Sunday, September 10, 2017

Making a Frozen cake

Adventures of a super-amateur (as in, mostly experienced in cake mix) baker....

For her 4th birthday this year, my daughter requested an "Anna and Elsa cake". When she requested the same thing last year, I went the cheap route, ordering a chocolate sheet cake with plain white frosting from Costco, an edible cake topper from etsy, and Frozen figurines from Amazon. I also evidently never took a photo of just the cake.


This turned out ok - Costco cake is decent for such an inexpensive cake ($19 for a 1/2 sheet in 2015), the image made her happy, and the figurines were useful as toys afterwards, but I thought maybe I could do better this year.

After talking to a bakery and getting price shocked ($150 to feed 40 people??), and remembering that no bakery I talked to last year did a particular Frozen design, they just asked me to find an image online for them to replicate, I remembered why I went the Costco route last year. But I was still determined to do better. Maybe I would try to make one myself.

First, I thought I might take a Wilton Cake Decorating class from my local Michael's store, which was only $15, but after registering realized that you actually have to buy a lot of supplies, AND make a cake and buttercream frosting before showing up. Luckily, they were good about cancellations and refunding my class fee. Instead, I decided to indulge and sign up for a Party Cake class at Baking Arts in downtown San Mateo. The $90 class fee certainly wouldn't help me *save* money vs going to a bakery, but I also didn't need supplies or prior knowledge of cake baking or frosting making, and it seemed like it might be fun. Plus, I might actually be able to use the skills again. The class was fun, though focused more on cake leveling/layering/frosting than decorating, and I went home with a delicious recipe for a vanilla butter cake and another for Swiss buttercream frosting. Plus, a cake.


I then went about plotting my cake and acquiring supplies, primarily a cake turntable, short angled spatula, some decorating tips, and lots and lots of butter and eggs. After all, the party was going to have 40+ people, so I was pretty convinced I'd need both the 9" round "fancy" cake and a 1/4 sheet cake to feed everyone. I gave myself most of 4 days to work on this.

At first, I thought I'd do a simple blue cake with some snowflakes and white frosting and the Frozen figures on top, maybe try to make some white mountains with frosting or leftover cake or something. Thanks to the power of Google and YouTube, I found a simple tutorial on how to make royal icing snowflakes. My first attempt took me like 3.5 hours to make 20+ snowflakes, but turned out pretty well. Those snowflakes break really easily though. They also keep indefinitely, so I made them a few days early.


Then, since I was told buttercream can be made a few days in advance, I turned my attention to making blue and white buttercream for the two cakes. I figured I should at least triple the recipe for that much cake.



Royal blue color wasn't exactly the right color to use for the shade I was looking for, but what can you do. Didn't take too many drops to get the frosting blue. Making buttercream, at least with a stand mixer and an infrared thermometer, was surprisingly easy. Into the fridge that went.

After all that buttercream, I found myself with a plethora of egg yolks that I was loath to just throw away. After some Googling for what to do with leftover egg yolk, I used this recipe to make lemon curd from leftover egg yolk and lemons from our backyard. This was relatively simple (though it took a while for the curd to set) but boy are the lemons from our yard tart. This made some seriously tart lemon curd.  Word of advice: do *not* make scrambled eggs from just egg yolk. It's really weird.



So now, I was feeling good. I had my frosting, I had my snowflakes, I had my Frozen figures and my recipe for the cake. So of course, this is when my daughter tells me she doesn't just want an "Anna and Elsa" cake, she wants an ice palace on the cake. Errr....

Googling "Frozen ice palace birthday cake" turned up an unbelievable array of gorgeous, multi-tier wonders that there was no way I'd ever be able to replicate. But after looking through a ton of Pinterest photos. I came across a couple that I thought I might actually be able to do something with (cake 1 and cake 2). Oddly enough, it was my 4 year old who gave me the idea of what material to use. I asked her jokingly what I could make an ice palace with, and she said "um, chocolate!". I pointed out that this would mean a brown ice palace, and she said she was ok with that.   But of course, white chocolate exists, and after talking to Richard at Baking Arts, I went home armed with a bag of white vanilla non-pareils (no actual chocolate or cocoa butter content). His suggestion was to melt them down and spread them on parchment paper with my angled spatula to solidify into flat sheets which I could then cut into shape. Add a little blue food dye into one batch, and voila! This worked surprisingly well, and I soon had a collection of shapes that might actually resolve into a passable ice palace. Sprinkle a little blue and silver glitter on top, and they start even looking pretty.




