The Most Unprofessional Professional Cake Ever (or: how Nicole totally overestimated her skills)

So at my old workplace I was known for the birthday cakes I made for colleagues at least a couple of times a month. So when the company's 60th anniversary rolled around, they asked me whether I'd feel up to making the cake for the anniversary party - with 350+ guests, even though I don't even work there anymore. And totally floored by the honor of being asked I was like "Sure, no problem at all. Cake for 350 people? Coming right up."

(c) Nina Stiller (edited by me)
To give you a bit of a frame of reference here: until last Wednesday, I had worked with fondant exactly twice. Both times on cakes smaller than an average spring pan. I had never made a tiered cake. And the biggest cake I had ever made was probably my former boss's birthday cake, which had 4 layers, but was still the size of a normal spring pan.

You see where I'm going with this, right?

The party was Friday night, so I went shopping on Tuesday (and seriously, the looks you get at the grocery store when you buy 150 eggs and 8kg of butter - I mean, it's not that uncommon), was planning to bake on Wednesday and fill and decorate the cakes Thursday and Friday. I was totally convinced I had bought way too much stuff for the cake.

First mistake.

(c) Nina Stiller
Wednesday night I had my first mini-breakdown, because of course I had way too little cake for the size I had planned for. Plus, my go-to-chocolate cake recipe that even has "perfect for layer cakes!" scribbled in the margins of my recipe book failed me for the first time ever. Seriously, "Murphy" should be my middle name. So around midnight I finally had a plan worked out on how to rescue the cake...which I discarded again around 7am the next morning. I finally decided on losing a tier and just making the bottom tier out of two different cakes to give it some height. Then I got my ganaches out of the fridge to start filling the first cakes.

Any my white ganache had totally curdled. Again. (This always happens!! What am I doing wrong?!) So two hours of chopping chocolate all for nothing and no plan B in sight. About 5 pounds of emergency buttercream and 6 hours later I had finally filled all the cakes and crumbcoated them. Of course since all my cakes were totally falling apart, I had to completely scale back on my cream fillings and up the buttercream/ganache portion in the hopes that that stuff would basically glue them together.By this point, everything non-cake-essential (meaning: all my normal groceries) had to leave the fridge because there wasn't any space left.

So sometime that afternoon I started covering the first cakes in fondant and - as I had pretty much expected by that point - that didn't go as smoothly as I had planned either. I was using Satin Ice instead of Wilton fondant for the first time and first found it very sticky only for it to completely crack when I covered the cake with it. I'm pretty sure it was me doing something wrong, I just have no idea what it was. Did I knead too long? Not long enough? Should I have used some GumTex to make it more pliable? No idea.

Anyway. Since my crumbcoating skills leave something to be desired as well, the fondant was anything but smooth, but by that point I honestly didn't care anymore (okay, that's a total lie, but I couldn't do anything about it, so I had to move on). After I had covered three of the layers, I wanted to color a bit of fondant green for the decoration and let me tell you, I used almost an entire bottle of gel coloring, but do you think the silly stuff turned the green I wanted? Of course not. It stayed a minty pastel instead of turning a nice dark green. I could have lived with that, but when I started rolling the fondant out and cutting strips to cover the cake with, suddenly the fondant wasn't all cracking and sticky anymore - noooo, now it had the consistency of chewing gum. So instead of a nice even strip of green around the cake, I had a completely uneven...something. I attached the fondant paper anyway and just hoped everyone would be drunk enough at the party so they wouldn't actually see it.

(c) Nina Stiller
When I got up Friday morning, I felt like someone had run me over. Holy sh..., I've never been this sore from baking a cake. It felt like I'd built a house, not a cake. I still had to cover the bottom layer with fondant and finish my decorations, though, so I had to get up anyway....only to realize that I had no space anywhere to roll out the fondant as big as I needed to cover the whole layer (not too mention: how do you roll out fondant to that size (about 100x80cm) while keeping it even? And how do you move it after you've managed to roll it out?) In the end I decided to cover the two cakes separately, also because they would fit back into the fridge until the caterer picked them up that way, which was a plus considering the temparatures (but also looked very, very amateurish).

Shortly before the caterer came by to pick up the cake I arranged the bottom layer on the cake board we had made - only to realize when we wanted to bring the cake outside that the board didn't fit through my kitchen door. Let me tell you, I was dying inside when we had to start tilting the board to get it through the door, but alas, we made it without the cake ending on the floor.

I will spare you the story of how the caterer transported my poor cake. Let me just say, I refused to be left behind and insisted on him taking me with him, because I didn't trust him with the cake after I'd seen the vehicle it was transported in (not to mention that he ripped of half of my specially printed fondant paper while putting the cake in the car - thank you very much). I'll also spare you the story of what happened when we got to the party. Let's just say I was pretty close to a complete meltdown before the cake was finally assembled and found it's rightful place on the dessert buffet.

In the end, I was happy the cake arrived (mostly) safe and sound and people seem to have liked it (it even ended up being featured in the trade press as part of the anniversary coverage), so all's good. I still think I should have done a lot better, though, and I'm still kind of embarrassed by all the flaws the cake had.

So the next time someone asks me to make a cake for 300+ people and I'm tempted to say yes? Please someone whack me with a baking tray.

