Next up....

The monthly office offering! This month I really wanted to try making some of the gumpaste flowers from the instruction book I got for my birthday. One of the birthday girls' favorite flowers are tulips, so that is what I worked on. Let me tell you - making flowers is not a quick process! Those darn tulips took me 8 hours total to make. I also discovered that gumpaste flowers are very, very fragile.... broke a couple in the process. I did discover that I do enjoy making the flowers and can't wait to try some of the others in the book!

The final cake ended up being a basket of tulips. The cake itself was a marble cake - also going on the business menu - with the Oreo cookies & cream filling. I did a basketweave with chocolate buttercream. The handle I made from some sprinkler tubing - wrapped it in chocolate fondant - which tastes just like fudge if you've never had it! - to make it look kind of leatherish.

I love how this cake turned out. It is one of my favorites, however, as always I would do at least one thing differently! LOL - the artist is never satisfied I guess! Anyway, I think in order to make the handle more rounded, instead of pointy, I need to cut the length just a little bit. Unfortunately, after drying, when i bent the tubing to place it in the cake, it creased and became pointy.

I think this cake was a success from the comments I received just taking it into the office. One staff member had to leave the meeting early and was disappointed that she didn't see the cake.... not realizing that the basket of flowers WAS the cake!

April cake #2

My aunt moved back to the area this year after a long time of residing in New York. Since she is now "local" , relatively speaking, I was able to make a cake for her birthday this year.

This cake is from the Wilton idea book and was very fun to make! I experimented with cake flavors on this cake and found a recipe for a lemonade cake that turned out very yummy. This one will go on my flavors for the business.

Basically, this cake is a 1/2 of a round cake covered with buttercream. The mouth is black fondant and the rays are sugar cookies, lined with buttercream and sugar crystals. The sunglasses were purchased, however the original idea has you make the glasses from sugar cookies. Even though the glasses aren't edible, I think they are much cuter than the cookie would have been!

April is a busy month!

I had four cakes to do this month - my nephew's 6th birthday cake, my aunt's birthday cake, our monthly office birthday cake and my bosses' grandaughters cake. The last one being completed this weekend. I'll try to make separate blogs for them, but keep it short & sweet! :-)

First up is my nephew's cake. His request - Justice League and chocolate. Not too hard, right? Well.... the chocolate part was easy - this was a triple chocolate fudge cake with Oreo's cookie & cream filling. Yummy!! The difficult part was finding the figures for the cake - finally purchased online from a toy store.

I liked how this turned out, but I would design it completely different doing it again. Next time, I would make it a round tiered cake, covered in blue fondant (like a dusky evening sky). Then I would cut out a city skyline to put around the cake, positioning the super heroes to look like they are defending the entire city. Food for thought and always thinking on how to improve! My nephew thought it was awesome though - so that's all that matters!

Wow! I'm a slacker!

I didn't realize how long it had been since my last post! Since my last blog, I've done a couple of other cakes and learned some new things....




This cake was for a "paying customer" - I put that in quotes, because it was for a friend of mines husband's surprise birthday party. He is a fisherman and his wife asked for a cake that had to do with fishing. I've learned since then - ask for more details! This was - whatever you think would be cute and go for it! While I really enjoy that freedom, at the same time it is difficult to please the customer without knowing really what they are looking for.

Overall - I think this cake turned out very cute! One of my favorites, just because it's different. Sometimes I think my niche is character cakes - if you look at some of my faves they are not the usual stacked, tiered beauties, but are hamburgers, boxes of chocolates, etc.

This cake was my first attempt at modeling figures - the fisherman, the seagulls and the rocks are all fondant figures. They were really a lot easier than I thought they would be and I really enjoyed making them. There was wonderful instructions from a Carol Deacon book that broke the instructions down piece by piece.

So - things to improve on - covering a round object with fondant. That was a little sticky! :-) Otherwise - I really liked this cake.