Cake Endeavours

When I was planning out how to decorate this cake I was really at a loss.  Ben's wife, Rachel, asked me to make the cake for his birthday celebration that she was having while they were home visiting from Germany.  This was going to be a surprise.  The theme was to be gangsta.   The night before I sent a message out to the group for some ideas as Pinterest wasn't cutting it for this theme!  Thus the themed evolved into Snoop Dogg, which produced a multitude of ideas. Mr. T went out to lots of dollar and party stores in search of gold chains and for one with a big dollar sign.  No such luck.  Instead he ended up at the Bulk Barn coming out with gold coins and edible gold spray. This was such a fun cake to do.  I was able to watch some great Christmas movies while working on it.  Not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon!  This was a 9" three layer Perfect Chocolate Cake. I found this awesome silhouette of Snoop Dogg o...

This was the first order I did while on the mend with my back.  It was the perfect one to ease back into.  Two dozen vanilla cupcakes with red 50s on top. These were topped with vanilla butter cream icing followed by a white fondant disc with the numbers on top.  I used two different fonts for some variety. I did learn for the curly font it is much easier to get the numbers to come out if you let the fondant sit rolled out to dry for 15-20 minutes.  It went much faster and they held their shape better too.

I'm doing some catch up on my blog postings.  At least I'm not as behind as I originally thought.  I had to take a break from baking and even cancelled two orders for the first time ever.  It's harder to bake with a bad back than I realised. Fortunately I am on the mend and slowly getting back into the groove. I made this cake before my "episode" for a co-worker's sister's 50th birthday.  It's been so long that I've forgotten what flavours I did this cake in.  Yikes!  I believe the bottom tier which was an 8" two layer chocolate and the top was a 6" two layer cookies & cream.   On the board, you can barely see it, but it does say Happy Birthday Ani. I am loving using the 1/2" white boards.  I can add ribbon around the base for extra decoration.  I still have a bunch of silver foiled boards to go through but I might just switch over to the 1/2" boards only going forward.  

In October we had a bittersweet farewell for our Senior Director.  I was asked to do a cake for her.  Her favourite colour is red and she loves flowers.  I thought that this design would be appropriate.  I really love this technique.  It's very simple and quick to do.  Just requires a lot of icing.  This also makes it easier to cut as the slices are defined by the ribbon. I did add a banner that had the quote "Where flowers bloom, so does hope." This was an 8" two layer cookies and cream cake.

When I realised that Nelson's birthday party was on a weekend when I already had 3 cakes to do I sent his mom a message asking Nelson to go easy on me for his theme.  He likes to give me a challenge.  Thankfully his party theme was movies and I could do a cake along that theme too.  Woohoo!  This basically gave me carte blanche. Remember how I bought the brown fondant instead of black?  Yeah, well, I still needed black fondant.  I realised this morning that I was going to have to dye my own black fondant.  So, I didn't get off so easy.  I had black dye all over my hands.  It's still under my nails.  Nelson is not a fan of fondant either so for extra punishment I decided to ice the cake in red icing.  It's so much fun trying to get a true red colour.  Thankfully, Americolor Super Red really is super! Nelson is an amazing kid and totally worth the effort.  Happy Birthday Nelson.  Hope you have an amazing year.

I was booked to do this cake months in advance and almost completely forgot about it.  Thankfully Chloe's dad dropped off the figurines to me at work a couple of weeks ago which reminded me.  Yikes!  Thank goodness this cake was keeping in style with other cakes I was doing this weekend.  I made a big batch of pink icing and pink fondant that worked for three of my orders. This was a 10" two layer chocolate cake.  I was so grateful that Chloe's mom had sent figurines for me to use.  I would never have been able to replicate them, rather it would have taken many hours to do.  Buying the figurines is way more cost effective and what kid doesn't want to have more toys to play with??  Each toy had little holes in the bottom which were perfect size for sticking a toothpick in.  It made it very easy to stick them into the cake. At 9pm last night this cake was picked up.  I finished decorating around 8:50.  Afterward, I fla...

Yesterday I did 4 dozen cupcakes for a baby shower.  I just love how these turned out. I made 2 dozen vanilla and 2 dozen chocolate.  For the icing underneath the disks of fondant I used the rose technique as it makes a nice flat surface for the fondant to rest on.  Since the sex of the baby is unknown I was asked to do half in pink feet and half in blue.  These little baby feet cutters are so adorable.  They came with two sets, this is the larger of the two.  With the smaller set I could use them on mini cupcakes.  Too stinking cute! The dark brown fondant was thanks to an error on my part.  I had actually ordered black fondant but picked brown by mistake.  I didn't realise this until after I had opened the tub.  Fortunately for this request Marg had asked for brown for the boy cupcakes and I was able to use it here.  I would never have been able to dye it to this really nice dark brown shade on my own.   ...

