Apologies for not updating for a while but I really haven’t got anything funny to say anymore. Ever since I started making wedding cakes for friends and family, drama has been sucked out of my life. I’ve no time to experiment with new recipes, I’ve relegated my kids’ toilet training to our domestic helper, I’ve stopped talking to my husband. It’s been a peaceful life.

Except for the time when I decided to make this cake.

Tatler Weddings had asked if I could do something for their cake shoot. So I whipped out this idea I’ve been saving for the big time – recreate the gorgeous pleats of this Carolina Herrera dress.

So I cut up strips of parchment paper and drew the pleats on them.

Then I made fondant stripes and placed them over the parchment. Can I just say here that all that cutting and folding was a royal pain in the neck.

These vertical strips were the easiest part. It’s a different story with the rest of the cake at the back. The workmanship was a right mess — the strips were stretched out of shape, triangles were different sized, the folds had cracks. Tatler? More like Tatter.

And this was when my husband Z stepped in. He was silent for 5 seconds and I knew I was in trouble. “It’s not good enough for Tatler,” he said. I wanted to kick him but I knew he was right. The guy is always right. I couldn’t accept the fact that I had to redo the whole thing. I have a life, you know, things to do. Like watching Giuliana And Bill.

Then, I thought about my cake being featured in Tatler. If it’s perfect enough, I might become some cake celebrity and get invited to their parties where I can rub shoulders with society people and exchange hairstyling tips. OK man, let’s go.

So here is cake 2.0, ready for her close-up in the studio. Oh, did I forget to say that all that back-breaking toil was to decorate only the front of the cake?

Indulge me as I show you the details. After all that hard work, you guys better look a bit longer.

And now back to my peaceful life.

]]> http://www.crummb.com/blog/pleat-cake-for-tatler-weddings/feed/ 10 http://www.crummb.com/blog/noelles-4th-birthday-cake/ http://www.crummb.com/blog/noelles-4th-birthday-cake/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:59:06 +0000 crummb http://www.crummb.com/blog/?p=2019

When I left journalism a year ago, I thought I had quit the rat race for good. No more jostling for promotions, salary increments, bigger headlines and all that tiresome stuff. I was now a full-time mother. The world I was moving into was a fluffy cloud of organising saccharine playdates, strolling down supermarket aisles with my singing kids in the trolley, and picking them up from school in sunny beachwear — the very look of Perpetual Holiday.

Or so I thought.

I didn’t know there existed a sport called Competitive Housewifery. And the first time I realised was when we went to Noelle’s playschool to attend Sports Day. While most families turned up wearing whatever they could rustle up on an early Saturday morning, a few families descended on the school compound all wearing the official sports day T-shirt. It must’ve been the mothers’ idea because the fathers looked bored and sheepish, like they were pulled out of bed just 10 minutes before and had the T-shirts dragged down on them. The mothers, it appeared to me, had ordered all those T-shirts because they wanted the family to come as a team. And they wanted to kick ass at velcro darts.

I’ve learnt that what clothes you put on your kids is of huge significance in kindy-land. For Chinese New Year, for example, the dress code was red. So I made Noelle wear her favourite stripey red T-shirt, never mind the collar was over-stretched and it looked ready for Salvation Army. When we got to school, it was like stepping into the movie set of Baby Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. There were mini red cheongsams from every known Chinese dynasty. There were flowery headgear of imperial concubines fighting for space against Chow Yun Fatt satin caps on the boys. Poor Noelle looked like some impoverished chambermaid sent to scrub the floors of the Forbidden City.

So the next time the school called for fancy costume, I wised up. It was Character Parade Day. The kids were to be dressed up as their favourite book character and the costumes were to be made from recycleable materials. I didn’t care what it took, I was gonna bring home the trophy for Noelle. Her favourite book that school term was The Hungry Caterpillar, and she wanted to be a strawberry. But no, I would not allow her to be just some pedestrian strawberry. I was gonna make her the strawberry that was being eaten by the hungry caterpillar. So I cut up some cardboard, crushed up old newspaper, painted and – voila! – Noelle was a strawberry that had a caterpillar poking out of her stomach. Tell me we’re not gonna win.

We got to the school, and there were some good, but non-threatening competition out there. But when I saw little Lauren’s costume, I knew we were doomed. She was dressed as a pink princess, and she was walking inside an entire pink castle — made of cardboard complete with fortified walls, spires, turrets — that was strapped niftily over her shoulders. In situations like this, only this Singaporeanism would suffice to adequately express my pain: Win already lor.

