Eddie changed the baking game

“I don’t like the look of printed cookies & don’t need to buy a food printer.” – Anna (circa 2021)

So I ate my words! Like I can literally also print my words on a cookie & eat it. Turns out having a food printer in my baking arsenal not only saved time but elevated my treats to a whole new level.

Did I already tell you that I was a former marketer & how following brand guidelines has been embedded in my brain?! With the addition of a food printer, I can be sure to match brand colors, fonts & logos with confidence and best of all, with ease.

Why Primera Eddie?

With a ticket price of $3k, I had a really hard time justifying the big expenditure especially as a part-time baker. Then I decided I was going to make the investment but also ensure that it paid for itself with holiday orders. After 1000+ macarons & cookies printed in over 120 holiday gift boxes & probably more than a full week of baking, decorating, packing & shipping, Eddie was paid off in one massive order!

Over 2 years later, the Eddie edible printer from Primera Technologies has been an invaluable asset to my baking business, revolutionizing the way I create and customize treats. This remarkable tool has enabled me to effortlessly print intricate designs, logos, and personalized messages directly onto cookies and small treats, bringing a new level of creativity and personalization to my products.

Learning curve & tray creation

With any new machine, there is a learning curve. The complication was not necessarily plugging in the printer & sending a print to it but figuring out the image editing software template & alignment. My biggest struggle in the beginning was figuring out exactly where to place the cookie so it would print in the right place. Out of the box, the printer leverages a roughly 2.5″x1.5″ “tongue” where the cookie is placed to print from. As you can imagine, this isn’t much surface area to hold a cookie securely.

This is where 3rd party cookie trays come into play. At the time, the available options were not to my liking and because I owned a 3D printer, I decided to design something that was super easy to use… a single piece tray with an erasable surface for perfect cookie alignment every time. When it comes to 3d models, I fully believe in the creative community so made the STL file available for free on Thingiverse. A few months after uploading, I realized that it was more accessible for some to be able to purchase the physical tray so have been selling them in my online shop & Etsy in addition to sharing the free file.

Once I started using my tray, it made printing with Eddie a breeze because all I needed to do was format & position the image using the image editing software (I primarily use Bartender) and then test print directly onto the tray so I knew exactly where to place the cookie.

Tutorials

Around early 2022, there were not many tutorials/videos available to learn all the cool ways to use the Eddie so really it’s been mostly trial & error. Primera sponsors & administers a Facebook group but unfortunately, it felt like a vendor sales portal rather than a learning community so I had left it. Fortunately an “unofficial” Facebook group was created & it has been a great community where fellow bakers share their cool creations as well as help each other with best practices & tips. I’ve since found that I enjoy sharing tutorials as well as my process. Therefore, 2024 is the year I will be creating & sharing YouTube videos consistently for all to learn.

Show your support for Ukraine

Thank you for showing your love for the people of Ukraine & I hope that you can display this heart proudly.

If you have not already, please consider donating to any of the charities on the ground helping the humanitarian efforts. There are so many organizations helping but if you need some inspiration, here are a few that I believe are very impactful during this crisis:

• UNICEF
• Airbnb
• Save the children
• Project Hope

The simple act of caring is heroic

As a crafter & a baker, I make these hearts to show my support & love for the people of Ukraine which allow others to do the same. Not only are my husband & kids Ukranian, I care because as a mother, it is breaking my heart to see how families are being torn apart & people getting murdered for the sake of power. I want to show my children what kindness & compassion look like & this is it. It is the whole world coming together to help their fellow humans in their time of need. Thank you all & let’s all hope for peace.

Tips for adhering the vinyl sticker

1. Remove the paper backing (making sure the sticker stays adhered to the transparent transfer tape).
2. Carefully position the sticker to the desired clean area. Use a hard edged object like a credit card to make sure the entire sticker is fully adhered to the surface & push out any air bubbles.
3. Slowly remove the transfer tape making sure no part of the stickers remains on the transfer tape.

I know 2020 was a year that no one will ever forget. But with all the bad this year, I gotta believe that there’s a silver lining somewhere…

Unemployment 2020

As of March, it was the year I was officially laid off for the first time. To be completely honest, I was not mad about it… even prior to the pandemic, I didn’t feel like I was apart of something worthwhile. In my career of being a digital marketer, my track record of hopping jobs every year had made me believe that I could probably find another gig if I tried hard enough. But there were many challenges: 1. I wanted to be more selective & find a job that was a better fit, 2. a global pandemic meant that most of the world was shutting down & jobs would be harder to come by & 3. schools shut down & my 3 kids were home with the start of all things remote, including learning.

