2013 Game Changer: Cake on Demand

Soaking Bake E-Z strips. Cutting out parchment circles. Running my oven for hours on end. Washing cake pans. These are a few things I look forward to not doing so much of in 2013.

It's all thanks to a random stop at a Safeway store on the wrong side of the Golden Gate Bridge this morning. On a whim, I popped by the bakery to ask if they'd sell me some uniced cakes. This was not the first time I've tried that move at various grocery stores and bakeries in my neighborhood. Except all the other times the bakery clerks looked at me like I had two heads.

Today, however, I was lucky enough to happen upon the bakery manager, who understood exactly what I was looking for and easily produced two 8-inch chocolate rounds from the freezer.

Courtesy of my new BFF, Phillip, the bakery manager at Safeway in Mill Valley

$10.99 plus tax bought me the two individually-wrapped cakes, with a cake circle and a box as well. Phillip even had 6-inchers to offer.

Decorators: what are your thoughts on buying pre-baked, uniced, frozen cakes? Is it "cheating" if you make no claims to have baked the cakes yourself?
As a buyer, would you be opposed to having factory-baked cakes if the fillings and frosting are made from scratch and the cake is custom-decorated to your specifications?

Mais non! Apparently the French do it as well!

Imagine my delight when I spied these uniced, wrapped genoise cakes available for sale at the G'Detou patisserie supply shop in Paris during my visit last summer. (And then imagine my despair when I realized I knew of nowhere else from which to purchase these cakes, except the G'Detou patisserie supply shop in Paris.)

G'Detou is, naturally, #1 on my abandoned Paris Top 10 list.

Click here to see what some are saying about decorating pre-baked cakes on cakecentral.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts below.

I Love Daiso: Treat Baggies

It's been a busy month of cake projects, and that means lots of cake scraps to make cake pops with.
Today, I cranked out a bunch of lemon vanilla cake pops in short order, to take on the road with me on a production gig to Houston (I have a colleague who routinely greets me with, "Did you bring me any cupcakes?")

"E" is for Ed, my co-worker with the sweet tooth.

To get them safely to Texas, I wrapped them individually in treat bags, which are easily available at cake supply stores, craft stores and even at many grocery stores.

Sweet little lollicakes, in their baggies, all nestled in a box. 

 But at $1.50 for 40 pieces, with twist ties, Daiso has the best deal around.

What is Daiso?Click here.
Is there a Daiso near you? Click here for a list of U.S. locations.

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: