Chocolate Cheese Cake - It's a celebration!

So much so that you might be able to recognize this cake as a chocolate cheesecake with melted dark chocolate, you might still be wondering what are those "stuff" on the cake. Right.

Mum, sis and brother in law were quite entertained by these "stuff" during my work-in-progress. You see, I made these motives for the cake the night before and left them on the dining table to dry. So the family was amused and started their "guess the motives contest" among themselves.



Mum said: "not sure what. The big green one is a spoon, then... 2 chicken drumsticks"
Sis said: "Carlsberg? otherwise must be a big green whale with 2 little fishes"

Okay. At least the Carlsberg is quite close. But sis did guess that it was a champagne bottle. No one actually notice that brown little figure. But with these comments, I threw away the "2 little fishes" and did new ones... I've also completed the making of the champagne bottle.


Bottle on the cake, added some hundreds and thousands to give the popping the champagne feel, and positioned the cork, so now most people know what that little brown thing is (I hope).

And here are the new "fishes" which now look like some kind of glasses if not the champagne flute glasses.

My colleague ordered this to celebrate her husband's promotion. Nope. It's not a new born baby celebration in case you were wondering. :)

Chocolate Cupcakes with Dark Chocolate Icing

Chocolate cupcake with Dark Chocolate Icing,

Topped with sugar coated walnut

Thanks for the support dear.

It was a comfort knowing that I've "achieved" something today. :p :)

Cupcakes, the fruity way!

I was really in the mood of shaping fruits during the last few days. I made a few coloured icing and tried to make a few easy to identified fruits. The easiest are actually apple and orange, followed by banana and carrot. I managed to make 3 items out of the purple icing but the mangoesteen has been identified as "tomato" or "round eggplant". Humph... My grapes look a bit strange too.

Made these yesterday for them to go on some chocolate cupcakes. The fruits look quite good on dark colour background actually.

Dylan's Four Season Cupcakes

After a couple of Facebook messages, I've got this set of four season cupcake order confirmed with Dylan. Dylan is leaving KL for UK and wanted to give his colleagues a special farewell message, and he decided to have these messages on some sweet little indulgence.

It's very exciting to be getting specific request from customers most of the time. That will steer me away from what I've done or improvise and put together what I've been doing into some new concept.

In my opinion, the little mini cupcakes are cute, customers will normally like them and so I thought I would not disappoint him (or would not miss to meet his expectation as Dylan had mentioned) but whether the cupcake sets were able to capture the "essence" of the four season was another matter.

This was my idea. For Spring, let's go with pink which I felt was a very spring colour, reminds me of the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) too. And my impression of spring has always been when all kinds of colourful flowers blossom. So the spring cupcakes were pretty much flower based. Sis, who'd lived in UK for 12 years, reminded me that roses and tulips are spring flowers. Oh, and a butterfly since it was mentioned by customer.


Summer was not that difficult in terms of finding a plant that represents the season. In fact, when I googled summer, I got loads of sunflower pictures. But I can't be filling up the whole box with flowers... And since I am not skillful enough to craft a beach, I thought I will capture some moments of tropical by having some fruits. Summer was orange, somehow like the sunny colour of summer.


Autumn was the most difficult for me, besides deciding that Autumn should be brown, I didn't know what happens during autumn that is significant. If you google autumn, there will be basically pictures of maple leaves. Erm... I wasn't sure what was the best way to make a maple leaf. Perhaps a maple leave chocolate mould, but I didn't have that. I hope the leaves were not too far off. The rest of the cake were decorated with brown colour toppers, chocolates, chocolate chips, pistachio nuts, and brown faded colour flowers and leaves.




And winter was icy blue. Winter was the easiest. Maybe because so much happens in this season and snow can basically do the trick. Since this season is about Christmas, I've included some plus mistletoe and snowing down the cupcakes with snow powder.

I've had some of the positions consistently decorated with chocolate chips. So, colourful thousands and hundreds for spring; orange glitters for summer; brown chocolate chips for autumn and snow powder for winter.

