Hat Box Cake Class

Hello there! How are you doing? We are enjoying the last few days of our summer vacation. Definitely enjoyed having my handsome hubby home the last few months.

I posted this to my Facebook page, but I'd thought I'd share here as well. I'm offering a class to learn how to make this hat box cake.

I thought this was a good design to start with. We'll do everything except bake the cake (I'll have that part already done). We'll torte, fill, and ganache the cake. We'll use home made fondant to cover it and then use a mixture of fondant and gumpaste to make the flower, jewelry and bow.

All supplies will be provided for use at the class and you will go home with a beautifully decorated 6" cake, recipes and the know how to do this yourself.

I have 2 different class options:

Class A: September 17th and 18th 6-9 each night. Cost: $80
Class B: September 19th 9am-4pm Cost: $80 (plus money for lunch)

Space is limited. Please leave a comment if you're interested and I will get back to you.

Thanks for all the encouragement I get. It's been such a blessing.

Till next time...
God's love and blessings!

Wafer Paper Mini Book Tutorial

Hello there! Welcome to my sweet little corner of the web again. Today I am going to share with you a fun tutorial for making mini books. These are great for cupcake toppers, and I thought they were rather appropriate with everyone in this house heading back to school this week.

I recently made this storybook cake for a baby shower:

Along with some matching cupcakes.

Since this was the second time I've made these books, and I had a lot of questions about how I made them the first time, I took pictures as I worked so I could write up a tutorial. Hope it makes sense. :o)

The first couple of steps I don't have pictures for, sorry. I went to the library and checked out books that I wanted to use. Then I scanned each side of them, including the spine, into my computer and used PhotoShop to put the pieces together. Then I laid them out in a document to fit as many as I could on a sheet of wafer paper at about the size I wanted them to be. I actually could have made them a bit smaller and they would have looked fine. The next step was to use my edible printer to print the book covers onto wafer paper.

Once they are dry to the touch, you need to cut them out. I used a paper cutter, but you could easily use scissors for this as well. Then I measured the size I wanted for the pages and cut them with the paper cutter as well. Now, my inside pages were blank. You could print these as well, but that was WAY more work than I was willing to do. I liked that I could stack a couple of sheets and cut them at the same time. This was also a good way to use some of my wafer paper that got kind of crushed in transit to my house. (You can see the torn corner on this one.)

The next step is to glue the pages together. I used a paint brush to apply piping gel just to the "spine" edge of the paper and then stacked another one on top. I think I did 6-8 pages/book. Depending on the spine, you could do more, but these were children's books, so they're not very thick.

Now, back to the covers. You need to roll out some fondant. I think I went to 3 or 4 on my KitchenAid pasta roller. (LOVE my pasta roller!) You could go thinner if you'd like. Once rolled out, I used piping gel all over the backside of the book covers and "glued" them to the fondant. Then I used an exact-o knife to cut around the edges.

It helps to fold the book in half for this next step just to help you see where the spine is. Fold it, and then lay it out, with the inside face up. Run a line of piping gel right along the spine.

And then "glue" your pages inside. The fun part about this is that the book can be somewhat opened to see the individual pages inside.

Because the covers are made with fondant, they edges tend to get a little ragged with handling.

Simply tap the edges on your table top, and that will push in any fondant that may have squished beyond the wafer paper edge and kind of even things out a bit. You'll want to do this on all three of the cut edges.

 Ta-da! Nice and smooth.

And there you have it. Lots of cute mini books to decorate with. These can be made several days ahead to make things easier on baking/decorating day.

If you don't have an edible printer, I've heard there are places where you can send your picture and they will print it for you. I just don't know who they are. You could also simply wrap the wafer paper pages with fondant, let it dry a bit and paint your book cover with food coloring or edible pens. A Bible would be pretty easy to do with this technique as you would really only have to draw a cross on it.

I hope this tutorial will be of help. These really are fun to make, and there's just something about miniature things that are just so fun to play with. :o)

Till next time...
God's love and blessings!

