Your mushrooms are fantastic!
Skyler said:
Your mushrooms are fantastic!
Thank you! The stems are made from spaghetti! See the comment below for more details
Skyler said:
Your mushrooms are fantastic!
Thank you! The stems are made from spaghetti! See the comment below for more details
Oh cool idea
Recipe and tutorial:
Micah said:
Recipe and tutorial:
The decorations consists of a few elements:
Fake moss: I made a small batch of green cupcakes and crumbled them into pieces to look like moss. After crumb-coating the cake, I mixed some melted dark chocolate and green food dye into the buttercream and piped it into tight circles using a star tip. I then dotted some of that moss on top, but in hindsight, the icing was really pretty on its own. The dark chocolate here also helped make the colour warmer and darker and therefore more “natural”, at least to me.
Fake bark: I simply cut a sheet of baking paper in half to make one long strip. I scrunched it in my hands. I used a clean paint brush to paint on patterns in dark chocolate, then poured over some more chocolate in a lighter shade. The dark chocolate here was just dyed with a few drops of oil-based food colours, which worked great. I then rolled up the baking paper and placed it into the fridge to set. When I opened it, beautiful shards had formed. I used cheap cooking chocolate for this but it came out crisp anyway.
Fake mushrooms!!! The caps of these mushrooms were made from marzipan. I put some food colouring on a plate and watered them down with a few drops of vodka. Some colours were mellowed out with coffee for that natural brown sheen. I then hand-painted every mushroom because I couldn’t help myself. The stems are made from… spaghetti! I cooked some spaghetti, shaped them into squiggles and gave them a quick 10-minute bake. I also gave them the same paint that the mushrooms got. They worked amazing for this project. To assemble, I melted some sugar in a frying pan, dipped the spaghetti carefully in it, and then dipped the hot caramel into the mushroom cap. It hardened in seconds and didn’t affect the mushrooms at all.
@Micah
You’re a genius.
Micah said:
Recipe and tutorial:
Holy grail buttercream (tart of success)
Context: Tart of Success is a popular cake in Scandinavia (you might have eaten a variant of it, the Daim chocolate cake, at Ikea). It’s fully gluten free and super delicious. The buttercream itself has a more complex flavour and smoother texture to American-style buttercream, hence why I consider it my holy grail. This is the basic recipe. I used double this recipe for my filling and decorating my cake, but if you’re planning to make a vintage detailed cake, I suggest using 3x. The leftover egg-whites can be used in other treats like meringues, so don’t discard them.
- 4 egg-yolks
- 1 dl whipping cream
- 100g sugar (use 50/50 brown and white sugar for a more mature caramel flavour)
- 1 tsp vanilla sugar or 1 vanilla bean pod
- 150g room-tempered butter in cubes
Mix the yolks, cream, sugar and vanilla in a pot. Carefully heat on medium until it thickens, stirring constantly. If you’re making the brown sugar version, toss in a pinch of salt too. Let it cool for a few minutes, then start adding butter little by little until fully incorporated. Let it cool in the fridge for a few hours or overnight. When ready to use, whip it up to get it fluffy.
This recipe is tasty on its own, but I make my own additions to make it a more functional cake decorating tool.
For my cake filling, I added 50 grams of mascarpone cheese and around 2 tbsp worth of melted chocolate, then whipped. For my decorative buttercream, I added around 300g of powdered sugar and a splash of coffee. This turns the velvety perfect filling into a stable decorating buttercream that still maintains that caramel flavour from the brown sugar.
Micah said:
Recipe and tutorial:
Additional ingredients:
- 3 plates of cooking chocolate
- 100g marzipan
- food-coloring
- a few strands of spaghetti
- sugar for assembly
- liquid caramel for dunking
- praline for crunch in the filling
Assembly:
- Cut each sponge in half.
- Smear some buttercream on the serving platter and place the first sponge on top. Mix liquid caramel 1-1 with water and drip some onto the sponge.
- Pipe a circle of stable buttercream along the rim of the sponge, then add our creamy filling in the middle. top with crushed praline.
- Repeat with all layers and crumb coat.
- Mix your remaining stable buttercream with melted chocolate and green food colouring, make the top of the cake look pretty.
- Pipe the buttercream along the sides of the cake and push the chocolate bark into it.
- Chill, then decorate with the beautiful fake mushrooms and voila! That’s 3 days of work
Micah said:
Recipe and tutorial:
Basic vanilla sponge (make 2):
5 eggs
150g sugar
150g flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla sugar
Instructions:
- Preheat the oven to 160C
- Prepare a 24cm wide spring form by placing a circle of baking paper in the bottom and buttering the sides
- Whisk the eggs and sugar with an electric whisk for around 10 minutes, or until you can write “ole” in the batter without the o disappearing by the time the e is written using the batter dripping from the whisk.
- Mix the dry ingredients together and sift them into the batter
- Carefully fold the flour into the batter until fully incorporated
- Pour into the spring form and bake on the bottom shelf for about 40 minutes.
- Let it rest for a few minutes, then take it out of the form and cool on a rack
- Repeat the recipe again for a taller cake
Every mushroom is fully edible. Once.
Seriously, though, great job on the cake!
Lovely, what flavor cake?
Eli said:
Lovely, what flavor cake?
Triple caramel. I spent two hours writing the recipe in the caption but it vanished and I haven’t been able to comment it.
I used 2x vanilla sponge cake, liquid caramel for dunking, tart of success buttercream with brown sugar for the filling and decorating, plus crushed pieces of praline inside the filling for crunch
@Micah
Yum
Eli said:
Lovely, what flavor cake?
Recipe in the comment below!
Wow! The detailed work is so impressive! This forest cake is truly enchanted in every way! 
This is so stunning!! 
Absolutely gorgeous! 
This is amazing! Great job!!