Saturday, May 30, 2009

Convocation Cake

I don't usually do last minute cakes....but when one particular co-worker of mine pulls his sneaky tricky stunts, it's hard to say no! :)

He said "Oh I wish I had thought of it earlier...my daughter's convocation is tomorrow and it sure would have been nice to have a cake....."

Since I really didn't have anything else going on, I told him I could do it. A few minutes later, he came back to my office and asked "did you like how I asked for a cake without really asking for a cake?"...What a sneak!

But the cake turned out great. I came up with the idea for a mortarboard (graduation cap) cake, which he then said that's what he was going to ask for, but wasn't sure if I could do it on short notice. Luckily I now have a tub of pre-colored black fondant, so it wasn't too hard.



The cake was lemon cake with lemon cream cheese icing as filling and iced with buttercream before being covered in black fondant. The top part of the hat was cardboard covered in fondant and the tassel was green fondant. The scroll was gum paste painted with food coloring.

He said he was a hero for getting the cake, so I'm glad I did it :)

Thursday, May 28, 2009

My Favorite Cakes

Over the past year that I have been decorating cakes, I've had a few people ask me which cake has been my favorite. It's so hard to choose!

So I will just post links to some of my personal favorite designs. (In order of when I made them)

Super Six Cake - One of my very first cakes ever! Done for some good friends of ours for their son's sixth birthday. He loves superheros, so they chose 6 of his favorites and I did their logos for the cake.




Big Comfy Cake - One of my first (and best) sculpted cakes and one of my first times using fondant to cover a strange shape. And also one of my first attempts at making figures out of gum paste. It turned out better than I ever could have imagined. I sat back when I was done, and I couldn't believe that I had actually made that thing out of cake!


Leopard Print Cake - My first attempt at painting with food coloring on fondant. My friend asked for a leopard print cake with some star gazer lilies on it, so this is what I came up with. It's one of my favorite cakes that I have done because it is kind of "wild" but kind of classy at the same time.



Golf Ball Cake - A client asked for a golf cake, so I looked online and found a photo very similar to the cake I ended up making. I went to Michaels and found the ball cake pan to make the cake and I tried it out and LOVE the results. Piping the grass took a long time and I was pretty sore afterward, but the end result was totally worth it!


Nesting Doll Cake - I saw a photo of a nesting doll cake that the instructor from my Wilton classes did and I thought that was a great idea for my mom's birthday. Except my instructors cake was all out of buttercream icing. I tried something different and covered the cake in fondant and painted the design on. I was thrilled with the result!



Football Cake - Along the same lines as the golf cake, this cake turned out better than I expected as well! Our friends who I did the Super Six cake for requested a football cake for their 10 year old, so I had to come up with something as awesome as the Super Six cake!



Stocking Cake - I made this cake for my family at Christmas. They asked for a cake and didn't really specify any design, so I was free to do what I wanted. After a lot of thought, I thought a stocking would be cute and relatively easy. It turned out better than I had dreamed!



Buffalo Sabres Cake/Cupcakes - My husband actually came up with this idea for one of his co-workers, and it's one of my favorites for sure! The logo turned out better than I had hoped, and the jerseys were such a fantastic idea! This design has been requested by a LOT of people since then for different teams and different players.


Daisy Cake - This is one of my most recent cakes and one of my favorites. The same friends who ordered the Super Six and the Football cakes ordered this pretty cake for her mom's birthday. This is one of my favorites for many reasons. The design was really simple, yet cute and fun and classy. The yellow color is so happy! The cake and icing were my favorite flavors - lemon cake with lemon cream cheese filling/frosting.


So these are some of my favorite cakes that I have made. There are many many more that I loved for different reasons, but they can't ALL be my favorites!

Monday, May 18, 2009

Daisy Delight

My friend Tracie asked me to make a cake for her mom's birthday this weekend. She requested a 2 tier lemon cake with lemon cream cheese icing.

So this is a 10" and 8" (both 2 layers) tiered lemon cake filled and frosted with lemon cream cheese icing.

The cake was covered in yellow fondant and decorated with white fondant and gum paste daisies with yellow royal icing centers.

View from the top

My cat likes to sit and watch me from a distance. It's kind of creepy, but kind of cute. Luckily he doesn't come near the cakes.

Mother's Day Cake


I did a Mother's Day cake for a friend whose wedding cake I will be doing in the summer. She wanted to try out the white chocolate cake and icing with her family, so this is an 8" white chocolate 2 layer cake filled and frosted with white chocolate icing. It also has some extra filling of blueberry pie filling.

Decorated with some purple buttercream icing roses.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Skateboard Ramp Cake

This week was our nephew Ryan's 13th birthday! His mom pretty much gave us free reign over the design. She had suggested a cake in the shape of a 13, but I couldn't think of anything really cool to put on a 13 shaped cake, so I came up with this:


The cake is 2 layers of white chocolate cake plus 2 extra layers on the sides to build up the ramp. The cake is filled with white chocolate icing, then iced with buttercream icing. The brown on the ramp is ganache. I sculpted Ryan out of fondant. The skateboards are a couple of Ryan's Tech Decks.

I gave Ryan the "Field smirk" as my husband calls it.

I did a bunch of graffiti on the cake because at one point Ryan wanted to be a graffiti artist when he grew up. So I figured he would like a bit of graffiti. "Feel the rue" has become a bit of a Field inside joke, so I added it.


Happy 13th birthday Ryan!!!

My Birthday!

It was my birthday on the 28th! On the 26th my team and I did the MS Walk for Life and then I had everyone over for birthday cake/pie.

Since I've started this venture, I thought of many elaborate cakes to make for my own birthday, But when it all came down to it, I'm actually a little bit sick of cake! So I decided to keep it simple with a 3 layer chocolate cake iced and filled with ganache, then topped with some Smarties.

But the cake was just a secondary dessert for anyone who wasn't interested in the main event: lemon meringue pie completely from scratch. I've always loved lemon meringue pie, but always made it from the Jello mix and used a pre-made pie crust.

Recently, however, I've started making everything from scratch. The crust, the filling and of course the meringue. The result is a bit time consuming, but totally worth it!

My birthday creations:


The cake:One of the pies:


*I didn't notice when I got them, but the Smarties I got have no artificial colours in them. That is why they don't look like normal Smarties. They kind of tasted different too...I think I prefer the artificial ones!

White Chocolate Cupcakes


I made some white chocolate cupcakes for a work birthday. The cupcakes are white chocolate cake, the frosting is white chocolate frosting, and they are each topped with a raspberry.