Tropical Beach Birthday Cake

I will be the first to admit that the idea of gumpaste flowers sounds daunting.  It is a time consuming task, no doubt, and the road to victory is paved with failure and broken hard work, but the payoff is amazing.  I was provided with a concept picture and told that the flowers should be prettier (the original design had pretty awful flowers on it).  I really like this client, so I just went all out making this the prettiest cake I've ever made.  It's so FUN!  The cake itself is just chocolate cake with strawberry filling and vanilla buttercream, with graham crackers crushed up to make the "sand".  I think the pictures speak for themselves!  The client just came to pick it up and she was so pleased!  I'm very very happy, and I'm gloating now.  Humor me!

My son is about to wake up from his nap and we're going to go play in the pool, and I've spent the whole nap catching up on this blog!  I think this should be a lesson to me to update more often.  If you have any questions about the flowers or techniques I use, don't hesitate to email me at alesharaelane@yahoo.com or leave a comment below.

Catching Up, Part Deux - Pink and Green Daisies Cake

Welcome to the world, little one!  I had an amazing time making this uber cute baby shower cake.  I followed the booties template from CakeCentral.com to make the shoes.  Those ladies are FANTABULOUS!  They're great at answering questions and there's a wealth of cake decorating information available on there.  If you ever have any caking questions, do a quick search on there and you will find answers.  There's also a lot of tips and tricks, such as my new favorite thing - using a flower nail (you know, the ones you're supposed to use to pipe roses on?) as a baking core.  When you bake a cake that's larger than 8" round, you need something to conduct the heat to the center of the cake, otherwise you will burn the edges of the cake and the center will still be gooey.  Anyway, you just coat it with cooking spray and set it in the middle of your cake batter, and your cake cooks perfectly every time.  It's amazing, and a little sad, that I had just bought a heating core from Wilton for $15 which was more work and less efficient for the sad results.  That's my little tip, just for you guys!

You start with a cake.  This one is yellow on bottom and chocolate on top.  I covered this one with marshmallow fondant in white and pale pink.  This cake is based off a picture that was provided to me by the client.  I made the booties ahead of time out of gumpaste to give them ample time to dry, as well as the daisies.

I dyed some fondant green, and some hot pink, and started to decorate away.  The little balls take a lot of time to get all the same size, but I watched Court TV shows during Stinkie's nap and rolled away.  There are about 100 little balls on this cake.  Anyhowzit, I covered the exposed cake board with white fondant, placed the balls, and placed the booties and the daisies.

I had decorated the booties with little flowers in pink and green.  Aren't they precious?!  This is where I found that humidity and fondant do NOT mix well.  I decorated up the booties a few days in advance, and the day after I did so, I came downstairs to find that the heat had melted the flowers off!  I was able to salvage them, though, and I kept the AC on for the next few days.  Fondant does not do well in the refrigerator, so I needed the whole house cooler.  My hubby did not complain, as he's always the one telling me we need to freeze in the Summer.  He's a cool cat.  Well, I placed all the elements together and this is what I call the Pink and Green Daisies 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!

Two Dino Siblings on a Cake

A good friend of mine wanted me to make a cake for her kids' birthday party.  There's a five year old boy and a three year old girl, and their birthdays are very close together.  She had SO much on her plate, getting stuff ready for the party, and I just honestly really wanted to do this cake for them (it was my birthday gift lol).  We looked at a few different inspiration photos online and picked the best one, and I went to work.
The cake itself is just chocolate cake with strawberry filling on the bottom 12" tier.  The top tier is just one 10" layer of chocolate cake.  The frosting is vanilly buttercream.  The dinos are completely made out of fondant and coloring gels.  I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to pull off this look, but I think I nailed it!  This cake had me giddy for a whole day.
I did mess up the strawberry filling, but I salvaged it (we had no more strawberries in the house and I had no way to get to the store, so salvaged filling it is!)  I tiered the cakes and covered them with light green frosting, let it crust (read: waited 20 minutes) and smoothed it with Viva paper towels.  I had leftover fondant from the wedding cake on the 24th and that's what I used for this cake.

I wanted it to be obvious that there was an older boy dino and a younger, very girly girl dino so that her daughter would be able to tell which one was hers.  I just had a blast with this cake.  I got the shine going by smoothing quite a bit on the counter with a little shortening.  I plopped the bodies on, then the necks and heads, then the tails and paws.  I rolled some half and half (colored and white) balls for the eyes and eyelids, and painted on coloring gels for eyelashes, pupils, and mouths.

