Minim Confection

What do you give to someone to thank them for the wonderful gift of a phenomenal book?  Manuscript-themed cupcakes, of course!  At least this is the sensible course if the book is a manuscript facsimile.  That, and I may have been on a bit of a cupcake kick at the start of the year...

Because I'm a nerd, I wanted the cupcakes to spell out 'diolch am y lyfr' (Welsh for 'thanks for the book'), and my first thought was to cut out circles of fondant, paint them with a textura or gothic script and place them on top of smooth-topped cupcakes.  Fortunately I came to my senses and realized that mini fondant manuscripts would be so much cooler as toppers, so that's what I made.  I used initials, decorated with red for each new word, on the pages to spell out my message of thanks.

Admittedly, the cupcakes themselves are as much the superfluous part of this post as they were the superfluous part of the gift.  That being said, they were pretty good.  They were a variation on my whisky cake, in that the chocolate cupcakes were filled with chocolate and Guiness ganache and topped with whisky buttercream.  I used this recipe from Joy of Baking for the cupcakes, and be careful to note that the recipe makes sixteen cupcakes.  Since the average tray has a dozen cups, this could be a problem, and you should be prepared for it before it comes time to pour the batter.  Since I only have one cupcake tray, I poured the excess batter into two small greased and cocoa-powdered souffle dishes.  This meant that in the end I had two 3-4 inch cake layers going spare... perfect for a bonus tiny cake.  The cupcakes were generally nice although they came out somewhat fudgier than I might have liked; others liked the fudginess, so this is personal preference.  The only change that I made to the recipe was using hot coffee in place of hot water, because coffee strengthens the flavour of chocolate cake.  I may also not have mixed the hot coffee with the cocoa poweder - too much time has passed now to remember - and it might be this that resulted in said fudginess.  The cupcakes were also quite susceptible to cracking when coring them to fill with ganache, possibly for the same reason.  If you pipe the ganache into the centres of the cupcakes with a piping bag and do not use too much pressure, it should not be terribly problematic.  The recipe for the swiss buttercream is in the Recipe Box, just add whisky to taste, and the same goes for the recipe for ganache but adding Guiness to taste.

I did learn something valuable in making this ganache: how to fix a broken ganache.  I can safely say that I had never broken a ganache before (I must have been lucky), so when it happened I wasn't sure what I was looking at.  I had been unable to buy my preferred ganache-making chocolate, so my first instinct was to blame the lumpy, oily mess on low-quality chocolate.  I tried draining off the oil, reheating the mess, stirring and stirring and stirring, and it still looked gross.  I wondered if adding the Guiness had caused the problem, but since it was clearly oil sitting on top of the chocolate and not stout, that did not seem to be the issue.  Finally I googled  'broken ganache' and found Matthew Kayahara's blog, where he explained that a broken ganache is the result of an unbalanced fat-to-water ratio, with the fat content being too high.  To fix it, heat some low-fat milk and, very slowly, incorporate it into the ganache until everything comes together and it looks like the smooth chocolate confection it should be.  Where did bakers and chefs go for answers before google?  Medieval scrolls, I guess.

On to the manuscripts!  I knew how I wanted my books to look, and a vague idea of how to get there, but for tips I googled (again!) and found this how-to from A Grey Eyed Girl.  She provides a very good step-by-step, complete with pictures.  I used different tools, but followed her closely with variation in the details (turned up edges or corners of pages, thickness of the book, lift of the pages from the binding) for each manuscript.  I also coloured my fondant with a mix of red, yellow and black gel dyes, just as I did with my Black Book of Cake manuscript cake, to make it resemble vellum.

Colour a ball of fondant to your desired shade, and break off a small lump for your first manuscript.  Shape it into a soft rectangle.

Using the blunt edge of a knife or a fondant or gum paste cutting tool, slice into the centre of the rectangle, approximately halfway through it.

Using a round pencil or another fondant tool for which I do not know the name, widen the incision and spread and smooth the pages on either side so that they resemble the wings of a bird if viewed from the bottom or top edge.  Trim the left and right edges of the manuscript at an angle to mimic the spread of the pages of an open book.

With the tip of the knife or cutting tool, draw the lines of individual pages into the top and bottom edges of the book, following the wing-shape you created.  On the right and left edges create the pages by pressing in with the length of the blade, rather than drawing the lines with the tip.  Turn up the corner of a page by gently sawing into it and lifting.

