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!

My Busy Weekend, Part 2

The last cake that was due this weekend, on Sunday, was for the same client who picked up the Striped Cat Cake on Friday.  Her twins turned 8 (did I mention that already?  I just can't remember!) and she had the awesome cute idea of using the figure 8 cakes for both of them, decorated very differently.  It was truly inspired!

The Race Track Cake was very straightforward and a welcome cake after the hard time I had with the last cake.  Just two 2-layer 8" rounds pieced together and frosted with chocolate frosting colored dark gray (think asphalt).  I layered, fit together, covered, let it crust, and smoothed with Viva paper towels on Saturday night and let the cake hang out in the fridge until the morning.  During waiting/baking times, I made the flags out of gumpaste and let dry a little, then painted on the checkered flag and handled it roughly...MISTAKE!  It ripped right next to the "pole".  So I did it again and painted one side, then let it sit overnight with the fan on it.  The next day, fully refreshed, I piped on the outlines on the cake, piped the grass around, painted the other side of the checkered flag, and *poof* cake was done!  The client was to place some Hot Wheels on the track prior to serving.  Super cute!  Happy Birthday to Twins!
By the way, moms of twins are amazing.  Every time I see twins, I set their mom on a pedestal.  You know the best part?  They usually have makeup on and their clothing matches and has no stains (totally unlike me, and I only have one)!   It's simply awesome to me when I realize that there are mothers out there who can handle two at one time.  To all moms of multiples out there, you rock!

Flower Power!

  Another week, and another cake!  After last week, my housework got WAY behind, and I was sort of looking forward to just chilling out and cleaning the house...okay.  Maybe not looking forward to cleaning the house, but you get the picture.  Then I got an email from a lady asking about a rush job for another Sweet 16 cake!  I love these kind of things.  You have people that have almost given up hope on getting the cake they want.  You can almost feel the resignation that they will end up either paying $600 or just going to Walmart for their cake through the internet.  At any rate, They sent me a few pictures, and I gladly accepted the challenge!
  I had a heck of a time with the fondant.  The first two tiers I covered I messed up on.  They just dried out too quickly.  In order to re-do them, I had to make more fondant and wait 8 hours for the batch to cure.  ARGH!  But I eventually got it and covered and stacked the tiers.  Blank slate.  White cake.

I rolled out a black fondant ribbon 1.5" wide and wound it around the bottom tier.  Then I started putting on the vines.  It was relaxing work, but definitely something different.  After putting on the vines, I placed the ribbons around the cake and secured them at the back.  Since they are satin, I couldn't use water or gumpaste glue under them.  I secured one end, wrapped the cake, and secured the other end with a dab of the glue.  This left an ugly little mess at the back of the cake.  Probably not noticeable to anyone but me, but gosh I didn't want to leave it there.  Anyhoos.  I cut and placed the flowers.  I had moulded the numbers for the top of the cake on Monday night, the night the clients came over, so they had ample time to dry.  They had craft sticks pushed up into them before they dried, so they were pretty secure.  I wound a few vines around them and attached flowers.  Then I covered the cake board with black fondant and placed the bottom (orange) ribbon.  I made a template for the name on the board, then scrapped that.

Block lettering didn't seem to fit the vibe of this cake, so I rolled out another long snake of fondant and wrote her name in cursive.  For the tittle, I made a little tye dye fondant using all the colors I used on the cake and cut out a little flower.  It was uber cute, I think!

  I then turned my attention to the back of the cake.  It was very plain.  The birthday girl had told me she didn't mind if it was just plain, but I really wanted to spruce it up and I had extra fondant, so I started playing with it.  I cut out a massive amount of flowers and went to work sprucing it up!
I love how the back turned out.  It reminds me of the back of a wedding dress, you know the ones that have the buttons going all the way down the middle of the back and down the skirt?  Anyway.  I had a good time!

Then when the Mamma and Daughter came to get the cake, they LOVED it and the girl gave me a wonderful letter telling me how pleased she was and how thankful she was.  It truly made my week!  My husband was so happy for me, too.  That is just really thoughtful for a 16 year old, you know what I mean?

Well, this week is over and I made another cake for a family member, but we ended up not getting together, so I'm probably going to give this cake away on Craigslist tonight.  It's kind of a bummer but no real biggie.  It was a fun little cake and I really enjoyed doing buttercream grass on it.
  With the leftover cake from the soccer cake, I experimented for the first time with cake balls.  What you do it crumble up cake, mix it with buttercream frosting, and ball it up on the end of a stick.  Then you freeze it nice and hard.  Then you take milk chocolate and melt it on a double boiler, add a teaspoon of shortening, and stir it up.  Then you swirl the frozen cake balls into the chocolate until they are nice and covered, then you put them in the fridge, then...you eat them!  I'm really looking forward to making these more often.

What a good use of that extra cake you cut off the top of the domed cakes and the extra little bit of buttercream you're invariably left with.
  I'm contemplating using ganache to cover the next cake.  I'll keep you posted.

Wu-Tang parties with SpongeBob

 This week I had two cakes on my agenda. There was a SpongeBob smashcake for a little boy's 1st birthday and a Sweet 16 cake for a big party!  SpongeBob first, because I'm just aching to write about the Wu-Tang  cake and it's such sweet expectation!

  Dean is turning 1!  Grandma wanted a special cake just for him.  It's nothing incredibly outlandish, but it was a fun little cake.  It measures 7"x5".  I never watch SpongeBob so I had to go completely off of pictures, but I think it came out well.  The original cake we decided on was out of fondant, but of course, the one year old doesn't want fondant!  So this is me trying to make buttercream look more fondant-y.

The Wu-Tang cake was a MONSTER cake!  It weighed about 50 pounds.  The tiers are 12", 10", 8", and 6".  It took over 15 hours to decorate this cake (without baking times included).  It is all yellow cake with two layers of buttercream filling and two layers of strawberry filling.  There were five pictures we took inspiration from when the clients came to order.  From those five we came up with this concept drawing that became the Wu-Tang cake.  Why Wu-Tang?  Do you see the tops of the Wu-Tang symbol?

Well, I do!  It was truly wonderful working on this cake and I was so happy to see it's completion.  It feels like I haven't done laundry or answered emails since Tuesday!  On this cake I tried out a new technique of covering the cake board with fondant.  It was fairly simple and I really enjoy doing something new.  The stars were difficult to figure out how to put on.  I made the stars out of gumpaste and pressed two together to sandwich the wire, then painted them and let them dry.  I was going for a more "puffy" kind of look to the positioning of the wires, but the gumpaste proved to be just a little too heavy for the gauge of wire I selected.  I think it looks pretty good anyway, though!  The clients loved it, and that was the best part!
Well, my back aches and I'm ready to cuddle on the couch with my hubby for a while.  Long days and pleasant nights, everyone!