Posted by Adam Kuban, April 15, 2008 at 9:30 AM
Think you're pretty darn smart, do you? A regular baking Einstein, huh? Well, do think you can make a brain cake? If you're not exactly a rocket scientist in the kitchen, the step-by-step article How to Make an Anatomically Correct Brain Cake on WikiHow.com will walk you through it. The one shown here appears to be based on a chocolate layer cake with the gray matter made of marshmallow fondant.
Why would you want to make a brain cake? That's a question our crack research team is still trying to answer.
Posted by Lucy Baker, March 21, 2008 at 3:30 PM
When I was a little girl, I loved to bake cakes from boxed mixes. I had a babysitter who taught me how to stir the batter so that there were no lumps, and to slice off the top of one layer to make a flat surface. Even though she never let me lick the bowl (for fear of salmonella) I looked forward to the times when she would watch me, and late in the evening when my parents returned home I would insist they have a slice of my frosted, sprinkled sugar bomb before I went to bed.
In the years since, however, I've become a bit of a confectionery snob. When it comes to baking, I've always thought, if it's not from scratch it’s not for me. If you can make a whole batch of double-fudge brownies in 30 minutes, without ever breaking out a set of measuring spoons or a bottle of vanilla, then it doesn't really count as home cooking.
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Posted by Robyn Lee, March 21, 2008 at 3:15 PM
Candy Addict shares an idea for a cute Easter Bunny Cake that's easy to cut and construct. Your naked bunny cake is then a blank canvas for heavy doses of frosting topped with all kinds of Easter candy.
Posted by Robyn Lee, February 21, 2008 at 3:00 PM
Tokyo-based design magazine PingMag has a feature on the history and making of the Japanese snack cake ningyo-yaki, which translates to "fried dolls." These small cakes made by pouring batter into intricate molds—varying from Hello Kitty to a traditional lantern—are typically filled with red bean paste, but may also be filled with chocolate or custard. Grab a box on your next trip to Japan!
Can't get to the bakery in time? Use the cake writing generator to send your loved one an image of a cake with a custom message written in red icing. It's almost like the real thing, but without the calories! Or flavor.
Posted by Robyn Lee, October 30, 2007 at 6:45 PM
Not Martha shows you how to make crawly spider cakes for Halloween using various kinds of Pocky, snack cakes, sugar eyes and chocolate sprinkles. Spiders will never again look as freakishly adorable or taste as sweet.
Would you eat this cake? Sure, as long as the skull is made of flour, sugar and eggs and the blood is...not blood. Ignoring the cake's empty eye sockets and trickling blood while eating it may also help it go down more easily.
Posted by Robyn Lee, October 26, 2007 at 8:00 PM
Best Wishes Suzanne
Under Neat that
We will Miss you
Huh?
He told them to write: "Best Wishes Suzanne" and underneath that write "We Will Miss You."
That's what miscommunication with the cake decorators at Wal-Mart will get you.
Posted by Robyn Lee, October 15, 2007 at 6:30 PM
Mmm...giant donut.
After seeing The Food Pornographer's photo of a "Homer Passed Out Atop a Giant Donut" cake, I formulated a new life goal for myself: to one day sleep on a giant donut.
Related: Homer Cake #1.
Posted by Robyn Lee, October 10, 2007 at 7:00 PM
A wedding cake doesn't have to have ornate designs to be impressive. This M&M Candy Wedding Cake made by Dahlia's Custom Cakes uses M&Ms in a unique manner that gives the cake a pixelated look in addition to a candy-coated shell.
[via Candy Addict]
Posted by Robyn Lee, July 25, 2007 at 5:40 PM
To celebrate the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Badnewsbear and friends threw a party with what may not be the most intricately made cake but is one of the more unique ones. How often do the worlds of Harry Potter and lolcat speech combine? Not enough, not enough.
Posted by Robyn Lee, July 10, 2007 at 6:00 PM
If you want to stare at pictures of impressively labor intensive-looking cakes , you have Cake Space and Cake Magic to turn to. But what if you don't care about molded animals, carefully drawn cartoon characters, or fancy fondant flowers? Maybe you want to limit your cake viewage to those shaped like Xboxes.
Enter gamecakes. Besides Xboxes, they also have Nintendo, Guitar Hero, Pac Man, and...Chuck Norris. You can't not have Chuck Norris.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, April 27, 2007 at 1:15 PM
The photo from TeamSugar's recipe for molten chocolate cakes with fresh whipped cream is killing me; the recipe itself, not so much. I do love the teeny little wax paper cups haze1nut chose to bake the cakes in, they're a great idea and I wouldn't mind it if they caught on—but if you're going to make molten chocolate cakes why not use the original recipe from Jean-Georges Vongerichten himself?
