Crystal & David's Engagement Cake; Styled Shoot

The beautiful people in these photos are Crystal and David.

I met Crystal through a mutual friend at a party a thousand years ago. With another friend, we escaped the party (because we knew no one) and ran across the street to get ice cream sandwiches.

Seven years later, Crystal is a makeup artist. She's been doing makeup for weddings and engagement parties, (she even did my spray tan for my wedding) and partnering with other vendors to put together styled shoots.

I was so happy when she contacted me to make a cake for a styled engagement shoot with her fiance, David.

These photos are just a taste of what photographer, Tito Vilela, captured during their shoot last month.

Though it's small, I love seeing professional photos of my cakes. I wanted to keep it simple for this cake - black on white with a monogram and some subtle detail work.

I am really pleased with how it came out.

Huge thank you to Crystal for putting this together!

Birthday Mocha Cake & Espresso Buttercream

My Brother-in-law loves coffee and chocolate... like, loooooves them... a lot. So, for his birthday this month, it was a no brainer to turn coffee and chocolate into a cake.

It was also really easy to make. Everybody wins!

I added a little Kahlua to the buttercream for a hint of liqueur flavor. The cake & buttercream combination was perfectly chocolately and espresso-filled without being overwhelming.

Can't wait to use these flavors again.

Rainbow Birthday Cake

This cake was just fun.

Though I'm not sure you can avoid fun when you're making a cake for a toddler's 3rd birthday.

Bright colors combined with the look on her face when she saw it = happiness.

I felt like a kid rolling out and dying fondant for the rainbow.

Then I had some extra (everything), so I made little rainbow cupcakes.

It's chocolate cake with fresh whipped cream and strawberries. I love anything with fresh whipped cream. So yummy.

Katie & Blake's Lemon Berry Cutting Cake

First of all I would just like to thank Katie for choosing my absolute favorite flavor combination. - lemon with lemon curd and fresh berries. I almost made extra so that I could make a little cake for myself too. Luckily, we did have a little extra lemon curd and raspberries, so I got to enjoy it after all. ;)

Katie and Blake were planning on serving bundt cakes to their guests, but they still wanted something a little more traditional so that they could do a cake cutting (which I would love to see some pictures of *hint hint*).

For that, they came to me. :)

I custom made a little 7" cake top and piped a lace design to around the sides to match Katie's dress. I'm pretty happy with how it came out and I think they were too!

Before I added the topper and the florist added baby's breath

A couple different views after we flowered and topped it. How cute is that topper? 

I know you've seen the cake now, so what more could there possibly be to see? Well, I thought the display they had set up was really adorable, so I thought I would share a couple shots I took of that too...

I just love the "Sweets" sign and the chandelier. Super cute.

Thank you so so much, Katie & Blake! I am honored and proud to have been able to make the cake for your wedding! Congratulations! 

Cinnamon Birthday Cake

I got a request for a mini cinnamon cake this weekend. Last time I made cinnamon cake, I paired it with a lovely Mexican chocolate filling and it was delicious, but this time I wanted to try something different with the cinnamon. So, since my hubby and I have been on a bit of a cinnamon roll kick, I decided 'what better to pair it with than brown sugar?'

It came out really well. The brown sugar buttercream was muted enough to let the cinnamon flavor in the cake really shine through, while still adding a subtle molassesy accent. 

I also used the Swiss-style buttercream to do the flower and the piping around the bottom, so it didn't have the body of the decorating icing I usually use, but I think it has a very organic vibe about it since I also chose not to overload it with color. 

View from the top

Digging in.

No Reason. I Just Love Lemon.

I made the little lemons out of white fondant and then painted them with gel color

This cake was for one of the girls on my mark. team. I love making cakes for no reason. There's something wonderful about ordering a cake just because you want to eat some!

And that's exactly what this cake was.

I supposedly learned my lesson about starting cakes after 9pm last time around, but apparently that didn't stick since I was up way too late making this little guy.

