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.

Toy Story Cake

This cake is vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream frosting and filling, fondant accents, and plastic figurines.  The Toy Story logo is fondant that I made a week in advance to let it dry and harden.
It was a fun and straight-forward cake and I really enjoyed making it.  I got to go to the birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese's and I got to see the birthday boy's face light up like a Christmas tree when he saw the cake.
I must start remembering to carry my cards around with me.  I always forget and there were many people asking for my information.

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 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!

Going Bananas and I Love It!

The cake itself is vanilla pound cake with chocolate butter filling and vanilla butter frosting.  I say butter instead of buttercream because this cake was made without hydrogenated oils per the client's request.  Many of the ingredients were organic as well.  I didn't have a recipe I could depend on for this cake, so I had to test out a bit and I wasted 3 entire 10" rounds to testing.  ACK!  Now I have it, though, for future reference.

The frosting was made without shortening, and I wasn't sure how it would behave, but it came out great.  The only difference was that once it crusted, it crusted a little harder than I was used to and was not very malleable.  I loved the blue color of the background.
The decorations on this cake are MMF.  The monkey is sitting on top of an inverted cupcake.  He was very fun to put together, and is made out of chocolate MMF.  I just need to take a second here to reiterate how much I love moulding fondant.  It is super fun, like playing with playdoh.  Speaking of, when my son is around and I need to work on cakes, I let him play with playdoh while I play with fondant.  HA!

The bananas were labor intensive but also a blast.  They're little crescents, each hand shaped and painted, then piled up on top of each other.  There's something like 60 bananas on this cake.  The "peels" are my favorite.  You just take the crescent shape, slice one end into four parts lengthwise, then flatten them out, paint them, and plop them on.  Easy peasy and oh so fun.
I have been using the hot knife technique combined with the paper towel technique recently.  I first pipe in the filling, hot knife it smooth, plop the top layer on, pipe a large, very close spiral on the top layer all the way out to over the edges, hot knife that, then go around the cake sides with a #12 tip to distribute the frosting evenly, filling in any weird gaps.  Then I hot knife that ONCE or TWICE maybe around.  If you take off too much frosting, then you're going to spend hours adding more frosting.  NOT fun.  Then I let it crust, use the paper towel trick, and continue decorating.

That was a long winded paragraph.  I'm done now!  I really enjoyed making this cake and it was fun to do a different sort of monkey cake.

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!

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!

Gumpaste Flowers and Basketweave

This cake is for a baby shower.  I am so pleased to be able to be a tiny part of this!  I was given a few pictures and pretty much free reign to design this cake.  I have been in love with basketweave for so long, so I decided to do the topper as a basket of gumpaste flowers.
The yellow cake recipe I've been making recently has baked funky and has been incredibly domed (which means more cake gets tossed out to level the cakes) the last few times I've made it, so a new recipe was in order.  I found it on Zaar, baked it up, and taste tested it.  Really really good.  I think it's better than the SeriousCakes yellow cake recipe.

 

This past week I made a cake aptly named "Eggless, Butterless, Milkless Cake."  I was a tad concerned that it would come out gross...boy was I mistaken!  The recipe came about during WW1, when those three items were in very short supply.  It was an amazingly flavored spice cake.  I made up some fresh blueberry syrup and layered it in, then topped it with some freshly whipped cream.  My hubby was so pleased!  I baked it in a jelly roll pan and layered it 4 layers high.  I had to add two dowels to keep it from toppling.  We ate up 2/3 of it right there...after Stinkie went to bed...we are mean parents!  The next morning, I ate the remaining third for breakfast.  I kept telling myself it was good for me somehow because it had blueberries on it.  Yeah that doesn't make sense!  Anyhow, I'm off like a dirty shirt!  Be back another time with my husband's birthday cake!

Edited to add:  The person who ordered this cake did a no-call, no-show for pickup, so I gave it away on Craigslist in the free section.  I will ALWAYS collect 1/2 down from now on!

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!