Note the cute little lipsticked girl!  The spikes on the boy dino were next.  The four largest spikes were fashioned on wires and inserted into the cake.  I did the boy spots and called that dino finished.  I then piped on the moss/grass with the grass tip so I wouldn't have to deal with going in-between the spikes of the two dinos.

The girl dino's spines were next.  They are just triangles of fondant, attached with my favorite gumpaste glue.  Then I did her spots.  Girly girl accomplished!  I glued on some claws and painted the girl's "fingernails" red, then filled in with the darker green grassy/mossy stuff.  For some reason I liked to look at it as moss, I don't know why.  I piped their names and ages on the side of the cake, ran electrical tape along the edges of the cake board (I know, tacky, but you can't tell and honestly who cares?!) to finish it off and called it a cake.  I am so pleased with how this cake came out and the kids loved it.  Stinkie ran around like crazy and started to have mini meltdowns because we were cutting into his nap by hanging out at the party, so we had to leave early, but we had the BEST time!  It is so wonderful to have friends, isn't it?

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!

Pop Up Birthday

One of my favorite clients called me on Monday or Tuesday and asked if I could make her a cake for Saturday for her boss' Fathers' 70th Birthday.  I didn't have much going on that week so I told her, "of course!"  She emailed me a picture of what she wanted and I got started on Friday evening, baking the yellow cake.  I tried a new recipe that looked pretty good.  I really liked the texture of this cake.  It had structure but still had a great crumb.  The original recipe called for shortening as the fat but I substituted butter for half the fat.  I also read something that said the fat and sugar should be SUPER creamed, so I stuck it in the KitchenAid for about 7 minutes (much longer than I normally cream the sugar).  I think that will be my thing to do from now on, as I was really pleased with this cake.

It's one 10" round (one layer only) topped with the numbers cut out of yellow cake and covered in vanilla buttercream frosting.  I did not level the top of the round because the inspiration photo kept it.  I think I much prefer the flat top, as it makes decorating evenly much easier (you can see where you're thick or thin in the icing department much more easily).  I froze an 8" round for carving, then scaled and carved the numbers.  After I crumbcoated the cakes, I smoothed the top only of the 10" cake and the zero.  I used tip number...well gosh it's the large leaf tip, I don't remember the number!  74?  Something like that.  Anyway, I used that tip to put on the vertical lines around the sides of the 10" round.  I then decorated the numbers (except the edging and flowers) with tip #16 (medium star tip), placed them on the cake (CAREFULLY!) and piped the swirl edge border around them and at the top and bottom of the round.  After spaceing the letters and marking the placement on the cake with a toothpick, I piped the letters in black.  I also used that color for the lines on the numbers.
The flowers I made out of rolled "buttercream".  It's pretty much just shortening and powdered sugar, and I happened to already have some on hand.  I used my floral cutters to cut out the shapes and rolled them gently larger, then placed and painted on the centers with food gel coloring, thinned slightly with vodka.
I did all the decorating on Saturday morning while my wonderful hubby was out with E.  I wanted this cake to be as fresh as possible!  They came to get it at around 1pm and they loved it!  I always enjoy people getting a kick out of what I do.
Coming up next I am going to make a wedding cake.  I'm going to post on Craigslist in the free section and see if there's anyone out there who wants a big ol' beautiful cake before the end of the month, only having to pay for the ingredients.  I hope someone bites, as I need to get a wedding cake under my belt and I am hoping to advertise with A. Chris' wedding photography business and I need a wedding cake picture for that!  Wish me luck!

Funny Little Burger Cake

So yesterday was April Fools' day, and since I had already made the Spaghetti and Meatballs cake I needed a new idea.  We invited a couple over for dinner and I thought another little cake (read: 4 servings and NO leftovers for me to pig out on).  I really wanted another shaped food cake, so I went with a hamburger.  I made up a boxed cake (is this becoming a trend for me?  OH NO!) into a 6" and a 10" cake.  I put them in the oven at 350 and let them bake for 10 minutes, then my Mother-In-Law called to say she was outside.  Miscommunication!  I thought she was going to be around 30 minutes out!  So I turned off the oven and let them sit in there while we went out.  They came out a little overcooked but otherwise fine.

When I came home I used the 6" cake for the base and covered it with white frosting.  The bottom and top buns I cut out 3.5" diameter.  The "burger" part was about 3" diameter and thinner.  The top bun I shaved into a dome and covered, and the bottom I just covered in the tan frosting.  I put the bottom bun on the base, then frosted the burger all sloppy-like so it looked sort of real and placed that.  I made the cheese and veggies out of fondant I had leftover.

