Detailed Pictures

Here are a few detailed pictures of Miles' cake!!

My 26th Birthday Cake!

These are the pictures of my 26th birthday cake. It came out pretty well despite the troubles it gave me... And there were quite a few troubles.

The flowers are made of gumpaste and dusted with rose petal dust. I made them a week in advance and kept them in a plastic container so they would remain soft and workable. The cherry blossom branch is made out of modeling chocolate. I'm pretty excited about the modeling chocolate thing. It's very easy to use, very easy to make and it tastes pretty good too! Love it!

The bottom layer are 2 eight inch rounds. They are white cakes sandwiched between black raspberry filling (YUM) and vanilla buttercream. The top are 2 six inch rounds. I "invented" my own recipe for this portion of the cake, key lime. I'd never had a key lime cake before but I sure do love key lime pie. So I figured, why not? To make this cake, I juiced 8 key limes (thanks central market!) zested them (thanks for the suggestion jess!) and added it all to a white cake. To compliment this cake, I decided that I would fill and ice it with vanilla buttercream. I didn't want to go overboard with the flavors, I wanted the lime to be the focal point of this cake and I thought a different type of filling might take away from that. It ended up being not quite as lime-y as I would have liked but it was still pretty good. In fact, it was the favorite of the two!!

*my troubles came with the icing. for some reason, there are good days and there are bad days when it comes to icing. this was a bad day. the consistency was just wrong for some reason and I couldn't get a smooth coat to save my life. icing is so fickle.

Italian Creme Dream!

This cake was made for a birthday last week. The customer didn't give much instruction as per decoration, just that she wanted my Italian Creme cake, she wanted chocolate on it and she was turning 34.

I decided to do some chocolate transfers on her cake and needed to choose a color, so I picked pink. Most girls like pink, right? Besides, you can't really go wrong with the pink and brown combination these days. Classic.

It's a two layer Italian Cream with both the cake and the cream cheese icing coming from my very own recipes. I'm pretty pleased with the taste of this cake, the icing is easy and delicious!

Everything on the cake is edible and all of the decorations are made from chocolate!

Modeling Chocolate Practice

This was my first attempt at making/using modeling chocolate. I wanted to make sure I could do it because I'm going to be using it on my birthday cake this week. That's right, I'm making my birthday cake. No one wants to buy or make me one! In fact, my mother in law said, "I'm not gonna bake you a cake. That's just crazy." It's cool though, I'm pretty excited about making it. I haven't decided on flavors yet but I do know what it will look like. The modeling chocolate (as seen in this picture) will make up a cherry blossom branch. The cake will either be white or light green with pink blossoms. I'm making this cake bigger than I probably need it but who cares, it's my birthday!

Modeling chocolate recipe (tastes a bit like tootsie rolls):

1 bag of chocolate candy melts (I used Wilton's brand found at Michaels)
1/4 cup of light corn syrup

Melt chocolate in medium size bowl, stir until smooth
Add corn syrup and mix until it all comes together

Spread over a sheet of wax paper (get it as thin as you can, doesn't have to be super thin - just can't be thick)

Let dry over night.

Kneed it together to make it workable, store wrapped in an airtight container!

Bomber Jet Cake

This cake was made for a war vet's 70th birthday. His wife came to me and asked me to replicate a model that they had in their home. I was slightly hesitant at first - there's not a whole lot out there about airplane cakes to begin with, let alone bomber jet's. I agreed to do it anyway figuring we'd just power through it.

This was the hardest cake we have ever done, period. Rodney did an excellent job of carving the body of the plane out for me, I was really pleased with the way the shape came out. It's two layers of a french vanilla cake. This is actually the second version of the cake, we scrapped the first one at 1 am Friday morning. The color of the fondant on the first cake was almost purple and it wasn't looking very good so we started over.

So - sheet cake is double layered devil's food with vanilla bc. The plane is covered in marshmallow fondant and painted with A LOT of silver luster dust. The only things that are not edible on this piece are the wings. (foam board covered in mmf) The propellers are gumpaste, as is the nose and the Air Force emblem. (the propellers spin as well). All of the other decorations were piped on by yours truly.

I'm very proud of this cake - it took a lot of work and a lot of effort (including a crack in the fondant Friday night) but it was worth it. I definitely couldn't have managed without Rodney on this one, he did most of the technical work and did a GREAT job.

Mini Cupcakes

These were made for Tango's "Wii Party." They requested that they be decorated in spring colors with half chocolate cake and half vanilla.

I loved making these. They were pretty easy and didn't take very long at all. Perfectly sized too! You can't go wrong with mini!

(icing was vanilla bc on both types of cupcakes)

City Baby Shower Cake

This cake was made for a baby shower. Two cakes were made, this was the main one. It's a red velvet cake with vanilla bc. It's decorated to look like the pattern and scheme of the baby's nursery.

To make the cars and the buidings I used white chocolate candy melts. I originally wanted to blow the picture that was sent to me up and trace each car. However, our printer was out of ink so I had to free-hand them. I was pretty happy with the outcome considering the picture was so small. They look exactly as they do on the print in the nursery. I colored a bunch of candy melts in different colors and then traced each car that had a piece of wax paper on top of it. Once those were done, the hard part was over.

The name was shaped out of home-made marshmallow fondant. I wanted the name to have a whimsical feel to it, so I made a batch of fondant and shaped it out 5 days ahead of time. (To give it time to dry) Apparently that was not long enough because the "J" broke on me a few times, as did the "K." I ended up having to use toothpicks through the centers and through the cake in order to keep it all together. The moon was made from marshmallow fondant as well and I used a piece of wire to hold it up. The toothpicks and the wire were the only non-edible pieces on this cake.

The only other problem I had with this cake came from one of the building pieces. It snapped in half after I set it in place. I had to "glue" it back together with some more melted chocolate and then reinforce it from behind with some royal icing.

I'm pretty sure everyone was happy with the cake, I had a lot of fun doing it!!

(the second cake was a small six inch, white cake with strawberries in the middle. it was decorated with the same colors)