Sunday, August 9, 2009

Pietacular?

So, I had a lot of blackberries this week, so I wanted to make some blackberry pie. But not a conventional pie...

Enter pie pops!

And pie pockets!

The pie pop idea is, sadly, not mine, but was stolen from Luxirare and Bakerella. They are super duper easy to do, although you have to be careful not to put too much filling in them. About half of mine were useless, because so much filling leaked out.

The pocket pie molds are from Williams-Sonoma.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Louis Vuitton cake

My friend issued a challenge last week. He wanted a Louis Vuitton themed birthday cake for our mutual friends. They are brothers, both with birthdays the first week of August, and both with an undying obsession with Louis Vuitton. For those of you unfamiliar with this designer, the bags look like this:
Now, I'm not talented enough yet in the "sculpting" arena to make a bag-shaped cake. So I figured we would just have to settle for a square cake with the Louis Vuitton design imprinted.

To do this, I downloaded a desktop wallpaper with the Louis Vuitton design. Then I flipped the image (so it was mirror image). I printed that out and covered it with wax paper to pipe each of the designs using melted vanilla candy coating (white chocolate would have worked as well - possibly better).

I then made gold "paint" using edible gold lustre and lemon juice. A couple of notes about this. The instructions say you can use vanilla extract, lemon juice, or vodka. I thought vanilla extract made sense, because the candies were made with vanilla candy. NO. Bad choice. Obviously straight vanilla extract tastes gross and is very strong. That was a moment of braindead-ness for me. So, I switched to lemon and all was peachy keen. The painting took a very long time. If I were to do this again, I would really search in earnest for edible gold lustre SPRAY paint. I think that would be much more time efficient.

Anyway! So then I had the candies, made an 8-inch square red velvet cake, and iced it with chocolate buttercream frosting.

And, folks, here is the final product:

Second photograph courtesy of Jermaine: