Alice in Wonderland

Hello there! I'm enjoying a nice chilly day here in the north, all snuggled up inside and sipping some hot cocoa. I've been working on my computer and trying to organize and back up photos and realize I have a LOT of them I haven't shared on here. I must remedy that. I think I will start with these photos of my nephew's wedding back in May, mostly because the finished pictures were taken outside with lots of warm sunshine. ;o)

My nephew and his lovely bride were having a themed wedding, and in case you didn't figure it out from the title of this post, it was an Alice in Wonderland theme. My head was about to explode with all the different ideas going on in there. So many fun things in that story to re-enact on a cake; the Mad Hatter, rabbits, playing cards, flowers, tea cups and pots, roses, etc. Did I mention they wanted 200 cupcakes to go with the main cake? That's a lot of modeling chocolate fun right there!

I actually took several in-progress shots for this cake because I worked on it over quite a long time. My nephew doesn't live near me, in fact he lives several states away so I knew I was going to have to ship something there as I wouldn't be able to transport it all on the plane and it needed extra time to get there. I couldn't ship my tools since I would need them, so that meant shipping the cupcake toppers. I've seen other decorators that sell their cupcake toppers online and ship them. I've shipped an Elsa and Olaf topper and didn't have too much trouble, I thought these wouldn't be too bad. I thought wrong. ;o( More on that later.

Here's the beginning of my tea pot.

Not too bad, but I wish I'd spent more time with the royal frosting undercoat to smooth out the rice crispy bumps better.

Here's the gumpaste tea cup to go with the tea pot. 

Here's some of the little details I was able to make ahead. Loved the door knob. 

Bunny butt! Sorry, that's just too fun to say. ;o) Did you notice my "butter"fly?

Here are some of the cupcake toppers before I mailed them off. Everything is made from modeling chocolate.

Here's some more. Unfortunately, they didn't look like this when they arrived. They looked more like a pile of green and white confetti. The watches and keys arrived fine, but I spent a frantic day recreating hats and roses.

 Here's the items I took as a carry-on on the plane. They arrived just fine. :o)

 Here are the toppers on their cupcakes. Drink Me bottles...

 hats...

 keys...

 flowers with faces...

 pocket watches...

 and roses. The idea in my head didn't look this gruesome though. Does anyone else see blood instead of paint? Yuck!

And here's the main cake all put together.

 Unfortunately I didn't get any super great shots of the cake before it was set up outside. While outside lighting can make for some great photos, the dinner buffet in the background didn't make such a great backdrop for it.

 Here's a few close-ups. This cake really had a LOT of stuff going on. You couldn't get it all in one photo. Here's the teacup, butterfly, Cheshire cat, part of the door knob, some of the singing flowers, and you can just see the "drink me" bottle behind the teacup.

Here's some more of the flowers, a playing card with his can of paint, and oh look, a bunny butt! Sorry. I couldn't help myself. Tee-hee. Now the roses on here don't look quite as gruesome as the ones of the cupcakes did. 

 And, the precarious teapot with still more flowers and the pocket watch.

All-in-all this was a really fun cake to make. A lot of time and work, a lot of things I would do differently next time, but a lot of fun too, and I'm so glad I was able to do this as a gift to my nephew and his new bride.

It looks like my mug is empty. Time to go get a refill. I will try and get on here next week and share another cake or two with you.

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

My Son's Wedding cake

Hello there and Happy New Year! I enjoy looking back over the year to see all the fun cakes I was able to make. I will try and share my favorites with you over the next couple of weeks. 

We had 3 family weddings last year that I got to make the cakes for. I have found that there are 2 extra benefits to making cakes for family get-togethers: there are volunteers to help with the cake, and extra (clean) hands to take photos of the process. So, I have more than just the finished shot to share with you today. 

Here I am putting ganache on the top tier. (I look so serious.)

My gorgeous sister helping to cut out flowers...LOTS of flowers.

Attaching the wafer paper butterflies.

This was a little surprise on the back of the cake for my son from his bride. How do yo hide a Tardis?

The topper was the bride's grandmother's. We removed the silk leaves and trailed the vine and butterflies across it.

This is the only good shot I got of it completely finished. I had forgotten the pearls in the photo above.

I don't usually get to see the bride and groom's reactions to the cake. This is when he saw the Tardis on the back.

Aren't they a cute couple?

And, cutting the cake. They work well together. ;o)

Hopefully, you will be seeing more posts on here in the future. Part of my preparation for the new year was to re-organize my planner and I put a section in with what will, hopefully, be a better system for me to sit down and write some posts out. Rather than just listing different things I'd like to share, I printed a calendar and put those ideas on specific dates. I hope it works. :o) 

So, till next time...

God's love and blessings!

The Ups and Downs of Cake Decorating

In August I had the opportunity to work with a sweet lady on her wedding cakes. Yes, I said cakes. 34 to be exact. She wanted a small round to be the centerpiece for each of the tables at their reception, and a larger, 3 tier for the wedding parties' table. I had a lot of fun working on these cakes, learned a LOT, and would have probably had a nervous break down if it weren't for a sweet friend from church who came to my rescue and lots of strength from the Lord. 

I mentioned a "blow out" in my last post.  This, my friends, is what a blow out looks like. 

 

Isn't it lovely? I spent 3 days baking, frosting, and covering all 36 cakes, getting them ready to decorate the Friday before the Saturday wedding. It rained all day Thursday. I woke up Friday morning to find half of the cakes in very similar condition to this one. Much of the fondant was tacky and wet feeling. :o( To say the least, I got slightly stressed. However, I spent some time with the Lord and realized Phil 4:13 was meant for such a time as this. "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." Now I realize that this is referring to many other areas of our lives besides actually having physical strength to do something, but I also knew that I couldn't possibly do this without God's help. Throughout the day, as I saw the cakes sitting on the shelves waiting to be finished, I just had to remind myself of this and my attitude quickly changed from one of stress, to one of peace.

 As I mentioned, one of the young ladies from our church had offered to help me with these cakes, and thankfully she is a very quick learner. She was rolling fondant out as quickly as I could make it. She stayed till about 10pm when I sent her home and I stayed up till about 5 am finishing what I could. Here are all the cakes in the back of my van ready for delivery. It's hard to see, but the 3 tiers in the far right are the main cake. I had to decorate it on site because of the design.

Since my hubby came along to help deliver, and he didn't have much to do while I finished the main cake, he decided to get a couple of pictures of me. I'm not usually on this side of the camera. Here I am using a lace mold to make the decor for the cake.

Here's a shot of the cake in progress. Because the lace draped down below the tiers, I had to do the decorating after it was assembled, and I wasn't even going to try and travel with it stacked.

We had 3 designs for the table centerpieces. One third of them looked much like the main cake. These stands were made by the bride's father. Aren't they awesome?

One third of them we called the "garter" cakes.

 And one third of them were ruffle cakes.

 Here is the main cake table. I didn't get a good shot of the whole thing, but she had this large cake, and one of the garter and ruffle cakes on it.

I'm happy to say they all turned out well, I finished the cakes on time, and the main cake didn't topple over. :o) What did I learn from this? Never, never, never, NEVER have windows open on a rainy day when you're working on cakes. Fondant and humidity do not play well together.

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