Talent Show

Here it is finally.... it only took a month to post it. This cake was for our ward talent show. The theme was "Every good gift is from God." which was written on the tag hanging off of the gift box bow. They wanted all kinds of talents showcased. It was a lot of fun to do and a lot of work. I took these when the cake was put together at home so it looked better when we got there. When they announced that it was time for cake there was a line before we even got there to cut it. They were all very excited to eat it. There was a strawberry cake with whipped buttercream and pinapple filling (SO GOOD) and a lemon with rasperry filling, and chocolate with fresh strawberry filling. Notice the artist pallet as the cake board. Gabby again. The crazy one.

Little Mermaid Coral Cake

owl baby cake

BudKitty

I did this for Dave's Boss who just had a baby boy. It is the logo for the company. They named him McGuire. This one was a really fun cake to do.

Purses

Here are the different designs that we came up with. The theme is "Purse-onal Enrichment" and the colors are black and white. I think my favorite is the polkadot one. These would be super cute in color. Gabby and I are going to be selling these on etsy.

Mini Purse Topper

Gabby and I are making purse cupcakes for enrichment next week. We need to make 75 (sheesh). This is the easiest way that I came up with to do them. We wanted something that will stand up but not take forever to do. Here are the steps to doing them. It looks like a lot but its super easy.

1. Gather Materials: Fondant, Large and small circle cutters, rolling pin, tiny flower cutter, drogees (sp?) and your handy dandy scraper.

2. Cut small flowers out of thinly rolled fondant

3. Cut purse body with lg circle cutter out of 1/2 to 3/4 in thick fondant.

4. Use scraper to cut the top and bottom off of the circle. More off bottom than top.

5. Smooth out edges

6. Cut purse flap with sm circle cutter out of 1/8 to 1/4 in thick fondant. Also cut strips for handle and roll into snake.

7. Get top of purse wet and flaten one end of snake and press onto top of purse.

8. Put sm circle on top of purse. Measure the length of the handle and cut and secure the other (flattened) end of handle under the flap.

9. Lightly press flap down to secure.

10. Add tiny flower and drogee in center. Done

You can also luster dust or add stitching to the flap if your super ambitious. You can also use the food coloring pens to draw designs or whatever. This is just the basic structure. Just thought I would share.

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.

for amelie

The inspiration

The result

Baby Shower cake for my best friend April. I used the baby's monogram for the front.

Garden Cupcakes

These are some of the cupcakes that we are going to sell on etsy. Gabby and I made them for her daughters preschool graduation. She said they were gone in under 5 minutes. We made the cupcake liners out of scrapbooking paper. The flowers, ladybugs and bees are made out of gumpaste.

Graduation

This was for my sister-in-law Heather's graduation. It has gumpaste cap and shoes and flowers with ribbon.

Cupcake Mania!

If I had it to do over, I wouldn't have put the folds in the "cupcake liner". I would have only done the lines with my mini pizza-cutter tool thingy.

Just for fun...

I was trying a new lemon cake recipie the other day and I was feeling a bit..."inventive" that day so this is what I came up with. It is a lemon cake with a blueberry filling (hence the fondant lemon and blueberries on top). I iced it by taking a 1M tip and just doing a shell border all the way around. I thought it was kind of cute and super fast and easy. I'll post the "Sour Lemon" cake recipie once I perfect the recipie.

Jasmine Cake

Here is the cake that we did for my neice. It turned out so cute. The only thing was that I put it on the wrong way (it had been speared with a paintbrush and we had to repair it). That should have been on the back. It was still cute. I like to make charachter cakes that represent the character rather than stick a toy on top. I think we did a good job of capturing the essence of Princess Jasmine.

rainbow trout cake

This is the most amaizing cake that we've made. totally loved it, we did a great job, heather is awesome ( even though she didnt want me to do the scales on the fish, but of course i didnt listen to her), we actually made two cakes that day and it was fun making them.

30th B-Day

Sorry, these are really bad pics but I LOVED this cake. Rarely am I really, genuinely happy with a cake but I loved this one. The wife that ordered this told me that she wanted a tiered cake and told me that she wanted to incorporate all of his favorite things into the cake. We chose a blue/silver color palate to put it all on. The only think that I would have changed is that I would have made it viewable 360 degrees but I only had 6 things to put on! There were 6 aspects that are in 2-D. 1. Guitar Hero:That guitar was freakin' awesome! It was so tiny and so like the real guitar Hero guitar. The guitar was my favorite part. I stuck it on a toothpick and stuck the toothpick in his leg to get it to stay there. 2. Pitsburg Steelers: He's a huge fan. She wanted the logo on there somewhere but I made the whole helmet instead. I was happy with it. 3. Water skiing: He only skiis on one ski but I thought that would be wierd to just have one ski on there by itself so at the last minute I had the idea to make a pull cable on there and just stuck the ski right on top of it. 4. Weightlifting: I was really worried about how the heak I would incorporate this on the cake but I think it turned out pretty good. I cut out different sized circles and stacked them on top of eachother then cut them in half. I put a toothpick in them and stuck them in the cake. 5. that he's turning 30 of course, hence the big 30 on top of the cake. I made it and the stars out of a fondant/gumpaste mixture. 6. He is a really sucessful computer software salesman for Motorola so we put their logo on there too. It was a lot of random things to put on there but I think it all came together really well. The blue was a really good background color.

Like I said, these are really bad pics. It looked much better in person.

Bee Cake

Here is the Bee cake from last night.

I know its not perfect. It was definatly a learning experience.

What I learned:

Dont put too much frosting on under the fondant - such a mess

Dont spray the fondant with water unless you want spots

Use a firm cake for carving

Chill, Chill, Chill the cake

Make sure your cake stand is big enough

If it doesnt look right do it over again

If you use cheesecake as a filling freeze it to set not refrigerate

If you are doing a 3 layer cake it is best not to put too much filling in so that it doesnt all squish out when you layer it.

Do everything up to your crumb coat the day before and get a babysitter

Lemon-Lime Cheesecake Cake is the best flavor combo in the world!!

Fondant Bees

My friend Gabby came over and helped me with these super cute bees for my cake on Tuesday. I love how they turned out.

Enrichment Night

Here's the cake and cupcakes I did for enrichment night. The heel on the shoe looks weird because I dried it on a plate and the surface of the cake was no as even. OH WELL! I'm not obsessing about it or anything. You know me, it's not bothering me one bit. (Yah right!)
Here's the little shoe that I got for you beth, heather do you want one too?

Cupcake...Cake

My friend had me replicate this birthday decoration into a cake and cupcakes. It was actually way fun. I bought the cupcake cake pan from Wilton and it's pretty cool. I was even going to put dark purple fondant swirls on the buttercream but when I went to look for the dark purple fondant that I had made, I only found blue. The purple turned blue on the Fondex! Weird. I LOVE the candle on top. I actually make giant cupcakes for my friends b-day's now because it's so easy. I always make a cute candle topper. They are my new favorite thing right now.