Strawberry cheesecake cupcakes

Today is a friend's birthday (no party, birthday only) and my boyfriend and I thought about visiting him. But what to bring along? Well, why not baking something ;)

So, I decided to make cupcakes. I was inspired by Bubble and Sweet's idea of using Oreos as the bottom of each cake and ended up with the following recipe.

24 Oreos
4 eggs
150 g sugar
1 sachet vanilla sugar
3 tbl. spoons flour
1 sachet vanilla custard powder
150 g strawberry cream cheese
500 g curd

Line a muffin tin with muffin papers and place one Oreo into each paper. Then mix the eggs with the sugar until light and fluffy. Add vanilla sugar, flour and custard powder and mix again, until well combined. Finally, add the cheese and curd and mix well again.

Fill the muffin papers with about one tablespoon full of the cheese cream and put the tin into the preheated oven for about 30 minutes (160°C). They are quite soft in the middle, eventhough they were allowed to cool for half an hour, but nevertheless they are done.

 The weird thing on top are parts of the razor-thin almond cookies from 'schöner kochen: Rezepte und Tipps für zauberhafte Desserts'.

Making of: Grenzbrück Wedding Cake

Lately, I was asked to make a cake for a LARP-wedding (weird people in kind of historic costumes acting being people from fictive countries...). The two characters who married were two of the most importent people of the aristocratic world within Grenzbrück, so that elements from both's coat of arms' can be found on the cake.
When the people who organised the event talked about decorating the tables I somehow mentioned edible decoration made of royal icing and fondant.

So the things I started with was the decoration because the royal icing has to dry for several days. 

The 'wedding' was to take place on a Saturday, so we (K. and I) started piping the blue cornflowers. Actually, we only did the outlines and the outline of the centre. It took us about three hours to pipe 138 of them.

On Wednesday my boyfriend and the 'bridegroom' sat together while I was at work and worked green foodcolour into roughly 1 kg of white fondant to make oak leaves. This process took about three hours as well.
Thanks a lot to both of you!

Here are all the cornflowers plus one out of three trays full of oak leaves.

So much for the decoration. On Tuesday I started baking the four cakes. Therefore, I used Peggy Porschen's basic recipe from "Pretty Party Cakes". For the four cakes in total you need four basic recipes.

1 3/4 for the 30 cm (12 inches) cake
1 1/4 for the 26 cm (10 inches) cake
3/4 for the 18 cm (7 inches) cake
1/4 for the 12 cm (5 inches) cake

But do not try to put it all together into one blender! It is way too much!

I made a vanilla flavoured cake for the top and the bottom tier (30 and 12 cm), which makes two basic recipes and a 'normal' cake for the other two tiers. I did not put any special flavour in because of the different creams that I used for each. But first about the cakes and about the creams later :)

One basic recipe that is:

400 g butter
400 g sugar
8 medium eggs (only 6 if they are large)
400 g flour (since I have not found the required self-raising flour here in Germany, yet, I add 2 teaspoons baking powder)

Mix the butter with the sugar, then add the eggs one by one. Finally, mix the flour with the baking powder and add it to the mixture. This mixture is enough for a round 22cm baking pan. Preheat the oven to 175°C and bake the cake for about 40 minutes. It may take a bit longer, so do not forget to poke a toothpick into the middle and check whether it comes out clean, before you finish baking it.

Leave each cake to cool for several hours. Then, slice it into so many layers as possible. Depending on the size of the cake the amount of layers varies between three and five.

I filled the bottom tier and the top tier with dark chocolate ganache. For both cakes you need

900 g dark chocolate (at least 55%)
800 g single cream

Soak each layer with sugar syrup (flavoured to taste) and than spread ganache onto it. Pile all the layers and then coat the whole cake with the remaining ganache.

The cakes should look like this.

My boyfriend thought of putting a sprite bottle next to the largest cake to show how big the cake is.

Here are all four cakes. Two of them covered with chocolate ganache and the other two not filled and covered, yet.

This is the cheese buttercream-strawberry cake.

The cheese buttercream (250 g butter, 500 g confectioner's sugar, 125 g curd)

The cheese cream cake half covered...

... and fully covered
Between the first two layers there is strawberry preserve, the other layers are spread with the cheese cream.

