Classic Cake: Pineapple Upside-Down

I have always love old classic cake such as Pineapple Upside-Down. I remember how my mom and my aunt used to talk about this cake and how my aunt used to bake this cake when I was a little boy.

And recently I went to the supermarket and I found Josepine Pineapples from Philippines were on sale for a dirt cheap. So I bought 3 of them and thinking of using these pineapples specifically for Pineapple Upside-Down Cake. After almost two weeks keeping these pineapples in the bottom drawer of my refrigerator, I finally came to a perfect moment and mood to bake this wonderful cake.

I love the faint smell and taste of pineapples sip through the butter cake base. This is a nice moist cake and taste great to be eaten warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Such a great dessert to end any dinner or lunch or your snack break OR as a gift to your neighbor or friends.

Hell.... I'd become like Nigella Lawson raiding my refrigerator in the middle of the night and cut me a slice of this cake and warm it up a little bit in the microwave oven and eat it really quick before I go back bed. It felt so good when I do this but I will bitch about getting fatter later. But this this cake recipe is not from Nigella's cooking book though. It came from my aunt however I did some small change to her recipe just to perfect it the way I want it. And it work like magic.

Chocolate, Vanilla & Rose Wedding Cake

I love getting a wedding cake order from a bride who knows what she wants. She asked for a 5-tier wedding cake but her budget has a limit. So instead of doing all 5-tiers with real cakes, I suggested to her that two of the tiers to be dummy cakes. So she decided to let first bottom tier and the last on top to be the dummy cakes.

The next thing she had to decide was that what flavor should be the cakes? After a long discussions back and forth, she decided with Devil Foodcake aka chocolate for the 2nd tier, Vanilla for the 3rd tier and Rose flavor for the 4th tier. And just to make the cake more interesting, I put some pink color for the Rose Flavor so that it looks pretty when she cut it into pieces for the guests and left vanilla flavor to the natural yellowish butter color.

Third discussions we had about the cake was that at first I thought I had to stacked the 5 tier cakes. But then she wanted to use fresh roses flowers to decorate her cake so she asked me if I could use pillar for the cake. So I changed it to Pillared 5-tier cake and filled up in between the tiers with fresh red roses. And to make this square cake more interesting, I put some kind of texture on the cake so it looks more contemporary and interesting.

However about the color of the frosting, at first I promised her to make the cake into ombre peach color, darker peach in the bottom and lightest at the top. But during the production of the frosting, in the middle of the night before the wedding day, the frosting that we had been making was not enough and I ran out of butter to make the frosting so I changed the color to one color tone only, light peach.

After the wedding she called me and said that she was very pleased with her wedding cake and everybody loved the cake and said that they were so delicious. I was so happy to hear such a comment from a happy customer.

And below is how the cake looked like.

Sudoku Book is a Cake!

A friend gave me a challenge recently, she asked me to make a Sudoku Book Cake for her Mom's birthday. The rest of the details for the cake was up to my creativity except the cake has to be a Vanilla Butter Cake, moist and not overly sweet.

So I did the fondant Sudoku Book cake and when I first showed this cake on my Instagram account, some friends thought it was a real book. I thought that was a compliment for my work though and I was so happy.

My main thing when I design anything at all and for the past almost 10 months are all about cake designing, I want them to be neat and show a clean decisive idea and not cluttered or messy. This is just my style in designing cakes. And I was pleased with the end result. Below is the Fondant Sudoku Book Cake.

Random Photos of My Latest Cakes & Berry Tarts

I enjoy making colorful cakes and I always end up making something floral too as I always love flowers and natures.

Minnie Mouse Theme Cake

I love customers who know what they want and at least got some idea of what kind of cake they are looking for. Hints and clues make my designing easier. This time this nice customer love the idea I presented to her after she told me that she wanted a Minnie Mouse theme cake for her daughter's 8th birthday. So we decided to go with red, white, black, polka dots, bows and Minnie Mouse ears. This whole cake is not a new idea. There are hundreds of similar ideas out there but I think we managed to come out with a cute, nice cake for her daughter's birthday and she was pleased with the cake. She loved the Red Velvet cake inside that Minnie Mouse.

Sweet Island Flower For A Wedding Cake

I have been meaning to put Tahitian Gardenia flower or Tiare (in Hawaiian) on a cake for a long time. I just couldn't find the right moment and the right cake. Finally this 3-tier light yellowish cream colored wedding cake deserves some of these really sweet Tiare flowers. 

I have always been so fond of Tiare since I was living in Honolulu many years ago and you can never find this flower in tropical Malaysia except in Hawaii, Tahiti and the pacific islands only. I wish I could bring the seedlings of Tiare and grow them here as we have the close cousin of this flower Gardenia Carinata growing wild in Malaysia. But this is another unrelated issue altogether.

I didn't want to use lots of Tiare flowers on my wedding cake for the first time...I just want to "quietly" introduce this flower on my cake for now and accented it with some tiny colorful filler flowers, so that the Tiare is still the main flowers and the center of attention. 

Next time when I can find the right cake, the right time, the right place and the right customer that can really promote my cake designs to the public, I will put Tiare flowers as the only flowers that adorn the special cake. I will make sure that that cake will be so awesome then and something that I am really proud of for something so unique that bears my name on it.

However this time, I don't like the quality of the photos of this cake. I was rushing to send it to a customer for a big wedding in Terengganu. I had to find a decent corner in my living room to shoot this cake and there were not enough lighting to show the real color and the designs on the cake. But I have to make do with just this for now. 

Totally Worth It!

Just when I thought accepting a last minute wedding cake was the last thing on my mind, somebody important called and ask me a favor. She needed a wedding cake for a local celebrity's wedding held at her establishment and her regular cake supplier was out of town and nobody else can accept her last minute wedding cake order. But reluctantly I said Yes the minute she mentioned the celebrity name. And plus her request for the wedding cake was not too much to bear and I can take a 24 hours of suffer for this. It's a win win situation!

My younger sister Fiza and I had to be up all night to finish up 3 cakes in total. It was very tiring and on top of that I had to deliver them all to the customers. During the delivery I almost got into accidents many times on the road because I was so exhausted to drive and fell asleep many times while driving. It was so dangerous, really! But after I delivered my cakes to the customers and saw how they were so happy with it, it made it all worth it.

About the design aspect of this wedding cake, I had to design something simple and not too complicated for Fiza to follow and ultimately complete this cake flawlessly. So after I covered the cake with fondant and stacked them, I quickly showed Fiza how to make the flowers. Everything went well and we were pleased with the end result.

Below is the photo of the wedding cake that belonged to Zakiah Anas and she used to be a TV host at TV3 Malaysia.

The Evolution of My Rainbow Cake Decorations

Boy, I have evolved so much since the first time I started baking and decorating my rainbow cakes. You can see the difference from the first time (first top photo) to the most recent one (last photo)