Sunflowers and Ladybugs!

This cute little sunflower and ladybug cake was FUN to make!  It was my first time making sunflowers out of buttercream, but it proved to be simple enough.  The ladybugs were so interesting to place, and the little crawl marks made me giggle.  Cakes like this are why I love to make cakes.  The cake itself is yellow cake with vanilla buttercream frosting and filling.

Princess Birthday Cake

I didn't start out thinking I would LOVE this cake, and as things went together, I was suspect, but when everything was in place and I stepped back and checked it out, GOODNESS I really like this cake.  It's chocolate fudge cake with vanilla buttercream frosting and filling.  The crown and flowers are gumpaste and the draping is fondant.  I made the crown by rolling out the gumpaste and using a hand drawn template to cut out the shape, then rolling it around an empty and cleaned Crisco container to dry, then setting that in a bowl filled with flour (so that the points curved just the right amount of outward).  I learned to do this after much trial and error on the last crown I made.  I made the crown larger (last time I used an oatmeal container, which was smaller in girth).  The crown was pearlized using my airbrush machine.  I love that thing.

The flowers have inedible gem centers.  I just liked the look so much more than piped centers, it gave a certain pizzazz.

I think I like the back better than the front!

I have a lot of cake stuff coming up and I'm feeling the pressure!  Tomorrow is a Barney cake, then a Lightning McQueen cake for Dollbaby's birthday, and next weekend is busy busy busy too!  Everyone is having a birthday in February!

Ah yes.  I made this little smash cake for Stinkie's friend last weekend.  I also made another cake, but I lost my iPod so I didn't get a picture of it :(.  That's okay, everything was SO frustrating about those two cakes, so I'm not incredibly happy with how they came out.  It's okay.  Both cakes were loved by their owners, and this princess cake made up for it!

Happy Father's Day!

This was a quick and fun little cake to do to show a certain special someone how loved he is!  I saw a cake with generic handprints on it while browsing Father's Day cakes on Bing images.  It's just a one layer yellow cake with vanilla buttercream frosting.  The decorations?  Actual handprints from his 3 of his 4 kids and wife (the youngest was sleeping when they came by).  I frosted the cake and let it crust, then pressed their hands into the finished frosting layer about 2cm deep.  Then I painted the buttercream indents with colors they chose beforehand.  It was fun and easy.  What a cute cake!  I didn't have a chance to photograph it, but I got a few pictures they posted for me on Facebook.

Happy Father's Day!

Betty Boop-boop de doop!

Two fun cakes for one fun event!  This Betty Boop cake was requested by the client based on her photo.  It is yellow cake with vanilla buttercream filling and marshmallow fondant (MMF) frosting.  I thought the composition of this cake would be more difficult than it was.  It turned out to be pretty fun!  I have always loved Betty Boop!

The hardest part for me was getting the flesh colored fondant.  It was a total pain.  The red fondant should have been the hardest, but I made up a special batch just of the red and added all the coloring to the melted marshmallows before adding all the sugar.  That made things very easy there.  I used powdered red as well because it has no taste whatsoever and the Americolor Super Red because it has very little flavor.  I will never again use the Wilton no-taste red...it certainly DOES have a bitter taste!

I love her little eyelashes.

The second cake is yellow cake with vanilla BC frosting and filling.  I usually use the chocolate BC as the base for any black frosting, but this time I tried something I read on a caking website.  I used the Wilton Juniper gel color first (man is that an ugly color) and then used a bit of the Americolor black (just a tiny bit) and a package and a half of the Chefmaster black food powder.  It darkened overnight and turned darker still when it was warmed by my hands.  The hearts are simply fondant cutouts.

The picture I took used flash and it came out looking gray, so I took another quick snapshot of it next to my Adidas bag in natural lighting and it looks much more true to life.  YAY! Oh, and yes, that is one of my custom made, super sturdy crazy awesome cake boxes.  I rock.
These cakes were not as stressful as I had anticipated and I am very glad I got a chance to make them!

Sesame Street!

I have always loved Sesame Street.  Always.  Even now that they've changed the opening jingle and added such magical creatures as Abby and her flying faerie school, Rosita, and...yes, you guessed it, Elmo, among others.  Though I'm still in love with what was, I can absolutely appreciate what Sesame Street is still doing in helping little ones (like my 3 year old) and their parents have some quality time together talking about the letter Q and the number 17.