Then I thought to myself, “I should explore what I love to do & see if I could do this baking gig full-time.” Generally speaking, I am risk-adverse so never considered full-time baking until the kids were more grown up. But 2020 seemed like the year to (crash) dive right in. I took the risk & as they say, “put myself out there!”

I cannot express how thankful I am to friends & family who supported my baking passion & submitted orders. Believe Cakes grew with checkout enabled on the site as well as many new designs added. I was most excited about offering a monthly subscription so everyone could get a dose of cuteness overload each month. I was baking almost everything including cakes, breads, pies, cookies, croissants, cake pops & especially macarons.

Soon after, I fell hard into the world of macaron art. I was so impressed & inspired by the likes of IG sugar geniuses @mellyeatsworld, @crememacarons & @sugardevotion (to name a few) that I became addicted. A few months prior, I was struggling making a round macaron that didn’t crack or have feet bulge. My addiction went from perfecting the macaron process to coloring & piping macaron characters with as much detail as drawing. I might have finally found my art form & never would have believed what could be done with egg whites, almond flour & sugar! I love to say that cute is my genre.

Who’s Following Who

I had a bit of a rough start growing a follower base. Believe it or not, Instagram was a bigger struggle for me than making macarons! I really never imagined that it would be as hard as it was. I spent so much time taking insta-worthy images, preparing captions & hashtags, shooting & editing videos and consistently posting. Yet all that was not enough to move from 200 IG followers. Now after 6 months of slightly increasing my following, I have so much appreciation for influencers who know exactly what, who, when & where on social media to get the incredible engagement they do… It is truly a full time commitment.

No matter how many times I complain about how much effort it takes to stay active on social media, I am so grateful to have found such an amazing community of people who support my work as art. Although I haven’t met many in-person, I’m very glad to have made so many unexpected friends. It is such an honor when most give me creative freedom to do my thing because they truly believe in my abilities… so much love to y’all!

2021: What’s Next?

This past holiday season, I was overwhelmed by the amount of orders coming in for cute creations. I have been saying for awhile that I need to pull back & take some time for myself & family but at the same time, I have a really hard time saying no to a really fun design. I really do love baking delicious & adorable treats yet the amount of time to make them is significant/daunting. As for 2021, I will most likely go back to full-time corporate work but that does not mean the end of the Believe Cakes journey. I look forward to working on new designs, improving techniques & sharing the process & creations with you all. Happy New Year!!

Growing up, I never went camping so making actual s’mores was more of a stove top burner experience . I still enjoy a good s’more every now & again but I personally don’t really like the ratio between the chocolate bar & the big marshmallow. Then everything changed with the invention of the s’mores bar!

A few summers ago, I tried the s’mores bars that Starbucks started selling at their cafés. It was all downhill for my diet and wallet from there . I began searching for recipes to replicate these bars because purchasing them for $4 a piece was getting too expensive and they weren’t available year-round. At the time, I didn’t find what I was looking for so I experimented & came up with this delicious, not-too-sweet version of the ultimate summer BBQ dessert.

To break it down into the 3 layers, it is 1. graham cracker crust + 2. chocolate ganache + 3. slightly roasted marshmallows in that order. Enjoy!

Anna’s S’mores Bar Recipe

Ingredients

• 4.5 graham full cracker sheets or 12 crackers
• 1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 8 oz bittersweet chocolate
• 10 oz mini marshmallows

Yields: 20 bars

Directions

Graham Cracker Crust

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Place graham crackers in zip top bag & crush into crumbs. Rolling pin method works great. Pour crumbs into medium bowl.
3. Melt stick of butter. Pour onto crumbs & add sugar. Combine well to coat throughout crumbs. Mixture will look slightly wet.
4. Line 9×13 baking pan with a sheet of parchment paper. (Parchment paper works great so you can lift the entire bar sheet up once set to cut into bars.) Pour graham cracker mixture into prepared baking pan & spread evenly throughout. Some use the bottom of a flat measuring cup to press firmly down. I prefer to use a rubber spatula to get a flat crust.
5. Bake for 7 minutes.
6. Cool completely.

Chocolate Ganache

1. Pour heavy cream in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over the stove & immediately turn off once cream starts to boil.
2. Add in bittersweet chocolate. (I use baking chips so it doesn’t need extra prep. If using a baking chocolate bar, cut into small pieces/chunks before adding to cream.)
3. Stir until chocolate is completely melted & the mixture is a smooth consistency.
4. Cool completely.
5. Once cooled, pour over graham cracker crust & spread into even layer.
6. Refrigerate at least an hour or until ganache firms up. (To speed things up, I put in freezer for 30 minutes.)

