Surprise Gene!

This is the birthday boy:The top of the movie reel is a cardboard cake circle covered with fondant. Use cookie cutters to cut oval's and replaced the grey with black. Notice one of the ovals is larger then the other... Yes, that was a mistake, I used the wrong cookie cutter by accident, Oops!
All the accents packed up and ready for transport:
Popcorn made out of mini marshmallow with yellow and brown food color powder
My incredibly messy workstation after finishing this cake...
Denise threw an incredibly awesome and wonderful surprise 40th birthday for her husband Gene. It gave me another excuse to practice making a cake... Denice is my idol in terms of organization for party planning. She has an incredible eye for detail and always makes great party food. It was fun to hang out with friends and eat!

The cake was inspired by the party invitations. I found this cake from CakesByLJ and she e-mailed me a link to the directions. I love the cake central website- Everyone is always so nice!

What I liked about the cake:

1. The overall cake, I was really pleased with the way it turned out.

2. The popcorn made out of marshmallow was fun!

3. Used luster dust for the first time with the stars, it was a little messy but looked good.

The lessons learned:

1. The sun will fade fondant.

2. Use royal icing instead of butter cream on fondant accents, it should adhere better and not change colors or bleed into the fondant.

3. For fondant to stick it needs either icing or water to adhere to a surface. It doesn't just stick to things...

Denise gave Gene guitar hero and rockband for his birthday. We had a great time playing and singing along. The picture below is Rachel jammin out on the drums and showing us her "rock on" face. She is such a rockstar!

On a random note... This is a picture of the first pansies I've ever grown from seed to actually live and flower! I'm so proud I had to post this picture...

A Father's Day Fish

To celebrate father's day I made my dad a cake with a fish on it... I'm not sure which my dad likes better- hunting or fishing... but it's fishing season so I choose a fish. He is also wearing a t-shirt that say's "I'd rather be fishing with my grandchildren". The fish on the cake is a small mouth bass (I think), I got the image from a fellow decorator on cakecentral- Bethallen.

For the past few years, once a year, I've gone fishing with my dad. I love it. It's peaceful on the water, the sun is usually shining and occasionally it's exciting because you catch something! I enjoy the time spend with my dad...

This cake is all buttercream icing. I used a new chocolate cake recipe that called for sour cream and chocolate chips. I still used eggwhites and applesauce. The fish is a Frozen Butter Cream Transfer. I added some pictures of the progression of filling it in. I start with the outline and then build the colors from there. I need to figure out how to make the plaque a little thinner so I don't have to back fill with so much icing...

This is the original image I outlined in black...



Then Filled in Red...

Added Green and WhiteAdded more icing to strengthen Filled in the rest of the background, smoothed it out and then covered it with blue icing, the same color as the base of the cake. Placed in the freezer for about an hour until it was hard.

Ray of Sunshine

I made a cake for Jackie, one of the ray's of sunshine that helps to make my work life managable.

I missed the birthday party that they had for her on Friday so I brought her a cake this morning. I choose the bright yellow flowers because I feel they represent her.

This is two 9" cakes yellow cakes covered in buttercream with MMF accents. The cake is filled with Red Raspberries filling.

Note* I had to get a new counter for the site. For some reason the old one went blank. I have 400 visitors with the old counter... This new one is pretty cool, tracks the visitors from all over the world. We'll see who stumbles across my site...

A going away bouquet

Leigh and Juli are leaving work. It's all very sad... So I made a bouquet of flowers to cheer up the mood.

I was in the craft store looking through a cake book (can't remember the name) on Saturday and came across a cool cake in the shape of a long bouquet of flowers. I took a picture of the page with my camera phone (of course a store employee walked by as I took the picture... and if you know me, I was anticipating I would be getting into trouble for stealing the idea, kicked out of the store etc... but luckily that didn't happen) and went home to recreate it.

I made a strawberry and applesauce cake using no oil and mostly egg whites. It's covered with a thin layer of butter cream icing and then in marshmallow fondant. The flowers are also made with marshmallow fondant. It tastes much better then regular fondant so I'm glad this new recipe works. I added some mounds of royal icing under the leaves to give them some movement and to help hold them into position. I added some gumpaste flowers I had made the previous week as a practice with a new mold I just got. The cellophane around the outside was meant to look like it was a fresh bouquet they just opened up...

If I would do it again... I would keep the leaf colors in the same family of green- I used olive, leaf and kelly- would stick with just two and blend them a little differently. I would also choose two contrasting colors for the flowers to help make them pop out.

Overall, I'm happy with the cake and might try to do this again for another special occasion.

Naomi's Little Birthday Cake

Made a little cake to celebrate Naomi's birthday. Used Gumpaste flowers and buttercream icing to cover a pineapple Yellow cake. I experimented with a new cake recipe from the cake mix doctor cookbook. I also made cupcakes with the remainder of the batter to have on hand for some dinner guests coming over this week. Can't hurt to have ICOE (in case of emergency) cake in the freezer :)

Sponge Bob

Here it is, a Sponge Bob Square Pants cake and it isn't for a child... It's for a principal who is retiring from one of the schools I work with. The food service staff at the school is putting together a special good bye for the principal and I wanted to contribute a cake. I'm happy with the way he turned out but he took a lot of time... I think a frozen buttercream transfer would be a better way to go next time.

The base is Buttercream and the sponge bob is marshmallow fondant that i made this morning. It was easier to work with today vs the previous time I made it but it still needed a lot more powdered sugar as I worked with it.

I added brown sugar and a few water plants, I could have done more but I was running out of time. I also didn't want to mess up the cake by writing on it so I made a paper banner.