My client sent me an inspiration photo for this cake and I was beyond excited.  What a cute cake, what a great show, what a perfect 1st birthday party theme.
I used Americolor Super Red and Wilton Rose to get the red tint.  The yellow is a mix of Wilton's golden yellow and lemon yellow.  The cake itself is yellow cake, 2-10" layers and 2-6" layers with buttercream filling and frosting and fondant and gumpaste decor.  The smash cake is yellow cake with buttercream frosting.

Cookie Monster, Elmo, Oscar, and Big Bird are made out of fondant, and it was SO much fun making them.  The bow loops, spirals, and balloons are made out of gumpaste so they would dry nice and hard.  The little border balls are fondant rolled to (approximately) the same size and randomly stuck on.  The blue "ribbons" on the bottom tier are fondant rolled thin.  The street sign is fondant rolled thin and cut to shape.\ with buttercream lettering and border.
I would love to explain in more detail what I did with this cake because I did truly have the best time making it, but I am just now overcoming bronchitis (hence the long wait on posting this cake I made two weeks ago!) so this will just be brief.

Happy Birthday to you, Avery!

My First Cube/Block Cake!

This cake was a different sort of challenge that I really enjoyed.  The cake itself is 5 (5!) layers of chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream frosting and filling, with fondant accents.  I decided to go with three layers on the bottom for stability, then a cake board, then the top two layers.  The cake itself measures 8" on all sides.  That may not sound very big, but TRUST ME, it's really really big and heavy!
I decided on a color palette using the color wheel and the split contrast color chart.  The birthday was for a little girl, so I wanted some pink in there, so I went with a dark fuchsia, sky blue, and a bright lime for the base.
The picture I have here I took without the flash...the ones I took with flash came out fuzzy.  I was hurrying to get the pictures taken so we could go, as my three year old was demanding we go to Cartwheels and Coffee.   The coloring in the photo of the back of the cake is closer to the true shades.

I've notoriously had a problem getting my reds really red.  It takes me forever to finally get it.  I followed the directions by SeriousCakes to get red buttercream, but used it on the fondant instead, starting with the colors rose, golden yellow (she uses orange but I didn't have that) and the AmeriColor Super Red.  That stuff is no joke!  I dyed my hands like crazy, but in the end I did have a nice Elmo red to work with.
Other than the sheer size of this cake and the issues of making sure it measured the same on width and height, it was a pretty straightforward cake.  I am so glad to have done one of these now!

Note:  Elmo's eyes fell off when I put the cake in the car.  I nixed those eyes and re-did them (with my engine running no less!) and after I took this picture I fixed the mouth to be more...puppet-like, I guess.  I was in a hurry though so I didn't get a picture of the finished Elmo.  It's not much different anyway.
I really hope they like their cake and enjoy eating cake for days!

1967 Dodge Coronet R/T - AKA MY FIRST CAR!

I've been wanting to make a car for a while now but I haven't had the occasion.  Luckily, I got this order and I was SO excited to start!
The cake is 2-10" yellow cake layers with vanilla buttercream frosting and filling.  The car is RKT covered and decorated with fondant.

I put the Rice Krispies in my little Magic Bullet and ground up about 2/3 of them before adding them to the melted marshmallows.  I did this so that the finished RKT would be a smoother surface for my fondant.  I printed off a good side view of the R/T, scaled it by hand, and cut out two, then laid them against the RKT and carved the side view shape, minus the tire wells at first.  Then I carved the tire wells, and put small ribbons of fondant where the shape of the body needed swells and dips.  The windows are chocolate fondant dyed black with powdered food coloring.  I love the black powdered food coloring.  It is more spendy but has no taste.  The black gel smells awful and tastes very bitter.  The same goes with the red.  Anyway, I rolled it thin and cut it to fit the top half of the car, then used my powder puff (a nylon stocking, never been worn of course, that I fill with powdered sugar and tie off so I can easily dust my fondant evenly) to dust it.  This made it so the gray fondant I laid on top wouldn't stick to it and I could carve out the windows easily.  I made the accent pieces out of fondant, except the license plate which is gumpaste.  There is a board under the middle of the car (fully wrapped in foil) that is holding it above the cake so the tires won't sink into the frosting.

