Leisure Cakes for my Hubby

I made a couple of cakes this past week, but they were ALL FOR US!  Hubster kept saying that I make all these good pretty cakes for other people but he doesn't ever get any, so I set about on a mission to make cakes!  He just recently got a great new job, so to celebrate I made him this cake.

It was made up of leftover frosting, strawberry filling, and two 6" chocolate cakes I baked on accident.  I know, I know, it's hard to understand how someone can bake two cakes on accident, right?  Well I did and that's all you need to know!  Hahahaaa.  I was going for a whole sunrise theme, since I had leftover frosting from the Striped Kitty cake that was in those colors and a little leftover white.  This cake was SOOOOO yummy!

April Fools' Day is tomorrow, but for some reason I thought it was today and DH has school tonight after work and won't be home until late so I decided to do April Fools Dinner last night.  I made a shepherds' pie that looked like...well gosh I'm really not sure.  I guess I'd say it looked like a chocolate and strawberry mousse pie.

The bottom is regular meat and onion stuff and the top is mashed potatoes dyed pink.  My secret weapon when it comes to sneaking veggies in is putting shredded carrots into everything.  This dish, sloppy joes, everything.  Anyhoosit, here's a picture.  It was pretty tasty!

For dessert I made a Spaghetti and Meatballs cake.  It's a lemon cake (boxed!  EEK!) with buttercream "noodles" and cake balls on top, covered with strawberry sauce.  It was fun to make!

I found myself laughing out loud the whole time I was making it.  The dish it's in is one of my Moms Heisey Crystal serving platters.  I'm not even sure if that's the right spelling for the crystal.  She has a whole collection, so I know they exist, but I cannot for the life of me find them online now that I'm trying not to look stupid and misspell stuff. Ah well, I'm sure all of you on the interwebz forgive me.
Have a long and happy warm day!
Edited:  I discovered the type of crystal platter, and I changed the spelling accordingly.  I spelled it Hi-C, like the HFCS laden, Red-40 havin "kids" drink!  I'm a silly, that's all there is to say about that!

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.