Burger Time! A Burger Cake Photo Tutorial

Hope you enjoyed this photo tutorial... anyone feeling hungry for drive-thru??

Full instructions can be found over at my post on the Craftsy blog!

Burger Heaven: Burger Cake, Fries 'n Soda!

Man oh man. If there's one cake I don't mind doing over again it's the Hamburger Cake Classique. It kills me every time!

Marissa asked me if I could do a burger cake for her husband Steve's birthday... her excitement and enthusiasm for the cake was matched by my own hyperness -- I love the magic of cake! Colour some buttercream, trick the eye with squiggles of "mustard" and leaves of fresh green "lettuce" and blobs of "ketchup." Roll out orangey fondant super thin and cut into squares then triangles, and you've got a cheeseburger! Personally I like my burgers a little more rare than charred... but you can blame the rich dark cocoa powder I used for the burger patty cake layer... ^__^

The cutesville kicker on this cake -- SODA AND FRIES! I was just going to make the soda and fries for display and for photos... but they turned out so cute I turned them into their own flags and poked them in to the top of the cake. I did a stripey cake board and matching flag. The cake itself was vanilla cake and chocolate cake, and between the layers of cake there was dark chocolate ganache...

I got a really cute email from Marissa the next day:

"I had to really be careful to preserve as much of its cuteness as possible when cutting it. The first cut was, indeed, the deepest."

CUTE!!!

I know how much I loved this cake because this was the last cake I made over a painful/delightful/extremely tiring weekend of pure cakeing... but I had so much energy in creating it because I was seriously so stoked on it.

Happy Birthday Steve! You've got a super cool wife! ^__^

Coco Cake Round-Up!

Lorna ordered dark chocolate cupcakes with chocolate buttercream
for her boyfriend Curtis' birthday...

She also requested one to look like Elvis, and the other to look like a guitar... I chose Fat 1970s Elvis as my inspiration... yellow tinted shades and silver dragee sequin-work... Fat Elvis, or party animal Chinese relative??

My old friend Sabina from HIGH SCHOOL (who now lives in the UK) ordered Toopy & Binoo cupcakes for her nephew's birthday... ! Long distance order! :)

I didn't know these little dudes before this order. I like Toopy the rat's nutty look, and "casual times" Binoo..

These cupcakes remind me of a synchronized swimmer's floral-look cap from the 1950s...

I found that vintage plate at a thrift store a few years ago... I love the robin's egg blue...

Burger Time! Such an awesome game of the 1980s! Nicole and her co-workers ordered this burger cake for their boss Jeff at Drive Organics, here in Vancouver. Must be a pretty rad boss to garner a burger cake!!

Note the bacon. This bacon has a lot of fat on it.

More to come in Coco Cake Land, coming soon!

xo Lyndsay

Hamburger Cake: The Reprise

For those of you who know Gerry Sung personally, you know he's a man of few words (although inside he's quite likely chuckling away). So when the man himself REQUESTS a HAMBURGER CAKE for his 65th birthday, there's no two ways about it: you make the guy a HAMBURGER CAKE, an extra special one, with coconut vanilla cake and dark chocolate cake, vanilla buttercream and chocolate ganache filling. So here is Hamburger Cake: The Reprise, made especially for my beloved dad, the man, the master, Gerry Sung!!! Happy Birthday dad, love you lots!

It's My Party, I'll Make A Cake If I Want To

A cake if I want to, a cake if I want to... I just love Leslie Gore. "It's My Party" has such sad lyrics. It's about a girl (presumably Leslie?) at her own party, and she's awaiting her boyfriend Johnny to show up, and then Johnny shows up with some new hussie named Judy and Judy's wearing his RING. What a JERK. But, did you know there's a sequel to the song called "Judy's Turn To Cry", about how Johnny finally comes back to Leslie? If I were Leslie I would dump stupid Johnny and find someone who respected ladies!

Okay... so yes, it was my birthday yesterday!! And what better way to spend my day than to BAKE, BAKE BAKE! Hee hee! My fave thing is to listen to the wonderful This American Life podcast and do my baking thang.

So, for probably one year now I've been loving the hamburger cake, so much so that it inspired an entire birthday party theme: the Trompe L'oeil birthday party potluck, complete with prizes for the top four entries. So I decided... I will attempt to make the elusive and visually alluring hamburger cake! Well, not so elusive. A quick google will bring up many wonderful examples of this little guy.

For your viewing pleasure, I present the "making of" the hamburger cake... !

HAMBURGER CAKE

diagrams are often helpful to draw! so i started out with making a full recipe for vanilla coconut cake for the "buns" and a half recipe for dark chocolate cake for the "patty." i used 9 inch circular pans, letting everything cool of course before assembly!

so i made a "dam" of butercream, and i am going to fill it with ganache!

my cooled ganache-- i used coconut milk and dark chocolate chips.

my piping bags filled with three different colors of buttercream-- with different tips, one leaf tip for the lettuce, one small circle tip for the mustard and one big circle tip for the tomatoes/ketchup!

filling my first layer with ganache...

i plopped my patty on top of the first ganache layer, then did the same "dam" idea with the red ketchup/tomato icing.

next up: "accoutrements" -- mustard squigglies, "lettuce" piped on and more ketchup!! at this point i was giddy with excitement!

plop the top vanilla coconut layer on top, add some white non-pareil candy bits for sesame seeds... add a little party flag... and you have... HAMBURGER CAKE!!!

The burger cake was a real hit, and I was so happy it worked out with the ganache filling! Yummy happy burger birthday to me!