Marshmallow Layer

1. Turn on oven broiler to high.
2. Place the mini marshmallows into the top layer of the sheet. (I used to spend a long time lining each marshmallow so the flat sides were on the top & bottom throughout the entire pan but got lazy & realized that it’s still just as delicious & much easier to pour the entire bag onto the pan & spread evenly. It definitely looks better if you line them individually so it’s up to you ). Be sure to fill in any gaps… you don’t want to see too much of the brown chocolate after you put the marshmallows on top.
3. Place onto top rack of oven for ~2 minutes. You want to watch this step carefully as the marshmallows could start to burn quickly! I typically put into oven with the door shut for the first minute. Then I open the door & shift the pan around for about another minute to get a nice even browning on all the marshmallows.
4. Refrigerate for another 30 minutes to an hour. Once all layers are set, cut into bars/squares. (Pro tip: use a long bread knife & spray the blade with some cooking spray before cutting. Wipe off about every 2-3 cuts & re-grease to prevent chocolate getting onto marshmallow layer.) Enjoy!

That’s it! It’s a very simple recipe but does take a bit of patience for each of the 3 layers. I will aim to add some pictures for each of the layers the next time I make it. It is a huge hit with my kids, especially because they can help with the lining the marshmallows.

Please try it & comment on how it came out!

I’d like to see you s’more

What is a macaron?

I still get confused when these treats are referred to as macaroons because I’ve always thought macaroons are coconut cookies. In researching the history, the original macaroons originated in France (hence the name French macaroons) made with ground almonds/almond paste. Ultimately, a new version was born (circa 1890s) which replaced the almonds altogether with coconut. So to summarize, macaroons are gluten-free sweets leavened by meringue/egg whites only.

In all honesty, I didn’t see the appeal of either version until this past year (2020)! I’ve had a couple store-bought ones before I started experimenting with them myself & my initial reaction was, “meh.” So I began to think that all macaroons were overrated & over-priced for a mediocre tasting small cookie.

It turns out that I completely misunderstood these delicate treats. If you eat a perfect macaron, it changes your whole perspective. To me, a perfect macaron has the lightly crispy shell with a chewy inside & paired with the right buttercream/filling for that delicate & delicious satisfaction. My favorite macaron so far is the Oreo macaron because it has the perfect cookies & cream combo without the denseness.

Love/Hate Relationship

So even though I love enjoying these goodies, I sometimes hate the process of how these are made. Even after a ton of research before attempting, I remember that the first time batch I tried making were over-mixed & so runny that they spread all over the the pan. After making over 50+ batches, I still get cracks from time to time. It is the most frustrating experience to stiffen the egg whites, color, “macaronage”, pipe to the right shape & wait for the shells to dry only to have the shells cracked in the oven. And when you look to the internet to try to find out why oh why, the answer is:

But really, this is the most finicky recipe I’ve ever encountered. Ingredients need to be weighed, eggs need to be “aged”, whipping the egg whites need to be timed, almond flour mix needs to be folded into the meringue just right, air bubbles need to be popped from the batter, piped shells need to dry until a “skin” forms, oven can’t be too hot & they have to bake just long enough to be cooked thoroughly but not too long to make shells crunchy. So to make the perfect macarons, EVERY thing needs to be just right… like the Goldilocks of desserts.

But the silver lining is that when you do get it right, not only is it such a satisfying feeling, you have a delectable treat to enjoy!

Getting Cute

Much like all my other creations, I mostly enjoy the art of it. I love being able to play with food & create things that look like other things with sugar & flour. From tacos for Cinco de Mayo to baby Yoda for Star Wars day, these are super fun to make. Check out what I’ve made so far!

If you like my french macaroon art & you want to see all the new macarons on my journey to make the cutest macarons, follow my Instagram page

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Anna Li (@believecakes) on May 21, 2020 at 7:48am PDT

Want some?

If you’re interested in ordering macarons, please complete the form on the bottom of the page with your info & I will contact you to get details. If not in the Chicago area, I ship across the continental US via 2day shipping.

The Three P’s

My son & I joke all the time that he has 3 all-time favorite foods AKA the Three P’s: Pretzels, Pancakes & Popcorn. This is the snack trio that he can eat in massive quantities in a short period of time. In the pretzel category, he can consume at least a couple cups of the pretzel snacks every day but he especially loves soft pretzels as well. I am also a big fan of soft pretzels so this is one of those recipes that I can make over & over.