I found myself so proud of my lettering on this one.  My son came in the kitchen while I was finishing it off and wanted to help me, so I had him read off the letters and make sure I spelled everything right by comparing it to the "Happy 60th Birthday" I had written on regular paper to make sure of the size of the message so it would be centered.  This was a really touching and special experience for my kiddo and I.  He got all the letters right, then told me that I did a good job writing my letters.  Awwww!
This cake was very fun to make and at times a little challenging.  I am so happy to have done my first car!

My first Elmo Cake

This cake was made for a party at Cartwheels and Coffee.  The Elmo is RKT covered by tip 13 stars.  The cake itself is 2-10" yellow cake rounds with vanilla buttercream filling and frosting.  There is a little cake board under Elmo held up by dowels to provide support for the weight of the RKT.
When I made the RKT I used too much cereal and it was diffucult to pack tightly enough.  What I do to pack RKT is take some plastic wrap, coat it in a little shortening or butter, coat my hands as well, and grab a large amount (about 3x as large as I want it to come out after packing).  I set it down in the center of the plastic wrap, wrap it up, and start crushing.  After I shaped the body and head, I put a wooden dowel in through the top of the head down through the bottom of the body to pre-make a hole for it.  I learned that this was a good idea on the Frog and Monkey cake.  I left the dowel in until it was time to decorate Elmo.  It looked really funny as just RKT sitting in the fridge.  We had a friend come over the night before the cake was due and he thought I had a voodoo doll hanging out in there.
The arms are being held on with uncooked spaghetti pasta.  His mouth is a smile made of black fondant.  Interesting side note, I had an awful time dying the frosting red.  Awful.  I ordered two different kinds of food dye online the night before this cake was due, knowing it wouldn't get here in time but knowing I'm not going through this again.  After reading a whole lot online, I found that Americolor Super Red is the best for going straight to red, so I ordered some of that as well as dye powder.  We'll see how it works.  Anyway.  I piped stars all over his body and arms, and the front and top of his head.  I left the back bare so I could use that to support the head when I pushed the spaghetti in to help hold on the eyes and nose.  They are simply fondant rolled to the right size and shape.  The pupils are black fondant.  I piped the back of his head in, applied the fondant star cutouts, and piped a shell border with #22.  Then it was done and I delivered it to my favorite place to hang out with my kiddo, Cartwheels and Coffee in Carytown.  Chris (my main man at CnC) said he had a #1 candle for the cake.  I wish I had a picture of it with the candle in it!

Tie Dye Insides

This was a little personal cake for Stinkie's real birth day.  It was fun to make, but it did take some time.  I made my regular yellow cake to start off with, but I used two egg whites in place of one whole egg.  This cake is only 6" round, so it didn't take nearly as long as I suppose a larger cake would.  I'm thinking I might save this technique for family and friends' cakes.  Anyway, I divided the batter up into three separate bowl equally.  I added blue color to one and started pouring the cake.  One spoonful in the center of a sprayed-with-Baker's Joy 6" Wilton round cake pan.  I let it settle while I colored the yellow.  Then a spoonful of yellow directly in the center of the blue batter already in there, then I dyed the red and spooned in a little of that.  

I did have to rotate the pan (slowly!  Don't disturb the batter!) to make the batter spread evenly.  My counters are crooked :(.  Between each spoonful, I waited about 10 seconds to give the batter proper time to spread out.  Consistency of your batter is pretty important.  It must be able to spread but must not be too loose.  Finally finished, I stuck it in the oven and let it bake for about 30 minutes.  When I took it out, I was SO tickled pink!  I love the tie dye effect at the edges.  I think I might do some dragging from the center before baking next time for a more incorporated look.  Ethan of course had a special cake for his birthday party (see WordWorld cake post) but this little cake was just for his actual birth day, the day after his party.  I didn't put frosting on it, but left it as is to show off the pretty colors.  He dug into it like a boy possessed.  It was fun!

 I had been worried about the texture of the cake, as I had never substituted two whites for one egg in this recipe, but it baked up just fine (other than these little pinprick bubble looking things on the top...don't know what caused these, but it may have just been the layering of the batters gave rise to air trapped in the batter in the pan?)  I cannot wait to try this again and I am going to have the BEST time ever.  I might do zebra stripes.

I picked up a copy of Bakerella's Cake Pops book yesterday at Barnes and Noble.  It's so cool to hear her story and see all the wonderful things she's been creating.  I know I want to do some designed and decorated cake pops sometime soon...they are TOO great!