For the binding, roll out fondant of a different colour (I prefer black) and trim it to the size of your manuscript.  Round the corners a bit if desired, and create the spine by placing two indents on either side of the sheet using a toothpick.

To paint on the 'text', you will need a fine brush and more of the gel dye used to colour the fondant.  As I showed in the Black Book of Cake, to paint with these gels it is helpful to thin them out using a clear alcohol such as gin or vodka.  As the paint dries this will evaporate, so there's no worry if feeding the fondant to kids!  By thinning the dyes, it is possible to adjust the consistency and the transparency of your colours.  Having the alcohol and cotton swabs on hand is also helpful in the event that you make a mistake, because if you act quickly it is possible to wipe it off using an alcohol-soaked swab or paper towel.

Because I did not take photos throughout the process of making the first batch of manuscripts, I made one more to top off the bonus tiny cake I mentioned earlier; this is the manuscript featured in my step-by-step.  I painted this one slightly differently, in that I included both coloured initials and 'text' on the same page, rather than the sort of carpet pages I made in my thank you cupcakes.  The 'text' of all of the manuscripts I formed purely out of minims; there weren't enough hours in the day for the level of procrastination that it would have taken to copy true tiny texts into these miniscule manuscripts, and fortunately minim confusion is not an issue on pages that are going to be eaten...

The Black Book of Cake

A year ago when I started Procrastibaking (the blog, not the past time; the past time is well established), I wondered, 'How long am I going to be able to keep this malarkey up?'.  Well, happy first birthday Procrastibaking!

My first ever blog post was about a cake that I made for a cocktail party.  The party is annual, and though last year I decided that the appropriate cake for a cocktail party was one that contained booze, this year I decided to draw on the medieval department throwing the fête; I made a manuscript cake.

There are numerous examples of book cakes out there in the internet, some of them better than others.  There are fewer sets of instructions for making them, however.  An exception is provided by Jessicakes, where you can find very detailed directions for making an open book cake (which was what I was after - where's the fun in a closed book?).  I appreciate the attention to detail that Jessica put into her cake, and especially the thought devoted to its structure.  Up until the day before I put the cake together, I was going to follow her example.  Then two things happened.  The first was that the only foam board (needed to support the spine) that I could find was expensive.  The second was the realization that no library would ever allow a precious manuscript to be laid open flat on a table.  Manuscripts need to be supported by pillows so that a tight binding doesn't result in torn pages; they should generally not be open flat.  Instead of two layers of cake laid out side-by-side, then, I decided that I was going to stack a smaller rectangle cake (the book) on top of a larger rectangle cake (the pillow).

I had already baked two layers of cake when I changed tack.  At least, they were two layers baked; in reality they were four layers worth of cake, as I had to double the recipe to fill the roasting pans I baked them in.  Have you ever wondered if you could bake cake in a roasting pan?  Wonder no more!  I greased and floured the pan like any other.  Then when I lined it I used extra-large rectangles of parchment so that there would be enough to go up the sides of the pan.  Just fold the parchment over itself at the corners to form to the pan, and trim some of the excess if necessary (I found that having a bit to grab onto to pull the cake out was helpful).

Having made it this far into the post, it's probably time I talk about the cake cake, the actual stuff that was inside the manuscript.  Because the decoration of the cake was going to be rather complicated, I wanted the cake itself to be relatively simple.  I opted for a basic (but yummy) yellow cake, layered with raspberry jam and iced, of course, with buttercream (a necessity for fondant cakes).  I adapted this recipe from Real Simple, and my version can be found in the Recipe Box.

I won't dwell on mixing the cake here: combine dry ingredients, beat sugar into butter followed by eggs and vanilla.  This recipe calls for milk (I substituted buttermilk) and this should be combined with the beaten butter in five alternating additions with the dry mix, starting with the dry mix.  Then into the roasting-turned-cake pan it goes!

Then rinse and repeat.  Also, make some swiss meringue buttercream.  The recipe is in the Recipe Box, with additional directions available in Great Chieftain o' the Puddin' Race and Sophisticated Swine.  For this cake I added two tablespoons of lemon extract, because who doesn't love a raspberry and lemon combo?  The only other thing that I'll add about swiss buttercream in this post is that, as with any recipe that calls for separating eggs, it is prudent to do the separating over a bowl that is not the bowl you are collecting the whites in.  I didn't do this.  I never do this.  And it's always the last yolk that breaks into the whites. *sigh*

It's no use crying over a broken yolk.

