Update: Happy Birthday, Jessica!

Here's a photo of the birthday girl with her cake. Many thanks to Jessica's mom for sending the pictures along and for giving me the opportunity to work on this cake!
Here's a shot of the completed cake with the musical notes attached. Thanks again to Jessica's mom for providing the pictures.

Happy Birthday, Jessica!

Yesterday I had the honor of preparing a cake for one of my favorite former students. The birthday girl wanted three tiers with pink ribbon and pink flowers and also some musical notes. All three tiers were vanilla flavored cake with vanilla buttercream filling and icing. The cake was covered with White Vanilla Satin Ice fondant. Flowers were handmade out of fondant. Musical notes were also made of fondant. Notes and flowers were adhered with royal icing. There are 16 flowers and 16 musical notes decorating the cake to represent the 16th birthday of the guest of honor.

Because it would be too difficult to travel with an already assembled three tier cake, the photos here are of the unassembled top and bottom tiers of the cake. The birthday girl has promised a couple of photos of the completed cake taken at the party. When those arrive, I'll post them here. When looking at the top tier, please disregard the cardboard circle; it was only used to transport the tier. Also, when viewing the bottom tier, please disregard the pillars. Those were invisible in the finished product, but I read somewhere that when using dowels to support a cake, it's easier to assemble at the venue if you leave the dowels sticking out of the cake a little. Gives you more room to position the tier and get your fingers out of the way.

Pirate cake

Here it is! This is a six-inch chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling and icing. The cake features the recipient's name which turns into a treasure map-style path leading to an X that's been claimed with a pirate's flag. Another decoration is a fondant anchor caught in some candy rocks. The skull and cross-bones on the top are made of fondant. Skull was made with a cutter, bones are free-hand.

Pirates tonight!

I began working on my next cake last night. This one is a just-because cake that a friend ordered for his son. Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate! The recipient is currently into pirates, so I'm watching my fondant pirate embellishments dry. There will be a skull and cross-bones, an anchor leaning on a pile of rocks, and an X marks the spot treasure map type something-or-other for decorations on the cake. Pictures tonight (hopefully)! Stay tuned! And have a great day!

Wedding Shower Cake

This latest one was ordered by the wife of one of my colleagues. She also teaches and was the host for a wedding shower at her school this afternoon. The cake was fashioned after the couple's invitation which was a lovely cream color with rich brown lettering, gold trim around the edge, a ribbon at the top, and maple leaves across the top. It was yellow cake with buttercream icing. The ribbon is made out of Satin Ice ivory-colored fondant brushed with gold glitter. Leaves are also fondant; they were brushed with coloring and glitter to make them look a little more realistic. Because of the dampness in the air while I was preparing the cake and overnight, it was necessary to leave the paper towels in the bow loops to prevent drooping. They were removed before the cake was presented at the event.

Happy 12th Birthday!

Here's the cake I delivered yesterday. The party was this afternoon, so it's okay to post the pictures now. The birthday girl wanted white cake with blue icing and fairies. YouTube has some great tutorials, so a combination of a few that I watched resulted in the fairies you see just beyond the fondant lake. The flowers are gumpaste fantasy flowers and gumpaste frangipani (plumaria) flowers. The icing is buttercream. This was a really fun cake to make.

Happy Anniversary, Pat and Dick!

This is the 50th Anniversary cake I did last week. There are 50 hand-made gumpaste roses decorating the cake. Flavors were chocolate cake with ganache filling for one half and vanilla cake with raspberry filling for the other. Both sides were iced with buttercream and covered in mm fondant.

Sneak Peek

Hi there! I just finished another cake. This one is for a 12th birthday. The party's not until tomorrow, so I can't show you the whole cake, but I thought I'd post a sneak peek. This is one of the details on the cake.

Ladybug

The neighbor was over yesterday morning working on the front step for us and I thought that I should make something to thank him. I made cinnamon swirl bread last time, so this time, a cake was in order. We are very lucky to have such great neighbors! I saw a ladybug cake the other day that I thought was simply adorable and wanted to try my hand at it. While my version is not as cute as the one I looked at, it's a start. The cake has a layer of devil's food cake and a layer of vanilla. There's a raspberry filling, and it's iced (under the fondant) with whipped chocolate ganache.

