Cakes, Past and Present!

To get to where we are, we all must have been somewhere else first!  Here's a few pictures of cakes I've made in the past, along with a few tips and tricks I picked up.
Since I have been trying to expand my portfolio and communicating with clients via email, I've been making good use of Google Images to find ideas for cakes.  Then I send a few pictures out, the client picks one or two, and I recreate it.  Thank you thank you to all the wonderful cake decorating people out there who make this possible!
I just finished this cake last night, and it was easy and quick.  I used the fondant about 2 hours after making it, instead of waiting overnight, and I think that caused a bubble issue.  Needless to say, I covered it up and it looks decent now, but I sure as heck made fondant yesterday for the cake I'm going to cover today.

This next cake is the one I'm most proud of.  10 hours of life (at least) went into this sucker.  I learned that it's darn near impossible to color homemade gumpaste black with black food gel.  You think you get it, then the red somehow evaporates into thin air and you're left with a very pretty, though decidedly not black, dark green.  So I made Darth Vader out of that dark green, let him dry, and painted him black.  This painting method also was a lifesaver for the details of my little Lego men!

 

Here's how, though it took a LOT of internet searching!  I put a few drops of alcohol in a small bowl, then smeared a little black gel on the inside lip of the bowl.  Then I wet a paintbrush with the alcohol slightly, spread it around with the black gel to make a THIN paint, and painted it on.  It took about 8 hours to dry after that.  I used royal icing to hold everything together, and everything is edible except for the toothpicks and dowels inside the cake.  This was SO MUCH FUN!  I learned a lot about forming gumpaste.

The previous two cakes were SO irritating!  I learned that I like working with fondant much more than buttercream!  The Turkey cake completely melted overnight because I used almond extract in the frosting.  It was even the good stuff from Wilton, but it was HORRIBLE to wake up to that!  The body was cake, the head and tail had gumpaste forms under the buttercream.  The tail got heavy and fell over on the cake, but thankfully I was right there to catch it.  The head sunk forward and I had to put a ton of toothpicks in to support the whole stinking structure.  NIGHTMARE!  The corn does look good, though.

The Tinkerbell cake.  Ah, making wings to be strategically put on right before serving.  I was supposed to get a special Tinkerbell doll for this cake, but the client never brought one, so I went to the dollar store and got an off brand Barbie.  I made these beautiful wings, delicate and glittery, out of gumpaste...of course they broke a mere 12 hours before the cake was due.  So I made some wings fast and they were ugly but hey, they were wings.  This cake used whipped topping, which is SOOO good!  Harder to work with, since it melts fast, but GOOD!

The Harvest Cake was fun fun to make!  This was my first shaping of gumpaste.  I made the figures too big, and realized the need for scaling an idea before making it.  Verrrry useful with the Star Wars cake.  I think it turned out pretty good, and the client's family loved it!  This was also my first cake made for a stranger.

The cake before that was for my niece Mpie.  I got a Wilton Dora cake pan.  It took me nearly 3 hours because I didn't have enough bags for the icing colors!  Seriously, there's like 15 colors on this dang cake!  The smash cake was to be Backpack and Map, and I didn't have a picture of the stinking character ANYWHERE.  My computer was down.  I found a little sticker (seriously, like half an inch in diameter) and I used that to draw out the character outline on a 6" piece of paper.  Then I went over that with dark red frosting, then turned it over and pressed it to the top of my coated 6" cake.  Outlined that again, then filled it in.  It was FUN, and Mpie and Dollbaby loved it!  My mother in law thought it was the BEST, and that made me feel SO good!

The cake before that was Stinkie's birthday cake.  This was my first time using fondant, and it was SO much fun to make it!  I use marshmallow fondant.  It's hard to make since I don't use a microwave (I abhor microwaves for some reason) and I have to use a double broiler to melt the marshmallows.  But it's wonderful to knead warm sugar dough.  The picture of George was a mistake!  I was just going to lay it on and find out if the image would work, and it stuck to the fondant.  When I tried to remove it, it TORE my fondant!  So I decided it could stay!  The banana is the smash cake!

So that's where I've been, and I'm really excited about where I can go from here!