We came in second behind Lauren. I felt beaten, but it thrust me into full competition mode. The next time the school called for fancy dress, I’m gonna take no prisoners. So for the National Costume Day, I went for gold even though it was a friendly event with no prizes in store. While everyone was reprising their Baby Crouching Tiger costumes to represent China, I went for the farthest country I could think of – Greenland. My kid was gonna be an Eskimo.

Not only did I go to the supermarket just to get cotton wool to stick onto Noelle’s hoodie and gum boots, I made her a fishing spear out of our Magiclean mop and stuck on a cardboard fish for added effect. I arrived at the school feeling absolutely smug and triumphant. That’s until I caught sight of the Tan siblings. All three of them came in resplendent, impeccably fitting Indian costumes which their mother no doubt got custom-made in Little India. Their beautiful hair clips and bangles sent more stabs at my heart.

Crestfallen, I thought, Darn it, I’m gonna pick my battles more shrewdly. From now on, I’m gonna compete in categories where I know I can’t be beat. And that’s how I came to make a toadstool cake for Noelle’s birthday party in school last week. All birthday kids could go to school in a special costume so Noelle chose to go as Snow White. So what better cake to make than a matching forest-themed cake populated by toadstools, grass, flowers and ladybugs?

Everything was handmade from sugar and even the flowers were coloured the exact shades of blue and yellow as those on her costume. Beat this, fellow housewife contestants.

There was no trophy to be won that day but check out the look on Noelle’s sleepy face on the morning she dashed into the room to see the finished cake. This I gotta say, Win already lor.

I saw this photo in the papers a few months ago. It was taken off the runway of the Armani Prive fall 2011 collection, which paid homage to Japanese kimonos, and I immediately thought of cake. That gorgeous headpiece, with the cluster of loops and ribbons, could be made into sugar. And it wouldn’t be too hard too.

It so happened that HC was undecided about her cake for her upcoming wedding. So she said the magic words: “Do you have a design you’re dying to do?” Why yes! I showed her the photo, gave her a description and knew she was taking a chance on something I’ve never done before. But thankfully she went with it.

This is how the loops were made:

I cut out strips of orange gumpaste and made long slits inside with a super sharp precision knife.

Then the strips are rolled up over, er, toilet rolls (haha!) and left to dry.

And that’s all there was to it. It ended up looking like a bunch of artfully bent straws in an ikebana arrangement. Like!

F wanted to splash out on a few birthday cakes for herself. But it wasn’t to celebrate the xxth anniversary of her birth-date, you know, like how people normally do it. She wanted to celebrate the 15,000th day of her being alive. Okay, so 15,000 translates to roughly 41 years. So I suggested that she have four cakes, one to represent each decade, and I asked her to give me some adjectives to describe each decade so I could come up with some designs. This is what she gave me:

1st decade: Receptive, floaty, vague, hungry, frank, unquestioning.

2nd decade: Struggling, montage of ideas, enthusiasm interlaced with disappointment, directionless energy.

3rd decade: Complicated beauty, heavy, burdened, crystalline.

4th decade: Essential simplicity, spirit-centred, full of life, contented, quietly passionate.

If I were a cartoon character, I would have about a million “????” in my thought bubble that day. How do you make cake out of that?? But persistence, as always, prevails. After playing a bit of e-mail ping pong with her, here is what I made:

1st decade: Plain white cake with only a small sugar flower on top, to signify “blank” and “impressionable”.

2nd decade: Square cake with flowers continuing to be the motif, but this time it’s in graphical form. Flower appliques sit side by side with empty imprints, illustrating the “chaotic” and “mosaic” phase.

3rd decade: Cake covered all over with sugar lace, to represent the “beautiful”, “complicated” phase. The flower motif is taken to a more refined, complex level.

4th decade: Two-tier cake decorated with handmade cloudberries and flowers, which is native to Norway where F lived for a while. The fruit signifies the maturity and completion.

]]> http://www.crummb.com/blog/faiths-four-cakes/feed/ 0 http://www.crummb.com/blog/a-tart-for-my-brothers/ http://www.crummb.com/blog/a-tart-for-my-brothers/#comments Sun, 19 Jun 2011 17:18:32 +0000 crummb http://www.crummb.com/blog/?p=1952 Don’t ask me how, but my husband was looking for some kids video for our daughter on Youtube a few days ago when they stumbled on Bohemian Rhapsody. And since then, the Queen anthem has been playing in my head on repeat. I first heard it when I was a kid, and I thought it was just the weirdest song ever. It had these grown men singing like fat operatic divas about some juvenile murderer telling his mother to carry on without him. Then, he goes on a full-on tussle with the devil, roping in everyone from Galileo to Mama Mia.

