Cake Endeavours

For this cake I was asked to make it to include purple, music and an iPhone.  This one I designed on my own.  Started with a 10" chocolate cake with chocolate fudge filling, iced in butter cream and covered in purple fondant.  Purple continues to be a colour I struggle with.  This is the darkest I could get it to go after using two thirds of a bottle of gel. At least it was obviously purple for a change! For the lettering I added the yellow polka dots to make it look like it was on a marquis.  The piano keys start on the side and come up over the top.  I used an edible black marker to add the black keys.  I cut out lots of stars in various size and added music notes in black marker. At first I wasn't going to add the iPhone as I wasn't sure how to incorporate it into the theme.  So, I made a little iPhone with some apps on the "screen".  Miss E recognised it as an iPhone so I figured it passed as a good interpretation.

One of my coworkers asked me to make a cake for his girlfriend's and her nephew's birthday.  The idea was to have one cake but to represent both of them.  I thought about doing two different themes on the cake but I really didn't like that idea.  You might as well do two separate cakes, in my opinion. My inspiration came from a cake that I've long had on my "Cakes I Want to Try" board on  Pinterest .  I made an 8" chocolate cake with salted caramel filling, iced in chocolate fudge icing. The cherries, I love how these turned out. So, to make it appear as if I made two cakes.  I added Happy Birthday to Karyn on one side. And Happy Birthday to Sammy on the other. I suggested that at the restaurant if they sat across from each other it would give each the illusion that they had their own birthday cake. So happy I got to try out this design.

This cake was for a coworker's husband's 50th birthday.  His favourite beer is Molson Ex.  I've heard of it before but never actually paid attention to what the labeling was like.  For fun, I made a stubby version with the classic label. The cake started out as a 10" x 10" 2 layer chocolate cake.  I trimmed off a 2 x 10 strip and used it to form the neck of the bottle.  I iced the cake in the chocolate icing then put it in the fridge to set.  Originally I was going to cover it in white fondant and then paint it with chocolate edible dye to make it look like a glass bottle.  Before I did that, I tried painting over the icing first to see if it worked.  It gave the cake a really nice sheen that looked like glass. I loved the way the Instagram picture made it look like a picture taken in the 70's. To finish off the cake I made a "bottle cap" and added Happy 50th.

For our family Easter dinner this year I made a carrot cake.  This was a 3 layer 9" cake with cream cheese icing. I loved the Instagram shot so I'm using it in my blog.  My inspiration came from a cake I found on  Pinterest .  My cake wasn't quite as high or my egg cutter was larger.  Because I was using cream cheese icing it was off white so I didn't want to put just white eggs all around.  Instead I used different colours including some marbled ones of all three colours.  I took some of the extra icing and dyed it green to add some grass as trim around the bottom. These little ducks are not as whimsical looking as I'd hoped but they were cute none the less.

I have some catching up to do on my blog posts.  My laptop died, it has been replaced and I'm slowly navigating around Windows 8.  I've only wanted to throw it across the room once, so far. :) I did these cupcakes several weeks ago for our senior director.  She's off for a few months recovering from surgery.  We had a team get together to wish her well and I was asked to make some cupcakes.   I wanted the cupcakes to be "happy" like and what better way than with coconut lime cupcakes? Vicky had given me these liners a while ago and I thought that they would be perfect for this occasion. Then I cut out pink and orange butterflies to add to the top of each cupcake.  To finish it off I added a little flower and yellow pearl to the butterfly.

Yesterday I went to a baby shower for one of Mr T's cousins up in Barrie.  It was fun to see his family for Miss E to spend time with them.  I was so excited to make the cake for the bee themed party. I pinned this  Bee Cake  on Pinterest to emulate.  I thought it was so sweet.  The whole cake was vanilla with buttercream filling with an 8" and 6" tier. The little bees were super easy to make.  I bought a silcone mold from  Flour Confections .  After they hardened a bit I took a yellow edible marker and coloured the body of the bee; then added black stripes.  At midnight on Saturday I was not in the mood to make the black balls around the base of each tier.  Fortunately I found this perfect ribbon in my scrapbooking supplies and two minutes later I was done.

This was an 8" two layer vanilla cake with buttercream icing.  The pink roses were a little more pink than I had intended.  I just can't seem to wrap my head around the fact that dye gets darker in icing after a while.  It does not with fondant. And sometimes, I should really take a picture, look at it on the computer and make changes if needed.  This would have been a really good idea with this cake.  I did not centre the lettering at all! *sigh* On a bright note, I followed the instructions in the YouTube video,  How to Make a Rose Cake , from I am Baker to do the roses and it worked amazing.  Before I started decorating from the centre at the top.  This time it was from the bottom up.  I was very happy with the results.