Cake Endeavours

The request for this cake came by way of Googling Super Mario Cakes.  Quinn's mom happened upon the Super Mario Cake I made Miss E for her 5th birthday and found my Cake Endeavours Facebook page .  She inquired about a cake for her son.  I was very excited.  She even liked the Neapolitan idea for the three flavours of the cake.  This cake was a 3 layer 8" cake covered in blue butter cream icing, then decorated with fondant decorations.  I did the lettering for QUIINN in the same colours as MARIO. I also did 2 dozen Oreo cupcakes and a dozen chocolate with chocolate icing, for the grown-ups.  So, the problem with not covering a cake in fondant is that it's really hard to get the icing perfect.  Sometimes I just can't leave alone and I try to make it smoother, only to have it look like it does above.  I don't know what I was thinking because I normally strategically place decorations over these imperfections.  For some reason I didn't this time and of

Luca for his 8th birthday requested a Transformers cake.  His favourite character is Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots.  For his cake, I did a 10" 2 layer Perfect Chocolate Cake with butter cream filling dyed blue.  I used the latest version of the Autobots emblem for the top. I was supposed to bring the cake in on Thursday but that was the day that Sears was coming to look at our fridge so I said that I would deliver the cake in the evening.  Well, the weather was pretty nasty and I am a total wimp when it comes to driving in the snow, especially when I have to go west of Yonge!  Fortunately, Mr. T offered to drive it up for me.  He's definitely a good guy to have around. Luca was very happy with the cake!

My week started off on Monday waking up to a fridge that quit keeping things actually cold.  Fortunately, we have a balcony and after a very warm weekend the temperature dropped so that we could put everything out there.  It is amazing how you don't realise how much you actually use an appliance until it's gone.  You have to plan what you need to get in advance or you decide that maybe lemon juice isn't required in the rice tonight because the lemons are buried somewhere in the wagon. Imagine how much fun it is when you have baking to do!?  It's a challenge but it's doable. Tonight, I needed to bake some chocolate chip cookies for my cousin and his girlfriend as a thank you gift.   There are thousands of chocolate chip recipes.  But in homage to my favourite show of all time, Friends, I chose to use the Original Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.  The One with Phoebe's Cookies episode is a classic.  Monica is desperately trying to figure

This year for Michael's birthday his request was for a Minecraft themed cake.  I had not idea what Minecraft was and could only think of the classic Windows game Minesweeper.  Fortunately his mom sent me a few pictures of what he'd like and of course Google offered lots of pictures of different Minecraft cakes. My friends are very good to me and let me run with the theme however I like.  Michael did specify that he wanted a Creeper face on it so that's what I decided to do the whole top as.  It was a 2 layer 10" chocolate cake with buttercream icing dyed green.  I covered the sides in Oreo cookie crumbs to make it look like dirt.  Then rolled out a 10" square of black fondant for the base of the creeper face.  I did four different shades of green, cut out eighty 1 inch squares.  I should have put the black base on first before I put the tiles on because when I lifted it on to the cake it started to crack and break apart.  Yikes!  Fortunately, fondant can be f