Wafer Paper Flower Tutorial

Hello there! Welcome again to my sweet little corner of the web. I'm here to show you a cool new cakey medium. Well, it's new to me anyway. I'd heard about it a while ago, but didn't know where to find any or how to use it, so the ideas were filed in the already-too-full head of mine, until now. Thank you, Craftsy for a new addiction. In case you didn't figure it out by the post title, it's wafer paper. I've included a link to where you can get some so you can get addicted to it too. You're welcome. :o)

This medium is a blend of two of my favorite hobbies--paper crafting and cakes. After taking a Craftsy class, to get familiar with it, I soon realized that with a little tweaking, my paper crafts could now become edible! Fun! Below you can see two flowers I made using a paper punch from Stampin Up!. The one on the left is made with card stock, and the one on the right is wafer paper.

And guess what? I took pictures when I made these so I could share with you how I did it, in case you'd like to be able to make these super cute flowers yourself. Wouldn't they look adorable on cupcakes? So, let's get started.

Here's what you'll need:
Stampin' Up! Blossom punch
wafer paper
scissors
petal dust (optional)
clean paintbrushes
water
Ignore the piping gel you see in the photo. I ended up not using it.

First you will need to punch out 6 flowers with the punch. The paper is super easy to punch through. Then use your scissors to snip between the petals a bit. I stacked all 6 together and cut through them pretty easily.

Now, with card stock, you would roll the petals around your paint brush handle, but that doesn't work well with wafer paper. It can be a bit brittle and break too easily for that. Instead, take a SMALL amount of water on your paintbrush and gently brush along the edges of each petal on the smooth side of the paper (that's the front). I've highlighted in pink on this flower so you can see where I brushed the water. At first, the petals will begin to curl away from the side you put the water on, but that's OK. Just wait a bit and they will start curling the opposite way.

Here you can see the flowers in the back were the first ones I brushed and they are starting to curl up. The bottom left one is the last one I brushed and it is still curling down here.

Take the first flower that you brushed. It should be still somewhat wet and flexible, but not gooey. You may find that you need to re-snip between the petals if they are stuck together. Put a tiny bit of water on one edge of one petal and roll it around your paint brush. Hold a second till it sticks and then remove the brush.

Now take the opposite petal and brush a tiny bit of water on both edges, bring the petal up and glue it to the first petal.

Take two opposite petals, apply a tiny bit of water on the edges of one petal and glue the two together around the first two petals.

And do the same with the last two petals. These two may need glue on both petals as they may not meet all the way. There, your center is finished.

To help the petals fill out a bit on the remaining flowers, take a little water and apply it to the base of the petals on two flowers. Again, I highlighted this in pink. This will cause them to curl up a bit. These two should be on top of the stack you will do in the next step.

Now, apply a little water to the middle of a flower and stack another one on top, staggering the petals. Keep doing this for the remaining flowers till they're all stacked. and "glue" your center in the middle.

Very gently gather the petals up a bit. You may need to add a little more water at the base of specific petals to help them lift up. If you hold them for a minute or so they will dry and hold their shape.

Then you can use the petal dust of your choice to add some color to your flower. You could even use Wilton Color Mist or an airbrush if you have one of those for cakes.

All finished. Isn't it pretty? It almost looks like a peony in this photo.

What do you think? My head is swimming with ideas with this new medium. Just wish there was more time in my day to get to play. :o) By the way, if you're interested in the card stock flower, I posted a tutorial for it on my craft blog. You can check it out here.

I will leave you with a picture of my first wafer paper cake project. I made this for a church fellowship. They always get to be my guinea pigs when I come up with new ideas. :o) The flowers are wafer paper, as are the stripes on the side of the cake. This was a dark chocolate/orange cake with almond/orange buttercream. Yum!

Well, gotta go finish some chocolate snowmobiles and a John Deere tractor.

Till next time...
God's love and blessings!