Cake Endeavours

What kind of cake do you make for a girl who has three boys, is addicted to Coach purses, and decided to be born on Christmas Eve?  A girlie, elegant and as far away from Christmassy as you can get kind of cake. When I first saw the Rose Cake on I am Baker's bog.  I thought of Joy right away and knew I'd make a version of this for her birthday.  It is an amazingly simple technique.  I've used it on cupcakes many times, but never thought of applying it to a cake. I used Martha Stewart's Lemon Cake recipe.  I did a half recipe and used limes instead of lemons.  I forgot to halve the lime measurements, but it tasted really good, if I do say so myself.  The icing is buttercream but instead of vanilla I used almond extract.  I love almond extract; it can completely change the flavour. Happy Birthday Joy!

I know, it's hard to believe that in the 905 there are hockey enthusiasts that are not Leaf fans...they're out there.  At least these two cheer for another Canadian team.   I made a 10" two layer chocolate cake with Oreo cookie buttercream for the filling and crumb coat. Callum and Iain were impressed. :)

One of my co-workers is having her family Christmas today and ordered 4 dozen cupcakes.  The Cookies and Cream cupcakes are a floor favourite.  Instead of the mini Oreo cookie on top I punched out 2 medium holly leaves for each cupcake and added a red Smartie for the berry.

Another cake for a coworker...for the World's Best Book Club. This was a Lemon Cake  from Martha Stewart's site.  The icing is buttercream and I only added blue dye to but it turned green...

I made two dozen of these cupcakes for my co-worker. She requested the Perfect Chocolate Cake cupcakes with fondant on top.  I even cut out the centre of each cupcake to add the whipped cream filling.  I piped on the icing and then put funky circle designs on top. That morning on the subway ride into work I was staring at a girl's gift bag she was carrying and loved the design.  I thought that it would make really cool cupcakes.  The same day I got asked to make these cupcakes.  There was supposed to be one dozen blue and one dozen purple.  However, again, the purple was not my friend and was blue when I rolled it out, but this time it did not magically turn purple when I put it in the fridge over night like last time. Oh well!  I love the way they turned out and so did my co-worker.

Miss E's day care had a bake sale today so I made these cupcakes.  I thought that I could just spread on the icing for the glue without having to pipe it on since I was putting fondant over top, but I was wrong.  It actually took longer than piping and looked a little sloppy.  Fortunately the fondant covered most of the icing.  The snowflakes were punches that I got from Flour Confections .  For the mini cupcakes I piped on some chocolate icing and dotted them each with a Smartie.

Clearly I have a trend in the cakes I've been doing lately.  I really like the black silouettes and fortunately so do the people ordering them.  This cake is for a co-worker, she wanted the same flavour cake as Donna's , with blue fondant and shoes.  That's what I did.  I found different silouettes of shoes online, sized them all about the same and printed them off.  Then I traced them.  When I put the shoes on, there seemed to be a lot of empty space where the toes met and I was going to write in a shoe saying in between each set: 1. If the shoe fits, buy it in every colour 2. Cinderella is living proof that a pair of shoes can change your life 3. Two things you can never have too many of: good friends and good shoes But I chickened out and put little polkadots instead.