.

Well... maybe not so much the baking part. While I still love to bake (stay tuned for a post on my foray into the world of French macarons), for me, the real fun begins when the cake comes out of the oven. So, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm coming clean: most of my cake projects start with a box of Betty Crocker. What do you think about that? (I'm already plotting a post on the debate on box vs. scratch.)

If you're here for cake recipes, I probably can't help (although I'd love for you to share yours.) What you'll find here are pictures, ideas, tips and the stories behind my confectionery endeavors. I am, for the most part, self-taught. You'll find that most of my projects involve trying (and very often failing at) techniques that are new to me, so any advice and insight you may have is welcomed wholeheartedly.

I love reading cake blogs and I hope I can also be a source of inspiration for other at-home decorators. I  hope you'll keep coming back... or better still, subscribe by entering your e-mail address in the box at the top right hand corner of the page.

Thanks for stopping by!

- Gitu