Fundraiser Cakes

These are the cakes that were in the Teachers' Rooms at school yesterday. The purple flower cake was a yellow cake with lemon filling and vanilla buttercream icing. The chocolate cake was devil's food cake with raspberry filling and whipped chocolate ganache icing. I also placed collection cups next to the cakes in the event that anyone was interested in contributing some small amount to the Alzheimer's Association 2009 Memory Walk. My wonderful colleagues contributed about $40.00 for the walk! Thank you so much! I am truly lucky to work with such great people!

What's Next?

Three weeks...three cakes. Later this week, I'm planning on making a couple of cakes for the Teachers' Rooms at school. They'll both be to raise a few extra dollars for the Alzheimer's Association. The following week will be a baby shower cake. And finally, there'll be another wedding shower cake. Stay tuned...

Welcome Back/Have a Safe Trip, Nate!

This cake was made for a gathering for a friend of ours visiting after a year-long stay in Costa Rica. His visit came just shortly before his return trip to Vancouver for another year at school. Nate is always on the move, so I decided a suitcase would be most appropriate for him. The cake is chocolate; it's filled with Oreo buttercream; and it's iced with vanilla buttercream. The fondant is home-made marshmallow fondant.

Happy Anniversary Ruth and Ed!

This was the cake requested for Ruth and Ed's 57th anniversary. All three have the same flavors: lemon cake, raspberry filling, lemon buttercream icing, and marshmallow fondant.

Congratulations, Jessalyn and Steven!

Yesterday's wedding reception at Glen Manor House in Portsmouth, RI was simply delightful! The weather was perfect; the food was delectable; the flowers were beautiful and unique; and of course, the bride and groom looked spectacular. What a great party!
The cake was French vanilla with strawberry filling and vanilla Italian meringue buttercream icing. Pam, from Blooming Blossoms, artfully arranged the roses and orchids on the cake.
Best wishes to Jessalyn and Steven as you begin your life together!

25th Anniversary Cake

This one was a surprise for a friend of mine. She and her husband will be celebrating their 25th anniversary on Tuesday, so I wanted to surprise them with a nice cake to mark the occasion. The cake is two layers, chocolate on the bottom and vanilla on top with strawberry filling in the middle. It's covered with vanilla buttercream and vanilla flavored fondant. The roses on the top are gum paste.
You'll have to excuse the poor photo quality on this one (and the last, for that matter). Brad wasn't available so I had to take the pictures myself.

Congratulations Rebekah and Craig!

Here is the wedding cake I delivered this morning. The event was held at Goddard Park in Warwick. The bottom (14") tier was chocolate almond cake with raspberry filling and chocolate buttercream. The top two (10" and 6") tiers were both vanilla cake with lemon filling and vanilla buttercream. All three tiers were covered in chocolate fondant. Ribbon and other embellishments were provided by the bride and groom. Congratulations and Best Wishes to Rebekah and Craig!

Stay tuned...

Photos will follow tomorrow of the wedding cake I'm finishing up as we speak. (Well sort of, I did have to wash the shortening off my hands after mixing up the fondant before I started typing.) As soon as I get this one delivered, it's back to the kitchen to finish the 25th anniversary cake, start another wedding cake, and start another anniversary cake. It sure has been a busy summer in our kitchen.

July 25 Wedding

July 25 is the next wedding cake I'll be doing. It will have 3 tiers. The bottom one will be chocolate almond cake with raspberry filling. The top 2 tiers will both be vanilla cake with lemon filling. I'm excited about this one because the bride and groom have requested chocolate fondant for the icing, and I just love the way cakes iced with chocolate fondant look. Stay tuned for details.
Other projects I'll be undertaking soon include a birthday cake and a 25th anniversary cake. Photos will follow.

Congratulations, Leon and Erica!

