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Wedding | Milo’s Parents Get Married!

| Milo, Weddings

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You may have noticed that our blog was pretty quiet at the start of 2016. That’s because we were working on a recent wedding — our own! I’m so excited to share some photos of the wedding cake, particularly the gumpaste flowers that were a labor of love over the first couple months of the year. (Photo credit above to the wonderful Tyler Branch Photo.)

With a color theme that spanned a gradient of dusty blues and greens, I made gumpaste succulents, silver brunia balls, dusty miller leaves, silver dollar eucalyptus leaves, and an assortment of white peonies, mums and filler flowers.

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I had also made a dusty blue dahlia bundle for the surprise groom’s cake, but then forgot the flowers in the hotel room. Bummer.

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Fortunately gumpaste flowers don’t die, so now we have a lovely gumpaste flower centerpiece arrangement to keep as a memento at home 🙂

The cake itself was a Napoleon, which is made of layers of homemade puff pastry with custard filling. After covering with buttercream and creating a tree bark pattern, I sprinkled the top with feuilletine flakes and dusted with powdered sugar. We only made the top tier as a cutting cake (the bottom tiers are dummies), and served our guests with Napoleon sheet cake from Porto’s Bakery which makes a delicious version.

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Wedding Preview | Malibu Romance

| Weddings

A couple weekends ago, I soft-launched the new Milo’s Bonbons logo when I catered a wedding in Malibu. I’m excited to share what I made and describe that adventure in more detail, but I may need to wait for professional photographs, as I didn’t have much time (or lighting) to capture many good ones myself. In the meantime, here’s a quick preview of the wafer paper flowers I made for the wedding cake:

Wafer paper is made of potato starch, and with edible ink, you can print pretty much any color you want. I printed out shades of coral and pink to try to match the bride’s bouquet, and then cut out petals to assemble together with piping gel. It takes a little time, but it’s a little cleaner and quicker than gumpaste flowers. I also love the soft, romantic feel that wafer paper lends itself to. Can’t wait to keep exploring this technique!

More detailed post on the wedding to come!

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Birthday | Chocolate & Apples (Unlikely Pairing!)

| Birthdays

Happy birthday this week to my friends Patricia and Chengos! I made this cake at the last minute for a potluck. The only guidance I had was “chocolate” and “maybe with fruit”. I thought about what I was originally going to make (apple tarts), opened up my favorite cookbook, Extraordinary Cakes, and the first page I turned to was “New York, New York,” a chocolate and apple cake. It was meant to be.

I don’t often associate apples with chocolate, but add in a little caramelization and rum, and it all comes together.

I used the same sour cream chocolate cake that I used for my previous German Chocolate Cake, since I knew I could count on it for a flavorful and light texture. I brushed the cake with rum simple syrup and then layered it with rum-spiked chocolate ganache, chocolate chantilly (whipped chocolate cream), and caramelized Golden Delicious apples.

The assembled cake was then coated with chocolate ganache, and covered with a chocolate glaze for a smooth finish. Then I placed thinly sliced Golden Delicious apples around the sides and secured with a ribbon. I didn’t have time to make additional decorations, so I arranged some fresh flowers on top.

Although you might expect this cake to be incredibly heavy, the lightness of the chocolate cake layers offsets the denseness of the ganache. I might skip the ganache filling layers in the future and save it just for the outer coating, but all in all, this was a unique and flavorful cake! Thin slices recommended for consumption 😉

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