I have tried a few different recipe variations but this is my go-to. I love this one because it is so versatile: you can do the classic sweet version by sprinkling with cinnamon sugar or plain butter + salt or making the perfect burger pretzel bun.

My Favorite Soft Pretzel Recipe

Ingredients

• 2 cups milk
• 1 1/2 tablespoons active yeast
• 2-6 tablespoons brown sugar (depends on whether sweet or savory)
• 4 tablespoons butter (room temperature)
• 4.5-5 cups all purpose flour (divided)
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 3 cups water
• 1/2 cup baking soda
• Topping options: 2 tablespoons melted butter, cinnamon sugar, sea salt, Parmesan + garlic, anything you want

Yields: 12 pretzels

Directions

1. Heat milk to ~110° F. If using Stand Mixer (SM), pour milk into SM bowl. Sprinkle yeast on top of milk & whisk together. Let rest 5-10 minutes until yeast has bloomed/activated.
2. Add brown sugar, butter, 1 cup of flour & salt to milk mixture & stir until well blended. If using SM, use the hook attachment & mix in remaining 3.5 cups of flour. Knead mixture until a ball forms. Mix in up to an additional 1/2 cup of flour as needed (dough should be soft but not sticky).
3. Cover bowl with plastic wrap & allow dough to rise in warm place until doubled in size (about an hour).*
4. Preheat oven to 450° F (425° F for pretzel buns).
5. Punch dough down. Divide into 12 equal pieces. Cover dough with towel while not in use. Roll each piece into long rope (~33″ long) & twist into pretzel shape or buns.
6. Bring to boil water & baking soda & turn off heat. Fully immerse pretzels into water mixture.
   1. If making buns, boil shaped dough for 2 minutes (turn after 1 minute for each side).
   2. Score a cross on the top of each bun
   3. Brush with egg wash (1 beaten egg + 1 tsp water or milk)
7. Place on parchment paper lined baking sheet
8. Sprinkle sea salt (if savory).
9. Bake for 7-11 minutes until golden brown
   1. Bake for 15 minutes at 425° for pretzel buns.
10. Remove from oven.
11. Brush with melted butter & cinnamon sugar (optional).

* How to shorten proof timing in half using a microwave: If you’re short on time, I found a hack that will help the dough rise sooner (also helpful in colder temps): Add a cup of water into a microwaveable glass or measuring cup. Set & run microwave for 1 minute. Transfer pretzel dough to a microwave-safe bowl & cover with plastic wrap. Once the cup of water has heated up for a minute, add bowl of dough into microwave. Turn on microwave for another 15 seconds & leave inside for 30 minutes without opening the door so the heat stays inside.

Some Inspiration:

70th Birthday Cake for Aunt May/ Āyí

Six months prior to my aunt’s 70th birthday, my cousin (aka Chau Wai Wai) asked me to make her mom’s cake & I was up for anything. I had no idea what the cake was going to be nor how large until I found out that the number of party guests was to be 150. And since my entire family lives in NYC, there would be the first-time added challenge for me to bake, assemble & decorate the cake outside of my own kitchen.

I knew my aunt was a huge fan of red wine, having seen her face flush & giddy from it many times . I was ideating on making the cake into the shape of a wine bottle. But then I came across a cake design that had the wow factor I am always looking for: a “floating” wine bottle pouring wine into a glass. I decided that the cake itself would be a wine barrel since it would be big enough to serve a larger party. Instead of pairing the wine with a classic cheese board, I paired it with “Classic” Lay’s potato chips since it was my aunt’s favorite snack.

Structure & Planning for Defying Gravity

There were a lot of things I needed to account for in order to pull off this cake:

• The wine barrel was going to be a little over 12″ tall so it would need supporting dowels & a cake board in the center layer.
• Since I wanted the pouring wine effect to stand out with the tall cake, the pipe connecting to the wine bottle needed to be quite long.
• In order to support the weight of a long pipe & floating bottle on top of the cake, the pipe had to connect through the cake layers & secure/screw into the middle cake board.
• To get the look of a real wine glass, the pipe needed to be clear & narrow to simulate a glass stem.
• The wine glass needed to be a heavy plastic goblet that could have the stem removed.
• Taking into consideration that the cake needed to be transported from Long Island (cousin’s house) to Flushing Queens (party restaurant/venue), I wanted to add connection fittings into the pipe that could be disconnected in transport & re-threaded at the venue.