 This is the bottom layer of the lemon buttercream cake, covered with apricot preserve.

Here are 250 g butter and the zest of three lemons. Add 250 g confectioner's sugar and mix very well and you get a yummie lemon buttercream. 

Top layer covered in marzipan and fondant.

More fondant...

The top layer with loads of fondant leaves and calla lilies. Still missing: a soft pink rose with golden borders.

The bottom layer

The cheesecream cake with oak leaves

 

To pile the cakes I use these aluminium pipes.

See here.

Here is the rose on top. Oh, by the way. I piped royal icing between all the layers and coloured it with edible gold dust. 

Some of the cornflowers broke while putting them into or out of the box I used for the transport, so I thought why not using them as saddles for the horses :)

Here you can see the gold dust on the borders and on the oak leaves as well. 

The oak leaves above and the cornflowers below were also used as edible decoration on the tables. 

And here is the whole thing.

A friend of mine also took some pictures during the celebration and kindly allowed me to include them in my blog.
Thanks to Thomas Michalski (http://www.thomas-michalski.de/) for these wonderful pictures!

The next big projects are already being planned, but first there will be three smaller projects in February. On February 4th there will be cake pops, so stay tuned :)

Cake Pops: Chocolate Flowers

Lately, I read so much about cake pops that I wanted to have a try making them. But hell week AND a four-tier-cake in one week is simply too much... I thought... There were the tops of two tiers left because two of the four cakes were bulky so I had to cut off the tops. But what to do with them? Hmm... There was some cheese-buttercream left as well.

So, I crumbled the cake leftovers into the blender and added small amounts of the filling at a time. The mixture should not be crumbly anymore, so that you can form it, but be careful not to add too much cream.

Then, choose a cookie cutter to your liking and squish the mixture into the cutter, paying attention to fill in all the gaps.

Here they go.

When they are ready leave them in a cool place for several hours, so that they get a bit more firm. Then, poke a lolly stick, or a kind of long toothpick (just look at the next picture and you will know what I mean) into one end of the cake and dip it into melted chocolate of your choice.

In the end, what you get is this:

Actually, you stick the cake pops into a block of styrofoam to set. Lacking one, I simply put them on a tray, lined with baking paper, to allow them to set. 

Yummie they are and I am sure there will be more within this year :)

Making of: White Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake

And here it is: My first Cheesecake Factory Experiment's 'Making Of' 

Crust/Shell:
200 g flour
50 g sugar
100 g butter (cut into chunks)
1 egg
1 sachet vanilla sugar
2 tblsp. or a bit more cocoa powder

Simply put everything into a bowl and knead it with a mixer until well combined. Then roll out half of the dough into a circle (26 cm in diameter, roughly 10 inches) and put it into a 26cm-springform pan that is laid out with baking parchment. Butter and flour the sides of the pan and roll out the rest of the dough into stripes, so that you can cover the sides of the pan with them.
I like the crust rather thin, but if you prefer more of it, simply add a bit flour and butter (about 50 g I would guess).

When finished, it should look like this:

Cover the crust with baking parchment an fill it with a kilogramm of dried peas for blind-baking:

After blind-baking the shell for 20 minutes at 200°C it should look like this:

Be careful, when removing the peas... They are hot, believe me ^^ By the way, you can reuse and reuse and reuse and... them, but after being baked the cannot be eaten anymore, although I have to admit that I do not know exactly what happens to them.

While your crust is in the oven you can prepare the filling. I used:

4 eggs
100 g sugar
750 g curd cheese
250 g cream cheese
1 sachet custard powder cream flavour
200 g melted white chocolate (less, if you do not like your cake too sweet)
50 g raspberries 

First, mix the eggs and the sugar until the mixture gets light and fluffy. Then, add the cheeses and the custard powder and mix again. When the chocolate is melted add it slowly while stirring.
Fill the cheese mixture into the crust.
Now it is time for pureéing the raspberries. You may want to add some sugar to them, but do it only if you like your cake really sweet.
Of course you can put all the pureé onto the cake and then 'swirls' throught both layers (raspberry and cheese) with a fork, but I wanted the swirls to be very thin and only few. So, I dipped a chopstick into the pureé and swirled it carefully through the cheesefilling. I did not use all the pureé because I thought it might be too much but if you like more colour you can of course put it all in.

