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

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. :)

Hillary's Graduation

Shortly after creating the facebook page for my cakes, I got a message from a family friend that their daughter was graduating with her Master’s from USC and they would like if I made her a white cake with fresh whipped cream and strawberries. 

Now, My husband is a little stumped as to how I went so long without making my own fresh whipped cream, especially since it was pretty much amazing and the easiest thing to make ever, but this was my first time and I was a little scared. 

In a fit of insanity, I also thought it would be a great idea to ice the entire cake with whipped cream and only used buttercream for the decoration. While this way tastes fantastic, buttercream doesn’t like to stick to whipped cream, so the freezer became my best friend while making this cake. It was in and out of the freezer every time I had to make a change. 

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.

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!

Labor Day

This was the first time I ever made my own ganache…or really bothered to learn what ganache is. They say it all the time on the Food Network, but I always just assumed it was just another word for chocolate frosting. That’s not the case. Chocolate ganache is magic. It’s just chocolate and cream.

I also had my husband help me make roses for this one. It was his first time. He’s now aloud to help me with baking and cake designs whenever he wants.

Once Upon a Time...

This was the first cake that I was able to do any “carving” with. As you can (hopefully) see, there’s an indentation at the “crease” and the edges of the book taper out to emulate actual book pages.

The biggest thing about this lesson was that I learned how to make roses. To this day, I probably enjoy making roses out of icing way more than I should.