Twinkle, Twinkle and Massive Cake Farts

My neighbor asked me to make a cake for her son Erich who just turned 2. I learned that I'm apparently not very knowledgeable about what two-year-olds like to watch. :) But he is a big fan of this video:


Pretty trippy, right? But I loved the colors,stars, oh the clouds! and the little blue and purple elephant.

Everything started out nice. Cake baked up sweet and dense, buttercream went on fairly smooth and easy, and fondant rolled right on and smoothed right out the very first time! That's a big deal, particularly since it's been 115° around here. I made some cool decorations, worked with wires, stuck on some stars and clouds and was feeling pretty confident. Bad sign at that point.

You see, cakes are moody creatures. I'd chilled the buttercream covered cakes to get it nice and hard so that the fondant didn't slide all over the place when I stuck it on. Common practice, I promise. But as the cake warmed with the fondant over it, it got the farts. The gas release causes GINORMOUS bubbles under the fondant. No matter how many times I popped them and tried to smooth the fondant down, they'd grow right back. To the point where the left side of the cake ended up a saggy, bubbly, ripply mess. :( It didn't help that the clouds were heavy, or that the decorations got squished down into the fondant as I tried to smooth it.

Hopefully all that has been hid or artfully turned away from the camera in the pictures. :)

 Isn't the little elephant precious?! And those little curls on top! Makes me swoon.

 And oh those little purple toenails!



I also made a little cake for just the birthday boy. I'll admit, not my best work. But I underestimated the difficulty in decorating a 3" block. 

The little guy and his cake, isn't he adorable?

And since this has become a favorite part for me, the aftermath:

See how the fondant sagged over the clouds in the border? Shameful. The cake is my favorite Magnolia Bakery Vanilla cake with chopped up strawberries added. The strawberries released some of their juices and made it nice and dense and moist. The frosting is standard American buttercream, which is so amazingly, teeth-numbingly sweet.

And here is Erich's little cake. A bit of eating out of the top and a lot of poking the sides with his fingers.

Happy 2nd Birthday Erich!

A Quickie

The hubbin's boss at TCTMNBN has a birthday today. So of course she put her cake request in months ago. Chocolate cake with chocolate chips and white frosting. No fondant. Which means I had to practice my piping skills again (got a lot on the wedding cake). I put off baking and had to frost first thing this morning. So pretend you don't see the chocolate crumbs in the white frosting. And the tacky foil covered cake boards.

A West Texas Wedding

The hubbin's uncle Phillip (aka PeeWee) just married Leona. They made a lovely couple and couldn't have looked any happier. Everyone was so excited when they got engaged. Mostly because it was a long time coming, but for me, wedding=cake! And Leona was more than happy to let me make it for her.

This was the largest cake I have done to date. And a cake that big comes with lots of logistical issues. But when you're driving over 10 hours to get to the wedding location and THEN bake the cake, it can be a nightmare! Here's how the whole thing started:

 That's a big pile of cake stuff. And we made a grocery store, a Michael's, and a Wal-Mart run for cake circles, eggs, and fondant while we were there.

But you're here for the cake, right? Here it is:

The design of the cake was unabashedly stolen from Maisie Fantaisie Cakes of London. Their wedding cakes are beautiful.  I'm a huge fan of the new styles of wedding cakes that are all colors and modern, sleek lines. So much better than the white buttercream with piping out the ying-yang. (I totally had one of these for my wedding, but it was a long time ago and everyone was doing it).

The cake is White Velvet from the Cake Bible. I LOVE this recipe. I may not ever make any other type of white cake ever again. I'm just sayin'. The layers are filled with Raspberry Jam and the cakes were covered in white chocolate ganache beneath the fondant. A cake this big needs lots of chocolate. I bought 8 bags of white chocolate chips, plus I had two boxes of bar chocolate.

Instead of a traditional cake topper (so dated now, aren't they?), Leona chose these little guys for the top of the cake. A word to the wise, ceramic birds are heavy and will squish your tiny top layer and make it bow on the sides.

