Christmas Storage

I can't believe it's been three full months since my last cake... I'm so excited to be using my new kitchen with actual countertops of space I can use to decorate! I don't have all of my cake supplies in their proper home yet (still working on unpacking and building storage). I cheated a little bit and bought wilton colored fondant because my right arm and elbow have been hurting, likely due to the many house projects of late... I just couldn't think about how my arm would feel after kneading four different colors of fondant. I found this cake idea on cakecentral.com. It took about a day and a half to make from start to finish. The bottom layer is a chocolate, chocolate chip cake. The christmas balls are french vanilla made in a Wilton mini-ball pan. The "box" is brown colored gum paste that I rolled thinly with the help of the pasta machine, the best invention ever...

For those of you that know me well, are you surprised I lined up the colored balls? I swear I did try to arrange them in a random way but they just didn't look right... :)

Here are some assembly pictures:

Prior to Box assembly- the gum paste drying

Ornament toppers, molded on top of a corn cob holder and added slash lines with a knife.

Fondant covered mini-balls...

I really liked the way the tree came out... as well as the Shellaway, although the name is so long I barely could fit it! My cousin Jason asked "can we shellac the shellaway ball and hang it on the tree?"

This is the cake ready for transport. I added the "box" sides when I got to my aunts house. I don't think it would have survived my driving ;)

One side of my awesome family.... We are missing one set of cousins & 2nd cousins... which would add 10 more...

Jeff's B-Day

I came out of hiding to make a special cake for my co-worker Jeff. Jeff is awesome and deserved an awesome cake... The only problem is I still don't really have a functioning kitchen, so I did the next best thing. Bought a cake and added a decoration.

Jeff has a saying at work "it's all about the blood" which motivates us to do our best to make changes to the environment for our kids in the study... Jeff probably didn't realize it a year ago when he said that saying that it would stick around to haunt him for his tenure on the study...

We surprised him today at work. Silly jeff, he thought we didn't know it was his birthday.... We have ways of knowing these things... The theme of his party was red foods- twizzlers, red (white) chocolate dipped pretzels, apples and of course cake!