Cheese first!  The pickles were light green with dark green outside.  I did this by rolling the lt. green into a thick log and rolling out a rectangle of the dark green, then using a serrated knife to cut thick chunks of that off and rolled them to the correct pickle size.  The tomatoes are just red fondant circles and the lettuce is dark green (I love me some romaine!) cut into ovals and the edges I rolled with a special frilling tool to make them lettuce-y.  I placed all these things (in this order) and cemented them with a drop or two of water, then used the #3 tip to pipe on the mayo and ketchup (just colored buttercream).  Then I placed the top bun on and piped on sesame seeds with the #2 tip in white.
It was a fun little cake!  When our guests

arrived, however, they had brought these HUGE WONDERFUL cupcakes from a little bakery out in the West End, so I decided to give it away on Craigslist.  We did have the most wonderful time visiting!  We don't invite people over enough to entertain.  I just have a kick hanging out with adults, now that I'm in full mama mode all day most days!  Right now I'm waiting for someone to come pick it up.  I really love doing that.  I think I need to start donating cakes to causes or something, it really makes me happy!
Edited:  The guy came to pick it up right after I posted!  Hurray for free cakes!

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!

My Busy Weekend, Part 2

The last cake that was due this weekend, on Sunday, was for the same client who picked up the Striped Cat Cake on Friday.  Her twins turned 8 (did I mention that already?  I just can't remember!) and she had the awesome cute idea of using the figure 8 cakes for both of them, decorated very differently.  It was truly inspired!

The Race Track Cake was very straightforward and a welcome cake after the hard time I had with the last cake.  Just two 2-layer 8" rounds pieced together and frosted with chocolate frosting colored dark gray (think asphalt).  I layered, fit together, covered, let it crust, and smoothed with Viva paper towels on Saturday night and let the cake hang out in the fridge until the morning.  During waiting/baking times, I made the flags out of gumpaste and let dry a little, then painted on the checkered flag and handled it roughly...MISTAKE!  It ripped right next to the "pole".  So I did it again and painted one side, then let it sit overnight with the fan on it.  The next day, fully refreshed, I piped on the outlines on the cake, piped the grass around, painted the other side of the checkered flag, and *poof* cake was done!  The client was to place some Hot Wheels on the track prior to serving.  Super cute!  Happy Birthday to Twins!
By the way, moms of twins are amazing.  Every time I see twins, I set their mom on a pedestal.  You know the best part?  They usually have makeup on and their clothing matches and has no stains (totally unlike me, and I only have one)!   It's simply awesome to me when I realize that there are mothers out there who can handle two at one time.  To all moms of multiples out there, you rock!

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!

The Fruits Of My Labors!

So I gave away the Soccer cake on Craigslist for free a while ago, and I got a really nice letter and pictures in return!  I just wanted to post really quickly and share the good vibes!

Hurray for eating cake!

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.

Wu-Tang parties with SpongeBob

 This week I had two cakes on my agenda. There was a SpongeBob smashcake for a little boy's 1st birthday and a Sweet 16 cake for a big party!  SpongeBob first, because I'm just aching to write about the Wu-Tang  cake and it's such sweet expectation!

  Dean is turning 1!  Grandma wanted a special cake just for him.  It's nothing incredibly outlandish, but it was a fun little cake.  It measures 7"x5".  I never watch SpongeBob so I had to go completely off of pictures, but I think it came out well.  The original cake we decided on was out of fondant, but of course, the one year old doesn't want fondant!  So this is me trying to make buttercream look more fondant-y.

The Wu-Tang cake was a MONSTER cake!  It weighed about 50 pounds.  The tiers are 12", 10", 8", and 6".  It took over 15 hours to decorate this cake (without baking times included).  It is all yellow cake with two layers of buttercream filling and two layers of strawberry filling.  There were five pictures we took inspiration from when the clients came to order.  From those five we came up with this concept drawing that became the Wu-Tang cake.  Why Wu-Tang?  Do you see the tops of the Wu-Tang symbol?

Well, I do!  It was truly wonderful working on this cake and I was so happy to see it's completion.  It feels like I haven't done laundry or answered emails since Tuesday!  On this cake I tried out a new technique of covering the cake board with fondant.  It was fairly simple and I really enjoy doing something new.  The stars were difficult to figure out how to put on.  I made the stars out of gumpaste and pressed two together to sandwich the wire, then painted them and let them dry.  I was going for a more "puffy" kind of look to the positioning of the wires, but the gumpaste proved to be just a little too heavy for the gauge of wire I selected.  I think it looks pretty good anyway, though!  The clients loved it, and that was the best part!
Well, my back aches and I'm ready to cuddle on the couch with my hubby for a while.  Long days and pleasant nights, everyone!