Ben Roethlisberger is allegedly a terrible person

I just thought I'd get that out of the way right off the bat. The cake design should not be miscontrued as approval of any king of Mr. Roethisberger's alleged actions. But the cake turned out pretty cute. :)

My hubbin's co-worker at TCTMNBN is a big Pittsburg fan. (It's much easier than being a Cardinals fan.) So in honor of his birthday, he got a Steelers cake. Flavors are chocolate cake, peanut butter filling, chocolate ganache frosting, and fondant. I bought the black fondant since I've always heard that it is really hard to get the right color otherwise. It stained my countertop pink. Thanks bathroom cleaner with bleach, you got it out pretty good.

So the pics:

 The circles around the cake have the symbols for the six SuperBowls the Steelers have won. The most recent was against the Cardinals. It should be noted that in SuperBowl XXX, the Steelers lost to the Cowboys.

Check out these awesme layers to this cake. How pretty even inside.

 





Lemon Flavored Crack

Okay, not P.C., but I have found the world's best frosting. Seriously, literally (and I use that word literally because I hate when people misuse it). I'm not really a sweets kind of person, though I love to bake. But I can sit with this stuff in a bowl and eat it for days. What is this magic elixir? This ambrosia sent to us lowly baking souls from the gods of the flour and the baking soda? It's swiss meringue buttercream. Martha Stewart has, yet again, won my heart with her recipes. When you have to give a recipe in POUNDS of butter, you know it's gonna be good. So I needed an excuse to make some and came up with two!

Reason #1- My particularly attractive, previously pregnant friend has a newborn at home who is more concerned with his next meal or pooping to give him mom much free time. So I decided she deserved baked goods. :)

Reason #2- The hubbin got a new boss at TCTMNBN. And since his coworkers are my usual guinea pigs, she needed a "Welcome to the Company" cupcake. The hubbin ditched my idea of spelling out "Welcome New Mary" in fondant on the cupcakes.

I dubbed this batch my Strawberry lemonade cake. Though it was pretty skimpy on the strawberries. I was using the rest of the ones I got on sale and I was too cheap to go buy some more. The batter was my go-to vanilla. I'm pretty boring apparently, this is one of my favorite cakes to eat. It tastes like sugar cookies, and who doesn't love them? I chopped up strawberries and added them to the batter. The frosting is Martha's Swiss Meringue Buttercream (see link above). But I dumped in some fresh lemon juice. Melinda declared that she liked her shower cake better, the hubbin declared it wasn't "my best" but I ate like 6 of the dang cupcakes and loved it.

Don't judge me by my frosting or piping abilities- It's rusty with all the fondant here lately and I was running low on frosting (again). But I did bust out my flower making skills from my Wilton's classes and added some roses that were totally off-center. You can find Melinda's pictures of the cake (which I told her couldn't show anything but the flowers since the frosting looks so bad) AND of her particularly attractive baby boy, Camden, on her blog. She has some nice shots of the roses to show you that not everything on this looked like crap.

For the cupcakes, I really like the idea of having tiny little decorations on each of them. So I made some tiny little flowers, then added my pearl drages to them cause I liked it, then I remembered I had some green fondant leftovers and added a leaf. I love them.

Making a Splash

I was approached to make a birthday cake for a little boy celebrating a big birthday, his first one!

Meet Miles-

Miles' momma, Cammie, told me that he really likes to go swimming, so she wanted some sort of pool cake. This is him in his swimming outfit. Check out those beautiful blue eyes!  Cammie wanted a two tier cake, one for the party guests and one just for Miles, and I found this cake on my favorite cake website. We decided to make figures of Miles doing different pool stuff, and I told Cammie I had to include his blue swimming hat. :) So without further ado:

The cake! My go-to Magnolia Bakery vanilla cake, ganache filling, and chocolate buttercream.

The Mileses!

