Cake Endeavours

A coworker asked me to make this cake for two graduates last week.  Their school colours were green and yellow. This was a two layer 8" chocolate cake with salted caramel filling.  It's hard to keep a cake for boys from looking juvenile and girly sometimes.  Hopefully by sticking to circles and stars as decorations it was okay!

This cake was for a group of women at work for a weekend away.  They were also celebrating a 60th birthday.  Instead of putting 60, I was asked to put 16oC.  60 degrees Fahrenheit is the same as 16 degrees Celsius.  Who knew?!  I think that was an genius idea, definitely different. I misplaced my black velvet backdrop after my trip to Blue Mountain so I have been using my tablecloth for the last few pictures.  I did finally find it, right where I left it. This was an 8" two layer cookies and cream with butter cream filling. I love the how summery this cake looks.  

I was asked to make the cake for Sofie's baptism several months ago and at the same time I was asked if I do cake pops.  I've stayed away from them up until now.  I figured that they were a lot of work and not worth the effort.  However, I was willing to take a go a it with the understanding that this was my first time attempting to make them. I found this blog posting through Pinterest that was very informative.  If I can find the link to it again, I will add it.  She had definitely done her research which saved me a lot of time and energy.  I even went to Target (and here in Toronto they are horrible) and was quite surprised that they actually had the pans I was looking for.  Score one for Target; a first!  I was off to a good start.  I followed her instructions exactly. First lesson in making cake pops, don't use cooking spray to grease the pans. I should have used Crisco or Wilton's cake release.  They were really hard to get out of the pan and some got misshape

This past Monday one of my co-workers came to me in a panic asking if I could make a cake for her son's birthday to bring in on Thursday.  After the craziness of the week before, this was going to be much easier.  Of course I was up until 1:30 in the morning finishing the decorating, but that's besides the point. I made a 2 layer 8" vanilla cake.  In my soccer ball pan I pour about 2 inches of batter and baked that to make the giant golf ball.  Covered the ball in white fondant, then used a bouncy ball to make the dimples (I think that's the proper term) in the golf ball.  Finished off the decorating with the argyle pattern.  The little purple diamonds are why I was up so late.  I cut them out at the last minute to cover the seams of the white fondant.

Last week, well almost two weeks ago, I got a panicked text message asking me if I had time to make a retirement cake, in the midst of my 18 dozen cupcakes.  Why not?   Originally I was going to to roses as per Hibah's (panicked texter) request, but the retiring teacher's favourite colour is green.  Green roses just seemed odd.  So I took the opportunity to try my hand at the ribbon technique. I LOVE IT!!!  I would do this again in a heartbeat.  It's remarkably easy.  Well, thanks to the  YouTube tutorial .  It worked so well.  This was a 2 layer 10" chocolate cake with chocolate ganache filling.  It takes a lot of icing but it I love the look of it. I added a big white flower.  I've made this type before but this time I did one large, two medium, and one small layer.  It made the flower much fuller.  I really liked this one.  The final result.  The cake was weighed a ton with all the extra icing.

Last week I made 18 dozen cupcakes for my town hall at work.  Crazy!  We were kicking off (ha) FIFA fever and I was asked to add something FIFA onto each one. I made 9 dozen chocolate and 9 dozen vanilla cupcakes; all decorated with grass green buttercream icing.  I bought a container of multicoloured tooth picks that went with the FIFA colours and printed off a small mailing label with the FIFA 2014 logo on one side and the ball on the other. It is much easier to fold the label sticky sides together first and then slide the toothpick through.  This helps to eliminate creases in the label.

Yesterday Miss E's school hosted a fun fair.  It was a beautiful day.  Not a cloud in the sky.  I volunteered to do face painting for a few hours while Mr T took Miss E around to blow money on toys and candy she didn't need to raise money for the school.  It was a lot of fun.  I did a lot of butterflies and saw lots of smiles from the kids when I was finished. Both Mr T and I ended up with some wicked sun burns.  He on his freshly shaved head and me on my left arm.  We're quite a pair. For the fun fair, I also make a couple dozen rainbow cupcakes for the bake sale. Fortunately I was able to get an extra 1/2 dozen from the recipe so that we could sample some today and to allow me to get a picture of the inside of the cupcake.  I divided the batter into four containers and dyed one with electric pink, electric yellow, electric green and electric blue.  From the picture I could have used more electric green for the colour to stand out better.  For the icing I used plain

It's my 250th blog post!  I'm so impressed with myself that I've kept it up.  Never thought that when I took the Wilton intro cake decorating course nearly six years ago that I would ever be making cakes for family, friends and sometimes strangers on a regular basis.  It's my hobby that keeps me sane, most of the time. This past weekend I was honoured to make a cake for a granddaughter of my before and after school babysitter.  My brother and I had some amazing birthday cakes made by her when we were kids.  My personal favourite was my Strawberry Shortcake cake.   The request was for a mini mouse cake in chocolate.  I made a 2 layer 8" cake with chocolate filling.   I decided on pink over red for the decoration.  I love how the pinks turned out on the cake.  It's so hot in our condo that the bow was pretty dried out within a few hours. A very cute cake I must say. :)