Now, as an adult, I think the song is pure genius. I don’t think there’s a better song that so effectively straddles ballad and hard rock, a cappella and melodrama, heaven and hell, poetry and high camp, and makes you wanna head-bang so bad. It got me thinking about the music that I grew up on. And it was an unusual one — based plainly on the fact that I have three older brothers.

With three boys in the family, I had no chance of growing up on Barbra Streisand. Instead, it was a daily dose of Blondie, Pink Floyd and Supertramp. To this day, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road still has the power to fill me with inexplicable melancholy because my second brother P played it for 4-year-old me before he boarded a plane for Singapore, leaving me behind in Malaysia (our home then).

Years later, when my brothers went to study in England, my musical palate took a seriously obscure turn. I remember one summer when they returned, their room started blasting the strangest, hippest, happiest sounds I’ve ever heard. The band was Madness, and it was only in recent years that I could identify their music genre as ska. (I was beside myself when I saw its frontman Suggs host a travel show on TLC recently. “You’re still alive!” I thought happily.)

Along with their shaggy hairdos and cool, tattered T-shirts, my brothers unknowingly introduced to me the best of 80s Britpop. When my third brother H announced once that ABC’s The Look Of Love was the most awesome pop song ever, I couldn’t agree more, and sometimes still do. Even one-hit wonders like Kajagoogoo and Nik Heyward felt achingly edgy because their brand of synth-pop was so new and exciting. And thanks to my eldest brother A, I knew every damn song on Spandau Ballet’s True album by heart because he returned to England after forgetting and leaving the cassette tape in the car. Too young to buy my own music, I had only that to listen to for absolute months.

Yesterday, it suddenly occured to me that I’ve never wished my three brothers Happy Father’s Day. To me, they are my brothers first and foremost, not fathers, even though they have been for many years. I would bake them something if we were all in the same country. But since we are not, I can only send them this virtual Florentine tart – an absolutely delicious treat I made using a recipe from Australia’s Junior Masterchef. (http://www.masterchef.com.au/florentine-tartlets-with-frangipane.htm) It is crunchy, soft, flaky and gooey all at the same time. For those of you who saw the episode on TV, the delighted look of the judges’ faces when they bit into the tarts was genuine — because I had it too.

So these tarts are for my three brothers. Because while my school friends had their childhood soundtracked by the benign likes of Abba, mine — thanks to my brothers — was soundtracked by Freddie Mercury, that peacock-strutting, buck-toothed Indian who is the biggest rocker who ever lived. Now who’s got a cooler childhood?

]]> http://www.crummb.com/blog/a-tart-for-my-brothers/feed/ 18 http://www.crummb.com/blog/ling-douglas-wedding-cake/ http://www.crummb.com/blog/ling-douglas-wedding-cake/#comments Sun, 12 Jun 2011 15:16:51 +0000 crummb http://www.crummb.com/blog/?p=1956

Terror has a new name: Stripes.

In the past, the one thing anyone could do to flood me with dread and trepidation is to ask me to make a birthday cake for a boy. Now, it is to make a cake with stripes. Sure, they look harmless. Just cut straight lines and paste them on. How hard can it be?

Well, I’ll tell you how hard. Check out my work table on a long, invariably exhausting day when I had to make stripes. You gotta make a lot of modelling fondant. You gotta roll them out really long. You gotta make sure it’s the same thickness throughout by using another smaller roller. You gotta cut out the stripes using a ribbon cutter (mail-ordered from the  US, I might add). You wet the section of the cake where the stripe is supposed to go. You lift up the stripe, only to find it stuck on the mat cos you didn’t flour the mat properly. Stripe is ruined, so you start over.  And you start over a lot because a million things could go wrong.

I found myself wielding my knife like a surgeon to get perfectly clean lines. To cover this 4-tier cake, I made 32 stripes. Thirty-two! Total number of hours? Six! By the time I was done, I was so spent I fell straight asleep.

But I was really excited about this cake because it was gonna look spectacular. Ling really liked my Vera Wang cake so she wanted something similar, but with three flowers instead of one. To match her wedding’s colour theme, she also had the brilliant idea that the edges of the petals be dusted in pink.

It didn’t take long to do but the effect was fantastic. Thanks for the idea, Ling!

And thanks to husband Z’s photography (taken on my humble work table with no special lighting other than what was streaming in through the window), this has become one of my favourite cakes. Totally worth the hard work

One of the things I like about my husband Z is that he is just such a smart dude. Okay, so he failed O-level Maths, has the memory of a goldfish and the sense of direction of a middle-aged auntie. But he is the only person I know who can identify all the harmful chemicals listed at the back of a shampoo (because he is paranoid), knows what obscure-named medicines are meant to cure (hypochondriac) and has a conspiracy theory for every PAP policy (possible opposition party leader).

