Easy Hello Kitty Cake

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Hello world. I know I've been slacking in the blogging department. Yet another reason not to make New Years resolutions. I made a sort of resolution at the beginning of the month to have a schedule for posting to my blog. I don't know what happened but it seems like as soon as I'd made the plan, my whole life conspired against me being able to actually stick to the plan. I won't go into the long list of things that have kept me from posting but I will tell you that I've been making lots of cakes. A baby shower cake, a Tinkerbell cake, Spongebob cupcakes, I even got a weird request for a mountain dew cake. It's been a busy couple of weeks!
This particular cake was for a friends 6 year old daughter. My friend called and asked if I could make a Hello Kitty cake for her daughters birthday. She said that her daughter wanted the cake to be in the shape of Hello Kitty's head and the cake to be "pink velvet cake." She's a girl that knows what she likes!
This was my first Hello Kitty head cake. I hadn't really planned on sharing it here but as I was making it, I thought it was an easy fun cake that almost anyone could do and I decided to post it. It's great for a beginner cake decorator.
So here's a Hello Kitty cake tutorial, of sorts.

Materials

1 half sheet cake (you could also use a 9x13 inch cake)
3 cups of basic white buttercream frosting. (I used butter not shortening)
Fondant for bow, whiskers, eyes, and nose.

Make or buy cake. Wrap well and freeze the cake overnight. It's much easier to carve the cake while it's frozen. Freezing the cake also helps decrease the crumbs, which is very helpful when you go to frost the cake.
My cake was a basic vanilla cake dyed pink, aka pink velvet cake. If you want to go really simple, you could buy an plain, unfrosted half sheet cake from a bakery. I made my own frosting but you could use canned frosting as well.
Hello Kitty's head is pretty easy to cut out freehand. It's just an oval with ears. I didn't use a template but if you want one you can go here and download this one. You need Adobe Reader installed in your computer to download it. Or you could just Google Hello Kitty coloring pages and print the page. You may need to blow-up the picture to get the size you want for your cake.

If using a template, pin the template to the cake with toothpicks and carve around the template. I cut the corners off on the bottom of my cake. On the top of the cake I cut off a little less leaving room to cut out ears. Then I just carved off any edges that kept the cake from being oval shaped.

sorry this picture isn't very good, but I hope you get the general idea!

Frost the cake. You may need to do a thin coat of icing as a crumb coat and refrigerate the cake for about an hour. This will keep the crumbs from showing through when you put the rest of the frosting on the cake. I have never tried this with canned frosting so I don't know if it works well or not.

Decorating:
I used fondant to make the bow, whiskers, eyes and nose, on my cake. If you don't want to buy fondant, you could use fruit roll-ups for the bow, jelly beans for the eyes and nose, and licorice for the whiskers.

For the bow: Pinch off a small piece of fondant. Add  food gel coloring in desired color and knead until the color is incorporated into the fondant. Roll out fondant out to about 1/4 inch thickness. I used a small heart cookie cutter and a small oval cutter. I cut out 2 hearts and put the points of the heart together and put the oval over the points to form the center of the bow.
If you don't want to use fondant, you could cut a bow the same way out of fruit leather and get a similar effect.

I painted my bow with edible glitter!

I made my whiskers out of gum paste dyed black that I put into a clay extruder gun to make long ropes. You also could roll black fondant into ropes by hand and let them dry overnight, or just use pieces licorice.

I cut the eyes and nose from small pieces of fondant but jelly beans would make a good substitution.
Place the bow, eyes, nose and whiskers on the cake. When I finished my cake I realized I should have put the eyes a lower but changing them at that point would have messed up the top of the cake.
I finished off the cake with a boarder of frosting around the bottom edge. This step is optional. Leave it off if you don't feel comfortable using a piping bag.
 This Hello Kitty cake is a pretty easy, very fun project that would be great to do with the kids. The good news is, even if it isn't perfect at least you can eat your mistakes!

All in One Holiday Bundt Cake with Sugared Cranberries

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I made Dori Greenspan's all-in-one holiday bundt cake for the first time this week. It's the perfect cake for this time of year. This cake is filled with cranberries, nuts, apple,and pumpkin. Sounds great right! Then you add a maple glaze. Yummm! That's pretty much all the holiday flavors packed into one delicious cake.
To make it even more festive, I topped the cake with some of the sugared cranberries I had leftover from the ICE cupcake cranberry challenge.
I thought this would be the perfect entry for this month Sugar High Friday. Sugar High Fridays started by Jennifer of The Domestic Goddess. This month's host is Susan atThe Well Seasoned Cook and the theme is: All that Glitters. Perfect because these cranberries just sparkle like little gems. Check out all the other glitter holiday desserts on here.



All-In_One Holiday Bundt Cake
Dorie Greenspan's Baking From My Home to Yours
(makes one 9- to 10-inch Bundt cake)

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Pinch of salt
1 1/4 sticks (10 tablespoon/5 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup (packed) light brown sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups canned unsweetened pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie mix)
1 large apple, peeled, cored and finely chopped
1 cup fresh cranberries, halved or coarsely chopped
1 cup pecans, coarsely chopped
Optional: Maple syrup icing (see recipe below)

To make the cake:
Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350F. Butter a 9- to 10-inch (about 12-cup) Bundt pan. Do not place the pan on a baking sheet - you want the oven's heat to come up through the Bundt pan's open core.

Put the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, ground ginger, nutmeg, and salt in a bowl and whisk to combine. Set aside dry ingredients.

Working with a stand mixer (using a paddle attachment, if you have one), beat the butter and both sugars together at medium speed until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat for 1 minute after each addition; beat in the vanilla.

Reduce the mixer speed to low and add the pumpkin and apples - don't be concerned if the mixture looks curdled. Still on low speed, add the dry ingredients, mixing only until the flour is just barely incorporated. Working with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon, stir in the cranberries and pecans.

Scrape the batter into the pan and smooth the top with the spatula. Slide the pan into the oven and bake 60 to 70 minutes at 350F, or until a knife inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Transfer the cake to a rack and cool for 10 minutes before unmolding. Cool to room temperature on the rack. Drizzle with maple syrup glaze.

Maple syrup glaze:
Sift 6 tablespoons confectioners' sugar into a bowl. Stir in 2 tablespoons pure maple syrup. Add more maple syrup little by little, until you have an icing that runs nicely off the tip of a spoon - you might need another 1/2 tablespoon to get the right consistency. Put the cooled cake on a sheet of parchment or waxed paper and drizzle with the glaze. Let the glaze set for a few minutes before serving.