Tommy Frog Cake

It is all cake except for the feet hands and eyes (fondant). I used a 10", 9", 8" and two 6". Yes the frog has a butt. I thought it would be funny.

Knights cake

Thomas cake

Before: ( a little embarassing) After: (just shows that I really can't wing a cake. It has to be pre designed and calculated to turn out decent)

This is my second attempt at a Thomas cake, and I think I did much better the second time around. You can see the measurments and the math that I used to get it to scale. I started with two 11 x 15 sheet cakes cut and stacked into 4 layers. Then I used my measurments to carve away the excess. It went slowly, but I wanted to be sure not to cut anything off that shouldnt be. Then I did a crumb coat, smothed it and decorated it. I was happy with the way it came out. It wasn't perfect but it was much, much better. If anyone wants a copy of the papers let me know and Ill send them to you.

Teddy Bear Birthday

I almost didn't want to post my pictures after seeing the amazing cakes you have on here. I just finished the Wilton class with Heather this past week. I made this cake and the cupcakes for my son's first birthday. I had a lot of fun and I think they turned out alright for my first try. I look forward to many future decorating attempts. Sara

phantom of the opera cake

Here's the final result. Thanks Heather for the advice. I didn't have time to do the piano keys, it probably would have been just the right touch...oh well!

Thomas the Train

Little Mermaid Coral Cake

Un-birthday Topsy Turvey

Here is our first topsy turvey. It was a lot of fun to make. Here is the concept and the actual. We ended up making a fourth layer. The teirs are 10", 8", 6" and the cupcake on top is 3". The dark blue bow broke during transportation, so we took the light one in back and swaped them. It ended up looking just fine. It was a Alice in Wonderland inspired Unbirthday Mad Hatter themed party. They wanted the colors to be red, yellow and blue. It looks like a Disney Princess cake. It was about 3 feet tall.

Princess and the Frog

This was Lizzy's "Princess and the Frog" inspired cake. I was suprised at how easy and quick the pillow was to do. i just carved the sides in and layed the fondant on and quilted using a ruler and my embossing tool. It probably took me 40 min. total to carve and color and cover and quilt and draggee. all the pillows that I saw online were rounded on top but I carved the middle going inward with a X shape. (It ended up not mattering because I put the lilly pad on top).
Lizzy thought of the blue color for the pillow because it was "like water" which I thought was genius. I was just gonna do purple.
The lilly pad was just a circle then I went over the edges to give them a wavy look and of course put the lines and the slit in it. Looking at the picture now, I think the lilly pad should be bigger. Everything was sprayed with a pearl luster dust-vodka mix.
The crown is gumpaste and I just cut it out with a large cookie cutter and let it dry in my Wilton Flower former tray. Then painted purple. I should have tinted the gumpaste and then sprayed it with the color.
The buttons on the tassel are wierd but it was late at night and I was tired and didn't care all that much. I couldn't think of anything else to do at the time. I hand-rolled the tassel strings. BTW-Jacob actually made me an extruder everyone! I was SO excited! He just needs to drill the hole sizes that I want into the different tips that he got. Now that I did this pillow with the tassels, I now know what size holes to make him do!
The lilly flower was made out of a cutter in my Wilton flower kit. I really just winged it. I shaped it in a cupcake tin and let it dry. I wish I could have dusted the lilly flower better but I wasn't that into it. Maybe next time I will color the gumpaste slightly as well. The ends are really fragile as you can tell. one petal broke and some are just curled up a little.
Lizzy loved it and it was really fun to make.
Thanks for the ganache tips, Shelley! It tasted like heaven. :)

More cakes

Theres one more that I didnt get a picture of that is comming soon.

iPod Cake

I did this for a friend so I got lazy and didn't put headphones on it. The color is much better in person. It was a silver/black color with a sheen on it.

Ipod

Pretty self expanatory. 11 x 15 in chocolate sheet cake with chocolate filling. We used a food coloring marker for the writting. We are finding those markers to be an essential tool.

Butterfly

Sorry about the mess in the back. We were on a time crunch. Anywho, this is our butterfly cake. We made the butterflies out of gumpaste. We cut them out with a cookie cutter (that I found in the clay modeling section of the store) and hung them hanging half way over the edge of a box in the center to get their wings to dry shaped. Then we painted them with lusterdust and piped royal icing on them. Food coloring pens would work great too if your going for a more graphic look.

