Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Bridal Dress



This update is late. It's late because someone (coughcough) broke our main camera late last weekend.

Anyway, this cake was made for a bridal shower last weekend - I based the cake on a design that the customer liked (good choice April!) and changed a few things to make it my own!

This cake is a vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream. The dress and roses are made of fondant (as is the white fondant border), with silver dragees used as accents!

I had fun with this cake but there was some added pressure because Jess was here while I was working on it. I'm terribly critical of myself as it is but having someone watch me made it so much worse!

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Week ending cakes!



This cake was made for a good friend of mine, Christy, for her 30th birthday!

It's all white cake (she would have it no other way!) with vanilla buttercream. The flowers are fondant, the topper is white chocolate with silver dragees.

I love how this cake turned out!

Bella/Caroline's cakes:

These cakes were made for a teacher's kids whose birthdays are on the same day (I think)! They were having a small family celebration and needed two smalller cakes.

Bella's cake is chocolate with chocolate mousse and chocolate buttercream. The topper is fondant, as is the polka dots!




Caroline's cake is vanilla with strawberry filling and vanilla buttercream. Again, the topper is fondant (as is the polka dots)



I love the colors on this cake! Side note: I am having major cracking issues with my cakes lately. I'm not sure if has something to do with the weather changing around here but it's been the source of much stress in these parts recently. I haven't changed anything in the process of making the buttercream or the cakes so I'm not sure what could be causing it. The only thing that I can think of is that decided to try stacking the cakes differently a few weeks ago. I guess we'll go back to our old way and see if that fixes the problem. Seriously though, I have never had cracks in my cakes!!!

Lola's cake:

This cake was for the second cutest baby in the world (Rylee has to be my #1), Lola. Lola was in my class at MDO last spring and in the summer and we bonded pretty quickly. Lola's mom is also pretty awesome and we soon discovered that we had a lot in common! She found the cake that I made for my SIL last year and decided that she wanted the same for Lola's second birthday celebration!




I'm pretty pleased with how the colors came out on this one! It's a strawberry cake with vanilla buttercream. The cherry blossoms were piped on with buttercream as well!

We sure do love cherry blossoms around here!

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Cactus



This cake was made for my Mom!

The pot is real but inside are two 4 inch rounds (carrot cake) topped with crushed Oreo's (that you cannot see) and a sports ball cake on top. I used tip #32 for the cactus (the green parts) and piped out over 600 royal icing needles (that dried overnight) using the #2 tip. (what a labor of love that was!)

I had a lot of fun with this cake but sticking every single one of the needles in was INTENSE!

The flower is fondant, forgot to mention that.

Every person in the restaurant we were at for dinner tonight thought the cactus was real! I got a lot of questions about it and a lot of looks once we started cutting into it!

Close-up:




PS - If any of you have asked me a question (or if you just have a question that you want to ask but haven't) in any of the posts below and I haven't answered, please ask it again on this post and I will respond in a separate post tomorrow. I apologize for my lack of response but I promise to get everyone's questions answered as best I can!!

-steph

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Cake, Cake and More cake

Can you believe we had SIX cakes this week???

SiX.

I'm amazed that we even got through it all, It feels like such a blur!

Here's the run down, last to first.


Brewer Motorcycle Cake:

This cake was made for our Pastor, in celebration of his birthday! It was requested so that it could be presented just before the "roast" at his surprise party this evening. Since he rides a Honda Goldwing, this was the natural choice!



This was probably the most fun we've had working on a cake. We had to do it all (including the baking) in one evening because we had 5 other cakes this week AND two birthday parties Friday and Saturday. We started working on the decorating at 8 pm last night and got about 95% done by 3:30 am. We were both furiously making engine pieces, seats, headlights...but it was a lot of fun and I want to say that this might be the best cake we have ever done! It was also great to see the cake presented ... but I had to cut it! I never do that!

A few more of the motorcycle:







The only two non-edible pieces were the antenna (floral wire) and the windshield, which we cut from some plastic packaging.

Ryan Twins birthday cakes

These cakes were created for our very good friends twin boy and girl, Bailey and Morgan (who also happen to be very good friends with Rylee). (Bailey and Morgan are also Pastor Brewer's grandchildren - lots of Brewer cakes this week!)

Their birthday party was held at My Gym (we miss it there!) and was Olympic themed. We came up with a cake for each of them supporting this theme -Morgan would have a ball pit cake and Bailey would have a trampoline cake.

Morgan's cake is 2, 10 inch square chocolate cakes that had the middle carved out. The "balls" are mini jaw-breakers (that weren't very hard) and the staircase was made from rice krispy treats. The "Morgan" figure is all fondant, which I made last week (I made both of the twin's figures last week, thank goodness!)





Bailey's cake is 2, 10 inch round vanilla cakes. The trampoline is fondant, as is the trampoline legs. I had a dilemma in trying to figure out what to put around the cake since the party was being held inside. I didn't want to do the entire cake in black (like a normal trampoline in a gym would most likely look like) so I went ahead and decorated it as if it were outside. Besides, all little girls love flowers!

This cake gave me soooooooooo many problems. I'm sure you can all see the little icing cracks. Grrrrrrrrrrr.









Jaclyn's cakes

These cakes were made for our friend Jaclyn, for her daughter's first birthday!

The main cake is vanilla (bottom tier) and strawberry (top tier) with vanilla buttercream and fondant details. The smash cake is vanilla with vanilla buttercream and a fondant bow topper. I had a lot of fun with this cake. I love the fun colors and the I'm very pleased with how the the bow turned out.





Amy's cake



Last but not least, we end this crazy week with the cake that started it off!

For our good friend Amy, in celebration of her birthday. It's 6 inches of entirely chocolate (including the topper - white chocolate with silver dragees) and fondant polka dots.

Love the colors on this cake!!

What an insane week we have had! Despite Bailey's cake which hated me, everything seemed to go off very smoothly.

I think September might be dubbed "Busy-tember."

Two more cakes this week, three the next.