Cake Endeavours

The kitchen renovations are in full swing.  It's amazing how it can take over the home and being in a condo it has completely taken over every room in the place.  So, when my mom asked about cupcakes for the choir concert at her church she offered to make the cupcakes if I would do the decorating.  No problem! Mom was able to get 3 dozen cupcakes from her recipe.  I made a daisy and a little lady bug for each cupcake.  My mom got to watch for the first time the process in decorating a cupcake.  She had no idea how time consuming it can be.  I think she has a new appreciation for it.   Only doing the decorating is great!  There is way less clean up to deal with. :)

Emojis are all the rage with 10 year olds apparently.  At least in Miss. E's class.  So for some fundraising at school Miss. E volunteered that I would do some baking. These were pretty fun to make.  All the black is edible marker.  For the tongues I used flower petals and they worked well. My favourite emoji is the winking one with its tongue out.  Miss E's is the one with the dollar signs of course. :) They were a big hit. This will most likely be my last entry for a while as our kitchen is undergoing major renovations.  I have no idea how long it will take.  Hopefully no more than a month, but we'll see.

Tessia asked me to do a cake for her birthday.  She requested a 6" cake with pink roses in butter cream icing.  Two layers of vanilla cake with strawberry filling. I love that the saying on the cake is: Happy Birthday to Me. I added some shimmer dust to the lettering for some extra bling.

My coworker, Gina asked me to make this cake for a relative.  I haven't done a doughnut cake in a while.  They are so much fun to do. I tinted the butter cream to look like a plain doughnut.  The sprinkles I made using the letter "I" from a cutter set. Mr T was kind enough to deliver it out to the west end with me as our Valentine's Day date and as a reward picked himself up a Slurpee on the way home.

This was a fun cake to do.  I'm learning more about painting with the gel dyes.  Adding the clear alcohol makes a huge difference.  It dries really fast which is great. For the strings this time I used quilting thread.  One day I will figure out how to get them to stay taut. I also used some black dye and alcohol to cover the cake to give it a sheen.  I really like how the wood grain turned out on the guitar.  Even the drop of "paint" that fell on it I was able to make it look like a knot.

I was asked to replicate a cake from 20+ years ago but I was pretty sure the Wilton cake pan was no longer available.  Then I found it at the Bulk Barn and decided to buy it.  I've never done a cake like this before though I had them for some of my birthdays growing up and thought it was pretty awesome. I went online to see what recipes worked best for this pan and every recipe used a boxed mix so I was not going to mess with success on this. After the cake finished baking I left the cake out over night to cool. The pan is slightly different from the original.  The paws of the original were more visible but you can't even see them with the new one so I just left them all pink.  There is a lot of surface area to cover with the start tip in icing.  It took a lot longer than I imagined.   Turns out that the original cake that I was replicating was made by the same woman who made our cakes when we were kids.  She was also our sometimes b...

1976 was an awesome year!  I know lots of people hitting the big one this year; myself and Mr. T included.  Doing a 40th birthday cake for anyone this year will be extra special.   For the electric guitar I was sent a picture of Steve's guitar to emulate.  Everything was edible except the guitar strings.  There was no way I was going to try and figure out how to put fondant on straight thin enough to pass as string.  Instead I just used silver paper. This was a 2 layer 9 x 13 red velvet cake.  Putting this one together was rather stressful!  I made the guitar and the lettering in advance.  I dusted the lettering with some gold dust to give it an ombre effect.  When I went to grab my new container of black fondant I opened it up and it was really hard.  I tried to kneed it to soften it up but it was filled with lumpy dried up bits.  Thankfully, I had plently of white fondant but did not relish the idea of having t...