Little Mermaid Coral Cake

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.

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.

More Cakes...

Ryan's 5th B-Day Cake: 2 6" circles for the bottom tier with fondant & fondant cut-outs. On the other side, there were coins and also a star that said "5 UP". The Mario was fun to make and it was Ryan's absolute favorite part of the cake. He even ate some of it. The top tier was a Barbie skirt pan that I trimmed down a tiny bit to make it a little more round. I found a cool trick to make a good red color for fondant! I used extra pink fondant that I had lying around, put in some burgandy to give it a deeper red color and then put in a lot of no-taste red and the color came out great.

Quinn's 18th B-day cake: 3 inch deep - 10 inch cake cut in half for the cookie layers and a 2 inch deep - 9 inch round for the middle. I should have cut the 9 inch down about 1/2 - 1 inch because it looked like a quadruple-stuffed oreo! I covered the 2 10 inch halves and then just iced the middle layer with swiss meringe to make it look like real Oreo stuffing. I iced the middle layer before layering in the bottom 10 inch but there was still a little clean up after I got it on there. Plus, I had 2 filling layers to cover up once it got on the cake. There was no supports necissary although the middle layer did get a bit squished. I refrigerated it so the middle layer wouldn't crack. If I was doing it for a client, I probably would have put supports through the 9 and bottom 10 inch tiers just so the middle layer wouldn't crack. All the detail work is actually in fondant. No piping. I didn't feel like making royal icing and trying to get it the exact color as the fondant so I just rolled very thin ropes of fondant on my wonderful Ateca fondant mat. That mat really makes rolling ropes a lot easier for some reason. It's far from perfect but it turned out pretty good. I LOVE doing "Imitations of Life"-type decorating. I think it's my favorite medium.

The "Terrible Twos" Cake...

So I had a hard time deciding what kind of cake to make for Trevor. I asked myself: "What does Trevor like??" Of course the first thought in my head was "Making messes." ..and then it hit me..."THE TERRIBLE TWOS!! It was so obvious that I'm surprised it didn't hit me earlier. I call Trevor my Beautiful Monster. Everyday he thinks up some way to make the biggest mess possible in the shortest window of time possible so I thought this cake was pretty appropriate.

As you can see, the scene is of Trevor making one of his disasters. He's apparently put his stuffed animal in the sink and turned it on and now it's overflowing, put some keys and a phone in the toilet, unrolled the toilet paper and spilled paint everywhere. Trevor thought it was pretty hilarious. If I had all the time in the world, I would have make some royal icing for the water and had that spilling out of the sink and put it in the toilet but I was lazy so I just painted it blue. The little handles on the paint cans are the only non-edible part and were made out of a really thin wire.