Cooking Measure Equivalents

Chocolate Birthday Cake

I made this chocolate cake from scratch, covered with pure semi sweet chocolate thick glaze and decorated with strawberries and raspberry, which I think goes well with chocolate. I also made a chocolate heart shaped mold flat sheet on which I wrote the birthday message with white butter cream icing.

 This is the first time I made everything from scratch and I was happy seeing the results.

I also learnt a new technique of making chocolate mold. To my surprise it turned out better than I thought, but needs some more perfection. :-)

Recipe for Chocolate Cake

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Ingredients:

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1 1/2 cups All-Purpose Flour

1 cup Sugar

1/2 tsp Salt

1 tsp Baking Soda

1/3 cup Cocoa        (I used 1/3 cup of Semi-Sweet Chocolate and melted in the microwave for about 20 secs, stir it, again 20 secs in microwave, until the chocolate melted - I was running out of cocoa powder :-))

1 tsp Vanilla Essence

1/3 cup Cooking Oil (can be substituted with un-sweetened Apple Sauce)

1 cup Water

Method:

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1. Preheat the oven  to 350F.

2. In a mixing bowl mix all the dry ingredients really well. 

3.  Add the liquid ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix with a fork. 

4. Put batter  in a baking pan of desired shape and bake for 35 to 45 minutes until the fork comes out clean.

Icing:

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4 Chocolate squares (I used same semi-sweet chocolates - 1/3 cup - just eyeball the amount of how much icing you need)

3 tbsp Milk

2 tbsp Oil

2 tbsp Icing Sugar

Method:

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1. Melt the chocolate in microwave first for about 20 secs, stir it with a rubber or wooden spatula, again microwave for another 20 secs stir again and repeat it until the chocolate melts.

2. Blend rest of the ingredients together with the melted chocolate.

3. Pour the icing over the cake and even it out with a spatula.

4. To get even layer, dip a clean spatula in hot water and even out the icing if you need to.

Baby Shower Cake - Animal Theme

I made this baby shower cake with animal theme.

I baked French vanilla cake with butter cream frosting to make the fondant to stick. I mixed yellow, bright green, light green and purple color fondants separately to make the fondant base with yellow fondant, green for the grass and moss, and purple fondant to make the ribbon to write the message with butter cream icing. I put plastic cake topper animals, to make my work easy and also to look elegant.

It is fun to work with fondant, but at the same time hard to mix and roll out the fondant, but cutting shapes and designs is easy.

I am trying to work on the writing skills now. I hope this is not bad this time, because before I used to get happy birthday candles or edible cake toppers and just write the name by myself. But I decided to give it a try again. I am happy that it turned out pretty good.