Boy Meets Girl Cake

I saw this engagement cake posted by Hello Naomi and I fell in love with it. It is too cute! I love love love the floating balloon on the cake, simple yet very pretty. I wanted to make something similar, but with fondant-covered tiered cakes instead of cupcakes. Hello Naomi's inspiration was a picture from BoldLoft "Boy Meets Girl" collection, so I went to their website and started looking for ideas. They had a lot of very cute illustrations on their website, but some of them were very complicated or not suitable for tiered cakes. I started doodling and came up with an idea which included Hello Naomi's floating balloon decoration. Since the main purpose of this was for me to practice my cake decoration techniques, I used cake mix and canned frosting for the base. Personally, I really like the cake, despite the uneven bottom tier and rather sloppy fondant covering. Not bad though for a first trial :D

Bake-oholic: Profiteroles & Gorilla Bread

I have an exam tomorrow, but having said that, I was not in the mood to study at all. My brain's already pretty rusty and I couldn't memorize anything. I was pretty stressed out, so as usual, I baked :p This weekend, profiteroles and gorilla bread were on my baking list. Profiteroles are basically mini cream puffs filled with either ice cream or pastry cream. Gorilla bread is the bigger version of monkey bread; store-bought biscuits filled with cream cheese, topped with nuts and cinnamon sugar. You can find the recipe for cream puff in my post "My Favorite Dough: Pate a choux" and here for gorilla bread recipe.

..... Alright, can't think of anything more to say, my brain is full of technical terms and diagrams -_______-" So, just enjoy the pictures of the profiteroles and gorilla bread below :)

Mid-Autumn Festival: Mooncake

Yesterday was the mid-autumn festival or 中秋节. Usually, we celebrate this festival by eating mooncake, lots of it. Too bad I'm currently living in a small Midwest town where it is very difficult to find good quality mooncake :( I was craving for it sooo bad and my mom only made it worse by telling me that she has plenty of mooncakes at home. Then I thought, "Hey, just make your own!" So, I looked for recipes online and found a pretty promising one. It looked fairly simple. For the skin, you only need：

110 g golden syrup
1/2 tsp soda water (combine 1/2 tsp baking soda + 1 tsp water, then use 1/2 tsp of the mixture)
40 g vegetable oil
160 g all-purpose flour
a pinch of salt

That's it. Just mix all the ingredients together and wait for 4 hours or more for the dough to relax. Very simple right? Next, the filling. Ughh, it was so complicated. You have to cook the lotus seeds, mash them, stir fry them until dry. Gosh... I needed a shortcut. I went to the Asian grocery store here and looked for premade lotus seed paste (莲蓉), which is my favorite mooncake filling, but I couldn't find it. They only had red bean paste. Okay, that would have to do for now. So I bought red bean paste and salted eggs, portioned the paste into 110 g balls (for big mooncake), and inserted one salted egg yolk (remove and reserve the whites) into each paste balls. After the dough has sit for a couple of hours, I portioned them into 60 g balls (it was supposed to be 40 g dough balls, but I wasn't that good in wrapping stuff so I ended up needing more than 40 g) and wrap it around the paste-yolk balls. I used my silicon rose mold to form the mooncakes, sprinkled a little bit of water on each of the cakes, baked them at 350 F for 5 minutes, took them out of the oven, turned the oven temperature down to 300 F, brushed the cakes with egg wash, baked them again for about 12 minutes, and lastly put them under the broiler for a couple of minutes until they became golden brown. Sounds easy, but actually it was difficult to wrap the paste balls with the dough. I got cracks here and there, but whatever :p Anw, if you can't find mooncake in your town like me or you just want to try making your own, just follow the recipe above, I think it should be pretty straightforward :D