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.

Spring Cakes

March is the time for new beginnings - the first day of spring and cakes that look like fun, springy days!

I tried to incorporate all of these ideas into the office birthday cake this month. I had purchased a Lindy Smith book a few months ago which featured this cake in it. It looked simple enough to do, so I figured why not! Since it looked fairly straight forward I thought I would finally start attempting cakes with fillings..... This cake ended up being a huge challenge!

The top layer - carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. The problem I had with the frosting is that is isn't a good one to use underneath fondant. It was too soft and caused my fondant to crack and rip very easily. I also had issues with it absorbing every little bump, poke, etc whenever I would try to smooth the fondant. The cake was good - nice and moist, the frosting was very yummy as well! Just not a good experiment to put under a fondant layer.

The middle layer - chocolate cake with a raspberry mousse filling. The filling was incredible! I dammed the layers before putting in the filling - ended up with four layers total. I used the tile method to settle the cakes and only ended up with a slight bulge where the buttercream "oozed". Once it was covered with fondant I stippled it with yellow food coloring and a artist's stipple brush. Yes - that is actually yellow - "Golden Yellow" to be exact. I think I used too much of the gel food coloring and not enough vodka to dilute the color. Either way - the color ended up being orange, versus yellow, but still pretty. I really like the stipple effect on the fondant - it has a nice finish to it.

The bottom layer started out as a french vanilla layer, however when I took the cakes out of the pans, one of them cracked into four separate pieces! Plan B was to make a yellow cake layer instead and I used french vanilla buttercream. This had the effect of making the fondant taste like marshmallow - at least to my co-workers! :-)

I premade the flowers a week in advance, so they had time to dry. Doing it this way though - I discovered that I didn't like the royal icing that shows when you "glue" the wires into the flowers. Next time - I will make the flowers, put a fondant blob on the back and stick the wires into that. The orange strips were the worst part of doing this cake. They are very easy to do - just time consuming! All the strips are cut by hand and then applied one by one with a paint brush and vanilla extract around the edges.

I really learned a lot doing this cake - things NOT to do i.e. soft frosting under fondant! As well as things that I did enjoy. One of the great things about this cake is that it is/will be easy to change the look of it, just by changing the colors. I look forward to trying this cake again.