When I was asked to do this cake I knew I already had two orders for this weekend but because the request was to do the roses I knew it wouldn't be an issue.  While this technique takes a lot of icing it is very forgiving and very quick to do.  This was before I remembered that I also had two birthday cakes to do.  Fortunately I had a vacation day that I could use yesterday to prepare.  I have since implemented a better day planner system.  For this cake I did an 8" two layer vanilla cake with pink butter cream icing.  I love doing these roses.  If you make a mistake you can swipe off the icing and start again. 

This cake is the first of 5 that I am doing this weekend and it was just picked up, next one will be picked up in a few hours.   For this cake I was sent a picture to see if I could replicate it.  The anticipation before opening the file always gets to me.  I always worry about how crazy it is going to be.  When I opened this one I was really happy.  I knew exactly what I was going to do.   I love how this cake turned out.  I even used cutters that I've never used before.  I love the tiny daisies.  I even had the pink icing for the centre of the flowers left over from the martini cookies ready to go. This was an 8" two layer marble cake.  Instead of the traditional marble effect I layered the vanilla and chocolate a couple of scoops of batter at a time without any stirring.   Now onto getting cake number two ready to go.

For Thanksgiving even though I wasn't tasked to make any desserts, I really couldn't resist contributing a little bit to the Coles family dinner.  We LOVE our desserts. Even though these are not my mom's famous Halloween cookies I'd say they are a close second.  The "burgundy" ended up looking more like purple then a dark red, but that's what happens when I don't need purple, I get a lovely shade.

Miss E's birthday was this past Sunday.  Because it was Thanksgiving weekend it was jammed packed with family get togethers so we didn't plan a party for her yet.  We started her birthday with a special breakfast of her choosing, Chocolate chip Eggos, vanilla bean ice cream, whipped cream, bacon, Skor bits, and cherries on top. For lunch we were going to a restaurant with Mr T's family for our Thanksgiving and Miss E birthday celebration.  I couldn't go without a cake for her but I didn't want it to be a crazy cake so I made a 6" chocolate cake with buttercream filling.  I covered it in white fondant and added the sentiment.  Then I handed Miss all of the edible markers for her to decorate as she wanted. She thought it was a great idea and had fun decorating it.  I just added little dots of colour when she was finished. The final result.  She did a great job.  The waitresses at the restaurant thought it was pretty cool which made ...

A coworker asked me if I did decorated cookies and I cringed.  I explained to her that I did have an awesome recipe,  Wilton's Sugar Cookies  with the best icing,  Cookie Crazie's Corn Syrup Glaze Icing .  However, to make them, it was a royal pain with really great results.  This did not deter her.  So, then I explained that for the time and effort the cost would be pretty high.  She asked, "How much?"  I gave her a quote and she said "Let's do it!" Alrighty then... While rolling out the dough to me is such a pain, it is really worth the effort, every few years.   My task was to make and decorate 25 cookies however I wanted.  I cut out 30 cookies with the anticipation that there would be a few casualties.  Decorating cookies requires a lot of piping bags and lots of tips!  I did have one break in the baking process.   For the decorating I did the black first then the inside of the glass with the finis...

Keaton's request this year was for a superhero cake.  I am so glad I bought the superhero cutters from Etsy.  They have been a great investment.  They save me so much time for decorating. This was a two layer 10" chocolate layer cake with chocolate filling.  To cover seems between the different colours for the background I added the black stripes and some stars.  Orange is Keaton's favourite colour, so I couldn't leave it out and added it in with the sentiment. Putting the cake together took a little longer than I expected, so we were a half an hour late to the party.  I had the best intentions to be on time for a change.  Oh well!

Last Friday I took a vacation day to do the cake and cupcakes for this wedding.  The request was to make 10 dozen angel food cupcakes and a 6 inch cake all decorated with various shades of orange. I ended up rolling and cutting out 264 flowers and 132 little green centres!  Phew!  This and putting the flowers together took the better part of the day.  I was able to plow through most of season 3 of Once Upon A Time. :)  There were four different shades of orange. For the 6" cake I ended up making a vanilla cake as angel food cake wouldn't have been able to take the weight of the flowers and all the stems.  I added the leaves after to fill in the spaces. I was sent a few pictures from the wedding.  I love how the look all set up.  

I'm finally caught up to this past weekend's activity in updating the blog.  The first cake on the menu was for a coworker (they really are super supportive of my hobby) who was having a wedding shower for a friend of hers.  This was a destination wedding, in Mexico, so that was the requested theme.  I was sent a picture and I kept pretty much to it. This was a two layer 8" coconut lime cake with coconut lime butter cream filling.  The flip flops, and shells were made from silcone molds.  I sprinkled some brown sugar over the cake to make it look like sand. Mr T was kind enough to deliver this cake while he was out on errands for me.

