Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Hello there and welcome again to my sweet little corner of the web. We've had some extreme ups and downs the last couple of weeks. I have another post for a more recent cake, but I'm still working on that one. It's a tough one to write about. Anyway, since I've been doing a lot of masculine themed cakes recently I thought I would continue that theme with some of the cakes I've done in the last year.

This first cake pretty much speaks for itself. I was given the toy to use as a model. I made the plane from rice crispy treat and covered it in fondant and gumpaste.

This is one of the few cakes that I've carved. I stacked the cake and then carved a ramp for the train to go up. My friend wanted a train car for each of the party goers to have so I made them from modeling chocolate rather than gumpaste. I really do need to work on scale though. I often find that my decorations are too big or too small for the cake. This one was just on the border of being too big.

I used wax paper as my template to know where to cut the cake.

Covered in buttercream.

And finally in ganache. This took some time to get nice and smooth.

And, my favorite. I used Carlos Lischetti's book, Animation in Sugar to model the car on this one. In the book, the car is a cake, but I made it smaller and used rice crispy treat for it instead. He provides all the patterns for the many, many pieces.

Here's some of the pieces after their paint job. The tread on the tires was hand piped with royal icing. That took a while!

I was extremely happy with how this turned out.

Well, I've got more cake to work on so I better close this here. I will do my best to finish my other post and show you some masculine cakes I've been working on more recently.

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

Emma's Rainbow

Hello there! If you follow my Facebook page, you are aware that the last few weeks has been "guy month" in my kitchen...knives, shotgun shells, snowmobiles and tractors. I think I need to make something pink and sparkly next week. ;o) Till then, I thought I'd share this pretty cake with you.

I actually can't believe I haven't posted this cake yet. It was one of my favorite ones to do last year. It was done for Icing Smiles. Icing Smiles is a nonprofit organization that provides custom celebration cakes and other treats to families impacted by the critical illness of a child. (From the Icing Smiles site)

I was so excited when I got an email asking me if I could do a cake for little Emma. I designed the cake around several things her mom told me were special to Emma--pretty flowers, rainbows, a heart and her new stuffed puppy.

The rainbow was made with gumpaste and dried flat. I attached lollipop sticks to the back to insert into the cake once it was dried. The puppy was made from fondant. I think this was one of the first cakes I used my new Tappits on too. Love those.

Emmas' mom gave me permission to post this photo. This, my friends, is what it's all about. That smile. This is why I love baking, to give a blessing to someone else and give them a smile.

So blessed to get to do this cake and looking forward to doing another one for Icing Smiles in May. Well, I've got a tractor waiting for its tires to be attached. Guess I better get in the kitchen. :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!

Fairy Cakes

Hello there! Thanks for visiting my sweet blog today. I've not been very busy with cakes the last week, so this gives me a chance to showcase some of the ones I missed posting about last year.

With all the snow outside, and spring around the corner, I thought I'd share the two flower-filled fairy cakes that I did for two sweet little girls. The first one is modeled after this cake by bubolinkata. Her cakes and cookies are AMAZING!!!! I loved the design of the cake and the fairy's dress, but since this cake had to travel across state lines, I knew my fairy would need to be sitting down.

I did use a mold for the body that I was given by my Mom who did cakes when I was a little girl, but I used techniques I learned from Craftsy's Cake Topper Techniques Class to make the clothes and hair. Painting faces still gets me nervous. I mean, what fairy wants two different size eyes, or crooked lips? I have learned that a little lemon extract can be used as an "eraser" in emergencies.

The next cake is one of my favorites of this past year. I was asked to do a "woodland fairy" cake. Um, yes, please. My head was immediately spinning with all kinds of fun details to add to the cake. The hard part was narrowing it down so it wouldn't be critter overkill. :o)

Every woodland fairy needs a tree trunk house to live in, so I used fondant logs to shape the outline of the window and door along with the roots, and then draped more fondant over the top and used a veining tool to add lots of bark details. After I took this picture, I added some lighter fondant to the top for the inner rings and did some shading with petal dust to give it a little life.

