Cake Endeavours

This past week my maternal grandma turned 90.  She looks amazing.  So many friends and family came out to celebrate with her on Sunday.  It was a fantastic day.  My brother and his business partner at  Krumbs Breadery  did the sandwiches and sweet trays.  Which were super yummy.  I was in charge of the cupcakes and cake. For the cupcakes, I decided on carrot, lemon, chocolate and vanilla.  Carrot and lemon had a cream cheese icing while chocolate and vanilla had butter cream.  I made one recipe of each flavour and was able to get at least 2 dozen regular cupcakes and 2 dozen mini from each. Grandma loves her flowers so I went with a flower theme.  I called in my cousin Alexa to help with the decorating, who is an amazing baker and cake decorator.  We decided to have one colour for each.  Even did up a legend for guest to know what which flavour they were picking. We did have one yellow rose go errant on us and cou...

This year for Erika's birthday the theme was spa day.  A group of 6 year old girls getting to have in house spa treatment.  Her mom asked for a zebra cake to go with a giant shoe chair with a zebra print on it that was part of the spa day theme.  I found this fantastic tutorial:  How to Make a Pink Zebra Cake .  I even used the recipe provided. I love, love, love how this cake turned out.  It was so much fun to make.   I'll update the blog later when I get a picture of a slice of cake to see how the zebra print turned out.  Can't wait! Update: Picture of cake slice.  Turned out really well.  This is a picture of the top layer.  The bottom layer has lots more "stripes".

Last Friday I had the chance to meet up with some high school friends that I haven't seen in years.  It was a fun evening of catching up and eventually playing Euchre.  We had lots of goodies; slushies, chips, Gobstoppers and M&Ms.  So, I thought I would bring some cupcakes and it was the perfect excuse to use my cutters for the suites in a deck of cards. Super cute and super easy decoration to add.

Mr. T asked for something different for his birthday this year.  Something different from the Perfect Chocolate Cake.  *GASP*  This is the cake that our whole relationship is based upon.  The first time I made this cake for him nearly sixteen years ago that sealed the deal for him.  He was never letting me go.  So, when he asked for something different I was rather shocked.  Mr. T doesn't ask for much, so I got over it pretty quickly and set out looking for something new and different. Dr Pepper is his favourite pop and I stumbled upon lots of recipes for the cake and icing.  I mixed up various different ones to get a combination that I thought worked best and for ingredients that I had on hand. I made a lot of icing.  I reduced 6 cups of Dr Pepper to about 1/3 of a cup even.  I was just shy of being able to decorate the entire top of the cake with the "kisses".  If we weren't already late I would have pulled it off and start...

My friend Albena asked me to make this cake for a shower that she's throwing for a friend of hers today.  She came over this evening to help me decorate.  I'm not very good with people helping me.  I'm a little particular with my work. I'm usually just happy to have someone to chat with while I am working.  Her and Miss E were actually great help in punching out the flowers and leaves while I painted on the branches with some gel food colouring.  It was awesome to be done the cake early in the evening. Albena had sent me a picture of the cake and cupcakes she wanted me to replicate for a spring themed shower cake in red velvet.  This is an 8" two layer red velvet with cream cheese icing filling.  The baby is a girl, obviously, and her initials will be MM, hence the monogramming on the front.  Originally I wasn't going to put a border around the bottom but we had some extra cream cheese icing and Albena suggested dying it yellow and I have to ...

Karen's mom asked me to make this cake several weeks ago.  She has never had one of my cakes but went on my mom's word and her "brag book" on her iPhone.  My mom has a picture of every cake I've done in an album on her phone.  Thanks mom! :) Browsing through the pictures,  Janice's Birthday Cake  caught her eye.  She really liked this cake and wanted pretty much the same theme.  The only change was to add a camera on the top instead of a shopping bag. This was a 10" two layer Perfect Chocolate Cake with the PCC icing as the filling. When I went to print off my pictures for my silhouette shoes I couldn't find them.  Mr T was still sleeping and I didn't think it was enough of an emergency to wake him up to help find these pictures buried deep in some folder on the computer.  Instead, I went in search of some new ones.  Sometimes I can get pretty caught up in searching for the perfect image to trace out and end up wasting too...