My daughter Lana is two years old this month! My husband and I decided to do a colorful balloon theme for her party this year. I decided to design and create Lana's birthday cake on my own this year - balloons are an easy medium to begin with self-design. So I drew up some designs while on vacation last month and had my husband pick the one he liked the best. Here it is! I wanted it to be very colorful so I picked a different shade of color for each balloon and then I used the leftover colors to make a color-changing rainbow border. So much fun! Lana's party was a lot of fun and of course the cake was a perfect ending. I love you Lana!
My husband's youngest brother is turning the big 1-8 this month! His Mom decided to throw him a big cookout birthday with all his friends and family. What cookout birthday is complete without a grill cake complete with edible sugar-versioned treats cooking on top? And of course I had to include a miny cake for Mike (step-father-in-law) who's birthday just happens to be the same day. This was a fun but challenging cake. I did the design myself - something I am trying to do more of to challenge myself - and I had to do some major brainstorming for the toppings. It all workd out though and the cake was a smoking success. Welcome to adulthood Matt!
So I got a call from a girl that is the sister of a dear high school friend of mine who's daughter was turning five. She requested a Hello Kitty cake that would match the Hello Kitty decorations that she bought for her party. This cake was pretty simple to make - standard double layer 8" round with buttercream frosting and hand-piped design. I thought that it turned out really cute and matched the thank you cards perfectly. I hope that you had a great 5th birthday with all your new school friends Aryn!
My sister's birthday is actually on May 1st but it was postponed due to my present for her this year. I took her to Hershey Park which doesn't officially open until after her birthday so we decided to do her entire celebration this weekend - the trip, the dinner, the cake! My sister loves everything Japanese - except for sushi. She is an absolute candy fanatic so I put the two together and created for her a Candy Sushi Cake! It turned out really well and she seemed to really like it! There were a lot of elements to this cake and I knew I couldn't just place it on a plain cake board so my husband and I brainstormed and came up with the idea to cover the base in Chinese take-out menus. It was the perfect finish for my masterpiece! 
My sister-in-law's birthday fell on Easter this year and her mom asked me to do an Easter-themed cake for her birthday. I decided to try making a classic Easter basket/ egg hunt cake. I made the cake portion look like an actual basket with Easter eggs spelling out a special birthday message. Then I fashioned a basket handle from candy clay and covered the base with grass. I topped it off with a Palmer's hollow chocolate duck, a couple chocolate bunnies and some Wilton sugar daisies. Although I struggled a lot with the basket handle and getting the letters into the molded chocolate eggs it came out beautiful in the end and my sister-in-law loved it!
A very sweet girl at my work is having her first baby in a couple of weeks and some of the girls got together and decided to do a potluck surprise baby shower for her. I volunteered of course to make the cake for her (it's what I know how to do!). The only thing we really knew about her theme was that she and her husband had painted the nursery a shade of aqua and that they were expecting a boy. I looked through some old Wilton cake magazines and the girls and I decided upon a baby carriage designed cake. It turned out beautiful! The expecting mother was very surprised and the shower went great. Lots of people were surprised that the cake was made by me. I guess my passion of baking hasn't reached all the departments at work yet!
So as you can probably tell from this blog I love to bake. Although I absolutely love to try new things I have always been terrified of making cheesecakes. They always seem to be complicated - don't over mix, don't over bake, cool in a draft-free location. Very intimidating. My husband bought me my first springform pan last Christmas. It was time to bite the bullet and make a cheesecake. Turns out they really aren't that hard. And they are totally worth the end effort - delicious! This is a Blueberry Swirl Cheesecake. I got the recipe from a Taste of Home Cheesecake edition magazine. It was made for my daughter, Lana, who's favorite thing in the world right now is blueberries! Now that it isn't so scary to make them, I will definitely be trying out some new cheesecake recipes in the future!
My sister-in-law gave me free artistic rein on the butterfly cupcakes. I had always wanted to try these 3-d chocolate butterflies that I had seen in the Hello, Cupcake! book but never had an excuse to make them... until now! Unfortunately the instructions that they gave in the book didn't work for me - the butterfly wings just weren't looking the way I wanted them to. So I did a little brainstorming and with the help of my sister we had 20 beautiful, colorful, unique butterflies on our hands! I baked some confetti cupcakes, iced them with buttercream frosting and my sister rimmed the edges with rainbow sprinkles that she had mixed up. Then I positioned the wings on the cupcakes at different angles to make it appear that the butterflies were fluttering on the cupcakes. So impressive and so fun! I have a feeling I will be using a lot of candy melts in the future for decorating. I see some candy clay in my future...
So this blog began with my niece's first birthday cake and now we have arrived at her second birthday cake! My sister-in-law requested two items: a butterfly cake for Elise's actual birthday party and butterfly cupcakes for the family celebration that evening. And so I had my mission. Here is the butterfly cake! White cake tinted a lovely shade of purple on the inside and the outside decorated with all the colors of the rainbow! The colored part of the wings had corresponding colored sugar on top of them to make them really bright! I also used Twinkies to make the body of the butterfly which ended up being the perfect size and shape! Elise and all of her little party guests really enjoyed this cake. I even got to use my new letter cut-outs to write a birthday message on it for her! All-in-all a great way to begin a new year of decorating. It turned out exactly how I envisioned it! Now on to the butterfly cupcakes...