I added an umbrella as I was sketching, I thought it was sorta cute. And thanks to an evening run to Wal-Mart by the hubbin', I thought it came out pretty cute. It's made of gumpaste, which hardens better than fondant and is more sturdy since it was going to be wobbling off the side of the cake. I rolled out the green and the brown fairly thin and stacked them, then cut the openings in the brown so the green would show through. The perfectly round shape? I draped it over a Styrofoam ball that I covered in plastic wrap. Brilliant!

Diving board- It was a pool, I thought it appropriate.

Beachball- Cammie asked for some pool toys. I had beach balls, noodles of varying colors, swim rings, and one of those inflatable rubber ducky ring things.

The view from the top. The water is piping gel tinted with food coloring. I'd read a note online someone had made that said to use the coloring sparingly because the piping gel gets dark really fast, she wasn't kidding! This was my sky blue!

But of course the nice blue gel makes a nice big mess when the birthday boy gets into it. :)

Happy 1st Birthday Miles!

A rumbly in Melissa's tummbly

Baby Shower #2!

Seems everyone has gotten themselves knocked up here lately (don't these people know that we're in a recession?!). And I volunteered to make the cake for the baby shower for my very favorite astronomer, the BEAUTIFUL Melissa and her (not a geek) husband Stephen. They're expecting a little boy (who will probably be a giant nerd, but that's okay) any second now.

See? Didn't I tell you she's purty?

Picture above by Sara J Williams Photography. Hope she doesn't mind me borrowing the picture since I gave her a plug. :)

The baby shower theme was Winnie the Pooh, so Pooh cake she got! We went around a while to try to decide on a design for the cake. But the mommy-to-be said to me in an email: "I think when you Said Pooh, I just had this mental image of a full-blown scene with all the characters and trees and everything with cute little quirks like the Mr. Sanders sign and leaves blowing a blustery day and whatnot." I've never doubted that this astronomer is a brilliant woman, but this was actually pretty close to the original idea that I had but scrapped and never pitched to her. It was supposed to be Classic Pooh, but when she wanted Disney Pooh I wasn't sure what to do with it.

So blustery days and Mr. Sanders she got! I love the cartoons and all the funny little Pooh things. And my very favorite part ever is when Pooh sings "I'm just a little, black rain..cloud... Hovering over the honey tree" Too cute. So I wanted Pooh and his balloon to take center stage.

Again, I have no pictures of the process, but lots of the finished product.

Pooh's House- Complete with the Mr. Sanders sign and the bell.

Piglet's House- This sign hangs in front of his first house (the one that got flooded). He thought his grandfather's name was Trespassers William.

Roo! This was my favorite out of all the characters I made because he was so darn cute. And with him was Kanga and Roo's mailbox.

The bridge where they play Pooh Sticks. And I learned that this is a real place too! They have Pooh Sticks championships. It was originally Posingford Bridge in Ashdown Forest. You can visit next time you're in the U.K. It's on my list now.

T-I-double-GUH-ER. :) With his corkscrew tail even. 

Evil Piglet-I don't know what happened here. I've tried to pin-point what's wrong, but I just can't put my finger on it. *Sigh* Oh well. At least he looks all blustery, right?

-

Pooh! (sorta) Apparently the camera focused on Pooh instead of the bee, but it was a nice picture of him anyway.

Rabbit's wheelbarrow- I was gonna make Rabbit and his garden too, but he got dropped last minute. That's what happens when you get a real job that you have to work full time the week before the shower.

Eeyore! He's sweet and adorable and I LOVE how the mohawk turned out.

Pooh's Thoughtful Spot- Halfway between Pooh's house and Piglet's.

The Front

The back

The side

The cake! Chocolate cake, caramel mousse filling, chocolate buttercream frosting (this stuff'll give you the sugar highs). But it looked pretty when it was cut.

Tristan (the cousin-to-be)- The picture was funny, couldn't resist adding it in. :)

And the aftermath- This almost makes me a little sad to see all my little critters like this. We had Tristan to thank for all the ears being eaten off. He's southern, he can't help it. :P

Congratulations Melissa and Stephen! May your baby not be a geek or too big a nerd.