The four season flowers...

Cupcakes - For Him and Her

Nic's order came with the request for 2 colours - pink and blue and he said something for girls and guys. Since we need to have 2 names on the cupcakes, I've omitted writing "Happy Birthday" on the cupcakes, change that to a birthday tag instead.

Since there are a yin-yang effect of colours, perhaps the decoration can go the same direction. Something for him and her. Actually, it's most of the time more difficult to decorate for a guy, cannot be too cute but still fun. Hmm... I hope this box was okay.

Chicken Pie

Unfortunately, I only have this one picture as I lost the other pictures! Luckily I found this one from my FB wall post :)

This is a mini chicken pie, about 2.5 inches (Can't really see from the picture though), the size you can jus snack on, or bring to a party ^_^

Very Strawberry Cheesecake

There is a "little gal" in my office who's crazy about strawberries. The last time I made the fruit cake, she basically went to extend to "fight" for the strawberries. For her birthday, she requested for a cake with loads of strawberries. She also wanted a cheesecake.



I think strawberry cheesecake is a wonderful idea, I love strawberries too. Furthermore, there are these delicious Korean strawberries on sale in the supermarkets lately, have you tried? It's only RM8.90 if you get it from Jaya Jusco.


Instead of my usual baked cheesecake, I decided to make a chilled cheesecake this time. One of the reason was I don't want to "cook" the strawberries. The cake turned out to be pink due to the strawberry juice - the strawberries were chopped before mixing into the cheesecake mix. I already love the colour to start with.

The cake was then topped and decorated with even more strawberries. I've actually used 3 boxes of strawberries for this cake. Hence it became this VERY strawberry cheesecake.

Almost everyone (okay, actually everyone) love this cake, it's smooth and creamy. A bit too soft and "watery" for me, so I will add more gelatin the next time to give it a sturdier texture. Other than that, this is a wonderful cake, look at the amount of strawberries amidst the tofu-soft cheesecake!

Cupcake for Aden's 1st Birthday

Here is Clare's order. Clare has been introduced to The TeaRoom by Jo, thanks dears for supporting The TeaRoom and its baker. It's very motivating to get great and so very considerate customers like you gals.

gummy bears

gummies

jelly beans

fondant orange

fondant apple

Cupcakes for Stylo Fashion Grand Prix 2009

I received a last minute order from Beatrice. Okay, it was not exactly last minute, but when I've got other events lined up, less than a week can be considered last minute sometimes, especially when the order is more than 200 pieces.

The cupcakes were for her guests and to be given out during the Stylo KL Fashion show. The colours of the flowers were meant to match the theme colour of the collection to be shown on the runway. It took me about half an hour just to mix the colours. It's quite hard to get icing colour to match fabric colour, furthermore, I don't really have a piece of fabric with me.

Heard that the fashion show was a success. I hope the cupcakes didn't do too bad either. :)

A picture from the fashion show courtesy of Beatrice (thanks dear)

Need a BOOST!

So just to amuse ourselves, and in order to give everyone a boost of motivation and humour at the same time in the office, I've created these cupcake messages. I find them extremely useful especially now that we've made all these into "icons" we can actually send "virtual cupcakes" to friends with the intended message. We are also using these icon as our profile pictures for instant messaging. It's very cool and cute too.

Diligent ("nu li")

Youth ("qing chun")

Gambateh! ("Jia Yiu")

Future ("Qian tu")

Unity ("Tuan Jie")

Strength ("Li Liang")

Good Karma ("Fu Bao")

Happiness ("Kuai Le")

This I made for the someone who'd really supported all of us throughout, and he's just so very cool, all the time. So everyone thought this is very apt.

The coolest ("Zui Ku")

As for me. I was really furious the other day, told someone off at the office, so this I made for myself. Must maintain ZEN.

Zen ("Chan Ding")

All right reserved. IF you would like to use one of these icons, please notify me first. Thanks.