Cake Endeavours

When I realised that Nelson's birthday party was on a weekend when I already had 3 cakes to do I sent his mom a message asking Nelson to go easy on me for his theme.  He likes to give me a challenge.  Thankfully his party theme was movies and I could do a cake along that theme too.  Woohoo!  This basically gave me carte blanche. Remember how I bought the brown fondant instead of black?  Yeah, well, I still needed black fondant.  I realised this morning that I was going to have to dye my own black fondant.  So, I didn't get off so easy.  I had black dye all over my hands.  It's still under my nails.  Nelson is not a fan of fondant either so for extra punishment I decided to ice the cake in red icing.  It's so much fun trying to get a true red colour.  Thankfully, Americolor Super Red really is super! Nelson is an amazing kid and totally worth the effort.  Happy Birthday Nelson.  Hope you have an amazing year.

I was booked to do this cake months in advance and almost completely forgot about it.  Thankfully Chloe's dad dropped off the figurines to me at work a couple of weeks ago which reminded me.  Yikes!  Thank goodness this cake was keeping in style with other cakes I was doing this weekend.  I made a big batch of pink icing and pink fondant that worked for three of my orders. This was a 10" two layer chocolate cake.  I was so grateful that Chloe's mom had sent figurines for me to use.  I would never have been able to replicate them, rather it would have taken many hours to do.  Buying the figurines is way more cost effective and what kid doesn't want to have more toys to play with??  Each toy had little holes in the bottom which were perfect size for sticking a toothpick in.  It made it very easy to stick them into the cake. At 9pm last night this cake was picked up.  I finished decorating around 8:50.  Afterward, I fla...

Yesterday I did 4 dozen cupcakes for a baby shower.  I just love how these turned out. I made 2 dozen vanilla and 2 dozen chocolate.  For the icing underneath the disks of fondant I used the rose technique as it makes a nice flat surface for the fondant to rest on.  Since the sex of the baby is unknown I was asked to do half in pink feet and half in blue.  These little baby feet cutters are so adorable.  They came with two sets, this is the larger of the two.  With the smaller set I could use them on mini cupcakes.  Too stinking cute! The dark brown fondant was thanks to an error on my part.  I had actually ordered black fondant but picked brown by mistake.  I didn't realise this until after I had opened the tub.  Fortunately for this request Marg had asked for brown for the boy cupcakes and I was able to use it here.  I would never have been able to dye it to this really nice dark brown shade on my own.   ...

When I was asked to do this cake I knew I already had two orders for this weekend but because the request was to do the roses I knew it wouldn't be an issue.  While this technique takes a lot of icing it is very forgiving and very quick to do.  This was before I remembered that I also had two birthday cakes to do.  Fortunately I had a vacation day that I could use yesterday to prepare.  I have since implemented a better day planner system.  For this cake I did an 8" two layer vanilla cake with pink butter cream icing.  I love doing these roses.  If you make a mistake you can swipe off the icing and start again. 

This cake is the first of 5 that I am doing this weekend and it was just picked up, next one will be picked up in a few hours.   For this cake I was sent a picture to see if I could replicate it.  The anticipation before opening the file always gets to me.  I always worry about how crazy it is going to be.  When I opened this one I was really happy.  I knew exactly what I was going to do.   I love how this cake turned out.  I even used cutters that I've never used before.  I love the tiny daisies.  I even had the pink icing for the centre of the flowers left over from the martini cookies ready to go. This was an 8" two layer marble cake.  Instead of the traditional marble effect I layered the vanilla and chocolate a couple of scoops of batter at a time without any stirring.   Now onto getting cake number two ready to go.

For Thanksgiving even though I wasn't tasked to make any desserts, I really couldn't resist contributing a little bit to the Coles family dinner.  We LOVE our desserts. Even though these are not my mom's famous Halloween cookies I'd say they are a close second.  The "burgundy" ended up looking more like purple then a dark red, but that's what happens when I don't need purple, I get a lovely shade.

Miss E's birthday was this past Sunday.  Because it was Thanksgiving weekend it was jammed packed with family get togethers so we didn't plan a party for her yet.  We started her birthday with a special breakfast of her choosing, Chocolate chip Eggos, vanilla bean ice cream, whipped cream, bacon, Skor bits, and cherries on top. For lunch we were going to a restaurant with Mr T's family for our Thanksgiving and Miss E birthday celebration.  I couldn't go without a cake for her but I didn't want it to be a crazy cake so I made a 6" chocolate cake with buttercream filling.  I covered it in white fondant and added the sentiment.  Then I handed Miss all of the edible markers for her to decorate as she wanted. She thought it was a great idea and had fun decorating it.  I just added little dots of colour when she was finished. The final result.  She did a great job.  The waitresses at the restaurant thought it was pretty cool which made ...