Last week we had a celebration for a co-worker whose wife is expecting their first child.  The theme was children's books.  There were so many books to choose from; I don't really have a favourite book that I can remember from my childhood, unless it was a Judy Blume book!  Not really appropriate for this occasion though. Tom is one of the two men in our group and until recently was our only guy.  So, I thought that this theme was appropriate. It doesn't help that I was catching up on Once Upon A Time, watching the 3rd season on Netflix.  Peter Pan was heavily featured in the episodes that I had watched so he was definitely on my mind. This was a two layer 8" Oreo cookies and cream cake with buttercream filling.  I know this is one of Tom's favourite flavours and went perfectly with the decorating on the cake.

I made these super delicious cookies from yet another find on Pinterest:  Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies .  I made a double batch and used the large ice cream scoop  and I think I got about 60 cookies from it. I also saw on Pinterest this amazing idea for packaging, CD/DVD paper envelopes.  They fit in perfectly.  I did put a square of waxed paper behind to help stop the grease from the butter from spreading.  I made the little thank you stickers to go on each of them. I will definitely be keeping this recipe handy.  It's great that you melt the butter first. That way you don't have to wait to bring the butter to room temperature before you start baking.

One of my co-workers recently celebrated her 35th anniversary for working at the bank.  We had a celebration for her and I was asked to make her cake.  I know Cris loves chocolate so of course I had to make the Perfect Chocolate Cake. This was a 10" two layer chocolate cake with the PCC icing for the filling.  I used my new letter press set that is very much like the Candy Crush lettering.  Congratulations is a VERY long word, 15 letters in case you didn't realise it.  I cut out a bunch of varioius coloured fondant dots and tried to put them on as straight as possible.  It's a lot more time consuming than one would think. I love how the letters turned out though.

Another treat that I made for the Run For the Cure bake sale fundraising.  I love caramel corn and found this recipe on Pinterest:  Salted Caramel Popcorn .  It is super easy and so good. Now, we don't have an air popper so I used Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet White Popcorn and omitted adding the salt from the recipe.  I made 3 recipes and got 25 bags.  Next time I will try it with an air popper.  I hope it doesn't take away from the flavour! We sold Clover's crack fudge along with the caramel corn and sold out within 15 minutes!  It was awesome.

Today was bake sale day and we wanted to do something extra special.  I made 6 dozen pink velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing.  As a special surprise I put a Hershey's hug in the bottom of each one. I cut out 72 large daisies, 72 medium daisies and 72 black centres two nights before so they could harden.  Mr. T and Miss. E were kind enough to drive me downtown last night to drop them off so I wouldn't have to lug them on the subway.  I would go by myself but there is no where to park.  Mr. T doesn't mind doing the drive when there is no traffic.  We were able to get there and back in less time then it takes for me to commute in the morning.  GRR!! We have a fabulous floor and partners willing to support the cause every week.  I bought these great clear containers from  Creative Bag  in Pickering for individual take-away containers.  Another big hit with packaging.

This year my coworker, Clover (maker of the amazing fudge) and I are champions for our team to do fundraising for CIBC's Run For the Cure.  Almost every Thursday since mid July we have been having a bake sale.  A couple of weeks ago we did brownies and fudge. I made the brownies and Clover the fudge.  She also made the chocolate pink ribbons that are on each brownie. We like to go all out with the packaging too.  So I made 80+ two inch origami boxes for each piece to go in.  They were a big hit.  I used my mom's recipe that we have been enjoying since we were kids.  I can't imagine using any other recipe.

Another special boy turned 4 last month and I was so happy that I was asked to make his cake.  Especially a superhero cake.  I had just purchased some cutters that would be perfect for the cake.  Etsy is an amazing site to shop on. This three tiered (8, 6, and 4 inch) was all vanilla which I didn't start until almost 10pm the night before.  Mr. T stayed up until almost 2am keeping me company.  At about 3am is when I started to put everything together.  It was awesome to see it come together.  I went to sleep at 4am extremely pleased with the outcome. The decorating is based on a picture that Meghan had sent me.   For the Hulk's fist, this was one of the cutters I bought.  I cut out two fists to join them together with toothpicks in between so that I could stick it on the top of the cake.  I made this first, and then with the impression mat pressed it into the cut out to get all the details.  I left this to harden over night...

Godzilla 2014 is one creepy looking creature.  It amazes me what a 4 year old boy likes.  I know his mom gets great joy (hahaha) out of telling me what her boys want in their cake.  You never know what they are going to pull out of their hat.  Definitely stretches me out of my comfort zone. I decided on a 9 x 13 cake.  Originally I was going to do a footprint shaped cake but then I realised that I would end up cutting away half of the cake.  Instead I went with footprints through the grass and the cityscape around the border.  Four footprints to represent Desmond turning 4.  Where does the time go?! Where the boys tend to go wild in their theme, the flavour choice is very disappointing to their mom.  Vanilla.  It's so hard because it's not one that I like or one that Mr. T likes.  I can never tell if the cake turns out okay.  I have issues with trying to steer people away from choosing vanilla, but not with kids, the...

