August Babies

There are 5 family birthdays this week including my own. I've been wanting to make this blue flower cake for a while and decided to attempt it for my birthday. I found the idea on cakecentral, there are so many talented decorators out there. I'm glad to borrow their creative cake ideas.
This a chocolate cake covered in buttercream. I made the flowers on a flower nail and then froze them to make them easier to get on the cake. I had a few placement issues but covered them up with extra icing.
I made a second cake for a party on Sunday. I used the leftover pansies and chocolate butterflies I made earlier in the week with Michelle's help. Overall, another cute cake...

Happy birthday to Mom, Katie, Nicole, Luke & Me!!

Roses ready to go into the freezer


Pansies awaiting the freezer as well


Start of the assembly. I moved the roses around a little and covered the mistakes with extra icing.


Adding the pansies

Threadcakes contest

Check out the winners of this contest.

The Cakes are based on Threadless T-shirt designs.

There are so many talented cake decorators out there it is unbelievable...

I had to share this:
http://www.threadcakes.com/home/winners

Cupcakes with Lauren

My cousin came to hang out with me for the weekend. After an eventful day of walking around the city we decided to make yellow cupcakes for a family picnic the next day. We made fondant flowers and leaves and used leftover buttercream icing I had in the fridge. All of the icing was different colors since it was leftover from different cakes so we tried to change the colors to match. Lauren did a great job pipping the base icing and making the flowers.

Lauren molding the flowers


Drying Flowers and Leaves


Lauren Pipping the base of the cupcakes


Cupcakes waiting for their flowers

Red Velvet Baby Cake

Was asked to make a red velvet cake for a friend of a friend's baby shower. The special order of this cake was that it had to be red velvet in memory of the expectant mom's grandmother. Easy enough, I thought... I used my largest pan 12x 18 x2 and mixed the first three boxes of red velvet mix as I normally do. caked cooled, flipped it out of the pan. No problem. I then mixed the next three boxes for the second layer except this time I ran out of regular eggs so I used all egg whites. Apparently when you are making a large cake you need the eggs to make the cake less crumbly... When I flipped the second layer onto the already crumb coated bottom layer it broke apart. It was 10:30pm. I was sad... What to do. The next day I went to the store to buy more mix. Guess what- Not everyone sells it anymore. I went to 6 grocery stores including my favorite Giant until I found it at the shoprite down the street... Yikes! This time I didn't have any problems when I flipped the cake over.
The rest of the cake went smoothly. I made three batches of icing- it took 9 cups of icing to cover this large cake. I smoothed the butter cream, added fondant circle accents, did a transfer pattern using white chocolate for the baby carriage.

The cake tragedy- a crumbled mess



The mess- cleaned up. I think I'm going to try cake pops with the crumbles...


The second cake-in one piece waiting to be flipped onto the bottom layer


The bottom layer crumb coated


The back of the chocolate transfer


Fondant circle cut outs


Circles drying


The carriage flipped onto the cake. In hind sight I should have made it bigger but you live and learn...


The carriage and circles- I thought it needed a little more so I added a circle of stars around the carriage, you can see on the final picture at the top of the blog

Farewell and a Birthday

Today is my Boss's last day as well as a co-worker's birthday. I made two special cakes. The cake I made for Eileen, my boss, looked more like a wedding cake then a fairwell cake... oh well. I tried to make it look pretty but the rings just reminded me of wedding rings, it was too much white etc... My sister Michelle was hanging out with me tonight and encouraged me to add color to make it less wedding like... It looks better with the green. Thanks shel...
The second cake is for Tori. I've been obsessing over hydrangea's (my favorite flower) because they are in bloom know and I'm anxious to get my tree for my house... I covered a small cake with hyrandrangea leaves that set on top of a 2" deep- 6" circle cake. I also made little cupcakes and added some color and leaves to them to wrap around the side. This was good practice for the birthday cake I'm thinking about making for myself...

Here is the cake ready for transport. I used the rubber mats to keep everything in place...


My sister was hanging out with me tonight and took this shot: