Tropical Beach Birthday Cake

I will be the first to admit that the idea of gumpaste flowers sounds daunting.  It is a time consuming task, no doubt, and the road to victory is paved with failure and broken hard work, but the payoff is amazing.  I was provided with a concept picture and told that the flowers should be prettier (the original design had pretty awful flowers on it).  I really like this client, so I just went all out making this the prettiest cake I've ever made.  It's so FUN!  The cake itself is just chocolate cake with strawberry filling and vanilla buttercream, with graham crackers crushed up to make the "sand".  I think the pictures speak for themselves!  The client just came to pick it up and she was so pleased!  I'm very very happy, and I'm gloating now.  Humor me!

My son is about to wake up from his nap and we're going to go play in the pool, and I've spent the whole nap catching up on this blog!  I think this should be a lesson to me to update more often.  If you have any questions about the flowers or techniques I use, don't hesitate to email me at alesharaelane@yahoo.com or leave a comment below.

Catching Up, Part Deux - Pink and Green Daisies Cake

Welcome to the world, little one!  I had an amazing time making this uber cute baby shower cake.  I followed the booties template from CakeCentral.com to make the shoes.  Those ladies are FANTABULOUS!  They're great at answering questions and there's a wealth of cake decorating information available on there.  If you ever have any caking questions, do a quick search on there and you will find answers.  There's also a lot of tips and tricks, such as my new favorite thing - using a flower nail (you know, the ones you're supposed to use to pipe roses on?) as a baking core.  When you bake a cake that's larger than 8" round, you need something to conduct the heat to the center of the cake, otherwise you will burn the edges of the cake and the center will still be gooey.  Anyway, you just coat it with cooking spray and set it in the middle of your cake batter, and your cake cooks perfectly every time.  It's amazing, and a little sad, that I had just bought a heating core from Wilton for $15 which was more work and less efficient for the sad results.  That's my little tip, just for you guys!

You start with a cake.  This one is yellow on bottom and chocolate on top.  I covered this one with marshmallow fondant in white and pale pink.  This cake is based off a picture that was provided to me by the client.  I made the booties ahead of time out of gumpaste to give them ample time to dry, as well as the daisies.

I dyed some fondant green, and some hot pink, and started to decorate away.  The little balls take a lot of time to get all the same size, but I watched Court TV shows during Stinkie's nap and rolled away.  There are about 100 little balls on this cake.  Anyhowzit, I covered the exposed cake board with white fondant, placed the balls, and placed the booties and the daisies.

I had decorated the booties with little flowers in pink and green.  Aren't they precious?!  This is where I found that humidity and fondant do NOT mix well.  I decorated up the booties a few days in advance, and the day after I did so, I came downstairs to find that the heat had melted the flowers off!  I was able to salvage them, though, and I kept the AC on for the next few days.  Fondant does not do well in the refrigerator, so I needed the whole house cooler.  My hubby did not complain, as he's always the one telling me we need to freeze in the Summer.  He's a cool cat.  Well, I placed all the elements together and this is what I call the Pink and Green Daisies Cake!

Catching Back Up - Part 1- Strawberry Hill Races

Hey everyone!  It's been a very long time!  I've slacked off on the cake thing for a while, just taking it easy and enjoying time with my kiddo, but I have done a few and I'm ready to show them off!  This one was a special order for the Strawberry Hill Races, the Preakness Race.  I'm not a horse racing fan, so when my Aunt-In-Law called to ask about this cake, I had to scour the internet for information.  I found out that each of the races in the Triple Crown have a special flower, so I decided to go with that theme.
The Kentucky Derby's flower is the Red Rose,

Preakness is the Black Eyed Susan,

and the Belmont Stakes is the White Carnation.

  To represent the Triple Crown theme, I made, you guessed it, three crowns out of gumpaste.  I messed up NUMEROUS times getting this right.  I think I should have gone with thicker gumpaste.  Then I needed the crowns to be, well, gold.  I tried a variety of things, and nothing worked very well until I used a lot of gold shimmer dust on top of yellow crowns.  Anyhoo, I made the flowers, baked up the cake (this cake is yellow and chocolate cakes.  Instead of one layer being yellow and one being chocolate, stacked on one another, I cut each cake in half and made the left side the chocolate cake and the right side the yellow cake.  The cakes on top were chocolate) and frosted it with buttercream.  I piped the letters and voila, there was a cake!