Cake Endeavours

 Here's a third grad cake for someone in my St. Paul's family.  I'm so honoured to be asked to do these cakes!  I love being able to help celebrate these special moments.  Alex is graduating from grade 8.  He requested vanilla flavour with buttercream icing.  Though I did add salted caramel icing as filling for some extra flavour.   I love how the two tones of icing worked out.  Though the icing was not cooperating very nicely in wanting to smooth out the way I wanted.  Grrr!  I used edible gold leaf for the first time for the decoration around the cake.  It was fun to work with; using a dry paint brush helped a lot. Mr. T and I took this cake out to Bowmanville tonight and then swung by to say hello to my parents.  For a Thursday night the traffic was pretty nuts!  The drive back was smooth at least.  Got back before lane closures for construction work. Congratulations Alex! "}

 This cake was for another St. Paul's graduate.  Eliza graduated with the Gold Medal in her graduating class for top marks in Disability Studies.  Inclusion is her passion for all people.   This cake was a three layer chocolate cake with salter caramel icing.  A popular choice these days!   For the cake topper I coloured a piece of 80lb paper with Copic makers in a rainbow pattern then cut everything out on my Cricut Air machine.   Eliza also enjoys her candy I was told so I added some Oreo cookies, wafer straws, fuzzy peaches (which I remember being a lot bigger!), mini M&Ms and tropical flavoured Swedish berries.  I fancied them up with some edible gold paint. The little grey car is for Eliza's actual car I made from fondant along with the gold heart to symbolize her big heart and her gold medal from school. Congratulations Eliza!

My church, St. Paul's United in Bowmanville recently held a virtual auction.  I donated a cake to be auctioned off.  The winner could choose the flavour and decoration.  Heather's mom had the winning bid and promptly ordered a cake to celebrate Heather's graduation. Heather's request was for a chocolate cake with salted caramel filling and icing.  A personal favourite combination of mine.  I cut out in vinyl and paper from my Cricut Air machine the giraffe (a request from Heather) and added a graduation cap, Trent University logo and the lettering.  I had Mr. T go out to Bulk Barn to find me the chocolate rocks that I sprinkled on the top of the cake (over the dirt, a.k.a. crushed Oreos) and set around the base as well. The scroll, trowel and book I made out of fondant.  On the book I added a few archaeology quotes: "History may be accurate, but archaeology is precise." "Archaeology holds all the keys to understanding who we are and where we come from....

I was asked to make a grad cake for 3 friends graduating grade 12.  The request was for an 8" cookies & cream cake. I hadn't made one in a long time.  It's Mr. T's favourite recipe to make as you throw all ingredients in at once which speeds up the process. To make the cap I used the Wilton baseball cake pan to bake some of the batter in.  For the board, I used a thin cake board and covered it in vinyl.  All the writing was done using vinyl cut from my Cricut machine. Congratulations Rachel, Hailey and Lauryn!

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.

These cute little cupcakes are for grade 8 graduation.  The school colours are black, white, silver and gold. I made 5 dozen vanilla and 5 dozen chocolate mini cupcakes in black liners.  Each was covered in white butter cream icing.  Mr. T found these awesome silver and gold Wilton stars at the Bulk Barn.  He is the best procurement manager. :)  I will definitely be using these again. 

Miss E had her graduation from grade 6 tonight.  *sob* One of the parents bravely hosted a class party in the condo party room so I sent Miss E down with a couple dozen cupcakes. I had leftover batter from the vegan cupcakes I made for the wedding so I just used that for the chocolate cupcakes and buttercream icing.  The Way to Go signs I made using my Cricut machines. The vegan cupcakes are surprisingly really good!

Miss E's class put on a play called "The Day They Parachuted Cats on Borneo".  The cats were dropped by parachutes to help control the mosquitos and rats but instead they ended up with lots of cats with no homes and nothing to eat.  A far cry from the type of plays we used to put on as 11 year olds.  Yikes!  Anyway, they were having a bake sale so Miss E volunteered me to make cupcakes. Originally I was going to draw a face on each cat but it looked really creepy.  Miss E agreed.  So we scrapped that idea and just went with the silhouette in rainbow colours. I made two dozen vanilla cupcakes with buttercream icing and placed a cat on each one.  They went over well with her classmates.

I was asked to do the university crest for the two graduates on a cookies and cream cake covered in buttercream icing. Of course their crests were pretty intricate.  The 3 lions on the Waterloo crest and the caribou and lion on Western crest are not edible.  I wasn't going to attempt to draw or cut these out.  Congratulations just fit with some finagling on the front of the cake.

One of Mr. T's coworkers asked me to do this cake for her sister that had graduated to be a dentist.  She asked that it has a dentist theme with money on it. This was a 6" chocolate cake covered in vanilla buttercream.  You can tell how humid the day was with the shine on the lettering.  The tooth, toothbrush and bills were made from fondant.

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!

Miss E took part in a weekly after school program at her day care for science and this past Thursday was the science exhibition.  For the celebration I was asked to make a "science" cake.  This is my interpretation of a flask.  Originally I was calling it a beaker but Mr. T corrected me and apparently this is a flask.  Only making it more obvious that science was not a good subject for me. This cake was easier to make than I thought it would be.  I made a two later 9 x 13 chocolate cake with buttercream filling.  Before I put the crumb coat on I put it in the fridge for 30 minutes to harden.  Then I trimmed the cake into the shape.  The extra pieces Mr. T took to work and were well received.

Fod Miss E'd end of year celebration at her day care I made a cake for the kids graduating from the Casa I and Casa II program.  They also did a celebration for the older kids, which included Miss E. This was a 9 x 13 two layer cookies and cream cake.  The layers baked perfectly even in the oven.  Unfortunately, they didn't come out of the pan so even!  The bottom layer looked like a massacre occurred but I put it back together, stuck it in the fridge and hoped for the best.