Cake Endeavours

Joy and Eason were having a combined birthday party so we went with vanilla and chocolate cupcakes. For Eason I did super hero themed cupcakes.  I have no idea if they are Marvel or DC.  I don't keep track.  Eason was happy and that's what matters. For Joy's cupcakes I did L.O.L. dolls.  Miss E is past this stage so I have no idea what they are really.  They look super cute.  :)

I was thrilled to be able to make this cake for one of my childhood friend's mom's birthday.  The request was for a chocolate cake with quilting the main theme as her mom is a quilter also that she was into fall colours and flowers.  This gave me lots to work with. The cake was a 3 layer chocolate 8" cake with chocolate filling and covered in butter cream.  The "quilted" blanket was originally larger and I wanted it to drape further down the cake but the fondant kept cracking and didn't look right, so I shortened it and covered up some of the mess with spools of yarn. My arms got a real workout dying the different colours of fondant.  I love fall colours but they are pretty dark and can take a lot of dye to get the colour you desire.  In the end all the colours turned out nicely and the birthday girl loved her cake.

Ilene, a very good family friend and my father-in-law share the same birthday and as we were tagging along for the birthday dinner I thought I would bring a cake as a suprise.  I figured as long as it was chocolate Bob, my FIL, wouldn't care how it was decorated.  So, I decorated toward Ilene's taste.  The cake was a 3 layer 8" chocolate cake with chocolate ganache filling. Ilene has always been so kind in commenting on my cakes on Facebook and how she wished she could have one for her birthday one day.  She even mentioned over dinner longingly that maybe one day she would get one of my cakes for her birthday.  I was SO glad I brought her one and she was delighted!  Of course Bob was good and didn't complain about the decorations. :)

Rarely do I get to do a Halloween themed cake.  When I was given cart blanch on the decorating I knew I wanted to do the marshmallow goo spider web affect.  It isn't as easy as it looks. Definitely need to be very patient with it and not to rush it.  Of course, watching a few YouTube videos helps. This was a 3 layer 8" chocolate cake with whipped cream filling covered in chocolate ganache that I added black dye to.  The Happy 50th sign I cut out in red vinyl from my Cricut and added it to card stock. For the spiders I used leftover icing and piped them on adding red dragees for the eyes.  Lots of fun!

For some strange reason I always thought I didn't like German chocolate cake and never thought of making it.  For our 2nd annual Coles Family Oktoberfest Thanksgiving, I thought it would make a great addition to the spread of Oktoberfest themed food. Of course I turned to Pinterest to find a recipe and came upon  this recipe .  I didn't make any tweaks to it; simply followed the instructions.  Every component of this cake is delicious; the cake, filling and chocolate icing, they are all decadent.  The cake is so rich that I couldn't finish my piece.  Though I am sad that I didn't save it for later. 

Miss E had been asking me for a few years to do a galaxy cake for her.  Finally I bit the bullet and went for it.  I made the Perfect Chocolate cake with salted caramel filling and covered it as smoothly as possible in chocolate ganache. There a multitude of YouTube videos available to choose from to use as a tutorial and recipe.  It's a lot of prep work for 1 minute of work and for one shot!  It turned out pretty good.  In some light you could see that the topping was melting the chocolate a bit and it was coming through, otherwise I was pleased and most importantly Miss E loved it.  I was surprised that the covering added very little flavour to the cake, which is a good thing.  I saved the left overs of the glaze in the fridge to see if I can reuse it for a later date.  Stay tuned...

I love doing cakes for these sisters each year.  I'm always excited to see what the theme is going to be.  This year was mermaid.  I went to Amazon to but the chocolate shell mold which were super fun to make!  I also had got the mermaid silicone mold several months before.  Each cake was a 3 layer 6" cake with flavours of their choosing. One was red velvet with salted caramel filling and the other was lemon with butter cream filling. I woke in the morning with a terrible migraine so was late starting.  Thankfully Mr. T was willing to deliver the cakes later in the evening.  Of course he was able to score himself a Slurpee for his hard work. :)