Pink and Zebra-Stripped Cake

I did a Hello Kitty birthday cake about a year ago for a little girl who is the daughter of an old high school friend. She's turning six this year and knew exactly what themed birthday cake she wanted this year - hot pink and zebra-striped! I have seen how to zebra-stripe fondant on several shows and tutorials but had never attempted to do it myself. Here was the perfect opportunity!

I started out by baking two 8-inch by 2-inch yellow cakes and two 6-inch by 2-inch chocolate cakes. Then I made two batches of fondant - one white and one as bright pink as I could. I'm not sure how they get hot pink so I just had to do pink. Note to self to experiment with that later. I bought the black fondant because it is impossible to get true black unless you purchase it. I made the topper first because it needed to dry for a couple days to stand on top of the cake. I cut the 6 out with a cookie cutter and then laid it on top of some black fondant, cutting a background 6 (freehand-style) with a cutting wheel. After it had dried for 12 hours, I flipped it over and attached a lollipop stick to the back with another piece of black fondant.

I covered the chocolate cakes with pink fondant; zebra-striped the white fondant with black and covered the yellow cakes. My husband helped me stack the cakes and then I just decorated! I cut the A out with a craft knife and homemade template (also compliments of my husband). Last but not least I bordered the edges with a fun "party hat ruffle" and attached the happy birthday banner.

This cake was a lot of fun to make. I learned a lot about covering cakes with fondant:

1. Just crumb coat the cakes you are covering. Too much icing will cause the cakes to be lumpy and the fondant to stretch, tear, slide and get goopy. Technical, right?

2. Only use as much fondant as you need to cover the cake! Using too much will just cause frustration. You won't be able to roll it out to the appropriate thickness and the weight will cause it to tear when trimming the edges.

3. When zebra-striping fondant, make sure that you cut the strips thin and you add them before rolling the fondant too close to the appropriate thickness. If you add them later, they will not form a uniform piece!

I am very pleased to say that my goal of drawing conceptual cakes has been progressing. This cake is proof of that! Of course I did not design the cake (I was sent a picture of the style and just tweaked it to fit the birthday girl) but it is a great start! Happy 6th Birthday Aryn!

PS ~ My mixer is still broken but thankfully I have a great mom who let me borrow hers to help make this creation happen! Brave woman with my history of mixer damage! I'm glad to say that the mixer was not harmed during the making of this cake :)

Fancy Recipe Cakes

My sister's birthday is here! I gave her a choice this year - a fancy decorated cake like she usually gets or a fancy recipe cake that would taste amazing. She choose the latter. So I busted out my Baking From My Home To Yours by Dorie Greenspan and looked up the recipe for a Black-and-White-Chocolate Cake. The recipe is for a delicious concoction of yellow buttermilk cake filled with layers of dark chocolate cream and white chocolate whipped cream and then friosted with the white chocolate whipped cream. I had been wanting to try it for while - so excited!

I made the cake layers no problem. Dark chocolate cream? Check. White chocolate whipped cream? Oops. My mixer broke! It was a disaster! Luckily I had some leftover buttercream frosting from a cake I had made the previous week so I filled the cake with the dark chocolate cream filling then frosted the cake in buttercream and decorated with a dark chocolate drizzle and sprinkles. It tasted delicious but I'm definitely going to have to retry this recipe once I get a new mixer! Josh and I have been married for almost eight years and I have broken three mixers in that time period. It may be time to shell out the money for a KitchenAid mixer...

Pink Ombre Cake

 

So ombre cakes are all the rage right now. In case you're not a cake world groupie like myself, ombre is a fancy word for graduated color. So when it was time for me to make a 21st birthday cake for my sister-in-law, I knew it was time to experiment with some color. My sister-in-law is as crazy about this style as I am and is always sending me pictures of beautiful ombre cakes she finds on the internet. I had some leftover pink fondant from the first birthday cake that I made earlier this month so I decided to go with a pink theme. First thing that I needed to decide was the type of flower I wanted to put on the cake. Since my sister-in-law is turning the big twenty-one this year I wanted to make something soft, elegant and grown-up. I decided on dogwood flowers because they were big enough that I wouldn't have to make a hundred of them to cover the cake and have a nice elegant look to them.

I made four different shades of pink, from almost white to a nice medium pink. I mixed some white gumpaste into the pink fondant to make the colors and to help them dry so they wouldn't droop on the cake. I only have three flower forming cups so I made three flowers a night for four nights in a row. It really helped me focus on getting them just right! Next I baked up three paisley chocolate cakes and then I mixed up about 18 cups of frosting. Way too much frosting! But it is better to have too much than not enough - it is hard to duplicate a shade if you run out. I'm sure it would be impossible when dealing with a graduated color cake! I stacked the cakes and frosted them with buttercream, light at the top and dark on the bottom. Then I mixed up some of the layer icing to make sure the borders added to the ombre effect. Last but not least I attached the flowers, starting with the darkest and ending with the lightest on the bottom.

