Cake Endeavours

I had a team lunch today and volunteered to bring a dessert.  I found the recipe for  Mocha Toffee Crunch Cake  and thought it would make for a great dessert.  This recipe is definitely a keeper!  It is delicious! I was able to snag a piece to take home to Mr T to try. Cake: 8" 3-layer chocolate cake with mocha buttercream 

 I've known Abigail's mom since she was very little.  I was so honoured to be asked to do her birthday cake.  The family is thrilled to be able to celebrate with her in Ontario as they are here for a few months from overseas.   For the decorations I printed out the characters and creature power discs, cut them out laminated them.  The Wild Kratts logo I cut out on my Cricut along with the cake topper and the 5.  For the figureines, Abigail's mom dropped them off  and I added them on top of the "grass". Cake: 3-layer 8" chocolate cake with buttercream icing

 Keaton never fails to pick a fun theme for his birthday cake.  This year was no exception.  His request was to have an iPhone themed cake and Miss E was to pick out all the apps to go on it.   The app icons were fun to make.  I laminated them to make it easy to stick into the cake. Originally I had "Happy Birthday Keaton!" with a blue background but Miss E pointed out to me that he wouldn't be sending himself the greeting so I changed it to grey.  Thank you E :)  Cake: 6" 3 layer vanilla cake with buttercream icing

I was very excited to be asked to make a TMNT cake.  My first one!  I love doing cake toppers these days!  This one was one of the more tedious ones I've made but I am so happy with how it turned out.  Using vinyl instead of cardstock does make it so much more manageable though.  I swear I've seen the gummy pizza slices in the Bulk Barn or a dollar store, but when I needed them, they were hard to find.  Thankfully I only had to go to three stores to find these.  I'm sure they taste awful but they did the trick and Nick was very excited when he saw them on the cake. Cake: 8" 4-layer chocolate cake with mocha filling, buttercream icing, and chocolate ganache drippings.

For this sweet cake I pulled out piping tips that I don't use very often to make the very large sunflower on the top.  There was a lot of icing on the top of this cake; at least an inch thick, probably more.   The ombre effect on the sides of the cake turned out nicely!  For the centre of the sunflower I used chocolate icing for some extra flavour. Cake: 8" 2-layer vanilla with rainbow sprinkles and buttercream icing, lots of it!

I've known Joey since he was 5 years old!  I was so excited to be asked to make his cake for his 30th birthday.  He loves Marvel and Iron Man is his favourite character.    It was a cool day when I decorated this cake but we were coming off a crazy heatwave so the humidity was still very high in our place, which is why the red fondant is very shiny and very sticky.   The red and yellow decorations are gumballs which made for a fun addition to the cake.  I love how the cityscape cake topper turned out! Cake: 8" 3-layer cookies and cream with buttercream icing covered in fondant.

I haven't done a lot of fondant work lately as my style has changed and evolved over the past few years.  Also, the fondant I really liked is no longer available in Canada.  What I use now is great for covering cakes, it is not great for making decorations.  It can be really frustrating to work with.  I really wish I had taken a close-up picture of the lettuce/cabbage I did as I was really happy with how they turned out.  They should have been at the front of the cake.  Ha!  I did learn that the border around the cake board is called Greek keys.  I didn't know that they even had a name.  Of course, they have a name.   Originally, I hadn't planned on putting grass around the bottom and vines up the fence but as I was piping out the grass on the top my piping bag burst.  Icing was all over a portion of the fence.  Two lessons learned; one, stick with the more expensive piping bags and two, decorate the top first then the sid...