Cake Endeavours

Picture a 2 tiered cake covered in purple roses, deep purple ones on the bottom, graduating to pale purple as we reach the top of the cake.  That was what Lori's birthday cake was supposed to look like.  Up until 1:00am the night before our weekend getaway to celebrate her birthday that is.  I went to bed blissfully proud of myself.  I was going to be ready on time for my 10:00am ride.  Even if I wasn't I knew I would be able to take an extra 15 minutes or more to finish up.  My plan was to get up at 8:00am, make the icing and start piping out the roses.  It would have taken me maybe 45 minutes.  Enough time to pack and shower.  Everything else was ready to go. At 6:12am I was rudely awakened by a text message.  From the birthday girl no less asking if I had seen Hannah's message on Facebook.  Hannah was my ride.  I knew right away that Hannah must be sick. :(  She was out of a fun girls' weekend getaway and I was out of...

I can't believe Logan has turned 8!  He is such an adorable handsome little man.  His wish this year for his cake was Minecraft!  Again a game I still have no idea what it is about but that's okay.  The game has a cake in it and I thought it would be fun to do a replica of that for Logan's cake. This was a 10" 2 layer chocolate cake with green buttercream icing on the inside.  Logan recognised it as the Minecraft cake right away which meant I nailed it. :)  This was actually a very easy cake to decorate.  I covered it in white fondant, added the red squares and did a trim in brown to look like the "cake". I've mentioned before, I believe every kid loves seeing their name and age on their cake, which I always try to add.

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.