Hair Stylist Cake

The cake is 2-10" yellow rounds with vanilla buttercream frosting and filling.  The blow dryer and straightener are RKT covered in marshmallow fondant.  The red clip is made of fondant, but the silver clip is gumpaste.  The scissors are gumpaste as well, and everything silver was painted silver with silver shimmer dust and lemon juice mixed together.

The cake itself was very simple, as it required no mixing of colors for the base.  Just plain white BC frosting plugs.  I think I need to post a link to the SeriousCakes video about that, as it's the bestest, most wonderful thing I've ever seen.
Aw heck I'll just post her video.  Te frosting plug part starts at 1:35.  I love her videos!  I don't pull the plastic wrap all the way through the tip.  I cut it off up close to the frosting before I plop it in the bag, but it still makes for super fast cleanup and changing of colors.
Anyway, I smoothed the cake and set the objects on top, ran a ribbon around it, wrote "Happy Birthday Cedric" (On a side note, I love LOVE the name Cedric), placed the "cords", and called it a cake!

Hello Kitty!

The cake is 2-10" rounds tiered together with vanilla buttercream filling and frosting.  The kitty is made out of fondant, the flowers on the top are made out of fondant, but the flowers on the sides are made out of gumpaste.  The ribbon is simply food safe ribbon.

I am pooped.  This week has been so full, with my kiddo getting sick in the beginning of the week and myself not feeling too hot for a couple of days.  I knew I had to muscle through it, though, so I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and got down to it.  There's not much to tell, this cake was pretty routine, but I did stay up until 1:30 in the morning to finish it so that my nieces could come over this morning and we all could hang out, have a picnic, etc.  It was fun!  The client loved the cake and the kids in her car seemed overjoyed, so I'm happy!

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 First Wedding Cake!

My Aunt-in-Law wanted me to do a wedding cake for a portfolio she's helping me put together, so I needed to do a wedding cake...FAST!  I posted on Craigslist in the free section that I'd make a wedding cake at cost (ended up being $65 delivered and set up).  I received quite a few responses, but many of them were for things like baby showers, or birthdays, or things of that nature.  I really wanted to do a WEDDING cake so I could get that kind of experience.  After reading through a few responses, I got an email from a couple getting married on the 24th (of April) that had not ordered a cake yet.  We met up, had some cupcakes, and talked about what they wanted.  The chose a calla lily and roses cake.  Their colors were candy apple red and white, the lilies white and the roses red.  This woman had a seriously beautiful dress picked out!  They were just a very sweet couple and I enjoyed making the cake for this special day.  The stakes were high, so I was a little stressed and it seemed that everything that could go wrong with the fondant, did.  It wasn't stretchy, then it was too humid, then there were little sugar clumps in it, then it tore, etc etc etc.  But I'm getting ahead of myself...

I made the calla lilies by starting with the pistils.  I cut wire the length of the pistil and stem, then rolled out thin, long cones of yellow gumpaste and shoved them on the wire.  I set those in that florists' foam to dry completely overnight.

The next day I cut out about 30 hearts out of white gumpaste and wrapped them around inverted sno-cone cups, flipped the edges, and let them dry for two days.  They were difficult to take off and I broke a few of them.  The gumpaste dried onto the cups themselves.  Next time I will make sure I rotate them a few times during the drying process.

Then I took the petals off the cups, put on a dab of "glue" (gumpaste dissolved in water), and stuck the wire through the hole at the bottom of the petal so the pistil was properly placed.  I then hung them up, upside down, for three days (just to be sure they were dry).  The roses were fairly easy, but time consuming.

I found a tutorial on YouTube that was helpful.  I placed the rosettes on precut wires and stuck them in the foam to dry, then the next day I cut out the green leafy bud stuff that goes on the bottom (I'm too lazy right now to look up the term, so I hope you know what I mean!)  I let those dry.  Flowers were pretty much done.
The fondant was difficult for some reason.  Maybe it's because it's all white and there's no room for error, I don't know.  But it was a PAIN!  I finally got it all stacked and placed the red ribbon around the tiers.
I got some florists' tape and bound the lilies together in a pleasing fashion, bound the rosettes with them, and placed them on the cake, holding them into the cake with wires inserted into the cake itself.  It came out surprisingly sturdy.

The couple had dropped off a cake topper, so I put two rosettes in it to tie the cake into it and placed it.  I wasn't too sure I liked the topper, so I took a picture with just two lilies and two rosettes on top as well.  I did use the topper for the wedding, but I'm putting both pictures on here.  I'm not sure why the picture of the cake with the topper is coming out funky, and I wish it wouldn't do that, but I'm too pooped out right now to figure it out.  Please forgive me!

