Friday, July 25, 2008

Back To Bussiness

OMG. It feels like ages since my last post. Yes, I disappeared for months and here's why. Months ago as it is common in early pregnancy, I got pretty bad morning sickness. Um, all -day -sickness to be precise. I didn't really have appetite for food, not even looking at them. Baking and cooking activities was sooo minimized. I must admit it was the laziest several months in my life. I don't know why I didn't feel like doing anything, you know... besides my primary obligations as a mom and a wife. And another confession to make here is, beside abandoning this blog, I didn't bother to go blog walking too. So forgive me girls...I'll be checking your blogs very soon.
Good news now, number 3 has arrived to this world, healthy and happy. Thank God :))
But as much as I was avoiding my mixer and oven months ago, I couldn't resist when number 1 asked me to make him a birthday cake with car theme. You know boys. I remember what they say about boys : their first love are wheels, not heels. Hmm, true. I decided to go for a cake with 3D cars on it as I haven't done that before. My son picked Luigi and Guido, characters from Disney's Cars movie, the Italian duo who own Casa della Tires, a tyre store in Radiator Spring. The base cake was Lapis Surabaya and the characters were carved from butter cake. But eventually the two cars were too big to stand on the cake although the cake was big ( it took us some time to finish that cake). Finally only Luigi, the more dominant character stood alone on the cake.

Just in case you are wondering, the circles beside Luigi were meant to be tires :D

Another project I have done was birthday cake for my friend's daughter. Aurel, the birthday girl, loves Ariel (mother goose sure loves this rhyme :p) the Little Mermaid. It was her Ariel doll sitting on the cake.
The cake was covered by butter cream. Ariel's scales was made from fondant, which I thought was too plain. Should have carved the scales to make it more natural.

Along with the birthday cake were Flounder-shaped cookies. Initially, Sebastian was also on the list but I gave up. Come on.... Sebastian, a crab or a lobster or whatever he was with his complicated claws... :). Mmm...maybe next time.
It was quite difficult to find a perfect Flounder picture which is not to complicated. Once I found the perfect one from a website, I printed it out, cut, and paste it on a cardboard. The cookie dough then shaped, by cutting with a small sharp knife, according to the shaped cardboard.

Done with shaping, now it's baking time. I found that transferring the cookie dough from the work table to the pan was not very easy. The cookie dough was so delicate, once you slipped, the shape would look strange and you don't have any choice except to make another one.

The baked cookies then ready to be iced with colorful royal icing. This, I think is the most fun part of the process. It's really time consuming, yeah, so much for a cookie. ..But once I saw the outcome, I was quite satisfied. They're not very disappointing, are they?

But despite all the 'fun', if I was asked to do it again, I'm going to think twice :D.