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.

Helen's German Chocolate Cruise Ship Cake

This past weekend was my soon-to-be cousin-in-law (is that a thing?), Helen's, bridal shower!

She and my cousin, Matt, met on a cruise a few years ago. Their romance has been centered around their love of travel and the open sea. :) Helen's shower theme was, of course, nautical. So, my aunt asked if I would create a cruise ship cake for them!

I was delighted and excited to help in any way I could! As usual, I ended up procrastinating and staying up far too late the night before the shower adding the finishing touches, but when I was finally done, I had made a pretty adorable cruise ship/tug boat ;) German Chocolate cake.

Full Bag, Full Heart

Today was The Chase Foundation's annual Full Bag, Full Heart fundraiser. I was so honored that they asked me to make a cake as the centerpiece for the table at their event.

They designed the event logo using the Pantone Color of the Year, Tangerine Tango, and asked me to incorporate their logo into my cake design.

I wanted to keep it simple and not take away from the clean lines in the design, so I ended up with this:

When I arrived to deliver the cake today, I was delighted to find they had an entire snack table done in Tangerine Tango. My cake fit in perfectly.

I love this display, and I loved that my cake was a part of it.

Thank you so much to The Chase Foundation for thinking of me to help with your event! I am so happy that I was able to contribute!

Edit 4/17/12 2:26PM: I just found out that The Chase Foundation raised 15k at Full Bag, Full Heart to help hospitalized kids be kids. :) Congratulations Chase Foundation!

Happy 80th Birthday, Karl!

Friday, March 16th, my incredibly amazing and genius grandpa turned 80!

For as long as I can remember, he's had a 1966 Ford Mustang GT sitting in pieces in his garage. So I thought it would be cool to incorporate a Mustang into the design for his cake.   After multiple discussions and a couple google image searches with my husband to figure out the design, we decided to keep it simple and classy.

Sitting pretty, before moving the cake to the party

It got rained on a bit, and one of my aunts brought candles that ended up being the
perfect colors.

Chocolatey chocolate chocolate

My grandpa didn't want to cut up and eat the Mustang. He thought it was too pretty. 

I would also just like to add that if you met this man, you would not believe for a second that he is 80 years old. All of my grandparents - old folks just aint old like they used to be. 

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. :)

Jack-O-Lantern

It turns out, getting married takes up quite a bit of time, so I wasn’t able to get my creative cake juices flowing for a while. As it turned out, it was October - Halloween Time! In honor of Halloween, I decided to host an evening of pumpkin carving, which requires an appropriately themed cake.

This baby is all hand carved and, as per usual, covered in homemade marshmallow fondant. It was so much easier and took so much less time than I expected it to. My husband suggested I make a jack-o-lantern cake and I thought to myself, “He has got to be kidding me.” I was wrong to think it would be so difficult.

America Strikes Back

My marketing manager, aka my husband, suggested that I add another “pro bono” cake to this weeks’ agenda to help stir business. :)

It would be America; the cake - Part 2. I didn’t know how I would out-do the original, but planning to bake on Wednesday and decorate on Thursday, I figured I could churn it out along with the other cake I was doing that week.

This cake was going swimmingly until I went to make the ganache. I like really thick frosting-like ganache, but that was not what I was ending up with. It was your typical drippy shiny ganache - not what I wanted, not what would give the cake the structure I needed. I tried freezing it, but it was already after 11 and I wanted to go to bed. Finally, I decided to make layered frosting because I’d already put ganache on half the cake and it wasn’t thickening the way I hoped it would. So I mixed some of the ganache with buttercream and end ended up with a lovely chocolate buttercream to help hold the cake together and add a subtle buttercream flavor. 

The next 2 hours were spent painstakingly rolling and cutting fondant into an American flag. I spent half the time telling Tim I didn't think it would meet a high enough standard to be a marketing piece, but IT DID! It did and I am so happy!

P-p-p-poker Cake

No so long ago the girl half of one of our couple friends asked me if I could do a poker themed cake for the boy half’s upcoming birthday party. I immediately thought I should make the cake into a miniature poker table and decorate it with fondant. So, after doing a little online research - I didn’t know if poker tables were octagons or hexagons - I put my sketch together and forgot about it for a while. 

I set to baking the Thursday before the party…and got excited and decided to go ahead and stack the layers and make the fondant that night too. Friday night I carved the cake into an octagon, which was really easy because of the markings that were still left on the cake from the folded parchment paper, and then covered it in black fondant. And Saturday I spent pretty much the whole day dying and rolling out fondant to cut into chips and cards, and then piping all of the detail onto them. 

I accidentally made the piping icing too thick, so I had to take a break after piping a handful of chips because my hand hurt so bad, but I thinned it out and got back to work. The below is the result of one full day and two evenings work.

Happy Birthday / End of the World!

I got a request for this cake just a few days after that last one. They wanted a cake that was half red, half white with a halo on the red side and devil horns on the white side. 

My wonderful husband pushed me to use fondant even though I was still sore from my last attempt. He convinced me it would look cleaner than trying to make a perfectly straight line out of icing. 

But it worked! Hooray! I used a pizza cutter to get a perfectly straight line down the middle of the cake and pretty much dyed my hands red getting the fondant that color, but it worked out pretty well. And my hands are getting progressively steadier when I do piping, so the writing came out really well too. 

Seeing Spots

There was a while between the last cake and this one where I really just had no reason to bake. It was a little tragic. 

Then I got a call/email/text (I don’t remember which) from my sister’s coworker who needed a cake for her daughter’s upcoming first birthday. 

Delighted with the opportunity to take on a real commission, I also needed some practice. So, I picked up some ingredients and got to work on this cake, which - though adorable - does not use any of the same design techniques as the cake I actually made for the birthday party.

Colette & Ryan's Engagement Cake

My first tiered cake was for my big sister and her fiance's engagement party. It was cinnamon cake with Mexican chocolate filling and it was so delicious. 

My mom's husky, Blue, standing - er, laying guard

America; the Cake

America; The Cake - Fourth of July 2009

America served a la mode

Father's Day 2009

2nd fondant cake; a soccer ball for Father’s Day, June 2009

Little Sister's Birthday

My first fondant cake ever. The fondant is made of marshmallows and is delicious. Not so bad for a first try.