NEW BLOG!

Hello readers!

I am starting off the new year with a NEW Sugar Bites blog and a new email address.

I've been told by quite a few people that Wordpress is a better blog host and that it looks more professional for business type blogs. So I've made the switch! All of the old posts and your old comments made the move over to Wordpress so it's got all the same stuff, just a new address. So from now on, I will not be updating this blog. Only the Wordpress blog. Thanks in advance for joining me in the big move! Make sure to update your bookmarks or your feeds or your readers!

http://sugarbitescakes.wordpress.com/

Also, since I got an iPhone, I've been using it to check my email more than my computer. However, Shaw doesn't seem to get along well with the iPhone for some reason. I've had a lot of weird problems with my Shaw email address on my phone. Like if I reply to an email, sometimes it doesn't show up as being sent, BUT it will actually send it once every 10 minutes so it fills the recipient's inbox with the same email over and over! We can't have that! And I also have sporadic problems connecting to Shaw. So I finally decided to give it up and switch over to Gmail.

So the new Sugar Bites email is sugarbitescakes (at) gmail.com (sorry for the weird format. Don't want spam!)

Happy New Year!

Snowflake Wedding Cake

Happy New Year!

Our renovations are pretty much done now! But we still have the huge job of "moving in" down there and sorting through our stuff. Whew!

Over Christmas we kept pretty busy too. Especially with this cake! My friend Carmel got married in Red Deer on December 27 and she asked me to make her wedding cake for her and I was more than happy to do it!

I baked and filled and iced and covered all of the tiers at home before leaving for the wedding. The top tier was an 8" round 3 layer deep dark chocolate cake with ganache filling. The middle tier was a 12" round 3 layer blueberry cake with blueberry pie filling filling. And the bottom was my favorite - 16" round 3 layer red velvet cake with cream cheese icing filling. All tiers were iced in buttercream and covered in white fondant.

A couple weeks before the wedding I also made a lot of gum paste snowflakes. Each snowflake was cut out with a cookie cutter and left to dry for a few days. Then I painted some piping gel in designs on the snowflakes so the white sprinkles would stick in different patterns. Then each snowflake was finished off with a royal icing snowflake pattern over the sprinkles.

Then we packed up everything and traveled to Red Deer. The entire wedding and reception was held at the same hotel, so Dale and I stayed at that hotel. I built and decorated the cake in our room and then we transported it down the hall on a cart with the help of a busboy.

I used gum paste to create the drape effect. I tried fondant first, but the fondant I use is a little too soft for this effect so I was happy that I brought gum paste along too! Then I attached all the snowflakes onto the cake with royal icing. It turned out so great! It was one of my favorite cakes of the year!

Here is the cake set up in the reception area

Once it was set up, it needed a bit of extra sparkle, so I just shook sprinkles over the entire cake. It looked like snow!

I was so proud of the cake!

Carmel and Lance liked it too

Dale and I cut the cake for them. It looks kinda pretty all cut up too :)

Congratulations Carmel and Lance! I loved doing your cake!

Christmas Tree Cake

Was 22 nights before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, except for my cat Franklin...and me finishing a cake
No stockings were hung anywhere since they are still in storage
In hopes that the renovations will soon be done
Nobody was nestled all snug in their beds yet
But visions of red velvet cake and fondant decorations were dancing in my head...

......anyway........

When we had to have our front yard dug up to replace the sewer line this summer, the company that came to do it just happened to be owned by the husband of the niece of a good friend of mine so he has had my cake before. He ended up knocking a bunch of money off of our final bill in exchange for a cake for their Christmas party. All he said was "something Christmasy and cakey"...which wasn't a lot to go from. But he had a lady from the office call me and she suggested a Christmas tree cake and "ornament" cupcakes.

The cake started with 6 layers of cake - 3 layers of 6" round and 3 layers of 8" round - red velvet cake with cream cheese icing filling.


Then I carved it to a tree shape


Then iced it with juniper green buttercream icing


Then piped the branches with a star tip our of buttercream icing

Then decorated the tree with royal icing tinsel, fondant decorations that I had made ahead of time and some large sprinkles and dragees that I had



Then Dale and I delivered the cake and the 40 cupcakes to the party. There were 20 chocolate cupcakes and 20 white cupcakes. All were frosted with Swiss meringue buttercream and decorated with assorted sprinkles.

Saskatchewan Roughriders Cake(s)

Oops! I forgot to post about this cake!