All in all, it was a fun cake, but I think I'll stick to birthdays and fun stuff for now.  I just love to giggle when I'm making a cake, it's like an extra ingredient.  I know, I know, wedding cakes are where the big bucks are, but perhaps I'm just a silly little doe...I'm okay with that!

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!

Spiderman Cake and Cookies!

So I decided to try something new, since I do happen to love every little kind of cooking and baking.  A client asked if I could make a Spiderman cake, and of course I agreed.  Then she asked if I could make cookies for the kiddos, and of course I couldn't refuse!  I had found a super yummy sugar cookie with hard icing on Zaar for Christmas, so I decided to use that.  It's a great recipe by a woman dubbed "Kittencal".  The client dropped off the monies and things, and gave me a paper with a picture of what she was wanting, and I got to work.  But more on that later.

The cake was a Spiderman cake, as I said before.  I decided to try making it 13" by 13"...a size I don't own in bakeware!  So I made 9x13 pans, cut and pieced.  By the time I got the shape right, they were only 11" around anyway...ARGH!  I have 12" cake pans and could have not had to waste the cake!  I ended up making 3 boxes of mix, just to realize that they wouldn't have enough cake for the party!  AH!  So I made another 10" round cake and put on another layer (that's 3 layers for anyone who's counting) and that should make it much more useful.
I was really pleased with the buttercream I made.  It just seemed wonderfully consistent and creamy.  Each batch comes out a little different, even though there's the same ingredients, because of how much you let the mixer work on it.  Anyway.  I was pleased.

Another thing I liked was how the red turned out.  I have had many problems getting a good red frosting color using the Wilton No-Taste Red...it always comes out pink, no matter what I do!  I searched and scoured the interwebz for the answer, and it was...start using the pink coloring, add a little tiny bit of yellow, THEN add the red.  I can't believe it took me this long to just buckle down and research it!  I had been using a TON of the coloring gel and not even getting close.  Now, I can just use two or three big glops on a craft stick and voila!
I've also decided that I love to color frosting yellow.  It's just beautiful.
A few days ago, I got three cake orders in one day.  That's the first time that's happened to me!  As far as this week is concerned, as it stood on Wednesday, I had the Spiderman Cake on Friday, a baby shower cake on Saturday, and my Best Girl's birthday cake on Monday!  Whew!  Talk about full!  We have snow in the forecast, so the Spiderman cake may be on hold due to weather.  The baby shower has been postponed until next weekend (breathing a sigh of relief.  I would have gotten it done just fine, but now I can spend more time on the decor, since it's got moulded flowers and stuff on it).  I am super excited for Doll Baby's cake.  It's going to knock her socks off!

So, back to the cookies.  I found myself very disappointed in them. They are SO messy!  I decided to hold off on doing them so they would be as fresh as possible for the kiddos.  I tried to bake them on popsicle sticks, but the dough just got too warm when I tried to insert the sticks, it mushed the shape out of proportion, and they had to be pretty thick which changed the cookie texture.  I tried securing the sticks  with royal icing, but it just wasn't strong enough to hold up to a kid eating the cookie.  Does anyone have any tips or pointers to do this easily?

I did the red background on Thursday night (the night I baked them) and planned on doing the final decorating on Friday, the pickup date, during nap time.  If I finished them at 3pm, they would have about three or four hours to harden completely before I had to pack them up.  The client emailed to ask when she could get them (the earliest) so I said 3 and went to work, working FURIOUSLY FAST so they would have time to dry.  I didn't wait for a confirmation email...D'oh!  She didn't end up getting off work and coming over until after 7, so I could have taken my time and made these look better.  She liked them, though.  I don't know if I'll do cookies from now on because they are SO labor intensive and I'm not great at mass amounts of freehand (the nerve damage in my hands starts to act up), but they were fun anyway!  There were 31...no, wait, there were 32.  I gave one to a little boy I sit for to share with Stinkie.  They loved them.
Well, it snowed today and it's supposed to snow until tomorrow.  It's beautiful, but it makes me concerned about having all the necessary ingredients for Doll Baby's cake.  I'm not sure if her party will continue as scheduled (Monday morning), but I'm going to make it anyway so she can have a beautiful cake like I promised her.
Long days and pleasant nights, everyone!