Cake Endeavours

This for Nelson's 10th birthday his request was for a Smash Brothers cake, in particular the character Mega Man.  I had to ask Mr. T to educate me on what and who Smash Brothers were.  I had no idea.  Thankfully, there is always Google. This was an 8" 3 layer vanilla cake with buttercream filling.  No fondant covering here.  Had to use my not so great skills at covering the cake smoothly with icing in the colour blue of Mega Man.  His head is on the top and around the base of the cake I did 10 different symbols representing various characters from the game.

My bride, Maria from last weekend asked me to make a cake for another store down in the beaches,  Cold Turkey  with their logo.  Originally I was going to have this cake done and delivered last night but then our plans fell through for today so I had more time to do the cake. This was a 9 x 13 two layer chocolate cake with chocolate filling.  I made the cake last night with the intention of cutting out all the decorations.  Instead I went to bed early and got up early.  I completely underestimated how long it would take me to do the logo.  Thankfully the cake wasn't needed until later in the afternoon.  Everything but the juice.com was traced and individually cut out and then pieced together. We all delivered it down to the beaches so we could enjoy an early dinner at the GOOF (a.k.a. the Garden Gate Chinese Restaurant) which is just across the street.

My last cake of the weekend.  It has been so hectic, I am so glad it is a 3 day weekend, well actually 4 day for me since I took Friday as a vacation day but that hardly counts as a vacation day!  For today, it was nice just to focus on one cake. This was a 3 layer 8" pumpkin spice cake with maple cream cheese icing.  The perfect cake for fall. For me, cream cheese icing is very hard to get a perfectly smooth covering where no dark spots are showing of the cake unless the icing is super thick.  Even then it has a tendency to start to droop as it it is not as thick as the butter cream.  Instead I try to work with it so I just took an offset spatula and spun the cake around slowly with the spatula pressed to the icing moving up in a spiral pattern.  Very quick and easy to do for a rustic look.  I scattered some fondant leaves on the top in various fall colours and some pumpkins around the bottom. I took this to my great aunt's for Thanksgiving din...

I was so excited to do Maria's wedding cake or cakes rather.  I even went out and bought 12" round cake pans, something I swore I would never do, but I am so glad I did! Each tier is a different flavour and with that I did 4 dozen mini cupcakes in each of the four flavours.  I bought these silver trays at the Dollarama.  They fit 4 dozen mini cupcakes perfectly.  All the liners were silver foil as well. I made little place cards identifying the flavours.  Thankfully it was a cool night as I was able to store them sealed on the balcony because there definitely wasn't room in the fridge! To deliver the cake I put the bottom two tiers, chocolate and vanilla together.  I was worried by doing a 12" cake that it would take a long time for the centre to bake and outside would be dry.  However, my chocolate cake recipe did not fail!  I did a double recipe and got the two 12" layers and 4 dozen mini cupcakes out of it.  I did th...

My first groom's cake!  I'm so excited.  I've been wanting to do one for so long.  Maria, the bride knew exactly what she wanted as the groom's cake.  They own  The Ecig Flavourium  and this is the groom's favourite hexohm box. This was a 10" coconut lime cake that I cut in half to stack together to form the box.  The neck was made with two cupcakes.  Splattering the "blood" was a lot of fun, messy, but fun.  I love this picture of the cake.  It's far better than the one I took at home before we went out to deliver everything. I wasn't really impressed with the recipe I used for the coconut lime.  It was more like a pound cake texture than "normal" cake.  At least the cream cheese filling was good! Next time, I will go back to my stand by recipe.  Don't mess with what works!  Lesson learned.

I'm so excited that I got to do my first Frozen themed cakes for sisters Chloe and Sophie.  Each cake is a 3 layer 6" cake with butter cream filling.  Their mom gave me some figurines to add to the cake, thankfully.  I could have replicated Olaf, but Elsa and Anna, especially with this weekend's craziness it wouldn't have been pretty. I admit I am a bad parent, I've only seen the movie once and didn't even realise there was a Frozen Fever.  I had no idea what snowgies were.  Chloe's cake was all vanilla but each layer was a different colour; purple, teal and white. Sofie's cake and one layer of chocolate, then purple and teal.  Snowflakes and sunflowers went around each cake. When their mom came to pick them up I realised I only had one 8" cake box.  Ack!  Fortunately I was able to find another box that actually worked out better as it was taller and I could cover most of the cake.

As a last minute add on to the wedding I'm doing this weekend I was asked to do a cake for the rehearsal dinner for the bride's sister and brother-in-law.  Why not?  What was one more cake at this point?  Her request was chocolate and that it said Happy Anniversary.  She thought it was their 15th anniversary and I had it cut out ready to put on the cake and fortunately I saw on Facebook that it was actually their 16th. My favourite cake.  I did a 3 layer 8" cake filled and covered in my chocolate icing.  I added the rosettes with a little purple and white heart on each one.  Miss E happily licked the bowl for this icing. Mr T and Miss E delivered the cake on the Danforth for me in Greek town. While I got to work on the next cake order.

This long weekend I took on a crazy amount of orders: 9 cakes, 16 dozen mini cupcakes and 2 dozen standard cupcakes.  It's Miss E's birthday and it doesn't even include her cake. I had to make a spreadsheet to make sure I had all the ingredients I needed.  I forgot to include the icing sugar, cream cheese and pumpkin puree in this picture.  I will need 40 eggs, 4kg sugar, 10lb butter, a 10lb tub of Fondx, 7kg of icing sugar and 31 cups of flour. I also made up a timesheet from now until the cake is delivered on Saturday afternoon.  Wish me luck! Update:  I had all the ingredients I needed, only dropped 1 egg on the floor, took a 20 minute nap mid Friday afternoon and Saturday night I was asleep by 10pm.