Every year SIGA (where my husband works) holds a bake sale/auction thing to raise money for their kids Christmas party. Last year I donated this cake with the SIGA logo on it and it raised a lot off money! This year, since the sale/auction was on the Friday before the Grey Cup and Saskatchewan was IN the Grey Cup, I made a Saskatchewan Roughriders logo cake in hopes that it would make a bunch of money. And it did! Sadly the Riders lost, but the cake was great! :)

In honour of the Riders, I made green velvet cake. Similar to red velvet, but...well...green! VERY green!

The batter was eerily green


I didn't get a photo of the inside of the cake, but I had made some test cupcakes a while back so this is what the baked cake looked like


The cake was 2 layers of 10" round cakes filled with cream cheese icing, then iced with white buttercream and covered in white fondant. The logo was made of fondant, gum paste, and royal icing.


I put a little gum paste bow around the base to finish it off. I didn't want to do anything TOO girly since it was a football cake.


Closeup of the logo


I actually made 2 of these cakes because I accidentally made way too much cake batter. But it all worked out fine because I took one to my workplace and took the leftovers of that cake to SIGA. So everyone had a chance at some green velvet cake.

Flavor List

I have finally made a list of all of my cakes and icings!

These are the cakes and icings that I have made the most often. I have made others and if you don't see what you want in this list, don't be afraid to ask for it!

Cakes:

• Red Velvet Cake
  This cake is my newest favorite. It is very hard to describe the taste. It has a very subtle chocolate flavor, but it is not chocolate cake. And the colour is very red. For more information about Red Velvet Cake, please go here. I also recently made Green Velvet cake in honour of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
  
• Hershey's Deep Dark Chocolate Cake
  This cake is one that I have been making for many years and is always a big hit! It is extremely moist and decadently dark and by far the best chocolate cake I have ever had. It is too moist for elaborately carved cakes or large heavy cakes, but it is great for a simple round or square cake. This recipe is no secret and if you want to try it on your own, it can be found on the Hershey website here. They have a ton of great recipes that I have tried over the years.
  
• Yellow Cake
  This cake is a fairly basic cake that most of the people I know have made on their own at home. It's a homemade classic.
  
• White Cake
  This cake is similar to Yellow Cake, but much lighter since it uses vegetable shortening and egg whites only to achieve the pure white colour.
• Cookies 'n Cream Cake
  I've added crushed Oreo cookies to my White Cake and it makes a fabulous Cookies n' Cream Cake! Most of the recipes I have seen for Cookies 'n Cream Cake call for a boxed mix, but I do not use boxed mixes in my cakes. This is the real deal! Goes great with the "Oreo Insides" Icing!
  
• Lemon Cake
  This is one of my favorite cakes of all time! I use real lemons to get a great lemon flavor from this cake. It is nice and fluffy yet dense enough for carved cakes. Yum!
  
• Lemon Poppyseed Cake
  Similar to the Lemon Cake, this cake uses actual tiny pieces of lemon along with the poppyseeds. Again, it is dense, yet light tasting and very lemony!
  
• White Chocolate Cake
  This recipe was shared with me from a client and it is excellent! I'm not usually a fan of white chocolate, but this cake has a beautiful mild white chocolate taste.
  
• Marble Cake
  I am still working to find the perfect marble cake recipe and it's harder than it seems! But I have found a pretty great one that I am working with right now.
  
• Fruity Cakes (Strawberry, Raspberry, Blueberry, etc)
  I make several flavors of fruity cakes and use fresh fruit to enhance the flavors.
• Carrot Cake
  Not one of my personal favorites, but if you enjoy carrot cake, I've got a great one that even I don't mind. I've made several different types of cream cheese icings that will suit any taste. Yum!
  

Icings/Fillings:

• Buttercream Icing
  This is a basic icing with butter and icing sugar and milk. Delicious! I usually use this icing underneath fondant.
  
• Swiss Meringue Buttercream Icing
  This icing is the smoothest icing I have ever had! Instead of icing sugar, it contains sugar and cooked egg whites along with butter. It is rich tasting and light at the same time. One of my favorites!
  
• Chocolate Swiss Meringue Buttercream Icing
  Same idea as the Swiss Meringue Buttercream Icing but with some chocolate added.
  
• Ganache (Chocolate and Cream)
  When boiling cream meets chopped chocolate, something magical happens. You get a smooth, rich, chocolatey mixture that is a fabulous filling and/or icing for cakes. Yum!
  
