Owl Cake

I think I'm overloading my friends with all the posts I've put up this week on the blogs, but, I figured if I've got the free time, I might as well catch up on some of the cakes I've done in the past. I actually can't believe I didn't blog about this one sooner. It's one of my favorites.

I can't really take much credit for it though. I used the invites to design the cake and the owl is an exact replica of the one on the super cute invite. I believe the invitations came from etsy, but I'm not sure which shop.

Little Maya was turning one and they wanted a little cupcake just for her so I made a smaller version of the owl for her cupcake, and all the others got matching bows.

This cake was super fun and I think it came out super cute too. Happy Birthday, Maya!!

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

Horse Lovers Cake

I did this cake for a couple of young ladies at our church. As you can tell, they both love horses, so this was an easy one to design.

The horse silhouettes were done by printing horse outlines onto printer paper, placing that under some parchment paper and then filling in the lines with melted chocolate. ALWAYS make extra. There's bound to be some broken legs and tails. The top horse is actually the second one I made since the first one broke in transit.

The cake itself was simply covered and decorated with buttercream. The flowers were royal frosting and the horse shoes were made from chocolate clay and brushed with silver pearl dust.

This was actually a pretty easy cake to do and I was quite happy with the results.

Well, what do you think? What other designs would work with this silhouette idea?

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

Animal print cakes

I know, I know, this is amazing--2 posts, 2 days in a row! :o)

Here's a couple of cakes I've done with an animal print theme. The first one I did a couple months ago and it was my first zebra print cake. The stripes are fondant and the purse is rice crispy treats covered in fondant.

I tried a fun technique for the cake itself too. There are lots of tutorials online, but I followed this one. The birthday girl's mom sent me a photo of the inside since I couldn't see the results myself. :o) Wish I had colored the vanilla cake pink.

This next cake I just did a week or so ago. The birthday girl gave me a picture of exactly what she wanted. To copy that look I had to hand paint the stripes and spots. It took some practice, but I think it came out pretty close. If you read my last post, you can tell by the sides that I used ganache under the fondant on this one. Nice and straight! :o)

I don't have any requests for cakes till March, so maybe I'll get a chance to post a couple of my older ones this next week or so.

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

I'm back!

Boy, it's been a while since I've had a chance to post to any of my blogs. I really want to blog, but the technical stuff gets so confusing to me sometimes that it's just easier not to.

Anyway, enough of the excuses and whining. I am going to try and get this going. I may not get all of my older cakes on here, but if you're interested in seeing some of them, you can check out my facebook page. I'm trying to get the albums up to date on there this week.

In other news, we are making some decisions about how to get a licensed kitchen so I can get this business started. I have some phone calls to make tomorrow and hopefully I'll have some more info to post then.

In decorating news, I've been playing around with some new techniques. I have always struggled with covering cakes with fondant and getting super smooth sides. They look great at first, but within a couple of hours the sides are bulging out and look terrible. My guess is that the cakes are kept very cold at all times to keep this from happening. Then I wonder do they serve the cake cold or at room temperature? I do have a large fridge now, but it's in my detached garage--downstairs from my kitchen. I'm none too thrilled about the idea of hauling a cake up and down that flight of stairs 4 or 5 times in the process of decorating a cake, especially when there's 6 inches of snow on those steps. Then there's the issue of condensation.

Recently I learned about covering your cakes with ganache before covering with fondant. I found this great tutorial on it. There are some super sweet decorators out there who are willing to share their knowledge. Here's an example for you. This is a cake I did for my daughter a couple years ago.

From a distance it looks pretty good, but if you click on the picture and see it larger you will notice the pink fondant is buckling and puckering all over the place. Looks like it's trying to slide right off the cake. Now, here's a cake I did this past weekend. I covered this cake with a thin coat of buttercream and then with ganache before laying the fondant over.

Can you see how much smoother the sides are? The ganache is very firm at room temperature which keeps the sides of the cake from buckling and bulging. I still have to work on my fondant smoothing skills, but the marks you see in this one aren't from the frosting underneath, they're from my ring and my clumsy fingers bumping into it while trying to decorate. I also rolled the fondant too thin on the edges which made them a little ripply.

Now, here's another cake I did recently. The bottom layer was covered in chocolate ganache while the top one was covered in white chocolate ganache before the fondant layer.

The white chocolate ganache didn't firm up as well as the chocolate so that layer buckled a little. I'm going to have to work on that recipe to get it right.

I have to say I really like the results with the chocolate ganache technique, but I don't think I will be using it on all my cakes. It can get very expensive, and, I know this may sound ridiculous, but chocolate doesn't go with all the different cake flavors. :o)

I hope this might be able to help any other new decorators out there. I'm learning there isn't one right way to decorate a cake. There's lots of different ways and you have to find the one that works for you.

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

Lego Cake

Here's a Lego cake I did a while back. I enjoyed making it, and I liked the way it turned out, but as usual, I learned things along the way. I didn't have a mold for the bricks. Next time, I will. I will also do a better job of making sure the sides of the cake are perfectly straight, especially in the corner where the bricks are exposed.

 I made the people from 50/50. They are the size of a real lego character.

 I had my teenage daughter helping me glue the little dots on the bricks. That was a bit tedious.

 Looking at the sides is where I really wish I had a mold for the bricks. I hope someday to be able to do a similar design of this cake.

Pretty Peony

 I recently took an online decorating course through Craftsy. It was their Handcrafted Sugar Flowers and the teacher is Jacqueline Butler from PetalSweet. I came across her blog a while ago and fell in love with her gumpaste flowers, so when I saw the ad for her class I didn't hesitate to take it. 

Here's my first peony. Not too bad. The peony was not part of the class, but I used the techniques she taught and the recipe for gumpaste to make it.

Here's the bouquet I made. The class taught how to make the hydrangeas and the cute little filler flowers and how to assemble them all together.

Craftsy has been quickly adding to their list of cake decorating classes and I have to say I've taken most of them. I so love learning more about this fun craft. Now if I only had the time and money to learn how to take better photos of my crafts!

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!