Making My Own: Birthday Cake

Tomorrow is my official birthday, so last night after a swig of moonshine, I decided midnight was as good a time as any to bake it.

I went small, and LAZY. I found a 7 inch and an 8 inch pan (though I have umpteen 8 inch pans, don’t ask me where they are at midnight.) I settled on a devils food, with lots of hazelnut oil in it. The flavor is rich, but subtle, and perfect for the filling I have planned.

That’s where we stand.

In this first series of videos, I’m just going to talk you through how I go about making a buttercream here. It isn’t my basic recipe, but it’s close. I wanted MORE hazelnut, so 1/4 cup of Nutella got mixed in with 1 pound of butter. Follow along with the videos for real life in the Doughmesstic kitchen. Expect NO editing. Expect kids, shouting, and snotty heads. I imagine no less.

Part One: Making Nutella Buttercream

Part Two of Two: Making Nutella Buttercream

Next up, I’ll be piping and filling the cake. That is, if I don’t eat all the buttercream. Gosh, it’s good. Stay tuned. I’ll let you know via Facebook when the next segment is up!

Okay – here you go! Two more videos…

Step 3–Filling and Slicing

Piping

And here’s what it looks like all filled, and then stacked.

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It’s in the fridge now, chilling. That means it’s time to move in to sculpting that owl. I doubt I do a video for that, but I’ll post a few pics as I go.


UPDATE:

Wow, time got away from me.

So here’s a play by play of what went down this evening.

First up, the cake stayed in the fridge while I made the owl. I used the four pre-packaged cereal treats to shape a rough head and body. I kept them separate while adding fondant – it’s easier and makes the process simpler. You can be decorating one piece,and not worrying about messing up the other.

In the second picture, you can see that I have taken some random blue and white fondant to beef up the owls body. It was leftover fondant from a past order, and I like to use what I have. It’s not like anyone will be eating this bird, but even they did, they’d just see some off color fondant as they took a bite. No big deal.

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You can also see in the second picture that I rolled out a thin sheet of green fondant. This I cut out with a round cutter (a large piping tip, actually, it was about an inch in diameter.) If you take a look at the third picture, you can see I stretched it a bit into a teardrop shape, quickly stamped it with a paisley stamp (a regular scrapbooking type of stamp, nothing special) and then perforated it with some decorative holes around the edge.

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In the next frame you can see how I layered these “feathers” onto the belly. I started at the base and and overlapped from left to right, bottom to top. You just attach them with a little dab of water.

To that I added the chocolate fondant wings, which I decorated with a few multi-colored paisley press-outs and dots. Nothing fancy. Once the body was done, I placed a skewer through it, then placed the head on. The skewer goes into the head, as well as down into the cake, for added stability.

For his head, I covered it in more chocolate fondant, then added plain circles for the eyes. Pink first, then white, then brown, then a tiny blue highlight dot. I also added a few embellishments as well as a freeform yellow nose.

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What took much longer than I anticipated was the “nest”. For this, I made varying shades of brown and tan fondant, rolled them into tubes, then cut them into pieces and scored them with a bit of wood pattern. I used no rhyme or reason for placing them, just kind of freeform and fun.

Lastly, I cut out a few leaves, buttons, and flowers to add to the nest. Nothing difficult!

Here you have the final cake. What do you think?

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Not perfect, of course, but…not too bad. I’ll be honest, I am kind of excited to eat it! That buttercream was delish!

Have a great night everyone, and thanks for the encouragement to do this. See you again soon!

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