Ideas for Decorating Cakes

Its one thing to make a cake and decorate it, but its another thing to actually come up with the inspiration on what NEW cake to make for that special occasion.

I know I have always struggled to find ideas for new cakes, or I have found pictures but never the instructions to make it. Once you have the basic skills under hand its easy to make professional looking cakes without any hassle.

Here are a few top tips for baking and decorating cakes:

1. Do not use butter to grease your tin, butter has water in it and when it melts it will make your beautiful cake soggy. If you use a touch of flour instead that will keep it from sticking to the cake tin.

2. Before you start icing make sure the cake is 100% cooled. Otherwise the icing will start to melt in front of your eyes, and you don’t want to rush your cake decorating.

3. Always put a top and bottom border on your cake to make it look complete. Otherwise, your cake will look a little unfinished.

4. Make sure to stand in front of your cake when you are decorating it. Even better get someone else to glance at it to make sure everything is where it should be. Even take a break every now and then.

5. Make sure that you have the perfect consistency in your icing, too thick or too thin will ruin your cake before you have even started. To thin will not stay on and too thick will pull chunks of your cake off.

It is hard to find inspiration and instructions to actually have your cakes come together like the professionals cakes.

And if you find baking and decorating cakes yourself a bit difficult then you can simply order mouth watering cakes online.

Author: Andrew @ Articlet

How to make yogurt

Last week, I made my own yogurt for the first time, and met with surprising success. While it wasn’t as eventful as last year’s maraschino cherry experiment, I’m still very proud of myself. Here’s how to duplicate the process at home:

1. Get your hands on some yogurt culture. Oh, wait, that’s expensive, which defeats the whole purpose of trying to save some money by making something from scratch. Just get some plain yogurt with live cultures.

2. Doesn’t anybody make plain live-culture yogurt anymore? There’s dead yogurt, there’s flavored yogurt, and there’s plain sugar-free yogurt, which actually has aspartame in it, which is bad for you, and also gives me headaches. Settle on some Dannon vanilla flavored.

3. While you’re at the store, buy a quart of cheap milk. This is an experiment, after all, and you have no idea whether the result will be edible. If it works, you can buy the fancy-pants organic milk next time.

4. Measure three and a half cups of milk into a saucepan. Wonder why you can’t just use the whole quart. Decide to follow the directions this time, since you’re experimenting with bacteria and you wouldn’t want something to go wrong.

5. Add half a cup of dry milk powder so your yogurt will be thick and spoonable like the store bought kind. Unless you’re making yogurt smoothies and you want it thin.

6. Boil the milk. DO NOT turn your back on it, because milk goes from not boiling to boiling over very suddenly.

7. Remove boiled milk from heat. Clean up the mess from the milk that boiled over. Allow the milk to cool to 115 degrees.

8. Realize that it takes an awfully long time for milk to cool down on an eighty-degree day. Pour it in a jar and leave a meat thermometer in it while you watch a few episodes of Firefly, or whatever.

9. Add a couple heaping tablespoons of live-culture yogurt to the 115-degree milk and shake well.

10. Incubate the yogurt at 115 degrees for 6-8 hours. You can do this in a variety of ways, but I used one of my husband’s lunch boxes, because everybody knows how much microbes like to grow in lunch boxes.

11. Open the jar and check on it. What looked like milk this morning should now be all thick and yogurty. Hooray!

12. Who eats plain yogurt, anyway? Mash up some berries and mix them in. Yummy.

13. Oh. wait, not so yummy. Add just a little sugar. That’s better. Enjoy!

Author: Jack Black @ Articlet

Recipe for a Delightful Chocolate Cake

The most famous name in chocolate cakes is the German Chocolate Cake, but the interesting fact is that it was not `German’ at all. It merely used chocolate brand which was called `German’s’ because it had been developed by an Englishman named Sam German in 1852! He was working for Baker’s Chocolate Company.

The recipe for this chocolate cake was first made popular by a Dallas housewife in 1957, and probably due to the fact that German baking is one of the best in the world, the name not only stuck, but also lent the cake its squarely German touch. The result was an instantly popular cake which carried up the sales of the chocolate too. Actually the popularity of the cake can be attributed to the fact that in The Southern US, buttermilk chocolate cakes have been a hit for decades, and the fact that German’s chocolate is sweater than regular baking chocolate, also helped. Coconuts and pecans which are available in the area too, only added to the taste.

In classical terms, the most famous chocolate cake of all times, worldwide, is the Sachertorte, the Viennese chocolate cake with its three layers of luscious chocolate sponge, interspersed with layers of apricot jam. The whole cake is then thickly iced with velvety chocolate. The result was probably why chocolate is synonymous with sinful! It took its name from its creator, Chef Franz Sacher, who created it in 1832 for the Prince Clemens Lothar Wensel Metternich of Austria. Sacher was then an apprentice cook, all of 16 years old, and the Prince’s demand was met with a cake that used only the available ingredients, nothing more. The recipe made him so prosperous that he went on to open several Café’s and restaurants.

Whatever the origins, the chocolate cake has always been one of the most irresistible temptations…after all how many other desserts you know have been named `Death by Chocolate??’

Chocolate Cake Recipe

2 cups flour

125 grams chocolate (squares)

3 eggs

1 cup softened butter

1 cup sugar

2 tbsp cocoa powder

¼ cup milk

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Grease two cake tins of 7 inch diameter.

Melt the chocolate in a bowl set over a deep pan of boiling water.

Cream together butter and sugar and add the eggs one at a time, beating well. Add the melted chocolate and beat till well combined.

Sift the flour and cocoa powder together and fold into the chocolate-egg-sugar-butter mix. Don’t beat too much. After the mixture is blended well, pour into the baking tin . Bake for about 45 minutes, or till well risen.

For the sandwich icing :

100 grams unsalted butter

1 and a ½ cup icing sugar

1 tbsp cocoa powder

½ tsp vanilla essence

Beat together all these ingredients to form a light chocolate cream. Use to sandwich the two cakes together.

The top layer can be either dusted with castor sugar or cocoa powder, or both, Stencils may be used for decorating further.

For a different look, and in a bid to be creative as Chef Sacher, try using apricot or raspberry jam to sandwich layers, alternating with chocolate cream, white cream or plain chocolate layers, before closing with the second cake layer. Icing can also be made to have a royal touch if chocolate cream is poured over this whole cake sandwich.

And if you think you can’t take the pain of making a chocolate cake yourself, you can simply order a chocolate cake online.

Author: Andrew @ Articlet