(If you're not feeling JGV, Chowhound bakers pointed to their favorite recipes on Epicurious a few months ago, they all sound just as delicious.)
Posted by Lia Bulaong, March 13, 2007 at 2:03 PM
Live somewhere with a large population of Irish descent? Chances are pretty good someone you know (or at least the bars around you) will be observing St Patrick's Day this coming weekend. If baking for holidays is your thing, you might want to try Nigella Lawson's recipe for Chocolate Guinness Cake (from her cookbook Feast), as every single blog post I've ever seen about it has raved on about how delicious it is and how it's quite possibly the best chocolate cake ever.
If Nigella's frosting of cream cheese, sugar and cream sounds too sweet for you, Maki Itoh makes an Irish Stout Cake with Whiskey-Sour Icing, having reworked a Gary Rhodes recipe and added the icing. I can't decide which one sounds more delicious so as a non-baker I guess I'll just have to talk someone into baking me both!
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 14, 2007 at 2:09 AM
Florence Fabricant explains why over 300 people (including 80 chefs) flew into Monte Carlo from all over the world to spend this past weekend commemorating the 80th birthday of the chef Paul Bocuse in Celebrating the Ringmaster of the Restaurant Circus: "Before chefs had their own TV shows and million-dollar book deals, when today’s international obsession with chefs and restaurants was in its infancy, Mr. Bocuse was on the cover of Time magazine as the champion of nouvelle cuisine. People knew his name when they could name no one else who worked in a kitchen. "He made it possible for chefs to be respected international celebrities,” said the New York restaurateur Drew Nieporent. "And he made haute cuisine popular. His restaurant was a pilgrimage destination, the way El Bulli in Spain is today."
Other highlights:
Eric Asimov visits Park B. Smith's wine cellar in Connecticut, an 8,000-square-foot space (with its own full kitchen, bath and dining room) constructed over 25 years that currently contains over 65,000 bottles. If that number boggles your mind, consider this: "More than half of Mr. Smith’s collection is in magnums, twice the size of normal bottles, and the count doesn’t include the 14,000 bottles auctioned off by Sotheby’s last November, which raised almost $5.33 million for his alma mater, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass."
In So Naughty, So Nice, Florence Fabricant talks discusses how red velvet cake is on the ascendance in New York City: "The layers are an improbable red that can vary from a fluorescent pink to a dark ruddy mahogany. The color, often enhanced by buckets of food coloring, becomes even more eye-catching set against clouds of snowy icing, like a slash of glossy lipstick framed by platinum blond curls. Even the name has a vampy allure: red velvet. "It’s the Dolly Parton of cakes: a little bit tacky, but you love her," said Angie Mosier, a food writer in Atlanta and a board member of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi in Oxford."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 6, 2007 at 10:27 AM
"How do I cut a heart-shaped cake? Unlike standard round or square layer cakes that virtually have dotted lines for easy slicing, heart-shaped cakes leave me to my own devices." dessert comes first figures it out.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 5, 2007 at 10:05 AM
The ubiquity of the warm chocolate cake: "What started as a refreshing choice at a handful of restaurants is now becoming a de facto dessert at almost every restaurant - eclipsing the likes of such stalwarts as creme brulee and (gasp!) apple pie. (...) Mind you, I am not saying I don’t enjoy this cake a lot, I’m just saying that it is no longer a pleasant surprise and I think its time for chefs in the city to start thinking about how they could raise the bar on what has become the safe choice on a dessert menu."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 5, 2007 at 9:21 AM
Can't wait till June for an iPhone? Unwilling to spend $599 on one? Munch down on a cake version instead, like this one an Apple enthusiast was surprised with on his birthday. So nerdy!
[via Engadget]
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 2, 2007 at 9:27 AM
People really get into decorating cakes for their Super Bowl parties, mostly in the shape of footballs or football fields (or both), but the cake that's made me laugh the most out of all the ones I've looked at on Flickr has got to be this one:
You can bring it to any party in any year, even one with mixed team affiliations, and it still works!
P.S. Cupcakes decorated with footballs are pretty cute too.
Posted by Adam Roberts, January 16, 2007 at 6:53 AM
Nabokov once threw his manuscript for Lolita
in the trash. Stephen King did a similar thing with his manuscript for Carrie. In both cases, the wives of these authors dug out the manuscript, read it themselves and then urged their husbands to continue writing. If it were not for these women, these texts would be in a trash heap somewhere, smoldering into nothingness, suffering a cruel fate, the same fate that befell the chapter I wrote this summer about making a squirrel cake.
The chapter was for my book, which is based on my website, The Amateur Gourmet. It was a chapter about challenging yourself, about the way that cooking something complicated can motivate you to take big chances in life. The original idea was to make croissants, but that would've been too time consuming. Croissants require lots of resting. I didn't want to spend 36 hours making pastry.
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