I still wasn't quite sure how I was going to create the book even after I'd decided to stack it on a pillow.  I knew that I would cut one of my two layers in half and turn it so that it was wider than it was tall, just like the pillow base.  It was creating the angles of an open book that I wasn't certain of.  I googled something along the lines of 'angled cake' and came up with a Wilton post on topsy turvy cakes.  In the end this didn't affect how I made the book - which I decided to simply carve - but it gave me the idea to set the book into the pillow layer, to really give the impression that the pillow had moulded around the book.

I started the process by splitting the pillow layer (remember to do this when the cake is cold but not completely frozen, so it isn't crumbly but also not impossible to cut) and then I filled it with a layer of jam.  The next step is to carve the hole for the book to sit in.  Though it's not what I did, it might be cleaner to do this from the top layer alone, before it is joined with its jam-covered bottom.  In this way, rather than peeling the carved-out top layer from the hole, as shown below, the top layer could be carved and then lifted (leaving the hole behind) onto the prepared bottom layer.  The risk here is that the edges of the top layer are too thin, and in the lifting the cake would break.  Freezing the layer would make it more stable, however, and if you like a gamble...

After I cut the book layer in half, I rounded the corners to make it more manuscript-like.  Then I placed it on top of the pillow and used toothpicks to mark the edges of where to carve.  This worked fairly well, though the hole should be widened a bit after carving because once the cake is iced and covered the space otherwise becomes just a little too tight.

Gently use a small offset spatula to remove the centre of the hole.  I then carved the edges to slope inward and deeper in the middle, to reflect the shape of a pillow with a manuscript in it.  Next ice this part of the cake with buttercream and place it in the refrigerator or freezer to harden while finishing up the book.  Because I was going to be sinking the book into the hole of the pillow, I decided to stack both halves of the second layer to make a very tall manuscript.  I split the layers and then shaped the open pages by marking a line down the middle of the cake and carving down and inward towards that line from just inside of the right and left edges.

Once carved, I iced the book with buttercream.

One mistake I made was taking the pillow out of the freezer and letting it sit only ten minutes or so before covering it with fondant.  Covering a cake that is too cold can make the fondant sweat, and that's what happened.  Fortunately for me, I had already imprinted the fondant with a paper towel to get a fabric-like finish on the pillow, so I continued to use paper towels to remove the sweat.  This will obviously not work for a cake that needs smooth fondant.  Another trick, which, combined with time to dry out worked quite well, was brushing the fondant with corn starch.  I used a large clean makeup brush and lightly powdered the fondant.  By the morning the cake was perfectly matte!

Don't forget, when colouring fondant don't use standard liquid food dye - this will make the fondant very sticky, especially with the quantity it would take to make the colour dark.  To make the flesh colour of vellum (the calf skin from which the pages of many medieval manuscripts were made) I used a combination of yellow, some red and a little black.  After I finished mixing the colours but before I rolled out the fondant, I put the book in the freezer for a few brief minutes, just so that it would be a little stiff when I had to pick it up and put it in the pillow.

This fondant is still too thick to use for covering.

Covering the book was relatively problem-free, but as with any cake with angles you have to handle the fondant gently around the corners and smooth it quickly before it dries and cracks.  Thicker fondant will hide more of the flaws under it, and will be a little less likely to tear on the corners, but for me, taste-wise, a thinner layer of fondant is desirable.

When I iced the book, I wanted the edges to be rounded.  If I had been making a modern book, with their precise and sharp corners, my book would have been too soft, and this softness was only amplified when I put the book into the pillow.  I hadn't made the hole quite large enough to compensate for the additional girth of the buttercream and fondant, so the fondant on the sides of the book billowed out a bit when they pushed up on the edges of the hole, and simultaneously the fondant on on part of the pillow was pulled down by the book and tore - but what else is a book cover for if not for covering tears in fondant?

But before I made the book cover, I made four pages to lay on top of the book to give it more depth.  Using an offset spatula I pressed lines into the side of the book to give the impression of pages, but manuscript pages often don't lie flat and the edges may be a little wrinkled or warped, so adding a couple of pages on top reflected that.  If I were to do it again, however, I would try to make the indentations of the lower pages more pronounced to better blend in with the top pages.