Another note: this stuff hardens quickly and if you obsess too much about getting it perfectly smooth, you end up really screwing it up. On the plus side, it is super easy to re-melt and start over. Also, I carefully cut it with a knife - put a little too much pressure, and it'll splinter off in an unexpected directly. Yay re-melting!

OK, so now I had snowflakes, ice palace pieces, and frosting. Time to actually make the cake(s) (the day before the party).

So much butter and so many eggs. My recipe was for two 9" rounds, so I doubled it to make the 9"x13" cake. That ended up being too much, so I ended up with two 9"x13" cakes, one of which was a bit thicker than the other. I figured that actually meant I could make the rectangular cake three layers so people eating that cake wouldn't get stiffed on frosting layers.



I didn't anticipate how buttercream frosting turns hard as a rock (or butter) when cold. Need to leave time (2-3 hours) to let it come up to room temperature, and then put it through the stand mixer again to get the consistency right. But once I did that, it seemed almost as good as new. Next time, I might not make it ahead of time though. It takes less time to make than it takes to come up to room temperature.

Looks like I didn't forget everything from the Party Cake class about leveling, frosting, and putting on the crumb layer (thin layer of frosting that keeps crumbs from getting into the pretty layer). The turntable sure was nice to have.


Leveling and frosting the rectangular cake was more challenging, since many of the techniques we learned didn't really work. I did my best:



Time for the blue frosting. This was before refrigerating for an hour and cold-carving it smooth. At this stage, you just do your best to make it mostly smooth.



Post cold-carving and application of snowflakes (very very carefully - I broke a bunch in this process, but on the plus side, you can sometimes just stick the broken pieces together with frosting and it's not obvious).



Not seen is my dry run at making sure I could make the ice palace work. This basically entailed making yet another batch of white buttercream frosting, gobbing a bunch of it on top to resemble a snow drift, and making sure the white chocolate pieces would stay upright when stuck into the buttercream.

My original intention was to put snowflakes on both cakes, but do all the fancy decorating on the round cake since the other one was just to make sure we had enough cake. However, my daughter threw another wrench in the works when she declared the day before the party that she really wanted an "Ariel" (Little Mermaid) cake as well as a Frozen cake. Going along with her felt like over-indulging, but at the same time I did have a second cake, and the ocean *was* blue. So my original plan was just to take her Little Mermaid figurines and do this:

Alone in a vast blue sea...
However, my sister had just done a mermaid-themed birthday party for her daughter the month before, and she offered me her ocean-themed cake decorations to use.

Finally, it was the day of the party. I carefully boxed both cakes up (yay Baking Arts again) as well as all the other component pieces, and cheered when they survived the drive to the birthday party venue. Once there, I spent a good twenty minutes re-assembling the cakes as the kids played.

Final products:

The seaweed is always greener...in somebody else's cake
So crowded, but hey - ice palace!
Finally enjoying the fruit of my labors (not really, I sampled a lot of cake and frosting along the way):



Turns out, a three layer 9"x13" cake is more than enough to feed twenty 2-4 year olds and whichever of their parents decided to actually eat cake. The Frozen cake was disassembled again, transported home, and actually frozen in the deep freezer to eat another day. And a final note on that: it's advised to defrost the cake overnight in the fridge and then out on the counter to bring to room temperature before serving. I decided last minute that a large family reunion a week after the birthday party was a great opportunity to eat the cake, but only had a couple hours to defrost. Turns out that you can defrost the cake at (somewhat higher than) room temperature for 3 hours, and it pretty much works. True, it was a particularly warm day during a heat wave, and the cake wasn't perfect, but there were no complaints.

So, in the end, making my own Frozen cake didn't remotely save me money, between the cake class, the cake decorating supplies, the time, and even the cost of the eggs and butter. However, I think I was happier with the end result than I would have been working with one of the local bakeries I talked to, I had a lot of fun, and I might (hopefully) be able to use the skills gained again in the future.



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