Red-ish Velvet Cupcakes

I was supposed to bake my mom a cake for her 50th birthday, but got a job instead. I figured it was a perfectly fine trade-off but apparently this has been in the back of her head for a year now. So on a trip back home (which included a couple long car rides, 14 hours each way) she declared I had to bake her a cake. Still reeling from the coconut cake disaster, I skipped trusting someone else's cake pans and opted for cupcakes.

BONUS! I had a sous chef for the cake! If you don't speak any French (for that matter, this is probably one of the three French words I know) sous means "under" and it's the chef's right hand man. Or in this case preteen girl. The best part is putting her on "dry stuff" duty since I hate measuring flour. This is why I always just do it by weight. This site is bookmarked on my phone (my cookin' buddy). And Alton Brown says that's the best way to do it anyway. And whatever AB says is like cooking law.

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WARNING! PG-13 Friends reference follows. If you're easily offended, please scroll down past the little stars. The only reason I ever remember this French stuff is an episode of Friends when Phoebe dates Monica's sous chef. When Phoebe first meets him and sets up a date, she says to Monica "I can't wait to get sous-neath him". So you have to say the line whenever you think about sous chefs.
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So red velvet it was, because it's fast and easy and hard to mess up. But I didn't exactly have enough red food coloring (had to raid my aunt's pantry for supplies and wasn't clear that I needed like a gallong of the stuff). So instead of the usual deep red color, they ended up more pinkish in the bowl. So red-ish velvet they are. And just for the record, my sous chef frosted most of them. :) I take no responsibility.

 Everybody ate 'em, my Dad had three and Mom took home a dozen so I suppose they were fine. Though one sad soul tried her darndest but never got even a crumb:

That's Mia, the most pathetic dog in the world.

So by the end of the evening we had a bunch of these:

But someone found a way to take care of the leftover frosting.

So Happy Birthday Nini!

A Coconut Flavored Disaster

Sigh........... People, this is what happens when you don't: #1-Have the right pans, #2-Line the pans you do have properly, #3-take the cakes out of the pans before they cool, #4-reheat the pans when you warm them up the morning after you bake them but don't get them out while the pan is still warm, #5-Have time to rebake cakes that have fallen appart when you took them out of said cooled pans, #6-make enough frosting to spackle the broken cakes together, then nice thick layers of frosting between the broken layers to support them, #7-use Crisco in your frosting to give it some structure instead of the butter just melting and taking the cake down, #8-get much effectiveness when you try to stick straws into the cake to hold it upright when the right side of the cake decides to declare civil war on the left side and seced from the nation and when you DO #9-feel so sad for the cake and the giant fissure opening up in the top that you just cover the whole damn thing with coconut and hope no one notices.

The sad, saggy cake:

What is apparently the cake equivalent of the Mason-Dixon line:

On the right side: the rebels. (Yes I'm from Texas where rebel flags aren't exactly uncommon). On the left: the rest of the nation. And smeared all over it: the valient coconut buttercream trying desperately to hold this little nation together.

It took a trip to the fridge and some squeezing and cussing on my part, but though the rift remained, it never was able to fully break the cake apart. War averted. And it sure tasted pretty good too! Even my "I don't like coconut" hubbin ate a slice or two. I'll try this recipe out again soon. And I will avoid the cake sins I commited on this poor little fellow.

An Oldie

So I totally forgot about this cake but by chance (and a dead battery on my part) I found these pictures on the hubbin's cell phone! Probably a good thing too, since this was was a pain (literally and figuratively) and worth posting.

I posted pictures of a bunch of royal icing flowers a while back. This is the cake that they were used on.

Don't remember the cake flavor, but the frosting is good ol' Wilton's buttercream. It was looking pretty jagged that day, overworked it trying to make it in a hurry. The basket weave is suprisingly easy to do, but it takes days to do. The course kit came with two little oval pans so that we would have something small enough to do it our two hour class. Still, a cool trick you see a lot. And like I said in the previous post, I love these flowers.

This little birds are made from color flow icing. I'm not really sure what's in it, probably a lot of sugar, but it dries really hard but fairly brittle.

Front of cake from eye level:

Top of the cake (with bright reflection off of the foil).