As a Christmas present to some close friends of Curious Confections (with the added bonus of being a great way to test out recipes on new people and a way to receive feedback), we decided to experiment with some chocolates and candies.

We made a caramel ganache to go in some molded truffles, and a cherry bounce cordial, we even coloured the chocolate accordingly. Our favourite piece (and the piece with the most reviews) was a white chocolate lemon truffle piped out and then it had sugar crystals grown onto it to form a protective shell.

Our first attempt at taffy was mostly a success, made with Godiva chocolate liqueur it had a rice smooth flavour. A little too chewy perhaps but fun to make!

We finished with peppermint sticks. Hand pulled and twisted, we definitely need more practice there!

We also made some bacon dog treats for the pups in our lives. All reports indicate that they went down very well indeed!

We hope 2010 brings you nothing but happiness.

From the two of us here at Curious Confections. We hope your Holidays are joyous and your New Year is prosperous and happy.

For the local astronomical society we made a butter cake with English buttercream. Covered in fondant and airbrushed to resemble the night sky, with just the last hints of daylight on the horizon.

The stars are pearl dragees and royal icing, for some variety in size, then we added some large stars on wires.

While studying as part of my coursework I had to design and make two showpieces, one in chocolate and one in sugar.

The one in chocolate had to be film or book themed so I went with Harry Potter. Using two big heavy tomes (titled from the series) as my base I then had the phoenix, Faulkes, rising from them. As a small additional detail I made a pair of Potter style glasses to sit on the corner. This utilised all three main flavours of chocolate (milk, dark and white) whilst also showing a combination of tempering work, and modelling chocolate.

The sugar showpiece was an abstract piece, demonstrating several techniques. Among them are pulled and blown sugar, net sugar (the backdrop) and straw sugar (the large pink piece). Sugar does not keep well in the Texan summer so it didn’t last too long sadly.

We were set the task of creating a Roman themed cake “with pillars and marble” for a toga party. Settling on a slightly different presentation to normal we created the base with the cake being held up by the pillars, painted to resemble marble.

The main challenge was how to decorate buttercream to look like marble, after a few practices we found a method that seems to work for now, giving light and dark variances in colour, and veins running through it.

We added the age in Roman numerals around the side and then researched the Latin equivalent for Happy Birthday (as I discovered, the Romans didn’t celebrate birthdays as we do, so there’s no direct translation, the inscription we found appears to approximately mean ‘congratulations on the moment of your birth/natality’

The cake was a vanilla butter cake with black raspberry filling.

Along with the chocolates previously mentioned, some work with candies has been attempted.

This includes traditional items such as divinity and pralines, along with candied zests, marzipan squares and many other delicious items. Visit the gallery for more items. Hopefully in time many more confections will be joining them.

In the past we’ve been playing about with some chocolates, they’re an area we know a little about, and would love to learn more. Truffles can be either hand rolled, or molded, either way they need to be coated with a layer of chocolate to protect the ganache and prevent it from spoiling.

In the gallery now we are showcasing a range of styles and flavours of both the rolled and molded truffles. Other flavours and styles will of course be tried in later months, but we decided to share what we have for now.

A wedding cake for the lovely ladies over at Freak Revolution, it’s a 9″ square white almond cake filled with vanilla buttercream.

Wanting traditional with a twist we gave them the classic cherry blossom cake but with the blooms in rainbow colours. The flowers are made out of gumpaste, with some on wires to give them more depth and movement. The branches are made out of fondant.

Of course we couldn’t let our favourite holiday go by without some sort of party!

Wanting to build a bigger and much more impressive cake than the past we settled on the majority of it being made from styrofoam, with only the top four inches being edible. This meant we could get an impressive centrepiece, while not having so much cake left over we’re eating it for months!

The cake was a butter cake, tinted a wonderful brain colour, filled with a black raspberry jam.

As the skull turned into a more stylised shape, to allow for maximum cake capacity on the top there, we decided to go for a dia de los muertos theme, painting it with bright colours.