• Cream Cheese Icing
  I LOVE Cream Cheese Icing! Usually some of it "accidentally" ends up being left over at the end of a cake job and someone has to eat it :) This icing goes so well with Red Velvet Cake, Chocolate Cake, Fruity Cakes......any cake really! Also available in chocolate flavor and lemon flavor.
  
• White Chocolate Icing
  This icing is meant to go with the White Chocolate Cake, but can go with many other cakes as well. It is light and fluffly and not too sweet.
• "Oreo Filling" Icing
  This icing is meant to go with the Cookies 'n Cream Cake, but can go with many others as well. Tastes similar to the inside of an Oreo cookie.
• Royal Icing
  This icing is usually used for decorations such as flowers and string work.
  
• Fondant
  This icing is used to give the cake a beautiful smooth finish. I used to make my own marshmallow fondant, but it was time consuming and inconsistent and often didn't work very well. For the past year I have been using premade Satin Ice fondant and Golda's fondant and I am very pleased with the results. I am hoping to try some new flavored fondants in the near future as well. For more general information on fondant, please go here.
  

Betty Boop Cake

A co-worker of Dale's requested a Betty Boop cake for her birthday.

So I made a 2 layer 12" red velvet cake with cream cheese filling, iced it with buttercream, then covered it in white fondant. Bettie sent me a picture of Betty Boop that she wanted me to use, so I copied that picture using gum paste and fondant and royal icing.




The "ribbon" around the bottom is red fondant.

Pleasure-Way Cake

Ever since I started this cake decorating thing, I've wanted to make a Pleasure-Way motorhome out of cake. In the back shop someone posted a picture that the owner of a PW had sent in of a cake they had made that looks like their motorhome. I always thought that was a really cool idea but didn't really have a reason to make one.

Until now.

Yesterday was the owner of Pleasure-Way's birthday. I found out last week that his birthday was on Tuesday and thought it would be really fun to make a PW cake. And it was! I haven't had that much fun making a cake in a long time! I always have fun with my cakes, but there are a few that are extra fun to make and I can just lose myself in them and forget to eat and stay up WAY too late and it ends up being totally worth it in the end.

I started with 2 9x13 pans of red velvet cake cut and stacked then carved into the shape of the motorhome. The filling was cream cheese icing.

Then the cake was iced with buttercream icing

This is one of the photos I was working from. This is a 2009 Pleasure-Way Ascent-TS

And this was my Ascent when it was done! At 12:30 in the morning. There were a few more details I would have loved to have put on, but I had to get up at 6, so I left some things off. But it still turned out better than I had ever thought possible!

The cake was covered in white fondant and all the extras were made of gum paste, fondant and royal icing.



Merv didn't want to cut it but we made him do it :)

The cake got rave reviews for looks and taste. Maybe I'll get to make another one again someday. Goodbye Ascent!

Second 1st Birthday Cake

I got to make another first birthday cake this month! My husband's godmother's daughter's little boy turned one last week and they asked for Elmo sitting on a stack of presents.

So I made Elmo out of red fondant first. He was a little creepy for a while because his head and arms and body were all separate. But once he was all together he looked great! A little fat, but still Elmo!


I used nice bright primary colours and big shapes for the presents


I made a little smash cake for Ethan as well (background)


Ethan seemed to really like his cake. He stared at it for a long time


And then he REALLY got into the smash cake! He ate quite a bit of it and wore even more! It was very fun to watch him smash that cake apart!

New Moon Cake

A woman I know asked me a long time ago for a "New Moon" cake. Her daughter is really into the Twilight books and decided to have a party celebrating the book/movie of New Moon.

So I made a cake for them in the shape of a book. The cake was white cake filled and iced with white buttercream icing. Then partially covered with black fondant to look like a book.

Instead of trying to re-create that beautiful elaborate flower on the cover, I got an edible image printed up of the actual book cover.

My husband suggested making a bookmark too.

The writing on the front and side is royal icing.

Kat told me that one of the guests almost went to pick up the "book" because it looked so real.

First 1st Birthday Cake

My husband's best friend's baby turned one last week and they had a party on Sunday. So Dale, being the baby's godfather, provided cake along with presents. :)

It was fun doing a 1st birthday cake! I looked at lots of cakes online and found a few designs that I liked, but Dale chose the one that he liked the best out of those.

The stars and curly things looked very festive!




I found a super cute candle to go with it


Baby loved his smash cake!