Then I had fun adding the fairies, flowers and critters. There were ladybugs, caterpillars, bumblebees, snails and butterflies. I thought the fairies needed a little extra room so I added a rice krispy mushroom house on top. There were flowers everywhere and even sunflower seed doorhandles. I just wanted to shrink down and open that door to see what was inside the house. (If I remember correctly that was a strawberry lemonade cake with chocolate ganache in there. Yum!)

My favorite part though were these two little fairies. The one on top is unaware that she's not only watering her garden, but her little friend as well. :o)

So, so, so much fun to do.

Till next time...
O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusts in him. Psalm 34:8

Minnie Mouse Cakes

It seems that Minnie Mouse is quite popular with little ones right now. Here's three that I've done in the last 6 months. The first one I was given a picture and asked to replicate, the other two I was given free reign to design what I wanted. I think the middle one is my favorite, but I like the "bloomers" peeking out of the bottom one too. ;o) Which one do you like best?

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

Painted Cakes

I'm back with some more of last year's cakes. This time I thought I'd show you some painted cakes. I took The Hand Painted Cake course on Craftsy a while ago. This is one of their free classes, so feel free to go check it out. One thing I do differently than the video though is that I use food grade airbrush colors rather than regular food colors. They don't need to be watered down with lemon extract as much and they blend much nicer.

This is one of the first ones I did. This cake was purely an "accident".  Well, it was inspired by one anyway. Mike and I were driving home from delivering a cake on a rainy afternoon when a young buck couldn't decide which way he wanted to go across the street. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong way. Fortunately, he wasn't hurt and neither was our vehicle, but as we stopped to check for damage, I noticed the beautiful lilies in the pond next to us. I was thankful that my camera was in the van and snapped a couple of photos. My husband kids that only I could turn a deer collision into a photo-op. :o)

I looked up tutorials for making water lilies, but didn't like the results of them, so I just played around. I cut a pattern from cardstock with my Silhouette and used it for the petals and cut them out with an x-acto blade.  Then I just played around with shaping the petals and used tissue between them to space them out till the gumpaste hardened.

The scene on this next one was inspired from a painting book I have: From Flea Market to Fabulous by Kerry Trout.

As you can see, it was for a gentlemen celebrating his 95th birthday. I tried to make the tractor look a bit vintage, more like the ones he would have used in his early day. Even though church and the subsequent party for this young man were canceled due to the extreme cold that day, we took this on over to him with a couple other brave souls to celebrate. It's not every day you get to celebrate your 95th birthday!

I will leave you with a sneak peak of the cake I'm currently working on. This is Peggy. Isn't she cute?! I used another tutorial from McGreevy Cakes. This lady has some awesome cake skills!

Well, it's time for lunch and another Wii Party match with my daughter. Gotta go!

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

A Year in Review--Not happenin' :o)

I must have had a short term memory block when I wrote that I might do a Year in Review post. I didn't realize how many cakes I got to make this last year. And each one was so fun to do that I would have a hard time narrowing it down to a reasonable number of cakes to squeeze into one post. It would be much easier on my sanity to do it a little bit at a time.

With that in mind, I'll think I'll post updates by theme, starting with baby showers.This first one is actually a dummy cake that went on top of two other layers. Unfortunately I didn't get a good picture of the finished cake. The topper was modeled using Carlos Lischetti's book, Animation In Sugar. Awesome book! Totally worth the investment.

This next one I got to use my baby mold for the first time. I used Shawna's awesome tutorial for this little girl. So sweet! I love me some baby bum. :o)

Here she is on her pretty cake. I invented my own tutu flowers to go with the Tutu Cute theme of the shower.

This one wasn't technically for a baby shower. It was a gift during a holiday visit to show little Abby that she will always be top dog. Abby will have to wait 'till April to meet her little sibling. I was able to use my baby mold again, but Abby was modeled by hand from a picture I was given.

Here's a close-up of Abby. Trying to match a breed is difficult.

 Well, my little one is busy practicing her piano and I must go give encouragement and help her to study for a test.

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