Cake Endeavours

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.