The sketch above was key for planning the structural dimensions. PVC piping was the answer for this design. Fortunately I was able to get clear 1/2″ PVC pipe, elbows & fittings delivered to me in Chicago a week prior to heading to NY. If I had more time, I would’ve opted for 1/4″ PVC but that thickness in clear color is not readily available & delivered in a few days.

Next came the construction & binding of the piping. This is where I passed on the hard engineering to my handy husband George who had to pull out the solder gun. He also had to help secure all the joints & fit the middle cake board with the flange for the PVC to secure into:

Traveling & Baking in a Foreign Kitchen

Not really knowing the extent of tools my cousin had in her kitchen, I planned on bringing all my own, just in case. I pretty much packed a suitcase full of my kitchen supplies for this bake. (Thank you Southwest Airlines for the free check-in!) I prepared two batches of marshmallow fondant at home to bring with me. Among other things, I brought cutters, fondant decorating tools & brushes, rolling pin & mats, food coloring (gel & powder) and even the pasta roller attachment for the stand mixer. It turned out that my cousin had a lot of caking supplies but I’m still glad I was fully equipped so I could feel more at home in someone else’s kitchen.

The Barrel Cake

Wai Wai is known for her delicious carrot cake (or so she says! ) so she was in charge of making three 10″ layers while I had to make the other 3 layers of vanilla cake. I used a new recipe that called for butter & it came out more like a firm pound cake. It did work very well for supporting the weight of all the layers plus everything going on top but if I had to do it over, I’d probably find another recipe that was less firm/dense & more moist/delicious. Once it was all stacked & iced, I realized how massive this cake really was. It took the space of 3 shelves in the refrigerator:

Wood Grain Fondant

Next came the fondant detail. I was debating between covering the entire cake with one gigantic sheet of fondant vs adhering the fondant as individual “planks”. I’ve always done the former because I was never sure whether the buttercream underneath would squeeze out. Even so, I decided there was no possibility that I could get a fondant sheet large enough to go over the size of this cake… it would’ve been the size of a 3 foot circle.

Since the circumference was roughly 32″, each plank was approximately 4″x12″. I recorded the entire process of covering the cake & I think this method was more time-intensive than using a single sheet & smoothing down. But it gorgeously gave the appearance of the wood planks of a wine barrel.

To achieve the look of wood, I used the fondant “blade” tool to impress the grain lines onto the fondant planks. The last step for the wooden grain was to paint with brown food coloring powder & vodka. The first layer came out very light & I ended up painting about 3 layers of brown to get the deeper wood colors. I especially like this paint brush technique because it gives it the natural imperfect browns of real wood planks.

The detail of iron branding the wood barrel with my aunt’s Chinese name & age was my way of customizing (although she was not very happy to have her name printed on the cake). To emboss the Chinese characters into the fondant. I meticulously cut out the characters onto parchment paper, pressed the paper into the fondant to impress the shapes & then turned it over to my more artistic sister to paint in the letters with black food coloring.

Lay’s Potato Chips

Gum Paste (GP) is an essential ingredient to utilize in cake decorating because it can be rolled paper thin to achieve delicate objects like flowers but also dries hard so it works well in sculpting figures/models. Although it can be made using Tylose or Carboxymethyl Cellulose (CMC), I prefer to purchase it because I find it tricky to get the right consistency & store-bought tends to keep longer on the shelf without drying out. It can be quite expensive for even small amounts (roughly $11 USD per pound) but because I prefer the Satin Ice brand, it is more cost effective to buy in the 5lb. size. Please note that a little gum paste can go a long way especially since it gets rolled so thin for flowers. But depending on the size of the flower & how many, it may require a lot of layers of petals. For sculpting, I do not recommend making the entire figure out of gum paste because it dries so fast that it is hard to get smooth shapes without wrinkles. I typically do a mixture of fondant & gum paste for figures to get the pliability of fondant with the firmness to hold its shape from the gum paste.

The Lay’s Classic potato chip bag was made from an entire batch of rice krispy treat mashed into the shape of a pillow. I then covered it with a sheet of fondant on top & bottom and crimped the edges to create a bag. In order to get the shiny yellow color like a plastic chip bag, I airbrushed the top sheet with yellow food color. The Lay’s circle logo was cut out using a blade knife for the letters on top of 2 concentric fondant circles. (Honestly at this point, I was too tired to be as precise as using a cutout template so I basically eyeballed it.)

The potato chips were made with yellow gum paste but this is where the KitchenAid stand mixer pasta roller came in handy! There are two reasons why I love utilizing a pasta roller for gum paste: 1) I struggle with rolling GP evenly to the same thickness with a hand roller or rolling pin. Using the pasta roller, it flattens the GP in a uniform thickness without having to fret. 2) I use the number settings to control the thickness easily. For example, I used setting #5 to get the thickness of the chips but I generally use #7 for sugar flowers.

