Happy Monday, sweet friends!
Have you noticed how suddenly cool it has become? With all the frozen treats I’ve been sharing on Fridays, you might think I’ve lost my baking momentum. Not at all — it’s just that summer calls for evenings outdoors, and time for elaborate baking gets squeezed between work and weekends.
That said, my cake mojo has been visiting in smaller bursts. While sorting through old photos recently, I rediscovered a couple of projects from last year that I never shared — little cakes that were fun to make and full of personality.
First up is this tiny hat cake I made as a thank-you gift in October. For some reason I never posted it, even though I thought it was utterly charming. I only found three photos of it, and they were nearly identical, but the cake itself was memorable.
The cake was chocolate with a chocolate mousse filling — a combination I still love. I remember my partner and I finishing the leftover mousse straight from the bowl with our fingers; it was that good. To create the rounded top, I baked half-spheres in a silicone mold that proved uncooperative at the time, which made things a bit tricky. Since then I’ve found better molds that release beautifully, which makes shaping much simpler.
The hat and ribbon were made from modelling chocolate, and I used a piping tip to punch out the polka dots on the hat band. To give the brim a bit of movement and a natural curve, I draped scrunched plastic wrap over supports and propped parts of the brim up with small sticks until the modelling chocolate set. It gave the hat a whimsical, slightly windswept look.
You can expect to see a refreshed take on this hat in a future post — I enjoyed the design and plan to refine the technique now that I have more reliable tools.
The second cake is a small chocolate cube layered with coconut cream, made for my aunt who adores coconut. At the time I hesitated to share it because I wasn’t entirely convinced by the design — I experimented with fondant and a poppy patchwork pattern that, in hindsight, perhaps didn’t suit her tastes.
After finishing the decorative layer, I changed my mind and carefully removed the fondant from the ganache. It was a bit messy, but once I smoothed the ganache and added another thin coat to even everything out, I piped a border of coconut cream to hide any rough spots. The final look was less polished than the original idea, but it still tasted wonderful.
In the end, the cake served its purpose — my aunt, who isn’t usually big on dessert, loved it. She appreciated the coconut flavor, the balanced sweetness, and, of course, that it was homemade. I bake all my cakes from scratch, and I always pour in a little extra care and laughter along the way.
Try a few more bites:
Red Velvet & White Chocolate Gift Box Cake
Red Velvet With Coconut Swiss Meringue Buttercream
Momma’s One-Bowl Coconut Cake
Chocolate Cake With A Kick
I’ll be back in a few days with another installment of my Friday Frozen Summer Sweets — plus more cake projects. Thanks for reading, and I hope you find a little baking inspiration to enjoy this season.