July saw four friends sharing a birthday party. We wanted a cake that would give each person a cake at least partially tailored to them, while coming together into one presentation.

We briefly considered a tiered cake, with each person getting a tier each, but put that idea to the side after deciding that it would be unfair to have one person get a large cake while the person who got the top tier would get a tiny one.

In the end all four cakes were 9″ round, with the flavour and the base colour as the favourites of the intended recipient. The patterns are in the other three colours to tie the cake together. Each cake was able to move around the centre pole so they could be positioned as desired, but we felt the spiral looked best.

The top purple cake is a super intense, chocolate fudge cake made with 100% Venezuelan Black Cacao with a chocolate fudge icing.

The blue is a spice cake with a pumpkin buttercream, a new recipe for us that we were very excited to be able to use.

The red cake is a pina colada, a pineapple cake with a coconut buttercream.

The red cake is a red velvet with a cream cheese icing.

And what does a 64th Birthday need but a Beatles themed party.

And of course every Beatles themed party needs a Beatles themed cake.

The cake of the day was Ringo Starr’s bass drum. Made of a lemon chiffon cake with vanilla English buttercream. The drum face was covered in fondant, to get that pure white, but the rest of the cake was covered in white modeling chocolate. All the drum pegs were made of the modeling chocolate too. We made this cake taller than usual to get the proportions closer to that of a bass drum.

Butterfly book.  A 9″x13″ red velvet cake with cream cheese icing.  The butterfly and simulated text were designed and painted by Martin Whitmore.

We at Curious Confections believe in the power of the pioneering spirit of creative individuals.  We admire anyone who can take a talent, skill, or product, make it marketable, and try to make a living from it.  Heck, we are those people.  As such we’ve got a good habit of trying to support and promote go-getters who are making their dreams a reality, bolster the small business community, contribute to their local economies, and contribute to the happiness of others — especially in Austin, but we recognize stand-out people everywhere.

Martin Whitmore is a talented illustrator, living and working in Austin.  He took a chance and walked away from his 9-to-5 job in order to earn a living using his abundant talents.  He has a wildly wicked sense of humor, and made his way into our hearts by being as big a fan — bigger, even — of zombies and the undead as we are.  He draws Tasty Flesh, a twice-weekly webcomic, offers a variety of products on his site… t-shirts, prints, etc, and takes personal commissions.

Do us a favor — do yourself a favor — and take a few minutes to learn a little more about Marty and what he does.  If you like what you see, show him a little love and throw some business his way.  Support the arts by supporting a talented artist.

Bolt’s dog tag.  A 12″ chocolate cake with chocolate English buttercream and milk modeling chocolate exterior.  The entire outside was detailed with an edible bronze powder to give it the appearance of metal.

A silhouette-style butter cake with chocolate English buttercream, covered and detailed in fondant. The base is tinted piping gel with chocolate and tiramisu filled cookie wafer sticks.

Presented for your delight and delectation,three more cakes have been added to the gallery.

A highly technical two tiered cake with extensive piping, pastillage and gumpaste flowers.

A devils food cake with cocoa painting and modeling chocolate details.

And a sculpted cake of tea and cookies.

Enjoy!

A while back, I came across a blog, it belonged to a girl who was in the final stages of a Baking and Pastry program at the Culinary Institute of America called Sweet Napa since it was in the Napa Valley in California that she was studying.

Since I’ve been following her she graduated from class and has been opening her own business making chocolates and candy bars. She moved back to LA and making a policy of using local ingredients (organic where possible) and nothing artificial, her business has been steadily growing.

BonBonBar started off at farmers markets, she then progressed to offering a mail service and now her chocolates are available in a wide number of stores in LA.

Just before Christmas I finally ordered some of her products. I had wanted to since I arrived here (she doesn’t ship overseas), however she is very proud of her products and doesn’t want anything to damage their quality and so until the cooler weather hit it was overnight shipping or nothing.

As soon as the cool weather arrived I ordered some. A small selection containing some of the Single Malt Scotch Ganache Bars, Caramel Nut Bars and the Malt Bar, along with the Pumpkin Pie Bar, available for the holidays only. The only bar I didn’t try was the Orange Bar.