I had some leftover lemon curd and cake top though, so there was definitely enough sugar around to keep me awake. :)

Kim & Will's Winter Wonderland Cake

This is the wedding cake I made for Kim & Will’s snowy Lake Tahoe wedding. The top tiers are Chocolate with ganache and raspberries and the bottom tier is Boston cream pie. 
I had a really tough time finding those pine cones, but it turns out, if I had just waited until we got to Tahoe, I would not have had to think about it at all. 
I also had some pretty phenomenal assistants in the kitchen with me, threatening to eat all of my ingredients. 

I am so happy with how this cake turned out. I wish I could have stuck around to eat some of it. 

Oh, also, the lovely and talented Emily, over at gem photo, has offered to send me some of her absolutely stunning photos of this cake. I am super excited about this. It was sort of the catalyst for redesigning my blog since I wanted a blog that was pretty enough to put professional quality photos on. 

Bridal Shower Cupcakes

I got this cute little cupcake stand as a gift from my sister. I thought it held a dozen cupcakes, but I was wrong. It holds 13, which is a little awkward since muffin/cupcake pans typically hold 6 or 12.

Anyway, big sis and I hosted an adorable little bridal shower for our friend, Kim. And I decided to make some cupcakes. These are lemon cake with buttercream and yummy raspberries on top.

A Wedding Cake...or Two

That was exhausting. The flowers were actually easier than the white detail. Next time I have to make one with fondant. I have a feeling that will have a much cleaner look. 

I looooved making the different flavors and stacking them. That was a blast. I made three different kinds of cake - almond cake with champagne buttercream and toasted almonds, chocolate cake with chocolate ganache and raspberries, and lemon cake with lemon curd and strawberries. The lemon was my favorite, hands down. Although, next time I make a wedding cake just for fun, I will have to substitute the strawberries with raspberries. Raspberries and lemon just go so well together. 

Flowers!

White on White

Baby Monkey Shower Cake

Baby shower cake! No drama for your mamma - not really anyway. I just waited too long to get started on this cake and ended up completing around 1am the night before it was getting picked up. Oops!

The elephant is my favorite. No surprise there. 

Mark. Cupcakes

In addition to making cakes, I’m also a Mark. rep. This Sunday I hosted my very first Mark. party. So I figured, what better way to combine my businesses than to make cupcakes for my party? I thought it’d be great to make a cake, but for parties, you really want something that is going to be easy for people to pick up and carry around with them while they shop - instead of being stuck to a table with a fork. :)

So, this was my first attempt at Mark. cupcakes. They’re yellow cake filled with chocolate ganache and topped with vanilla buttercream (and sprinkles, of course). They came out delicious. I was a little worried that the chocolate ganache would be too rich, but it was lovely. If you’re a Mark. rep (or if you’re hosting any kind of party!) and you’re reading this, let me know if you’d like cupcakes for your party! I can customize them to be any flavor and design combination! :)

Just to spell it out for you

A Little Old Fashioned

I think my current favorite cake flavor combination is yellow cake with whipped cream and strawberries. It’s right up there with my all time favorite desserts, strawberry shortcake and cheesecake. 

That’s where I pulled my 4th of July cake inspiration from. I wanted something classically delicious and not so highly decorated that people didn't want to cut into it. 

In honor of the holiday, I brought some blueberries into the mix.  I love love love making whipped cream at home. It makes me never want to buy whipped cream ever again. When you add fresh berries to that, its magnificent - so simple and yummy. 

My husband, who is constantly pushing me to be more inventive and over-the-top with my decorating, complimented me on my decorating skills here, saying it reminded him of a cake that his grandmother spent all day slaving over and that he could easily see it layered and turned into a beautiful wedding cake - which I’m planning to do as soon as I have a little more free time. 

The Little Mermaid; Part 2

After seeing my original mermaid cake a while back, a friend of mine said to herself “I want that”. She’s a mermaid lover, so for her birthday this year, she asked me to make one for her. 

