Cake Endeavours

For this family BBQ we celebrated my brother's 40th and my Uncle's 60th birthday, which combined turned into a 100th birthday.  Carrot cake is a family favourite so I stuck with it. I kept the decoration simple for this cake with a couple of beer mugs to cheer them on. The birthday boys of Ireleand Street!

At work we had a potluck fundraiser for CIBC's Run For the Cure and I of course volunteered to bring cupcakes.  You can tell how humid it was by how shiny the chocolate icing is.  Somewhere I have a chocolate mold for the ribbons but for the life of me could not find them so I improvised and made "ribbon" out of strips of pink fondant.

It's hard to believe that my baby brother is turning 40 this year!  So, when my cousin planned a big family BBQ I decided to bring a carrot cake covered in cream cheese icing as one of the desserts and to celebrate this milestone. The intent of the icing was to have an ombre effect on this 3 layer 8" carrot cake using lots of cream cheese icing. I know it's one of Geoff's favourite; any vessel to cream cheese icing really. He's a huge Star Wars fan and saw this idea for a cake topper which I knew would be perfect.  I cut out 3 layers of card stock on my Cricut machine and glued them together and finished it off with a couple of skewers to stick it in the cake. One of my favourite pictures!

This 10" 2 layer cake was for the day after the wedding for Alli and Spencer.  I am so late in finally updating the blog that I can't remember what the flavour of the cake was.  I do believe it was lemon with cream cheese filling; that's my best guess! Hopefully, this will teach me not to get six months behind in updating. :( Mr. T and I delivered this one to Alli's parents' house.  I love going along with Mr. T sometimes for deliveries as we get to venture into areas of the city we may not have been before.  This took us to Broadview south of the Danforth.  The century homes are so beautiful with tall trees shading the streets you forget you're in the city.

I love how this cake turned out!  I love doing wedding and anniversary cakes.  I also love adding bling. For this 25th wedding anniversary cake the 8" bottom tier was 3 layers of chocolate cake with chocolate fudge filling.  The 6" top tier was 3 layers of vanilla cake with butter cream filling. As much as I love that it's finally getting warmer here, I do not enjoy the humidity.  As soon as you bring the cake out of the fridge when it's covered in fondant it starts to sweat and you have to be so careful not get anything on the cake.  Thankfully, it was too humid to finish decorating the cake.  All the non-edible decorations are tacked on with pins that are easy to take out when you're ready to serve.

For the grand re-opening of a school I was asked to make 12 dozen vanilla cupcakes and 1 dozen gluten free.  Below is a small sample from the assembly line! Thankfully, one flavour in this quantity goes much faster to get ready versus different flavours.  It helps that the batter is the perfect consistency for scooping into liners.

For Mother's day this year, I wanted to try something different.  Apparently, different means, crazy multi-step, multi-ingredient and time consuming. This dessert required the following: - Phyllo pastry, used store bought - Chantilly cream, made fresh - Macaroons, store bought from  Charmaine's Sweet Studio  (highly recommend) - Meringues, made myself.  Note:  Only use fresh egg whites, not from a carton or you end up wasting your time and ingredients to start over! - Chocolate ganache, made fresh  - Brownies, store bought 2 bite brownies - Strawberries, not Ontario grown :( They aren't ready yet) There are numerous YouTube videos on these types of cakes to follow.  I chose to use Phyllo pastry instead of using a cookie recipe because I didn't want to worry about it breaking and how it would be difficult to cut without breaking it. It was a lot of work!  But totally worth it for my mom and me!  It was really good....