After rolling, I cut circles using a 2″ circle cutter & stretched some out to get an oval shape while left the rest circular. To get the nonuniform & wavy look of potato chips, I laid & dried the GP chips on an egg carton. The added detail was brushing brown food color powder along the ends of the chips to get the browned edges of real potato chips.

Pouring Wine from Candy

In order to get the look of wine in the glass, I needed something thick enough to coat the inside of the cup. In researching, I found some really cool “splashing” effects made with melted hard candy so I started experimenting. Knowing that it would take multiple tries, I opted for an extra large bag of Jolly Ranchers . In the first few attempts, I realized quickly how hot the candy gets when at its melting temperature. I tried it on some practice plastic wine cups (the really thin & cheap ones that have the detachable base) & it immediately melted the cup out of shape. Luckily, the plastic goblets at the Dollar Tree are much thicker & able to withstand some heat.

The other challenge is that once it’s melted hot enough, it thins out & pours nicely BUT it cools almost immediately so you have maybe 60 seconds before it’s no longer workable. I had to reheat the candy several times in the microwave to get the inside of the cup coated for a half-full glass of wine look. Again, I leveraged George who is willing to get a little burnt for the sake of his wife’s cake endeavors!

Lastly (and finally), I wasn’t confident that the melted hard candy would coat evenly along the entire length of the PVC pipe so I covered it with dark purple fondant & brushed red piping gel over it to get the liquid look. (I honestly wasn’t completely happy with how that came out but I was down to the wire on timing & it had to do.) I then connected the empty plastic wine bottle to the top end. Shout out to Wai Wai for using the WD-40 method to detach the wine label from a real red wine bottle to adhere to the plastic bottle so it looked legit !

I held that awkward looking pipe by the wine bottle the entire drive to the restaurant. Once there, I screwed it into the base of the wine cup & presto : floating bottle!

Overall, it was a labor intensive & technical cake but it was the showstopper of the party so huge success! Happiest birthday to my second mother, Āyí & here’s to many more!! And as always, thanks to my family for supporting my passion for caking & believing in my abilities!

The Firefighter Husband

I met my husband (George) over 15 years ago when I moved to Chicago at my first real job after college. He was the jokester that didn’t quite fit the corporate mold. He has had a way to always make me laugh & still does to this day.

Ever since I met him, his dream has always been to become a Chicago firefighter. After 10 years on the waiting list, his dream came true & he graduated from the fire academy in 2008 to become apart of the Chicago Fire Department (CFD). Sometimes, I still don’t know what I want to do for a living, yet he had known his entire life & was determined to become a fireman. Through the years of job hopping, I’ve continued to envy his dedication & passion for firefighting.

Being a Firefighter’s Wife

With three kids, George has been an incredible father. It is not surprising that a man who is willing to sacrifice his own life to save others would be an amazing dad. My kids adore him & are so proud to have a fireman father… especially when their dad would be on duty & come to their school to run the fire drills. (I mean how cool is that!)

His 24-hr on, 48-hr off schedule makes life interesting as well. For some reason, emergencies always seems to happen on those 1 out of 3 days he is not home. As a baker, I have however been able to use the 24 hours away to my advantage when crafting surprise cakes for him. I’m actually pretty sure that every cake I’ve made for him has been a surprise… although I do have to admit that George is a bit oblivious. (Ha!)

Fire Cake Journey

What I love about having pictures of all my cakes is to be able to see the progression of caking skills through time & practice. I especially love learning new techniques mostly from trial & error.

First Firetruck Cake

George’s initial assignment after the fire academy was Engine 4 at the old Cabrini Green station. This was my first attempt at making a 3D firetruck cake. As you can see, there was much room for improvement. I decided to make the wheels from Entenmann’s chocolate covered donuts. I also didn’t work much or well with fondant at the time, so I smeared black buttercream on top of the fondant to achieve the black color.

After a few years, George crossed the floor onto Tower Ladder 10. For anyone who doesn’t know the difference between a CFD engine and tower ladder truck (because I definitely didn’t know the difference until I became a firefighter‘s wife), an engine carries the water, gauges & hoses for the fire while the truck primarily houses the ladder & specialty tools. Not every firehouse has both but when a medical run (AKA 911 dispatch call) comes in, the assigned house is required to arrive within 4 minutes.

Fun fact: Four minutes is the maximum amount of time that a person can be oxygen deprived before brain damage can occur.

