Shopping and Cars Cakes

This first cake was pretty fun to make!  I had never made a high heel shoe, but there are excellent instructions and templates on cakecentral.com, so I followed those, but I printed them off half size for a smaller shoe.  I think the next time, I will make the heel thinner and do a peep-toe style.  The cake is my favorite yellow cake recipe, with vanilla buttercream frosting and filling.

Interesting sidenote:  I thought the cake that was due was a Barney cake.  I even made green frosting and frosted the cake before I realized!  So I scraped off the green and made up a fresh batch of soft pink.  I'm so glad I caught my mistake!  I really like the way it turned out.  I did shopping bags with tissue "paper" (actually gumpaste) on my American Girl cake and I really love the way fondant and gumpaste move and lay.

Looks like he's saying "Ka-CHOW!"

  The Lightning McQueen cake is for my  niece Dollbaby.  Her mom and I have been planning her party and working on the decorations for a while now, so this was like the climax of all that planning.  My hubby hung out with me in the kitchen while I caked it up.  We had a good time talking and just being around each other (he's been working 7 days a week, 10 hour days for a while now, and he's going to school two nights a week!)  I didn't have a real "plan" for this cake, other than the few things that Dollbaby told me she wanted.  She said she wanted red on top, blue on the bottom, lightning zigzags, and "a Lightning Mcqueen on top, but not a plastic one.  One made out of frosting".  Oh my.  Me thinks I have spoilt the child!  :)  It makes my little heart pitter patter.  The McQueen on top is made out of smooshed cake and frosting (think: inside of a cake pop) and is covered in fondant.  The cake itself is iced in buttercream with fondant decor.  I wanted it to be an impressive size, so I went with three tiers, 10, 8, and 6 inches.  The middle tier I tied to the party decorations (I'm going to write another post about that later.  The party is today so I will take lots of pictures!)  The candles were pretty cool, they are spirals and I got them in the cake decorating section at, you guessed it, Walmart.

  Well, lovelies, I'm still covered in powdered sugar and I am going to get cleaned up.  Till next time!

A Cake and a Flop

Yesterday I made something...unusual.  I found some great ideas off CraftGawker and Pintrest that I wanted to try out, so I chose a lamp that I really liked but didn't fit our style anywhere:

And decided to alter it.  I bought 1/2 yard of cream and brown fabric and cut them into 2" strips.  I like to fold the fabric over and over so I don't have to cut straight for very long to make each strip.  They ended up looking like this:

I cut off the beads from the top of the lamp, then I started sewing down the middle of each strip to create a ruffle.  9 stitch tension and 4 (longest) stitch length.  This went really fast.  Then I hot glued the stitched part to the lamp, starting at the bottom and alternating colors.  This is where I think I went wrong, for it ended up looking like something from the 70's traveled forward in time and threw up on the lamp:

And lit up it looks like this:

The colors are meh.  I am very dissatisfied.  I wish I had randomized the colors, bought two more colors, and instead of doing straight lines, let them meander all over the lamp.  I did fray the edges of the fabric strips to try giving it a little more appeal, but it's just ugly and I'm feeling down about it.


The bright point is the cake I made for a very special little boy in my life who turned 1!  His Mama and Daddy decided on a balloons/rainbow theme and pretty much left the design to me.  I wanted it to be special, so I made the inside a rainbow and didn't tell anyone until it was cut.  The little smash cake was rainbow inside too!  It was fun and looked like this:

The inside looked like this:

To achieve the look, I made up a batch of White Almond Sour Cream cake (WASC on Cakecentral.com) that was 1400 or so grams in weight.  I put 200g into each of 7 bowls and mixed in a LOT of color.  I wanted it to be very vibrant.

I put 100g of each color into 2-8" rounds.  I measured these by using the tare function on my awesome digital scale.  I let it settle naturally between each color so it spread well and more evenly.  Next time, I am going to coat the entire pan with the red and use more red than any other color so it shows up more, and go less and less as I get closer to the center.  Does that make sense?  Anyway, after I shaved the top to make it level, it looked like this:

I was so happy with how pretty and loud the colors came out.  Yay!  Happy Birthday little buddy!

Thomas the Train!

Here's another cake I made for Cartwheels and Coffee.  Stinkie was dying to put the train on the cake...so I LET HIM!  He was so careful and did such a great job, don't you think?
The cake is Chocolate Sour Cream cake, a new recipe that I am in love with that bakes up like a dream and tastes lovely.  The filling and frosting are vanilla buttercream, with fondant accents.  Everything is edible except the Happy Birthday sign and the Thomas, which I got on sale at Walmart for $3!  It's not the regular Thomas train for the tracks, though.  It's...wait for it....MEGA BLOCKS!  It comes apart into 5 pieces.  Stinkie loved it but I wouldn't let him play with it.  I hope James has the best birthday ever!  The party is tomorrow morning.
  This was my first time doing a spiral carving on a cake, so it was a little nerve-wracking.  Thankfully, I had to carve out enough cake so there was a lot of "leftovers" to snack on!  The technique ended up being pretty simple and I didn't have too stressful a time with it.

The hardest part of this, believe it or not, was the mountains.  The funnest part was the clouds.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JAMES!