Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

I'd had my eye on this recipe for a Cranberry Orange Bundt Cake for a long time and yesterday seemed like the perfect time to try it. We don't often have both sour cream and orange juice in the refrigerator, and we were planning on spending February school vacation week skiing in Vermont.  A slice of this cake with a cup of coffee would be perfect before heading out in the morning! And I've been eager to make another cake in  this  beautiful glass Bundt pan.   But... so much went wrong. I was happy when the cake slid out of the pan easily and was intact. But as soon as I tried a piece I realized there'd been a serious problem with the baking. The cake is dense, like a pudding cake, even though I did keep it in the oven until a skewer inserted in the middle came out clean. The recipe suggests a baking time of 55-70 minutes at 350 F.  I baked it most of the time at a lower temperature of 340, to compensate for the fact that my oven runs a bit hot. I didn't ...

 I wanted to try out  this bird mold  to make cake toppers for Valentine's day. The birds didn't work out to my satisfaction, causing me to change the entire cake design. It was the first time I used this kind of mold where you stuff the fondant inside, and it was trickier than I thought.  For my first attempt I thought of using white fondant and then painting it. I didn't use enough fondant, though, and the fondant was too soft. The birds head and chest came out misshapen. I tried fixing this with my hands and even though it looked kind of lumpy, the figure definitely still had the shape of a bird. I thought it could still look cute once painted. However, I did make a mess of the painting. I used one drop of Americolor Sky Blue diluted in what I thought was a lot of lemon extract. But the color was still too strong, and it was streaky when painted.  It did not look nice at all. My next attempt was using primary blue fondant from Wilton. I used most of a small p...

 I had a hard time deciding what to make for St Valentine's Day this year. I'm eager to decorate a layer cake, but we were in Vermont over the weekend and the beginning of the week was busy.  Ultimately I decided to make a roll cake. I love making roll cakes because they are easy and always make an impression. I used  this recipe  from King Arthur Baking for a chocolate roll cake with chocolate whipped cream filling. I decided to forego the chocolate glaze on top in the interest of cutting back a bit on sugar, and on time. I'm sure it would have elevated the cake, but it was good without it too. So for this recipe, the baking time is 10-12 minutes and although at 10 minutes a toothpick inserted in the center came out clean, the cake wasn't springing back to the touch the way I expected. I left it in the oven for 12 minutes plus one minute more with the oven turned off. I should have taken it out at 10-11 minutes, because it's a bit of a thicker sponge and it did tas...