Starting 2008 forward, every CFD firefighter graduated as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) firefighter. A fire engine/truck almost always arrives at the medical emergency first as there are less CFD ambulances than engines & trucks.

Another Birthday Fire Cake

After much digression, I get back to the next fire cake. When George turned 35, I threw him a surprise birthday party where I made this cake without his knowledge. I was going for the brick impression on the top tier with flames on the bottom tier. Unfortunately at the restaurant, the fondant on the top tier started to sag. I learned the hard way that cream cheese frosting should not be used to ice the outside of a cake tier underneath fondant. Since then, I’ve switched to a somewhat stiff American buttercream to dirty ice cakes before covering with fondant. On the flip side, the melting look coincidentally seemed to work well with fiery flames below.

Fire Helmet Cake

After 7 years at Engine 4/Truck 10, George transferred to a firehouse closer to home on Foster & Western at Truck 12. As I heard, the types of calls were much different than the high-rise emergencies in the Gold Coast/Old Town area. For another birthday, George was scheduled to work so I thought it would be fun to surprise him at the firehouse with this cake. Trying to mirror his fire helmet, this cake came out how I planned it.

I have been making fondant with marshmallows for awhile but have switched to buying Satin Ice black fondant a few years ago. One of the biggest learnings so far is that achieving pure black fondant requires a large amount of gel food color. The tricky part about using that amount of coloring breaks down the sugar & causes the fondant to become very tacky.

Lieutenant Firetruck Cake

Soon after, George’s house lieutenant was celebrating a birthday so I was asked to attempt my second firetruck cake many years later. This time, I was proud to present this cake. I didn’t own an airbrush at the time, so I used Wilton‘s “color mist” silver spray. I elevated the cake on the cake board using stacked boards in the center to raise the body of truck onto the wheels. Looking back at this cake, my biggest criticism is that it could have used more detail work.

Lake Forest Firetruck Cake

A friend later asked for a firetruck cake from his township for his son’s 1st birthday. Determined to pay more attention to detail, I did some research & found some pictures of the Lake Forest Fire Department (LFFD) fire engine for reference. As my 3rd go at making one of these, I wanted to add more flair. I searched the web to get inspiration & found some engine cakes with lights and was immediately committed. After getting the small battery operated mini-led lights, I knew just where they would go. I struggled the most with the detail on the LFFD branding & logo (going back to comment about lack of fine art skills), but someone recognized it as LFFD so it couldn’t have been all too bad. I added the diamond plate look onto the silver panels & got a little creative with the hose by spelling Cameron’s name with it on top.

Fire Hydrant Cake

After 10 years of being in the Chicago Fire Department, George got promoted to an Engineer.

Another fire department interesting fact: the role of the engineer is to drive the fire engine & supply water to the hose from the hydrant. They have to know all things about water pressure from various nozzles & pipes/hoses.

In all honesty, he wasn’t exactly thrilled at the idea of staying out of the “action” as he would no longer be going into the fires. What’s crazy to most (sane) people is that firefighters want to run into burning buildings! I’ve heard them brag to one another about having a “good fire” & which engine was 1st on scene.

People are always asking me how is it that firefighters run into a burning building when everyone else is running out. Courage is the answer.  

Chief Kennedy

The other sacrifice was giving up his station at Truck 12 & losing his shift of really great friends/work family. I can say from first-hand experience that the firefighters on his shift are a hardworking, passionate & dedicated crew. Especially since they ensured that my pre-mature baby that I unintentionally delivered at home was safe after delivery (I promise I will write about that story some other time!). When a promotion occurs, the engineer gets assigned a district & a shift but no particular house. Therefore George has continued to be a relief “floater” engineer, which is basically an engineer that floats to different fire houses each work day. Living out of the trunk of his car is absolutely not his favorite part of the gig at the moment.

Again, back to the cake! I had to get creative with the cake I was to make for his promotion party. I’ve already exhausted making fire engines/trucks so I thought a hydrant suits the promotion well. I even took a picture of a Chicago fire hydrant on the sidewalk in order to get the right details.

Since it would be a tall & narrow cake (I believe it was 8 layers high), I had to put a support structure in the middle to avoid collapse. I also struggled with the weight of the hydrant caps hanging in mid-air. I used rice krispy treat but realized too late that I should have used a cake board underneath both caps in order to prevent gravity from pulling them down. As you can see in these pictures, I was able to capture the full hydrant intact before the caps almost immediately fell off once I brought it outside.