I also had some of the Caramels (I had the original and the salted nut.. She also has wildflower honey, cinnamon almond and single malt scotch), but not the marshmallows (available in vanilla or passionfruit). They arrived in the cutest little box and I couldn’t wait to try them out.

I have to say, these were some of the best chocolates I have ever had. The flavours were well balanced, a fantastic use of salt made the flavours pop and also helps cut through the sweetness of the chocolate. I will not hesitate to buy more of her products next time I want to treat myself. The caramels were a little soft, but full of flavour.

They have a short shelf life, due to no artificial ingredients. It’s hard to imagine a ‘fresh’ chocolate rather than a bar that’s been sat on a shelf for no one knows how long, but you can taste it, you can tell from the first bite that these are something special!

I’m trying to encourage people to support her not only because they are amazing chocolates but because I admire what she’s done.

She finished culinary school and immediately set to working on what she wanted to achieve, and she is doing well at it, she’s having to hire staff now to keep up with demand.

Please do support BonBonBar, you won’t regret it!

And since it’s the festive time of year, what’s more festive than a Christmas Cake.

Now, this is apparently an entirely English thing that I’m introducing America to, but it’s a good cake, even if it is a fruit cake.

But it’s a good fruit cake (I’ve seen the ones in the shops here, I wouldn’t eat one if you paid me!), and here’s the important bit, it’s soaked in alcohol!

The cake making is in fact a process that takes a few months, starting by soaking the fruit in alcohol, then making the cake. Once the cake is made it then gets soaked in alcohol. In this case we used Cherry Bourbon.

A week before Christmas it’s covered in marzipan (homemade, and less sickly sweet than the shop bought marzipan here), and once that’s dried out it’s covered in fondant. From there you can decorate it as you wish.

For this cake we made some white modelling chocolate and dyed it, cutting out several hundred leaves (no, I’m not kidding, it was 800 in total). Then we decorated the cake to look like a Christmas wreath.

Happy Holidays

October found us with a commission from a friend back in New Orleans.  She requested a cake that was — and I quote — “icky, disgusting, gross and delicious… like the ones you used to have for your Halloween parties.“  How could we refuse flattery like that?

Why come to us, 500 miles away?  Because we are the best there is!  That, and she initially contacted our friends at Flour Power Confectionery back home, only to be told that they were booked solid.  After calling every specialty bakery between New Orleans and Austin, she found that none had the skill, nor the inclination to produce a realistic and disturbing horror cake.  Realism, perfection, and the opportunity to create a cake that could evoke a strong reaction on sight from a room full of guests is our bread and butter — generally we like an “ooooh!” or an “ahhhh!“, but an “eeeew!” will do just as well.

So, we set forth to bring to life The Zombie.

The Zombie is composed of four individual pieces, and made to full human scale.  The entire cake measured 4ft x 2ft.

The torso is the primary piece, and is constructed from “green velvet” cake, which is tender and moist with a dark mossy-green color.  The layers were filled with an English buttercream icing tinted the color of muscle tissue, and sprinkled with tropical flavored gummy bones.  Then hands are green krispie treats over an armature.  The head is a white chocolate “brain-pan” filled with a sweet, deep red sauce and covered with green krispie treats.  The teeth and eyes are white chocolate, as are the miscellaneous exposed bones on all pieces.  Everything is iced with the English buttercream and covered in fondant, then airbrushed and hand detailed.  The “dirt” is composed of a mixture of graham cracker, chocolate cookie and ginger snap crumbs.

This cake was meant to be interacted with before serving.  The hosts had first to dispatch this zombie, who was gradually digging himself free of his grave!  The most reliable way to do that is to destroy the brain.  A hammer was brought into play, and the head was smashed, shattering the chocolate brain-pan and allowing the blood-red sauce to flow out.  Guests — reluctantly at first, and then with great glee — took to smearing the top of their serving of cake with the sweet sauce.

“Icky, disgusting, gross and delicious.“  Mission accomplished.