Jim's MBA

Congrats to my friend Jim on obtaining his MBA from St. Joes! Jim's Wife, Kris (my childhood neighbor) threw him a party and asked me to make a cake. Kris and I have reconnected in the last year, talking about cakes and things. She has made some cool cakes for her son's birthday. I think I might have convinced her that she can do a frozen butter cream transfer as well... Can't wait to see what this year's cakes will be...

Kris sent me some picture samples of the hawk. I was going to attempt the block lettering of the HAWK but opted to do the more traditional script writing. After I placed the frozen butter cream transfer of the hawk (not an Eagle- like Jim's dad thought, nor an Arizona Cardinal as my Aunt Kay thought...) on the cake and did the writing I thought it needed more so I made some cluster of stars to fill in the white space. Cake was marble. I could have done a little better on the marbeling- it sort of looked like a chocolate cake on top of a vanilla. Next time I will mix more.

The cake, almost finished. It needed more so I added the red stars.

This is the hawk filled in with icing. Essentially a frozen buttercream transfer is coloring in between the lines with icing. I outline the drawing of a reverse image and then fill in the colors. Freeze it for an hour and the flip over and put it on the cake.

This is the image I used for the cake

That's it. The next cake will be next weekend for Lilly's 5th birthday. It will be my first barbie cake... Can't wait to make it!

Here are some pictures of Kris's handwork:

Christmas Bell

We celebrated Christmas a little later with my dad's side of the family this year. The 11th is the official last day of the Christmas holiday season in the catholic religion so we were safe, we just got it in.

This cake was unofficially a test cake for my niece's birthday cake. She wants a barbie cake for her birthday. I practiced making the skirt by baking a cake in my large papered chef glass measuring bowl. It worked surprisingly well. I thought the cake was going to be overly dry since it was in the oven for about 80 minutes but it wasn't. Yeah...

I originally intended to make a big looped bow for the top of the cake but unfortunately that didn't work out. I didn't form the loops correctly, too much of an "end" to the bow and I tried to make another batch of fondant but I had my first fondant disaster.... I think my house is so cold the marshmallow cooled before the confectionery sugar could get incorporated. So... I went with plan B which were red roses and detailing around the bottom.

My Mistakes- One was the looped Bow that wasn't meant to be ... and the other was the fondant that just didn't happen, no matter how long I mixed. The powder on the right was all suppose to be in the lump of marshmellow on the left...