Cake Endeavours

A friend of a friend asked me to make a cake for her husband's birthday.  He has a beautiful speed boat that she wanted replicated in a cake.  We settled on a 9 x 13 cake with a smaller version of his boat on top.  This way there would be lots more cake.  I love the look of 3D cakes, but you can lose a lot cake in order to get the shape and look of the object. So, making a speed boat shape turned out to be a lot harder than I thought!  I had planned to make it so much bigger, but it just wasn't working.  Definitely not something I'd want to do again.  Hopefully I captured the essence of his boat.  I was able to add two front seats and a back bench along with the blue stripe down the front and "Charger" written on the sides.  I picked some new Wilton  fondant molds  from the Bulk Barn and used them for the border and sea shells.  Quite fun to work with.  Not too stressful either.

For my 3rd cake last week, I was asked to make a cake for an auction at my old high school, BHS.  The French teacher, who was actually my grade 8 English teacher and my brother's since we were in French Immersion, wanted a cake to outdo everyone else.  Enough said.  I can be very competitive when the mood strikes.  It usually doesn't matter what the prize is, just the title of winner is often enough.  So, it was not a problem for me to go all out.  Judy (when my brother referred to her as Judy the first time, I wondered who he was talking about and then I clued in that he was talking about Mme.) wanted a French themed cake with the Eiffel tower and a frog on it. I made an 8" and 6" tier, both chocolate.  The frog I made out of fondant.  I'm still not into making 3D figures but this was small and Googled polymer clay frogs to come up with this design.  Not bad if I do say so myself.  The Eiffel tower is made from a chocolate mold. Th...

My brother's business partner, Sherry-Lee asked me to make a cake for her in-laws' 60th wedding anniversary celebration.  She asked for a smaller cake in chocolate with a couple dozen mini cupcakes in vanilla and chocolate.  After that it was pretty much up to me.  I love getting full reign over the decorating.  I was able to bake the cake and cupcakes before heading off to Logan's birthday party last Saturday.  When we came home from the party I had to take a nap to recover from being up so late baking at Lindsay's. After my nap, I felt so much better and was ready to decorate the cake.  Mr. T and Miss E went to bed and I sat beside the open balcony door desperately trying to catch a breeze in the heat while I decorated the cake. Despite the heat it was actually very relaxing.  I had Golden Girls playing in the background.  Good times! :) The cake was iced in a pale green then covered in flowers and leaves cut out of white fondant. ...

It's hard to believe that this is my 4th cake that I've done for Logan to celebrate his birthday.  However, it is the cake that almost didn't happen. Normally, when I'm doing a cake I like to bake it 2 days in advance or at least refrigerate overnight before icing it.  When we arrived home on Thursday evening last week we could hear the generator going in the parking garage.  We just assumed that there had been a power surge prompting the generator to start up.  However, to get an elevator to come to L1 took about 10 minutes.  This meant that only one elevator was working with the generator going.  We got home and had full power.  Woohoo!  Then I went to get the water to mix the cocoa powder into and that's when I realised we had very little water pressure.  Didn't even clue in that that meant no water.  Crap!  A message came over the speaker advising that Toronto Hydro was on their way to fix the problem.  I thought, okay, I...