Tommy B- Day Cake

This is the cake I made for Tommy's birthday. I didnt really have a plan. We just did whatever. Tommy loved it. I baked it in a 11 x 15 sheet cake and cut the peices out and stood them up on the board. This was done using our new Fondant recipe. It tasted like royal icing to me. This is basically how I set it up. Looking back now. I wish I would have done a smaller head. We did a chocolate cake with chocolate peanut butter icing.

Kitty Cake

This is a cake that we decorated for a neighbor. She already had the pan but didnt have the time to do the stars. Gabby and I layered the extra peices of cake on there to raise the legs and nose. For a star cake it turned out pretty good.

Jacob's 30th B-Day Cake

Explination:

The cake base: Replicated concrete floors that Jacob did in our home.

The Lumber: Jacob's new passion is making things out of wood. ie: tables, toy chests, anything.

Business Card: Replica of Jacob's new business card (thanks, Heather!). He just got his contractor's licence at the end of last year.

Snowy Mountain & Snowboarder: Jacob loves to snowboard! (And yes, I realize that the fondant snow-boarder is way to big for the mountain - because I made him before I made the cake - but I just didn't feel like re-making him nor did I have the time!)

X-Box Controller: Jacob LOVES his X-Box. He built an entire basement just for it! I made him an X-Box console last year so I had to do something different with the X-Box theme this year.

"Happy Birthday" letters: Made those to look like scrabble pieces. Jacob's FAVORITE game is Scrabble. He's really good at it too!

The base is a piece of MDF that I just had cut at Home Depot when I bought it.

I screwed a "floor joint" to the middle of the board (it's galvinized steel so I covered in in tin foil) then just screwed a piece of PVC pipe (that is actually a sprinkler pipe) into it then covered everything in foil. I put a thin layer of piping gel on top of the foil for the fondant squares to stick to.

For the base, I to replicate the concrete floors, I cut out a bunch of tan fondant squares with my cutter and layed them onto the foil-covered base then took brown royal icing and splattered it on randomly then took my "trowl" aka: pastry cutter/icer and scraped it off.

The "Lumber" was just a 11x15 cake cut into 3 1/2 inch blocks then covered in tan fondant and painted with brown food coloring/vodka mixture. It would have looked MUCH better had I marbled the fondant to have a "wood grain" then layed it on but I had too many blocks to do and re-mixing fondant would have made the marble effect dissapear. The second stack of lumber is baked from a 12x12 pan and also cut into 3 1/2 rectangles.

The X-Box controller is carved out of pound cake and is just sitting on top of the top of the PVC pipe. There is cardboard underneath and it just sat there perfectly.

Jacob's business card: cut out of gumpaste/fondant mix and dried overnight. Painted with food coloring/vodka mix and piped.

Birthday/Graduation Braces

This was for a birthday/graduation for a new dentist in our ward. We loved the way it turned out. We used a garlic press for the tassel and real wire for the braces with fondant brackets. We used chocolate fondant under the teeth. It was heavier than normal fondant so it made the cake slouch a little. It is a three layer 4 inch personal cake.

Castle Cake

This is the castle cake that we did for a boy in the ward. He likes castles and the color orange. It tuned out nice. We absolutly hate doing castles now. This was one of those cakes that you just have to push through. Definatly not one of our favorites. The stupid towers just took FOR_EV_VER! Good luck to anyone wanting to cover the wilton towers with fondant. The top level is foam board covered in fondant and pushed into the cake. We did figure out whe my fondant turned out so bad last time. You need to use the Walmart brand of sugar to make it work. The C&H brand just made it so dry. If you are going to make your own fondant use walmart brand marshmellows and sugar. Keep extra corn syrup and maybe some glycerin on hand just in case.

Rothko Cake

This is a surprize birthday cake for one of our visiting teaching girls. Her husband wanted a special cake just for her. She loves the artist Rothko and calla lillies. It is a chocolate cake with chocolate hazelnut icing with toffe crumbs. We made gumpaste canvases and painted them with full strength wilton coloring gels. Each canvas was a different Rothko painting. We made the calla lillies out of gumpaste. Edna's videos were the best tutorials on how to make them. We would have put more flowers on but we were planning on using a smaller cake when we made the flowers. This is our first for profit cake. It went really smothly and the painting was so much fun.