Duhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuh BATCAKE!

I promised a cake, and here we are. Thank you to the birthday girl for providing the pictures.

My friend loves Batman. Her birthday was last month, so I made her a Batman birthday cake. Yum.



I didn't get to take any pictures right when it was done, so please excuse the wax drip and candle holes. And general squashiness of the cake. As we all know, I can't make a birthday cake without some sort of drama:

I work next door to a box and paper store and not far from a cake supply shop but could not find a box the right size for a 9", two layer cake. So I used a box that was slightly too small with toothpicks taped into the corners to hold it up. It looked more like a shirt box than a cake box, but I figured it would do. Guess who was wrong!

The cake left my house in perfect condition, I swear. Halfway to the party, some guys on the train started talking to me and asked to see the cake (don't ask me how they knew it was a cake). I showed it to them and it was fine. The cake was still totally intact. Somewhere between Queens and Brooklyn, the toothpicks fell off and the lid fell in. When I got to the restaurant and took the top off the box to show the birthday girl's husband the cake, half the bat symbol came off on the inside of the top of the box. And some the ganache was stuck to the sides. The cake was ruined! It was so bad the staff couldn't even tell what it was supposed to be (the husband could, though). I stood there shaking and shitting my pants (well, dress) while the staff brought us some chocolate sauce. The husband was able to fill in the outline left by the original bat with the chocolate sauce* and still get the basic look I had been going for. I didn't do it myself because my hands were shaking and they said the chocolate was at about 100 degrees.

We brought in the cake, everyone loved it and no one seemed to notice anything was wrong with it until I told them the story.

The cake is a doubled recipe of the Golden Vanilla Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Like the book suggests, I heated the soy milk and whisked in some tumeric, to get it really yellow (I was too lazy to do this for the Iron Man cake). I made this cake multiple times, because in my effort to get it good and yellow, I kept adding too much tumeric, and you could taste it. Blech.

I needed the cake nice and flat to get my stencil to sit on it, so I asked for suggestions on the PPK and got the idea to make my own cake rings:



They say cakes dome because the edges cook faster than the center. The slower cooking center puffs up, leaving the more done edges low. Cake rings are supposed to keep the edges from baking so quickly. I made mine by soaking some newspaper in cold water, wrapping it in tinfoil and taping it closed around my cake pans. I think the cakes were a bit straighter than usual, but it was hard to tell since one broke in half right out of the pan (I should have known that was an omen). Obviously, that was the bottom cake. I wonder if anyone noticed the break while they were cutting (if not, they'll know if they read this!).

I topped and filled the cake with the Fauxstess ganache from Vegan With a Vengeance because I think that one comes out closest to black. I printed the bat symbol out from the Internet, traced it onto cardboard and used that as a stencil for the icing.

Here's the cake with candles:



And the birthday girl blowing them out:



The birthday girl also loves Harry Potter. As a super nerdy bonus, this doubles as a Hufflepuff cake from the inside (assuming we keep pretending the ganache is actually black):



After this, the Iron Man cake, the Indiana Jones cake and the Yoda cupcakes, maybe I should change the name of this blog to Seitan Said Bake Dorky Things.

*Two days later, I realized I had no idea what was in that chocolate sauce and I just used it because I was desperate to save the cake. I doubt it was vegan, but such is life. It honestly didn't even occur to me at the time. I was the only vegan there, though, so with luck, my piece only had ganache on it.

Advice!

Here is some advice. Free. No charge. Gratis. Just for you:

Don't break your arm in three places while arm wrestling drunk unless you have someone willing to bake you cupcakes while you're in the hospital.

Just saying.



Those are Your Basic Chocolate Cupcakes topped with green Vegan Fluffy Buttercream Frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Harry Potter sprinkles in Harry Potter cups. Why green and Harry Potter? Why not?

I got home from visiting the hospital a bit after 1 AM, realized I couldn't sleep and was in the mood to bake, so I did.

I was always under the impression that ice cream scoops only came in one size. That's apparently not the case. The new one we got is huge and I can fill about two cupcake cups with it. Of course, it took me a while to realize that, so I ended up with a few muffin tops.