To make the top pages even more realistic, I lightly pricked holes all over them to look like the pores in vellum.  I also cut out a large hole (holes are often found in vellum, especially if it is of a lower quality), and poked holes vertically along the outer edges of the pages to mark the ruling.

After some debating, I decided to paint a real text on the manuscript, and after some more debating I chose a passage from the Medieval Welsh Laws of Hywel Dda, specifically from a section on the Laws of the Court.  The version I used is from National Library of Wales Peniarth 29, The Black Book of Chirk (Llyfr Du o'r Waun), and it outlines the rights of the court bakeress - perfect for a manuscript cake!  For anyone who is interested (because this post isn't long enough already):

'Huyduet e popuryes hy a dely y buyt or llys ay dyllat a seyc pan uo i e brenyn a theyssen dyuet poby o pop amryu ulaut a pop. ay guely en e buyty. ny dely keuody rac neb tra uo en poby. y naud eu hy y buryho ay crauell. y sarhaet eu trayan sarhaet y gur ony byt gur hanner saraet y braut y guerth na hy a uo guedu na hy ny uo hanner guerth y braut.'  (Peniarth 29, p. 27)

'Eighth is the bakeress.  She is entitled to her food from the court and her clothes and a dish when the king is present, and at the end of the day a cake from each type of flour which was baked, and her bed is in the kitchen.  It is not right for her to rise for anyone when she is baking.  Her protection is as far as she can throw her spatula.  Her value is a third of her husband's value unless her husband is half the value of her brother; her value, should she be married or not married, is half the value of her brother.'

For painting the cake, I used the same gels that I had used to colour the fondant (excluding yellow).  I'd never painted on a cake before, so I got some tips from That Really Frosts Me and The Hand-Painted Cake, a free Craftsy class by Erin Schaefgen (Craftsy is a pretty useful tool; I haven't paid for a class yet, but I know people who have and have really enjoyed them).  Fortunately my sister had given me a whole set of brushes at Christmas for just this type of production, so I was ready to go on that front, but I also purchased a cheap thing (it was in the kitchen section - to be honest I don't know what its intended use is) to mix my gels in.  You mix the gels as you would paint, the primary difference being that you dilute them with a bit of alcohol, which evaporates as the colour dries.  Vodka is widely recommended but I used gin - as long as it's clear and edible it doesn't matter.

The style of my manuscript was based on National Library of Wales Peniarth 1, The Black Book of Carmarthen (Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin), and the cake was even fairly close to the real manuscript's size.  Part of the charm of the Black Book is its size; it's a small book, often considered to have been the personal collection of a single scribe.  Despite its not being a grand professional production, however, it is nicely decorated with drawings in the margins, an unusual feature for Welsh manuscripts.  Naturally I drew on that and painted a hand holding the pivotal word crauell, 'spatula'.  Everything I painted I wrote out first on a piece of parchment paper the size of the book, and I kept a piece of spare fondant out to practice on.  Having a small container of gin (or vodka) and q-tips to hand is also useful, because they can be used to erase mistakes if you act fast.  Just dip the end of a q-tip in the alcohol and rub out the error very gently, perhaps using the other dry end of the q-tip to clean it up further.

I had already made my binding by this point.  The Black Book of Cake needed a black cover, naturally, so I dyed some fondant black and rolled it out, cutting four strips and inch or so wide and a bit longer than the sides of the manuscript to which they would be applied.  The overhang on the corners should be cut at a 45° angle so that they can be joined up (just press them lightly together and smooth if necessary).  Using the handle of my paintbrush I made two indentations to mark the spine on both the back and the front of the manuscript.  The final touch was to make a pair of  'snakes', lengths of curtain weights which are used to hold manuscripts open without causing them any damage.  I made these by rolling out plain white fondant into thin ropes and then segmenting them by squeezing them between the tubes of two q-tips.  In the end I opted not to drape the snakes over the manuscript because 1.) they were coming apart if too much gravity pulled on them and 2.) I'd just spent all that time painting the thing, why cover it up?  Only one person at the party called me out on that; the librarians would not be pleased.

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin'

This last Christmas I was given a slew of baking and cake decorating tools (hooray!), and among them was a rolling pin from the Little Venice Cake Company line of tools.  I'd been itching to try it out, though not to the extent that I wanted to make a buttercream cake that I could layer the test-rolled fondant over (because everyone knows that you can't roll fondant without using it to cover something).  Rolling marzipan was an alternative, but my default with marzipan is to make a princess cake, and I felt like something different.  I decided on a chocolate orange loaf cake with orange mascarpone frosting, covered with marzipan.

