Congratulations, Class of 2011!

  This cake was inspired by another cake of mine from back in 2009 (maybe early 2010?)  The graduate-to-be's school colors were blue and green, and she informed me she is "In Love With Pink".  She was so cute!  She wanted yellow cake with fondant, so I got going on it and cranked out this fun, whimsical cake.

  It's been a while since I did fondant, and I realized yet again that while I don't ejnoy cooking with a microwave, they really are quite useful for warming fondant for easier rolling and for making it have more elasticity.  I think I will have to finally cave and buy one for cake use.
  My camera batteries died the second I tried to take a picture of this cake, so I was stuck with a very bad picture taken with my webcam.  Thankfully, my client agreed to send me a couple of pictures she took so I'd have something to show here.  Thank you!
  I tried to make up a decent sugar-free cake recipe for the top tier, but I fell short after two completely botched tries.  The second one wasn't as embarassing, but still pretty bad.  I did purchase a huge bag of granulated Splenda and I plan on finding something that tastes as good as my special yellow cake...it's just going to take time and patience.
  Congratulations, Class of 2011!  You Did It!

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!

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.

Ribbon Cake

Stinkie is napping, and I am rejoicing!  I have four cakes due tomorrow morning, and I was starting to stress, but I finished ALL of them!  Granted, one was done already, and two were little 6" smashcakes, but the ribbon cake looked like it was going to be REALLY hard.  I had made all the ribbon pieces out of gumpaste last night and the night before, so they had time to dry really well.  I draped them over a cardboard tin foil roll (cut in half) to keep their shape.  When I wanted the smaller loops of ribbon, I used string to tie the cardboard roll very tightly.  I made sure to leave a little wiggle room to get the ribbons off.  The spirals were 1/4" strips of gumpaste wrapped around wooden dowels.  So without further ado, here are a few pictures!

I also thought it would be a good idea to take a picture of the cake before I added the name.

I learned that making ruffles is something I need to work harder on!  I just went for folds.  Also, I should have placed the ruffle before putting the fondant on...or something.  I just know it was hard as heck to put the ruffle under without flubbing the fondant!
I also made two little smashcakes to go with the two cakes.

The little cake is a toddler friendly carrot cake (I got the recipe from RecipeZaar) with just whipped cream cheese frosting.  I neglected to remember that cream cheese hardens by itself...OOPS!  So I covered it with plastic wrap, and hopefully it will last in the fridge until they have the party!  I don't have a picture of the ribbon smashcake, but it just looks like a little pink package tied up with dark pink ribbon, with a little bow on top.
I need to get along with making my Mother-In-Law's cake.  It's going to be a carrot cake with a glaze AND frosting.  Yum.  I still have no idea what I'm going to do with it.  Hubby said he'd come up with an idea but he's been working so hard and going to school nights, so he hasn't had the time lately.  I suppose I can just google stuff she's into and find something fitting!
Another thing I've learned using fondant is that the buttercream layer needs to be thin, or it will flow underneath your fondant and make your surfaces bunchy looking.  I tried using more frosting under the fondant on these cakes so that people can just scrape off the nasty tasting stuff and have frosting underneath, but I think I'm going to start sticking with a minimal amount from now on, like 1/4" or something like that.
I do hope to learn more about decorating with buttercream.  There's this fabulous woman on YouTube named SeriousCakes (okay, probably not her name, but it's her channel name!) who can do ANYTHING with buttercream.  Watching her is amazing!
Peace out, and have long days and pleasant nights!