I’ve said this before, but I am not a fine artist (meaning I cannot draw or paint well) but was really proud that I was able to replicate the CFD logo by hand with food coloring. Lastly, knowing the prankster that George is at his core, I thought it’d be fun to create a fondant figure of our dog pee-ing on the hydrant. There was no way to make a dog large enough to scale with the size of the hydrant so I made due with the mini-Sandy (Sandy is our pit bull/sharpei mutt doggy) & her piping gel “urine.”

Any More Fire Cakes?

So that has been the long (sorry if it was winding) journey of the fire-themed cakes made to-date. I don’t imagine this being the end of that journey. I am sure that I will continue to work to refine & find new ways to one-up myself in all future fire-related cakes.

Inspiration

My son Zackary just turned 9 (which is crazy to me how time has flown so fast!). For the past year, he’s been obsessed with reading & re-reading graphic novel series like “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” & “DogMan.” So not surprisingly, he chose Captain Underpants for his birthday cake. For those unfamiliar with this particular character, he is a not-so-smart, silly comic book superhero who flies around in his underwear & cape . He transforms between a mean school principal (Mr Krupp) & Captain Underpants when 2 best friends/comic creators (George & Harold) snap their fingers.

As usual, I went about looking for inspiration from other baker’s creations found on the web. Every result came back with Captain Underpants as a cake topper. I didn’t think having a small figure of Underpants on top of a cake would do him justice. I also figured that his egg-shaped body would be perfect for a 3-D model as a cake. So then I was determined to design this never-been-done cake.

Planning & Structure

I used graph paper to sketch the design to figure out the cake dimensions & scale (each square representing an inch). From there, the size of the cake board & base was determined. Since the cake would be standing on two legs, I had to figure out a way to elevate the cake with enough support to hold up the weight of such a tall cake. Rather, I passed off the engineering task to my handy, wood-working husband. Because 2 legs would not be stable enough, he decided to elevate the cake board with 3 wooden dowels. After a trip to the home improvement store & use of the power tools, voilà!

Since the cake layers would need to total 10 inches high, I stacked 2 X 8″ cakes plus 3 X 7″ layers and shaved away to get the egg shape. NOTE: I originally thought that all 5 layers would stack fine without needing additional support. I was WRONG! As I spent more time cake shaving & dirty icing, the bottom 8″ layers were slowly collapsing under the weight of the top layers . The challenge with my chocolate cake recipe is that it includes mayonnaise which results in a really moist cake. Albeit delicious, moist cakes are not structurally firm on its own & not conducive to supporting much weight above it.

I immediately needed to remove the top 3 layers and insert straws/dowels & a cake board to hold the weight of those layers before I put them back on. Luckily, I was able to rectify the mistake before the whole cake collapsed & would need to start all over. Whew!

Arms Vs Gravity

After I got the body of the cake completed, I realized the position of Mr Underpants’ arms were going to be tricky. I decided to make the arms out of Rice Krispies treat covered in fondant so they wouldn’t be as heavy as solid fondant. Even so, they ended up being heavy enough where gravity was slowly bringing down the arms after they were attached. For the arm pointing up, I had to cut the length down twice to get the weight down so it could stay upright. As far as the fist on hip arm, I ended up propping it up on an actual Captain Underpants book. Somehow, I want to believe that the book helped to bring the cake altogether .

Time Lapse Video

Tralalaa… It’s Party Time!

Now I take to the sky like an ostrich!

Captain Underpants

2020 will be the year that I plan to explore the art form of caking while finally sharing it with all of you. In the past, the focus was primarily on the final presentation of the cake & then delivery to friends & family. I’ve never been great at sharing my process or techniques mainly because I spent too much time being a perfectionist & nitpicking every detail.

However, when recently trying to find cake ideas & techniques from other bakers across the web, I was unable to find what I was looking for and ended up doing experimentation to come up with my own approach & styles. In doing so, I’ve realized that I enjoy the challenge of creating unique cake designs that are uncommon or never been done. I hope to share these ideas with everyone & give back to the online baking community one post or video at a time.

Nightmare on Elm Street Halloween Cake: inspired from my favorite Krueger “kill” scene

I have recently started to record the making of cakes and spending hours on iMovie editing on my phone to turn them into time-lapse videos. (Mostly because of 1-minute video playback limit on Instagram posts). Surprisingly, the finished product/videos are fun to watch & I somehow can find myself watching them on loop (like I don’t know how they will turn out!).

So welcome and thank you for joining me on my cake journey! I hope you will enjoy my posts & apologize in advance for my terrible writing. Please feel free to leave me comments on cakes you’d like for me to explore & share.