The Twelve Cakes of Christmas - (#6) Christmas Ornament

The Guinness chocolate cake (see cake #3 of Christmas) was such a hit, Jessica decided to do use it again as the building material for the latest inspired cake. This time the goal was to make a huge, shiny ornament.

Once again, the chocolate Guinness cake ingredients. This was a double batch so there were actually 2 cans of Guinness in the whole thing.

The cake was baked in two semicircular pans, then glued together to make into a ball using vanilla buttercream. The ball was then covered with a hefty piece of fondant. This was the fancy buttercream fondant, which is far less prone to tearing than the Wilton stuff.

The fondant was then painted with silver and gold luster dust. Silver dragees were attached with tweezers.

For the bow, we first had to learn how to make one (thanks to some YouTube clips), then tied one and placed it right on top of the cake.

The cake cut really clean and there was plenty of chocolaty goodness!

We served the cake at a holiday party for our neighbors, and it turned out just as yummy as the first time we tried the recipe. Guinness chocolate cake is certainly a keeper!

The Twelve Cakes of Christmas - (#4) Present

Following up on the post from yesterday -- what is Santa's bag filled with? Beautifully wrapped presents! That's what Jessica decided to make here with this very moist genoise cake. This is a French/Italian cake that doesn't use any leavening agents. Instead, the cake relies on the puffiness of beaten eggs to provide the airiness in this dough. When piped into strips, genoise cake is know as lady fingers.

The recipe was pretty simple. This was everything for the lemon genoise cake and the chocolate buttercream.

Starting off with a little bit of eggs.

Which get tripled in volume from vigorous whisking.

Covered with fondant and decorated with a bow it looked like it belonged under the Christmas tree.

It was a fairly stiff cake that cut fairly clean.

Overall, this wasn't our favorite cake because of the spongy texture of the Genoise cake. But, lesson learned and it made a nice little decorative present along the way.