In retrospect, it sounds like a bit much.  I meant well.

The cake wasn't bad, but it also wasn't my best.  The sides of the cake itself came out quite tough, although they were not burned.  I didn't feel as though I had it in the oven too low for too long, but that seems to me the most likely explanation.  To top it off (*ba-dum ching!*), I made the frosting too sweet for my own tastes and it may have been better with a layer of marzipan on the top only, rather that covering the entire cake.

So, now that I've sold it!...

The recipe that I found for the cake appears on Better Homes and Gardens, but is duplicated here, with the credit going to Nigella Lawson.  I suspect that Nigella's cookbook is the original source since the recipe calls for golden syrup, which to my knowledge isn't terribly common in American recipes.  It also calls for dark brown sugar, but I used light brown because that's what I had on hand.  My adaptation can be found in the Recipe Box.

I got as many lumps out of the brown sugar as possible first, then beat it into the butter before adding the golden syrup.  After beating in the golden syrup, I added the combined dry ingredients.  I had already zested two clementines and set that aside.

The zest and squeezed orange juice are meant to go into the batter last, though now I'm struggling to remember if I mixed those in before the eggs.  If so, I was probably trying to lessen the amount of time the eggs were beaten in an attempt to stop the cake from sinking in the middle (see below, and note: it didn't work).  The recipe also says the batter may look curdled; I didn't find that, though it didn't look wholly appetizing...

Fortunately it didn't bake ugly.  The blogger writing about Nigella's recipe said to expect a dip in the centre of the cake - that it even appeared that way in the cookbook - so I was unsurprised to find one in my bake.

The mascarpone frosting experienced a similar transformation from yuck to yum.  When I was imagining this cake, all I really wanted to do with the mascarpone was to add some orange zest and juice to it (and it is this version that I've added to the Recipe Box).  Unadulterated mascarpone tastes to me like cream: smooth, heavy, spreadable whipped cream.  I thought adding a flavour to it would be enough, but in checking how other people make this type of frosting I found that either heavy cream or butter is almost always added (depending upon the desired consistency and weight - Martha even adds cream cheese), and so is powdered sugar.  This recipe from The Hairy Bikers was the only exception, but in the face of all the others I thought I'd better add something, and since I hadn't checked the recipes prior to shopping and butter was all I had, butter it was.  I beat the butter first, and added the zest and juice to that before mixing in the mascarpone.  It looked gross.

Combining the beaten butter with the mascarpone drastically improved the frosting's appearance.  Mascarpone is temperamental, however, so be careful not to over-mix; this temperament is why I chose to mix the orange with the butter first.

I spread a thick layer of the frosting over the top of the cake, and then domed it like an elongated princess.  I liked the look; this cake may have been more successful aesthetically than it was taste wise.

Returning to the reason for the cake: the rolling pin.  My sister, who had used one of these rolling pins before, warned me that the marzipan (or fondant, whatever is being rolled) needs to be very level; any bumps or unevenness will result in the pattern transferring to some areas (the higher ones), but not to all of them.  This makes the rolling pins somewhat less convenient than the texture sheets that you can buy to similarly impress images onto fondant/marzipan, but which, since they are flexible, adapt to lumps and bumps.  That being said, ideally the fondant/marzipan will be level anyway and so there shouldn't be too many problems.

I chose to use white marzipan for this experiment, rather than the natural off-white to slightly yellow coloured variety.  As seen in the photo, the pattern is visible, although perhaps not as visible as I would have liked.  I tried to highlight it by brushing it with some white but sparkly lustre dust, but unfortunately this did not have much effect.  I'm not sure if coloured marzipan would have produced better results (I look forward to further experimentation), but coloured lustre dust probably would have been a better highlighter.  As it was, however, the pattern was very pretty and lent a subtle elegance.  I also did not have any trouble with it disappearing when I covered the cake.

If you haven't tried it, there is a lot of smoothing involved in covering a cake.  The bottom edges and corners (if there are any) need to be gently stretched and fanned out by smoothing so that the fondant/marzipan covering the sides of the cake does not become wrinkled or doubled over; all this smoothing and stretching can result in pattern loss, whether it is a depressed pattern, as with the texture sheets, or in relief, as here with the rolling pin.  Happily, this pattern survived the process intact.

With the cake covered, all I did was put a bow on it.

And served it, of course.