What a beautiful day for a wedding! Summer arrived in full force on the 4th. It was a perfect day for a wedding: not too warm or too cool, not to breezy or still, not rainy but not uncomfortably sunny. Everything was just right! Getting the cake to the venue was gray hair and ulcer inducing. The shelf Brad built worked great for the second tier from the bottom. The bottom tier was transported on the stand in the box in which the stand was shipped. Nothing moved around too much, and we (ok, Brad was the brains of the operation, I just helped with the tape)rigged up a covering over the entire back seat to shield the cakes from any sun that tried to get into the car and melt the cake. Pearls were applied at the venue on Friday, and the flowers were delivered and added on Saturday before the wedding began. The bottom tier alone served 100, so the top two tiers were leftovers. I think the cake went over well. Let me know what you think!

Next stop...Cape Cod

So I've just returned from a run to the market for the materials I'll need for my brother's wedding next weekend on Cape Cod. They're expecting about 100 guests for the big day. I'm kinda hoping that Friday will be grey and cool like today because we're going to have to transport the cake to the Cape and there's a huge melt-factor if it's too hot or sunny out and we're sitting in traffic. The day of the event there will be a shaded area for the cake, so that's a plus. The bride wants to keep the flavors simple, so we'll be doing vanilla for a few tiers, and chocolate for the others. The bottom tier will be half chocolate and half vanilla. There isn't an 18" pan that's a complete circle; you need to make it in half circles, so we'll use the natural split to vary the flavors. The 14" tier will be Styrofoam as the bottom tier alone will serve 100 guests and we don't want to have too much left over. The 10" tier will be chocolate and the 6" top tier will be vanilla. Decorations will be simple, ivory colored fondant (I broke down and bought some because I'm really afraid that the marshmallow will melt. It's not the Wilton brand, so it actually tastes really good. Brad said it was pretty close to the taste of the MM fondant.) with ivory ribbon at the bottom and a bead of pearls at the bottom of the ribbon. Erica's florist will be providing flowers, hydrangeas I believe. Photos of the process will follow shortly.

And here it is...

Brad had already emailed the vineyard cake photos before I did that last post. Didn't realize it though. So anyway, here is the topper for the vineyard cake. Please pretend you don't see the white cardboard under the cake. That was just so I could move the cake around before assembling it. There was no visible white cardboard on the finished project. I'm going to have to get a photo of the entire cake from the shower coordinator as I couldn't put it together until it arrived at the venue. However, if you're good at imagining, you can probably picture it assembled. Basically, the bottom tier was the same as the top tier except for the size. 14" base tier - 10" top tier is shown. Enjoy!

Shower Cakes

Two cakes this weekend. Photos will follow soon. Saturday's cake was for a shower that was being held at a vineyard. The coordinator of the event wanted something elegant and simple that fit with the theme of the shower. So, we decided on off-white buttercream with a wine colored ribbon around the bottom edge of each tier. Then, piped over the buttercream we did grapes, vines, and leaves in almost the same shade of buttercream. Brad suggested we add a little color to the piped icing to make it stand out just a little. Had some trouble with the piping icing. It was very warm and I used a butter/shortening combo. But enough extra sugar helped fix that problem. The bride requested yellow cake with raspberry filling and lemon-flavored buttercream.
Today's cake is for another wedding shower. This one has a beach-y/summer-y/fun theme. So we're going with a 12" tier topped with a 10" tier. Then, I found a rather unorthodox topper for the cake. I was really struggling with design for this one. The problem was that I didn't want to re-do a design I'd already done for someone else, so I needed to incorporate elements of the beach wedding cake without copying it. Ended up finding a birdhouse at Christmas Tree Shops that's shaped like a sand castle. I figure if I use some flowers and chocolate shells in a creative enough fashion, I can make it work. Plus, the bride-to-be gets a new birdhouse out of it. I'll put parchment under the castle to keep it from touching the cake, but otherwise I won't have to do anything special. It just works!! Hopefully someone at the event will be able to take some decent photos, as my live-in photographer is working at a wedding today and had to leave before the cake was finished. This one's another marble with vanilla buttercream.

Baseball Birthday Cake!

