Cake Endeavours

The first time I met Meghan was at my surprise 16th birthday party.  She was 8 years old, the daughter of my uncle's new girlfriend.  Sadly, they parted ways eight years later.  During that time Meghan and I spent lots of time together.  She would sleep over in my room at residence and my apartment.  Fond memories of Boxing Day sleep overs! It is hard to believe that more than 20 years later (yeah, 20 years!) from my birthday party Meghan got married. I was very touched when Meghan asked me to do her wedding cake.  She sent me a picture of the cake she was interested in having.  I scoured the web for ideas on how to do it.  Fortunately, I was able to find this fantastic step by step  Birch bark tree tutorial  and went from there. Last month Meghan and a friend, who is also a bride to be, came over for cake tasting to decide on the flavours.  Meghan decided on lemon and lemon cream cheese icing.  My fridge smelled heavenly y...

We were super busy this weekend with two weddings we couldn't go to Desmond's birthday party.  However, I couldn't not do his birthday cake.  He's the youngest of our gang and I can't believe he's 3 years old!  Unfortunately, he was very insistent on having another Thomas cake which meant his mom, Joy, couldn't stump me with a "difficult" cake.  Ha! For Desmond's cake I made a 6" two layer Perfect Chocolate Cake, then covered it in fondant for the face of Thomas.  I also made two dozen chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing.  Joy, wisely skipped ordering vanilla.  The crowd is VERY happy with the chocolate.  I wonder how many she hid away this time? A mom needs her secret stash! Mr. T was my delivery guy Friday evening while I worked on the wedding cake for the next day.  

A while back Tracy asked me to do a cake for her husband Sam's 40th birthday.  She specially requested a Tardis cake.  Never heard of Tardis before, ever!  I've never seen an episode of Doctor Who before, so it would explain my poor education on the show.  All I had to do was Google "Tardis Cake" and a plethora of pictures and links popped up. Fast forward to three days ago, I started really looking to see how I was going to create this cake.  Fortunately for Pinterest I was able to find this FANTASTIC  Tardis Cake Tutorial  and I was set.   Amazingly, I read through the whole tutorial far in enough in advance that I had time to do the base of the cake.  I used a 12" thick white board from  Flour Confections  and followed the instructions in the tutorial.  This took me 15 minutes to do on Thursday night.  I was super excited with the results.  I put it away from the wandering paws of the cats dry for two d...

Yesterday we made our annual trek out to Indian Point, about 20 minutes outside of Picton for a gathering of friends and family from St. Paul's.  Sunday there is always a potluck lunch.  I usually bring chili, which I did, so that we would have leftovers to put on our hotdogs and dinner time.  Yum!  I also made some mini cupcakes with leftover batter from Jim's cake and cupcakes.  I also had left over black icing. After I piped that on I decided to add some decoration as they looked a little Halloweenish. Of course at 11pm I decide that I'm going to put on the ladybugs on a leaf. I cut out 24 leaves with my cutter, that was at least quick.  For the ladybugs I made 24 red balls for the body and 24 smaller black ones for he head, joined them with a bit of water.  I pressed a line down the middle of each body then added black spots with edible marker. 

Ever since I can remember poking fun at someone hitting a milestone birthday has always been a favourite past time of mine.  I know this will come back to bite me since I am getting closer and closer to celebrating my 29th birthday for the 11th time but until then I will enjoy the ride. Joy's fiance is turning 40 and we celebrated this past Saturday.  We all joined in at poking fun. There are so many fun getting older cake ideas on the internet, but I went with the "older than dirt" theme.  The chocolate cake was supposed to be covered in the PCC icing but when I made it, because I did a batch and a half, I think I forgot a cup's worth of icing sugar.  When I iced the cupcakes first the icing was too runny even stone cold and I had a lot less left over than I anticipated.  So, I added more icing sugar and combined some butter cream icing I had in the fridge.  This turned the icing into a pale brown.  I added some black dye to make it darker but ...

Last week was my brother's birthday and when we were growing up my parents would have a big family get together to celebrate.  It was really just an excuse to get everyone together during the summer.  These parties were always lots of fun.  It wouldn't be complete if Geoff didn't run into the house crying at least once when he heard a train whistle go as a train was going through town.  It was a riot! These days it's pretty hard to get the family together. In the past years we haven't been able for even our immediate family to get together for his birthday.  This year it worked out even with some bonus visitors. Since I've never actually made a cake specifically for Geoff, I thought I would at least ask what kind he would want.  He went with cookies & cream.   Normally I like to use whipped cream to ice the cake but with the heat and traveling I wasn't sure if it would hold up so I went with butter cream instead.   Bei...