Earlier this summer Mr. T's brother got married and last month they had a celebration BBQ.  I was asked to make the cake.  They wanted it to include music and to be black, white and red. The bottom tier was chocolate with chocolate filling and the top was vanilla with salted caramel filling.  I found this awesome ribbon and Michael's.  I love that it's white on black.  The music notes really stand out.  To add the red, I bought some silk carnations to make the topper.  All the kids that were there got to take home a carnation, including Miss. E.

I'm catching up on some posts. This cake was for my brother's birthday celebration at the end of July.  I almost forgot about it.  My brother loves Reese's Peanut Butter cups so I thought this recipe would be awesome for him.  I found the recipe  here . The mousse torte was amazing.  However, I do not recommend traveling for almost an hour, then stopping for a family dinner for another hour and then heading to your parents house with the dessert in the trunk (even if it's in a cooler).  The torte had unset and kind of flopped when you cut into it.  Next time, I'm going to freeze it and serve it as a frozen dessert, then I won't have to worry about it flopping.

Today we had a family celebration for my Grandma J's 89th birthday.  One of her favourite colours is yellow and I know she loves carrot cake.  So that's what I made. This was a 3 layer 9" carrot cake with lots of yellow cream cheese icing.  Cream cheese icing is not easy to work with when you're covering a cake.  It goes on really easy but when the cake is dark as all cakes that go with cream cheese icing tend to be, it's hard to cover that up.  After the third layer I was out of icing and time.  I added all 89 daisies that I cut out and some green leaves for extra colour. My cousin bought this really cool candle for the cake.  When you light it, it opens up slowly into this flower.  It looked really pretty.  You can get them on  Amazon . Grandma J getting ready to blow out her candles. :)

Last weekend  Krumbs  catered a wedding at the Newcastle town hall. I got to do the wedding cake and cupcakes.  Miss E was staying with my parents so I was able to work Friday night and finish Saturday morning without any distractions.  Mr T took himself to bed super early on Friday night, so it was just me and P.S. I Love You playing on the TV while I worked away. The wedding cake was an 8" and 6" tiered vanilla flavoured cake with salted caramel filling.  Purple is a really hard colour to do for me in fondant.  I really don't understand it.  I did see a YouTube video a few days ago that made me feel a lot better.  The instructor said purple was really difficult with Americolor gels.  She uses Wilton gels for purple.  Next, time I will try them out.  I was able to get the purple as dark as I could.  Couldn't quite get it to match the ribbon exactly.  I still how it turned out. On the way to Newcastle I realised abo...

I made these very cute cupcakes for a bachelorette party before I went away for vacation a few weeks ago.  I love the combination of pink, black and white.  I added bright pink pearls to the centre of each of the two layer flowers for the toppers.

A couple of weeks ago friends of ours got married and our wedding gift was the cake, or cakes rather.  The wedding had a games theme so each cake represented a game. Fortunately the wedding was on a Sunday and I had all day Saturday to decorate.  Mr. T kept me company watching a marathon of Night Court on Comedy Gold while I decorated into the wee hours of the morning.  I was actually done by 2 am, which I thought was pretty good! Cake #1: Puzzle Cake Ben and Rachel provided their cake topper for this one.  I loved it.  All cakes were 2 tiered, 8 inch square.  This one was chocolate with chocolate fudge filling.  Originally I was doing a rope of black fondant around the base but it was turning out as I wanted.  Instead I opted to used a 1/2 inch ribbon around each base. Cake #2: Scrabble Cake Ben is an avid Scrabble player.  Years ago I attended an evening at the club where Ben played thinking I was a decent player.  Recr...

A coworker asked me to make this cake for two graduates last week.  Their school colours were green and yellow. This was a two layer 8" chocolate cake with salted caramel filling.  It's hard to keep a cake for boys from looking juvenile and girly sometimes.  Hopefully by sticking to circles and stars as decorations it was okay!

This cake was for a group of women at work for a weekend away.  They were also celebrating a 60th birthday.  Instead of putting 60, I was asked to put 16oC.  60 degrees Fahrenheit is the same as 16 degrees Celsius.  Who knew?!  I think that was an genius idea, definitely different. I misplaced my black velvet backdrop after my trip to Blue Mountain so I have been using my tablecloth for the last few pictures.  I did finally find it, right where I left it. This was an 8" two layer cookies and cream with butter cream filling. I love the how summery this cake looks.