My Busy Weekend, Part 1

I'm still recovering from this weekend.  I had three cakes due, one on Friday, one on Saturday, and one due today (Sunday).  I'm not sure even how to start describing it all, so I guess I'll just dig in!

  I had a Striped Kitty Cat Cake due on Friday.  It's yellow cake with chocolate filling and crumbcoat, covered with vanilla buttercream applied with the grass tip to look like fur.  The inspiration photo was pretty boring and the Client pretty much gave me free reign with design, which was nice.  Two of the cakes this weekend were for her.  She has twins that are turning 8, and she was inspired by the figure 8 shape in the two cakes she picked out.  I decided to do a tye-dyed fondant cake board to add flair.  Baking and layering was very simple, and this was a pretty straightforward cake.  It did take me a while to stick the "hair" on (not to mention my carpal tunnel was going nuts on me by the end!) but it was a very relaxing activity.  I did end up putting green cat eyes on it after I took the picture, but forgot to take another afterward, so this is what I have!  As I was looking at the inspiration picture vs. the picture of my cake after she left, I realized I didn't add whiskers!  I hope nobody really noticed...well I guess I just called myself out on it anyway!
The next cake was due on Saturday.  There is such a long and drawn out story to this cake, so I'll condense it as much as possible.  The Clients were a very sweet couple and they wanted the Bucket of Bud Light cake.  It looked pretty straightforward so I went to work.  Everything went wrong that could!

During our consultation, I told them I'd use rice krispie treats covered in chocolate for the bottles...then I saw something online that I really wanted to try and I went out and bought this paintable latex molding compound and spent two days making a mold out of a beer bottle and letting it dry.

Then I poured super hot sugar into the mold and these wonderful bottles came out!  I was so excited, so I wrote the client and asked if she wanted the sugar bottles...good thing I did, because she was pretty excited about the rice krispie treat/chocolate combo!  I do have to admit, the RKT bottles were much more tasty!  So I set about making the bottles by making a 1/3 recipe of regular RKT and molding it to look like a very skinny bottle (to allow for the extra layers of chocolate to be painted on top).  Each bottle took 1/3 recipe of RKT.  The secret to making them hold their form is to pack them very tightly!

Then I coated each one with milk chocolate, two layers, by brushing it on.  Mmmmmmm.  The labels on the bottles are painted rolled buttercream.  The labels on the top were SO tiny, even my super small brush was too big to use very easily!  I did multiple labels trying to get them better...with no avail.  Instead of freaking out, I just went with the best I could do.  I overshot my abilities on this one, I think!

When the time came to stack the tiers (3 tiers of 2-layer chocolate cake with strawberry filling and vanilla buttercream frosting) I realized I had drastically underestimated the sheer weight and top-heaviness of the cake.  I tried setting the bottles in the top and the whole top tier broke into little pieces.  And I realized that the party was in Petersburg and there would be a stop in-between...the cake needed strength!  So that night I stayed up until 2am (usual bedtime on the weekends?  10 LOL) baking more cakes and re-stacking using 1/4" dowels hammered through the reinforced 2-layer foam boards (replaced the cardboard I had used before) and into the new 4-layer (up from 2) foam cake board at the bottom.  I measured, cut, and sharpened the dowels and actually used a HAMMER to push them through all the layers.  Then I made a pilot hole in the the bottles by pushing a dowel through the bottom center of all the bottles and placed those on four of the five 1/4" dowels.  The top tier broke into pieces AGAIN.  The picture is right before things got really ugly.  I realized the bottles had to set very lightly into the cake, not set in as was described in the tutorials I'd seen.  At this point I was going nuts, so I boiled some sugar and corn syrup to the hard crack stage and poured it into the cracks.  MISTAKE!  lol I am so lucky I didn't ruin the bottom two tiers.  I was so tired at this point that I put it in the fridge and went to bed.  The next morning I woke up at 7am and started baking again.  I made the label for the bucket out of regular fondant and coloring gel and placed it.
The ice is 1/2c sugar and 1/2c corn syrup melted down and boiled until just before it turns yellow.  I crinkled up a piece of nonstick tin foil (nonstick part is CRUCIAL) and made little ice cube trays of sorts out of it. Then I poured the hot hot sugar into the "mold" I had made and let them cool, then popped them out and set them on the cake.  Voila, ice in the bucket.  And you know what?  They tasted like cotton candy to me! 

The cake was done.  Gosh, that was the condensed version, and I'm pooped out!  I wish I was more proud of it than I am, you know?  I spent SO much time and energy on it.  At least it tasted good!  I did get an email from the Clients today that told me that everyone LOVED the cake and it was SOOOO good, so that makes me feel really great...but I really wish I could have knocked this one out of the park for these people.  But, as a good friend of mine told me about this situation, we have to have bad experiences in order to appreciate the good ones.  She is so smart! :)
I will post later today or tomorrow about the Race Track Cake.  The Client is bringing little matchbox cars for the top, and I want a picture of it all finished!

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!