♥ Nicole

Kind of a "best of", part 2

Alright, where were we? Fondant! Right. So since I really enjoyed the fondant course, I did a second course at the same place, this time tackling edible flowers...


Well, let me just tell you: I'm a rose girl through and through. Who needs lilies anyway? Even though they might look a lot easier to make, they're not. The roses on the other hand I loved. So much apparently that I smashed one of the kitchen floor not 10 minutes after these pictures were taken. Good thing I'm a bit of an overachiever and did two during the course.


Cookies! I LOVE cookies. For some reason, though, I only seem to make them on Christmas. But then I usually go to town and spend days in the kitchen until I'm satisfied. Fortunately for me, my old workplace had a Christmas tradition where you could bring in Christmas cookies, people could buy them and the money got donated to a good cause. So fortunately for my hips, I didn't have to eat all of this by myself (...and that was only a little part of what was actually there):


Another one of my obsessions is peanut butter...


Mind you, I hate the stuff right out of the jar. It needs to either be incorporated in any type of baked good or come in a package that says "Reese's". These were Peanut Butter Choc Chip Cupcakes with a Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Frosting. Hmmm....Peanut Butter...


This was the birthday cake I made for my other former boss. It was probably one of the more involved cakes I've ever made. It had a chocolate base (...I just realized that apparently I only take pictures of all the cakes that have chocolate in them. I swear, I do make non-chocolate cakes occasionally), white choc and hazelnut ganache, chocolate panna cotta and red berry mascarpone mousse as well as a raspberry glaze. It was enclosed in a thin sheet of chocolate and I even made the decorations myself (which I'm very proud of, even though that was probably the easiest part of the whole cake).

Alright, I think that's enough for now. As I said in part 1, I hope to actually start blogging for real very soon, but bear with me if it takes a little while to actually find an event to bake for (if I bake for myself, I will have to eat it all myself - and my hips seriously won't thank me for it).

Thank you for stopping by!

♥ Nicole

PS: If you are interested in any of the recipes, I will try my best to find and recreate them (that is: find them in my folder of of recipes where I'm sure I've bookmarked them somewhere), so let me know if you're interested in a particular recipe!

Kind of a "best of", Part 1

So, as I haven't gotten around to baking at all lately (and let's not talk about my recent sewing misadventures...), I'm just gonna start of with a bit of a "best of" my baking adventures. Which isn't really a "best of" considering I usually forget to take pictures of most of the stuff I make. So actually, this is more of a "stuff I remembered to photograph" collection...so to speak. ANYWAY. As you will soon realize, I'm not exactly what you'd call a "good photographer" yet. At least not when it comes to food. So far, taking pictures of what I've made has mainly been an afterthought and you can really see that in a lot of pictures. I promise I will try to make more of an effort in the future (considering that now I might not be the only one looking at them yet) and, hopefully, my pictures will improve soon. What also makes taking great pictures with a nice setup a tad difficult is that I usually bake for other people's birthdays, so I can't really deliver photos of the inside of almost anything, because, well, it would be kinda rude to gift people with cakes that are missing a piece. But I'm grateful for any advice you might want to give me! No recipes yet in this post (...that'll happen as soon as I don't forget to write down what I'm doing while I'm doing it), because some of this pictures are from like, a year or two ago and I can barely remember what the stuff WAS, much less how I made it (...most of the time I barely remember what I had for breakfast). Yeah, I know, so far, I'm probably the worst food blogger in the history of food bloggers. Please forgive me. I promise to do better in the future. On basically every aspect of blogging. I swear! But let's get to the most important stuff: the food. So, what to start with?


This was an Almond & Peach Galette I did a couple of years back. First time I ever made frangipane....and I'm still preeeetty sure frangipane was neither supposed to look like that nor taste like that. Looked great, though! (And got eaten anyway. ;))


These were Coconut Cupcakes with a Peach Frosting that also did not quite turn out how they were supposed to if I remember correctly (are you starting to see a trend here?). So they got doused in coconut flakes and something pretty got popped on top and nobody even realized that that wasn't how they were supposed to look like.


My former boss's 40th birthday cake, which was a chocolate cake with orange mascarpone mousse. It had like, 5 layers and weighed over 4 pounds. The chocolate cake is my tried and tested recipe, but I wasn't too convinced when it came to the oranges. They tasted a bit bitter after a while, so next time I'd probably make it with a different fruit.


Another birthday cake, this one for a former colleague of mine. It was a bit of a joke, because she always has a big bowl of candy on her desk at the office and I probably stopped by there half a dozen times a day to get my sugar fix (which was apparently far more often than anybody else). The cake itself looked very different from the inside. It was a chocolate cake with a choc ganache and red berry mousse.


Ah, my first attempts at working with fondant. I did a course at a local shop here and this was the result and I actually quite liked how the blue one turned out. So naturally, after managing not to ruin a cake on the first try, I was convinced I'm a fondant master now and decided to make another fondant cake in honor of J.K. Rowling's new book (which I didn't realize at the time would suck - the book that is...well ok, the cake as well). Turns out: I'm not a fondant master by a long shot. Let's just leave it at that.

Alright, more in part 2! ♥ Nicole

PS: If you are interested in any of the recipes, I will try my best to find and recreate them (that is: find them in my folder of of recipes where I'm sure I've bookmarked them somewhere), so let me know if you're interested in a particular recipe!