For your viewing pleasure today, we have before and after shots of Baseball Cake. The cake is French Vanilla with red raspberry filling. The icing is butter cream - vanilla with some almond flavor.

Daisy Cake!

Here's the most recent project. This one was for a bridal shower. It's a ten inch round at the bottom - marble cake with butter cream icing and a six inch round at the top - yellow cake with butter cream icing. There are pillars holding the top cake about an inch off of the bottom one. I wanted to put more space in there but the daisies didn't want to stack. As suggested in one of the Wilton Year Books, there's parchment under the daisies on both cakes. I used a blob of frosting in the middle of the parchment to keep the flower stems steady. There was a slight snafu on the way to the event and the six inch shifted in its box. Thankfully there was a spatula in the kitchen, as I neglected to bring a travel kit.
I'm working on trying out some new cake recipes. Thinking of picking up a copy of The Cake Mix Doctor. I'd like to be able to offer more flavors than are available in a box, but I'm still not sold on from scratch cakes.

Thanks for waiting...

Here's a photo of the wedding cake I made for Nicole and Corey. It is a French vanilla cake with French vanilla butter cream icing. The seashells are white chocolate. There is fondant under some of the sand to keep the paint from the fence and chairs out of the cake/frosting that people would be ingesting. The sea grass was plastic; not sure what its intended purpose was, but after thorough washing, its new purpose was cake decoration! The sand is brown sugar.

Stay tuned for photos of the wedding shower cake I'm working on for next Saturday.

Please hold...

Well, my first wedding cake is finished and has been delivered. I won't have pictures for this one until...well, I don't know when. In the mean time, consider these photos the blog version of the type of music you hear when you're on hold.
The blue spotted one was for Brad's grandmother's birthday; the sailing one was for my grandfather's 90th birthday cake.

My New Favorite

I think the Food Network recipe for butter cream will be my standby, unless the bride requests something else. The bride I'm baking for tomorrow will have this one on her cake. The August 1 bride thinks she's leaning toward the Italian Meringue Butter Cream from CakeLove.

My next adventures will probably revolve around finding interesting cake/filling/icing combinations. How does dark chocolate cake with orange filling and vanilla buttercream sound? Kinda like a chocolate creamcicle (sp?).

Buttercream

Well, the CakeLove recipe for Italian Meringue Butter Cream icing worked...for now. I used it on a sample for a bride-to-be, and we'll see what she has to say about it. It was easy to spread and pipe, but I'm not sure if I love the texture. It's almost too smooth. I'm going to give this recipe from food network a try, and we'll see how that goes. Most of the reviews are very positive, but as with anything, there are plenty of nay sayers. We'll see what happens. Too bad one can't post taste samples on a blog.

French Vanilla

I have an important cake assignment coming up and the bride requested vanilla cake with vanilla butter cream. So I decided to try out some recipes before settling on anything permanent. Dunkin(sp?) Hines has a French vanilla boxed mix that's actually quite good. Looks like white cake, but uses the entire egg, so the cake is nice and sturdy. I found a recipe on line for French vanilla butter cream frosting. YUCK! It's like trying to ice a cake with a stick of butter. The flavor was awful. And the texture was worse than the taste. That recipe came from McCormick flavoring.

My next venture will be Italian Meringue Butter cream. It's supposed to hold up really well in the heat and be pretty much complimentary for any flavor cake. Found a recipe used by Warren Brown. He also does a super step-by-step lesson on IMBC preparation.

Part of me wonders if the reason I'm not too keen on the real butter cream is because I'm so used to the recipe we use for class. That one just doesn't taste fancy enough for a wedding cake. Tastes too much like grocery store frosting. We'll see how the meringue turns out. Have a great weekend!

So, I'll be using this blog as a sort of portfolio for my cakes. This way I'll have a place to send those who might be interested in having me create cakes for them. I am still just starting out and learning. I enjoy creating novelty cakes as you can see with the pizza cake, but am interested in honing my skills in the area of wedding and special event cakes. Your comments and suggestions are more than welcome. Thanks for visiting!