Cake Endeavours

Miss E had her graduation from grade 6 tonight.  *sob* One of the parents bravely hosted a class party in the condo party room so I sent Miss E down with a couple dozen cupcakes. I had leftover batter from the vegan cupcakes I made for the wedding so I just used that for the chocolate cupcakes and buttercream icing.  The Way to Go signs I made using my Cricut machines. The vegan cupcakes are surprisingly really good!

This is the first time that I've done a naked cake.  It isn't as easy as you'd think it would be.  The cake has to be very straight and level.  There is no room to hide mishaps with icing! This 3 tiered cake consisted of a 10" vanilla cake with chocolate filling, an 8" chocolate cake with salted caramel filling and a 6" Victorian sponge cake with whipped cream and strawberry jam filling.  The whole cake is crumb coated in vanilla buttercream. As some of the guests were vegan the bride order some vegan cupcakes.  I have a very easy chocolate cake recipe that happens to be vegan and then made the icing using vegan Becel and almond milk with some almond extra.  These were amazing if I do say so myself.  I took the extras to wine night and they were a huge hit.  I will definitely make these more often.

For this wedding cake I did a 10" square chocolate cake with salted caramel filling; an 8" lemon cake with cream cheese filling and a 6" marble cake with salted caramel filling. We delivered this cake to the Albany Club downtown and put it in the fridge so I did not get to set it up.  I believe they were going to add some fresh lilies to the top.  As easy as it is to only have to cover the cake in white fondant and then wrap a ribbon around it; it is difficult to make sure there are no marks or cracks in the fondant as you can't hide them with decorations.  Thankfully it wasn't too humid out and we just missed the rain for the delivery. The bride sent me this cake a few months later.  Love how it turned out for the reception. 

When I was asked to make this cake I had not yet seen the movie.  So Miss E and I had a movie night and watched this together for research. I had watched a video on how to make the cake before I saw the movie and didn't make any sense to me.  Now the under water or the parting of the water makes so much more sense. For the cake I made two 8" rounds and cut one in half and layered them to build the wall of water. For the water I dyed the white fondant with different shades of blue and didn't completely blend it all together to give the multicolour look.  For the ocean floor and sand I used graham cracker crumbs. For little Moana I printed off and fussy cut the figuring and coloured her in using my Copic markers. The fish and seaweed I made out of fondant and added pearl dragees as bubbles.  For the white caps on the waves I just added buttercream icing using a tooth brush.

I'm so happy that Beauty and the Beast is popular again and was thrilled to get to do this themed cake.   This was an 8" and 6" tiered vanilla cake with butter cream icing.  For the ruffles I used tear drop shaped cutter and overlapped them for three layers to make the skirt of Belle's dress. For "KEIRA" I used the Disney font to cut out the letters.  Very thin and finicky to work with.  But definitely worth it. Fallen rose petals from the rose I made for the top of the cake.  Just like in the movie. I also made 2 dozen mini chocolate cupcakes.  It was so humid that the cupcake liners came right off so I called them bite size cakes. :)

This was a last minute request to a very busy weekend but I couldn't resist doing this cake for my friend's great-nephew. This was a 9 x 13 two layer chocolate cake with chocolate ganache filling.  I used Oreo cookie crumbs for the dirt.  One of the corners didn't turn out so well, so I made it look like it was under construction.  Colin's mom was adding trucks at her house to the cake.  I used one of my favourite little cars as a demo.

What a fun cake this was to make!  Love to do a whimsical cake like this.  Of course when it came time when I needed my black wire for the bumble bees do you think I could find it?  I was able to find green though and it didn't look bad at all. The 10" and 8" tiers were vanilla and the top was chocolate.  To make the bee hive I used half baseball mold to bake the cake in.  The top tier is going to be the smash cake so it is covered in icing rather than fondant.  After several attempts I was finally able to get the look I wanted for the bee hive. To ensure the bees stayed on I added a toothpick for strength.  Then with the edible black marker I added the dotted trail. Thankfully I have a chevron cutter but it's not fun to add on to the side of a cake, that's for sure!