Butterflies and Pills

I made up another batch of the Key Lime Cupcakes for a small celebration with the neighbor girl, who is always helping me with things like what Disney Princess is worth creating on a cupcake or just generally stroking my cake ego with oohs and aahs.  Such a sweetie!
I had bought some of these tiny butterfly cutters and I am really enjoying them!  These ones are white gumpaste that I let dry then airbrushed a few different colors.

I made the letters using Tappits Funky Letters lowercase set.  I found the best way to get the letters out was to use some marshmallow fondant with Gum-Tex, then roll it into a very thin sausage shape.  I'm talking thin enough to read a newspaper through!  Let it sit for a minute like that, then cut the letter you need with a very well sugar dusted cutter, then smack the cutter on the counter edge very hard.  The letters should pop out.
Anyway, I attached the letters to toothpicks with royal icing and stuck them in.  And found out I'm in love with Tappits and butterfly cutters.  Ah the joys of new cake toys!


I was given the opportunity to recreate a wedding cake in a cupcake for a ten year wedding anniversary.  This is what I came up with:

Basketweave buttercream with fondant rosettes and little pearls.  It's not the greatest photo, but you can see the custom cupcake box I make for my cupcakes a bit.  Guarantees they don't slide around and mess up the design!


This cake is for a graduating pharmeceutical rep.  It's what's known on the street as a "Perc 30" but is actually a 30mg Oxycodone and a yellow Paxil bar.  Strawberry cake with marshmallow fondant, and the Paxil bar is Rice Krispie Treats with fondant.  The prescription slip is just painted fondant.

I found a very cute picture of Dora online and made her out of fondant for the top of this tiny 6" round cake.  I got to use the butterfly cutters again!  This time I wanted a more simple look so I just used colored fondant, but I did airbrush the base cake to give the illusion of sky and grass.

I really love this little figure's cute little face!  At first, I didn't have Backpack and Map on Dora's back, but my kid came downstairs, saw the cake, and insisted that Dora ALWAYS has Backpack and Map and I had to include them.

This cake is a Baby Minnie Castle cake for a sweet little girl turning 1!  The mama gave me the candle topper and I worked around that for the colors and design.  I used the Wilton castle set for the towers and covered the spires with fondant and little vines and flowers.

And I got to use the Tappits again!  Yay!

Cake Boards and Lacing and Cartoons, OH MY!

This past week has felt so hectic!  I feel like I've been running around like a chicken with its head cut off.  My Mother In Law's birthday was on Monday, and we all went over there on Tuesday to celebrate.  She had asked for a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, so I had a chance to make this amazing carrot cake from RecipeZaar.  I wanted to do a dark cake with white lace-type decor, so I made chocolate cream cheese frosting to coat the cake, and regular cream cheese frosting to decorate.  It was a very heavy cake.  The one thing I don't like about carrot cake is that there's strings of things in it - the carrots themselves, coconut, pineapple, all in all just a stringy sort of cake.  This makes leveling with a Wilton leveler next to impossible without tearing the cake up, so I just used a serrated knife for the bottom layer and left the top with a small dome.  I put the vanilla icing in the middle, lined up the layers, and frosted the whole thing with the chocolate.  Then I let that set for a while and used Viva brand paper towels to smooth the frosting.  I filled up a pastry bag too full with the vanilla frosting and started to freehand, then realized I needed more control.  That is a mistake I don't plan on making again!  I emptied half the frosting, then went about with the design.  I had piped some royal icing made from an egg white and powdered sugar onto wax paper two days earlier in an attempt to do real lace, but I wasn't careful enough removing the dried pieces so I came out with just the hearts and the letter "S".  Also, I should have listened to the directions on the website I found and used Wilton tip #2 (or even better, #1), instead of trying to be cool and using #3.  I worked the stuff I could save in, piped the decor on the top, piped the shell border, and called it a cake!

The next two cakes I made for a party at Cartwheels and Coffee, a great little coffee shop/kids play area in Carytown.  The manager was kind enough to give me a chance at making some Dora and Diego cakes for a party this weekend.  Let me tell you, there are like 25 different colors of icing on these two cakes combined!  I just bit the bullet and bought a pack of 50 bags and an extra 8 couplers.  It was SO worth it.  Three, THREE different colors of gray on the Diego cake.  I made the colors up the night before, and I made the "skin tone" color too light, but the next day I just started the cakes anyway and they came out fine, I think.  I wanted to make sure I got these done as close as possible to the date they were needed so they would be super fresh.  I used the Wilton shaped cake pans to minimize any margin of error.  The Dora cake was a basic yellow cake.  I got the recipe from SeriousCakes on YouTube.  I love her buttercream frosting recipe, too, so I decided to try out her Chocolate Cake.  YUM!  I also used a caramel sauce as the filling.  That recipe was from KittenCal on Zaar, and I had to modify it a bit so it would get hard enough to work as a filling.  I boiled it for an extra 20 minutes or so so get a medium-soft ball (when dropped boiling into cold water).  It was SOOO good!  I've found the hardest part of making cakes is not sampling!  I have to wash my hands so much that I'm starting to get chapped.  I think I'm going to have to get some Bath and Body works soap.  Mmmmm.  So without further ado, here they are!

I'll put in a word here about the cake boards.  NO WAY am I going to pay 2 bucks for a piece of cardboard.  I just went to the produce area and asked for a box, then measured and cut to size, then covered those with glue and glued tin foil to them.  I placed the cakes, cut them into layers, put in the caramel, then set the top layer back on.  Then I used a razor knife to cut out a desirable shape.  It was quite a bit of extra work, but I'm not askeert of some work!  I did splurge for cake boxes, though.  Pretty sure I don't have the skills needed to make those out of scratch!
So I hope the party people are pleased with these cakes and I hope they enjoy the yummy cakes!  I didn't get to sample the yellow cake, but I did have enough chocolate batter left over for a cupcake.  I smothered some caramel sauce on that bad boy and WOW it was amazing.
The next cake I have due is a Margaritaville, beach themed cake.  Wish me luck!

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!