When you are done, your cake should look like this:

Put your cake into the oven for about an hour at 170-175°C. If it gets too dark lower the temperature a bit and cover the cake with aluminium foil.

Fresh out of the oven your cake should look like this:

Now the cake is done and can be eaten. Unless you want to top it with some kind of cream. I used:

1 sachet custard powder cream flavour
400 ml milk
200g single cream
1 sachet Sahnesteif (English-speaking Dr. Oe. calls it 'whip it')

Heat 300 ml milk while mixing the rest of it with the custard powder (no machine, only mug and small spoon ^^). When the milk is hot, add mixture and stir, stir, stir, otherwise there will be lumps. The mixture will thicken and become a nice custard after a little while. Then, remove the pot from the heat and go on stirring until it cools down a bit. Cover the mixture with cling film and wait until it cools further. But be careful! Do not wait too long or it will become firm and then there will be lumps later as well. As long as the mixture is still creamy, beat the single cream with the 'whip it' and add it to your custard cream.

I let the custard get too firm, so I got tiny lumps...

Put the whole cake into the fridge until it is supposed to be served. A little while before serving decorate your cake with 50 g grated milk chocolate and whipped cream. I used 400 g single cream and two sachets 'whip it', but unfortunately I did not get the 'cream towers' they make at the cheeesecake factory. But I will experiment a little further on it, I have got some ideas on how to do it.
Next cake, next try ;)

Since I forgot to take a picture before we started eating the cake you only get pictures of parts of it.

Going international?

Today I found out that some people from the Ukraine visited my blog, so maybe I should start 'going international' and go on blogging in English. Within the next two weeks I will post my white chocolate raspberry cheesecake recipe. I have already started writing it down and sorting the pictures I made, but it still needs some writing. Furthermore, this week is so-called hellweek because our theatre group Actor's Nausea is going to perform this week again which means that since last Saturday there are rehearsals every day until next Wednesday, followed by four performances of 'Death actually - the play' (http://www.actorsnausea.de/index_englisch.htm).
In the meantime, I am working on a wedding cake for next Saturday (yes, one of the performance days). Well, actually it is for a ball where we dance more or less historic dances in more or less historic dresses. Within the story we play, there is a country where two of the most important noblemen (well, a man and a woman...) marry. There will be about 100-120 people to serve with a 4-tier-cake plus edible decoration for the tables.
Yesterday, K. and I started piping about 120 cornflowers, which are part of the bridegroom's coat of arms. A huge THANK YOU K.!
But I do not want to forestall everything without giving you the pictures, so you have to be patient and wait until performances are over. Then, there will be more blogging and hopefully loads of nice pictures :)

Geburtstag II

Hier ein paar Bilder vom Geburtstag mit der Familie. Bei den meisten Sachen haben wir zwar vergessen zu fotographieren (oder haben es zu spät getan), aber wie gesagt... Ich gewöhne mich halt laaangsaaam ans bloggen.

Hier der gedeckte Tisch.

Zuerst gab es Zwiebelsuppe (davon leider kein Foto).


Dann Salat.

Dann den Hauptgang (Schweinefilet mit Kartoffeln, Champignons und Rosenkohl).

Vom Rest gibt es leider keine Bilder, da man ja das Essen noch warm genießen wollte ^^
 

Dann das Dessert (Grießknödel mit Aprikosenfüllung, dazu eingelegte Apfelspalten und Haselnussbrösel). Auch ohne Bilder...


Als Kuchen gab es meinen ersten Versuch eines Cheesecake Factory-Kuchens. 

Natürlich war der Kuchen mal ganz, wie man in dem 'Making of' noch sehen wird, aber wie gesagt... Ich gewöhne mich erst an die ständige Fotographiererei ;)
Das soll übrigens meine Variante des White Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake sein.

So, mit etwas Glück kann ich noch ein Stückchen davon für meine Arbeitskollegin R. retten, die mich erst auf die Cheesecake-Factory-Seite gebracht hat und sehr neugierig auf diesen Versuch ist. Leider sind die Sahnetürmchen trotz Sahnesteif nicht so hoch geworden... Aber wie das funktioniert kriege ich auch noch heraus :)