Then I took a whole bunch of pictures because I love this cake! One of the better ones I think I have done up to this point. I put my camera into color accent mode for this last picture to really show of the color of the icing as it gradually goes from light to dark. It turned out beautiful. Happy birthday Abi! You have become a beautiful young lady over all the years I have known you!

Peyton's First Birthday

Last Sunday I received a phone call from my husband's best friend's wife asking for a first birthday cake for their youngest daughter, Peyton. May seem like a little late planning at first but the real deal was that they had tried to contact a bakery to do the cake several times and the bakery never returned their phone calls. Bummer. But at least I got to do the cake! I hadn't done one in awhile so I was gunning to get creative. I baked two 12" by 18" cakes (one chocolate, one vanilla) and frosted the entire thing in BC frosting. Peyton's mom had sent me a photo of the napkins she had bought for the party and I pretty much took the design and transferred it to the cake. Kneaded up some MMF, colored it according to the design and cut it out into cute shapes to decorate the cake. Then I made a mini version with the birthday girl's name on it and presto - cake and smash cake for 60 first birthday party-goers done in less than a week! I was pretty impressed with the turnaround on it myself, especially for how large it was in the end. Coming up at the end of the month is my annual back-to-back sister birthday cakes - stay tuned!

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not Cake

 Valentine's Day practice cake complete! It's amazing how all the work that was put into this cake ended with a mere 20 minutes to put it all together into this beautiful creation! Let me go over the things that I have accomplished (and the things I have learned) from this cake...

1. Gumpaste Roses: I had an earlier post on these so I won't do a big repeat. Mission accomplished!
2. Covering cake boards in fondant: Originally I thought this was the stupidest thing ever so I refused to do it. Thought it was a waste of time, fondant and energy. I was wrong. I am trying to "up my game" as a decorator and that includes presentation - the cake board being a huge part of that presentation! I have tried covering cake boards in wrapping papers - no good. The grease from the cake and icing seeps into it. Fondant is sturdy and can be colored/ decorated to match the theme of the cake. Will be doing future work (and more challenging designs) with this.
3. Covering shaped cakes in fondant: Not that hard. Same as any cake - take your time and smooth from the top down!
4. Quilting: Going to need some work on this one. Pressure is key to making it look even and purposeful. The sides of the cake really need to be thought through to know which lines cross. The sides of the top of the cake turned out beautiful since that was about the point I figured out what I was doing... will be practicing more in the future since I really liked the end result.
5. Piped ruffle border: I practiced this one a lot on wax paper beforehand. I knew I was using black icing and there was one chance to get it right. Beautiful! Will be using a lot in the future! Next time I think I will try also piping over the top line with a bead border to give it a really finished look.

All in all a successful practice cake. Got to do a self-designed, simple yet dramatic cake. The color scheme is one I had been wanting to try for awhile now. Simple bold colors that really gave a clean professional look to the finished product. I chose to name this design the "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not" Cake. Valentine's Day is definitely a holiday that brings on high emotions in both directions. I wanted to create something that included everyone in this holiday whether it was an I never want to forget or I can't wait to forget this day!

Monogrammed Snowflake Brownie Cupcakes

So we have a family dinner every Saturday night in my family... or I should say families. We rotate every other weekend between my family and my husband's family. This weekend is my husband's family's weekend and I was asked to bring something sweet. I wanted to stay away from Valentine's Day since I already have a cake in mid-design so I decided to do one of my favorite things - snowflakes! Lana and her cousin Elise just learned all about snowmen at the library this week so I just decided to keep the theme going :) Lana and I whipped up a batch of triple chocolate brownie cupcakes. Then I cut out some snowflakes and embellished each one with the first initial of a dinner guest. The extra cupcakes were topped with a secondary snowflake. Monogramming is very in right now (especially for weddings) so I figured this would be a good thing to have in my cake portfolio :) Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow... cupcakes of course!

Let Them Eat Practice Cakes!

The practice cake has officially begun! Here are the finished roses that will be the main focus for my February practice cake! What is a practice cake? It's a cake that lets me practice all those techniques in cake decorating that I have been dying to try! Since I don't have any cake orders this month it is the perfect time to create and execute a self-designed cake. My husband has been urging me to do this for the last 6 months. Since it's the only way I'm going to advance my cake decorating skills, I have finally seized the opportunity. Back to the roses... I am really happy at how they turned out. The roses themselves were not hard to do but the stems were a completely different story! My husband challenged me to forgo the traditional green paper wrapped floral wire and instead cover the wires in gumpaste to make the flower look uniform. It took several attempts to achieve this. And I don't even want to talk about attaching the leaves! Hopefully I will either get better at it over time or discover an easier way to accomplish rose stems and leaves. Stay tuned for the finished cake later this month!