So last month, when I told him I would make him the Heart Cake, it didn’t take him long to figure out that I wanted to make it not because it was his birthday. I wanted to make it because I wanted to make it. His birthday just happened to be round the corner.

And who could blame me? The cake has a heart somehow shoved inside a fully baked cake. When I first saw it on I Am Baker (currently my favourite baker-blogger – prolific, inventive, unpretentious), I almost dropped to my knees in awe. I just gotta make it. Even if it meant spending an entire night baking, slicing, levelling, frosting, sculpting, and desperately in need of a wash, when I could be watching E News.

I can’t even begin to describe how it’s done so I’ll just direct you to her site so you can see her step-by-step tutorial yourself. At Z’s party where the cake was served, I was absolutely dying to see how the inside turned out. And… it wasn’t quite a heart. It looked more like a pair of lips which, thank goodness, was still kinda apt given the occasion. I was disappointed that I didn’t smooth out the corners enough, but our friends seemed quite impressed. And, as if by osmosis, so was Z. “Thanks for making the cake, darleeng,” he said later that night. I was relieved, because it meant that I didn’t need to go out and get him a real present.

But last week, he was reading the papers when he suddenly turned to me and said: “Eh, don’t play already lah. Where’s my real present? I been waiting a month.”

Told you he’s a smart guy.

E first approached me wanting a wedding cake with starfish on it because both she and her fiance are avid divers. Now I was really cracking my brainbox over this because for the life of me, I couldn’t think of a way to make starfish look good on cake. And then I found out she was wearing Vera Wang. This one.

Furggid about starfish already, girl! I hollered to her on email. Have a Vera cake! The huge, frilly thing on the model’s shoulder can be modelled into a gumpaste flower. The stripes on the gown can wrap around all three tiers of the cake too. E’s concern is that an all-white cake would look too washed out. But with all those frills and contours going on, it will look texturous and classy. No worries, I told her.

So a few days before the wedding, I went about making what I hoped will be the show-stopping flower. It took an entire afternoon of building up at least 18 layers of frills, and another 15 wired outer petals.

This was the second flower I did. The first one bombed.

This is what it looked like from the back. The wires, when bunched up together and taped, was as thick as a tree branch.

The flower was left to dry while I covered my three cake tiers with pristine white fondant.

Initially I wanted to replicate the asymmetrical stripes on the gown. But looking at the actual cake before me, I thought there would be too much going on, so I kept the stripes horizontal but decreasing in width as it went down the tiers. So the focus would still be on the flower.

I’m very happy with the way the flower turned out, but not so much the stripes. I should’ve waited for them to firm up more before I attached them, so they look neater and crisper. Hopefully the next time I make a Vera Wang cake, I would’ve had ironed out all these problems. The cake, I swear, will be good enough to wear.

Now, whenever I hear these 6 words, my world turns a brighter colour as I skip my way to my sketchbook to see which design I wanna do next.  So while my customer-friendly official line is: I will give you whatever you want, what really gets me going, the thing that will evoke my undying commitment and servitude to your cake, is to let me do what I want.  (Told you I shouldn’t be writing this!)

The story is quite a funny one. J, who is a very funny lady by the way, wanted a cake for her son’s teachers. Apparently, her 12-year-old is an absolute horror in school, a right disaster-wreaking tornado, and so she wanted to send them a cake as a form of apology and as a “bribe” (her word) to them to not give up on him just yet.

So I decided to make a yellow cake because I’ve never done it before. Besides, it’s a bright, cheery colour that will hopefully do the trick in buying off those poor, beleaguered teachers. So the end result of spending about 3 hours cutting out those daisies and sticking them on neatly was a happy camper J, who on the same night after picking up the cake ordered another cake. This time, she wanted a pink birthday cake for her maid. Again, she left the design to me. Happy maid, happy me.

Bride-to-be N had a pretty unusual request. She had ordered a wedding cake topper, and the cake I was to make had to accommodate its size and style. When she emailed me a photo of it, I gasped back, So Tim Burton! It’s like you’re marrying Johnny Depp! Absolutely adorable.

The topper sat on quite a wide and thick base. So I made the top tier only 2 inches tall so that when the topper sits on it, it would blend right in and the entire three tiers would look proportionate. And so that all attention will be on the topper, the cake decoration was kept simple – just a sugarpaste ribbon and beads around the seams.

As it turned out, her husband – who works in men’s fashion – really does have hair like Johnny Depp. And N, in person, was even more gorgeous than her figurine. Swoon.