I didn’t have any royal icing flowers to decorate this time so I just used buttercream to make the flowers and it made the cake very Hawaiian looking - all the more mermaid appropriate. 

The hardest part was her face. I didn’t have any toothpicks to do the details, so I used dry spaghetti. It was a little too thick, so she is wearing a lot of black eyeliner. :)

Tiny Birthday Cake

Not a lot of drama here. My friend told me I didn’t have to make her a birthday cake, but I wanted to anyway. So, I told her I would make a tiny one…except that I don’t have any tiny cake pans. So, I made a half a recipe of lemon cake, baked it in a single cake pan, cut it down the middle, iced it and folded it in half, then cut it into a circle. 

Tadaaa!

Big Sister's Birthday

There was yet another baking hiatus following the Minnie Mouse cake, but I was able to get back around to it when my sister’s birthday rolled around again. 

Tim and I finally got our new house into a somewhat presentable state so we decided to have the family over for birthday cake and pizza… because those are the things we make best. 

I wanted to try something new and I’d heard of a recipe for pistachio cake that I thought sounded amazing…too bad you need pistachio extract, which I could only find online. Not worth it to do expedited shipping. So, I chose another nut; almond. Almond extract is easy to find and makes things delicious. I paired my new almond cake with mocha buttercream. Then my plan was to toast some almonds and use them to decorate the cake…but I burnt them. :( and I didn’t have any more, so I decorated with pecans - don’t judge. 

The cake turned out amazing. If I didn’t want to try new recipes, I would make this one every time. 

Isabelle's First Birthday

Minnie Mouse. This cake was a commission - my first, actually. It was supposed to be fondant, and as you can probably see…it’s not. 

It was a hot evening in September and I was kneeding sticky globs of marshmallow goo that just kept getting meltier and stickier the more I added to make it firm. I rolled out a perfectly light pink slab to cover the cake with…but once I put it on the cake, it was a disaster. There was at least one hole stretched through it and the rest of it was all uneven and gross. Plus now that one side was covered in buttercream, it wasn’t reusable. :( 

So, I reluctantly switched to buttercream and decorated the entire cake with icing. I was worried about how Minnie would turn out since the first time I made Minnie Mouse out of icing was when I was drawing her on a cake, but I think it came out lovely. 

The Mermaid

Mermaids are among my older sister’s favorite things. So for her birthday in 2010, I decided that I would take what I learned from my decorating class and attempt to turn it into a mermaid.

It was no easy feat. I hadn’t ever attempted scales before I decided on this design, but once I got going, it wasn’t so bad. I just had to find my rhythm. Those flowers are made out of royal icing. We used foil to get them to keep those shapes. 

I decided to keep her face simple because I thought too much detail in icing would end up ugly.

Hey, I've Been Turned Into a Cow...

I just realized I did not have a photo of this cake on my old blog. This was no decorative accomplishment, but it was a gift for a friend, so I think it needs to be on here because it fills me with a whole mixture of emotions that I don't need to go into on the internet.

It says, "Hey, I've been turned into a cow. Can I go home?"
I realized very recently that a lot more people share my love for the movie this quote came from than I originally thought, but every time someone new tells me they love it, it makes me smile - like we have something wonderful in common.

Haunted Cake

I didn’t bake this one. *GASP* My mom did. That makes me feel like a second grader, especially since I'm supposed to be the one baking things around here.

I DID decorate it though. So, I take full credit for all those little pumpkins and bats and that little kitty on the fence. This one I did in class. This was one of my last classes since I started a new job shortly thereafter and couldn't fit weekday cake classes into my schedule.

I had to take a break from cake decorating for a while after this, which made me sad, but I think I went out with a decorative bang.

Cornelli Lace

This one hurt my hand. The idea behind this kind of “lace” is that it’s one continuous line, so you’re supposed to do the entire top of the cake in one swoop. It was worth it though, huh? Look how pretty!