Also, my oven seems to be kind of fucked, so when the cupcakes were supposed to be done, they were still very wet in the center and the temperature was 340 instead of 350. I turned it up and left them in for a while longer and they seem to be OK.

This was my first time working with the pasty food coloring. It was pretty neat. I didn't know how concentrated it was, so I dipped a fork in the coloring, scraped the fork against the beaters, then resumed beating the frosting. It was pretty cool because the white frosting would turn really dark green around the beaters, then the color would slowly lighten and spread. I really like the mint green I got, but it makes me wish I had some mint extract to put in the frosting, making chocolate-mint cupcakes.

Also, I need to remember to use a bigger bowl next time I make that frosting. The beaters sprayed it everywhere, even when I tried to block it with my hands. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning up when I was done.

A friend gave me the Harry Potter sprinkles when I first got into baking, but I didn't know what I'd be able to use them for now that the series was over, so this was a good use. I bought the HP cups myself, on the cheap, to match them.

I had originally planned on spelling out GET WELL SOON in frosting on the cupcakes, but I miscounted the number of letters in the phrase and made two swirly cupcakes to use as spaces. Once I did that, I just did a bunch of other swirlies and wrote GWS (I couldn't bring myself to do one more swirl at 4 AM!). I really wanted to use the big star tip for the frosting, but it was upstairs and I was lazy, so I tried the small star. I think I would have been there until 6 AM if I used the small star, so I switched to a large crescent. The tip itself was pretty cool looking, but the icing was unimpressive. At least it was fast!

Naked cupcakes in all their nerdy glory:



Close up of the cup:



Spork 2000s:

How it All Began

I'm starting this blog with entries about what led up to me wanting to keep it. This post is backdated to approximately the date it happened.

There are two things I love more than may be considered normal: music and Harry Potter.

Because of the former, I check BrooklynVegan about a million times daily. Because of the latter, I'm a huge nerd.

Anyway! One day last June, I noticed the "Vegan Cupcakes!" link on BV, which took me to Isa Chandra Moskowitz's blog for Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I've been a vegetarian for about thirteen years, have considered going vegan many times and really like pretty baked goods, so I fell in love immediately and ran right out and bought the book. I should probably point out that I'd never really cooked or baked at this point. I was just compelled. I got my book home, flipped through it and was DYING to try out a few recipes. But for what? I needed some kind of event if I was going to bake enough cake to feed twelve people, right?

The event and inspiration came the next month.



Having absolutely nothing more interesting to do at work, I was poking around online when I found skull shaped cupcake pans on pushindaisies.com. First I laughed at the idea of gothcakes, then I had a brainfart: my friends were having a party to celebrate the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! How awesome would Edible Dark Marks be? Very awesome, indeed.

I decided to go with the Golden Vanilla and Basic Chocolate Cupcake recipes from VCTOTW with the Rich Chocolate Ganache on top. For the cupcakes, I used half all-purpose flour and half whole wheat, canola oil instead of margarine and vanilla extract instead of almond or caramel. Since this was my first time baking, I thought it'd be a good idea to do a test run of each recipe. I did and all the cupcakes came out lovely and skull-looking. Fabulous.

So I got some green sugar and sour gummy worms (OK, I actually got all the colors, used the greens and ate the rest) for garnish and stayed up baking almost all night before the book release (which was just a splendid idea considering I planned on staying up all the following night reading the book at getting in good and late the night after since I had tickets for Gogol Bordello, who were just awesome, by the way).

Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, or maybe I just couldn't make good twice in a row, because almost all the cupcakes I made that night stuck to the pan and failed. I had skulls without chins and foreheads and some were just cracked right in half. Naturally, most of the ones that broke were the chocolate, which were far more aesthetically pleasing, since the ganache blended in with the cake and all you saw was bright green on the dark background. I salvaged what I could, decorated them according to plan and...they looked like a first attempt at baking. Not terrible, but certainly not on par with anything you'd see in the blog linked above. However, they were still crowd pleasers, so I guess that's all right. It was a start, anyway.