See how there is a strawberry on the plate up there? Funny story. Someone requested 100 strawberries to dip in chocolate, fill with cream cheese frosting, and have plain at the reception. There was a little snafu in ordering the 100 strawberries. They got 100 POUNDS of strawberries instead!!! Check this out:

That's a fraction of the strawberries laid out on the kitchen table. They got sent home with people, they were sent to the local school on Monday morning for the teachers, they were donated to a women's shelter. So, so many strawberries.

The aftermath:

See the holes in the cake above? I finally found an excuse to use the SPS cake support system and I love it.

Of course the best part of the whole weekend was getting to be with so much familyCongratulations to Phillip and Leona!

Happy Almost 13th Birthday!

Quick one, lots of pictures. My cousin (who you've met before) came to visit a little before her 13th birthday. And of course, she needed cake and I needed people to eat it so I threw a little party. The spotlight was on the two adorible ankle biters that came though. :)

The pictures! (Taken by the lovely Melinda since my camera was throwing a hissyfit).

And of course the stars of the day:

And you've sorta met these little guys before too! Left Ankle Biter, Right Ankle Biter

Baby Cake

The hubbin' has a coworker at TCTMNBN who is expecting a baby soon. Well technically, his wife is doing the work, but they're both sortof part of the deal. So the department decided to throw him a little "party" in honor of the new baby girl.

You've met this coworker before. Not for real, but in cake. He's the Steeler's fan. And yes, I still think that Ben Roethlisberger is allegedly a terrible person.

They wanted something not too girly, since it's a guy, but sorta girly, since the baby is a girl. I went to Google (of course) and found a beautiful cake by a Cake Central Memeber, jardot22. So I shamelessly ripped off the design. It happens.

What you're here for:

Dum, Dum, Da-Dum...

I had a very special cake request this weekend. My lovely friend Heather (who was a camp counselor at Girl Scout Camp with me!) got married!

The lovely couple:

Aren't they adorable? I stole this from Heather's Facebook page, hope she doesn't mind. :)

As they were planning the wedding months ago, she asked me to make the groom's cake. What an honor and a great responsibility to make something so special.

Her new husband likes cars, and Mustangs in particular. Which raises him up a few notches for me seeing as how a '64 1/2 convertible was my dream car for a while. :) I even test-drove a GT when buying a car, but I fell in love with my Honda. But Ryan has an Accord, and he's all good. So she asked me to make a chocolate cake with the Mustang symbol on it.

So this guy:

(Not my picture, got it from here.)

 And of course, I just couldn't leave well enough alone. That's what gets us in to trouble, right? So I was like "What if I make A CAR?!?!" all excited like. And of course she agreed, who wouldn't? Ryan's dream car is apparently Eleanor. Now I haven't seen Gone in 60 Seconds, nor will I probably ever, but I gotta say, this car is hot.

(Again, not my photo. Got it from here.)

But then at that point, I had to figure out a how I was going to make cake look like that. The first practice round didn't go well, but I was already committed to it. I have to admit, I lost a lot of sleep over this cake. Both in the planning and execution phases.

But the end result was pretty good, if I do say so myself. Without further ado:

I even managed to get you a photo from the process! Of course it was just one, but that's better than normal right? The cake started with two really big sheet cakes. They were somewhere around 25x19x~1.5 each. I cut each into two long strips and trimmed off the excess to get the cake slightly larger than my finished product. This is the cakes all stacked and ready to go:

I did a lot of planning, had lots of patterns, tried to study every slope change on the car, but it is really difficult to manage in cake. The cake itself is on a raised platform (which became even more raised about 11:00pm Friday night before the wedding when I figured out my tires wouldn't fit) of foam board cut to size.

Once the cake was shaped, it was covered in ganache, then accents were added in modeling chocolate. These included the panels behind the two doors, the ridges down the body, and the spoiler in back. The spoiler was a lot of fun actually. I was happy with it.
Here's a view of it from the side along with the cake's platform:

And I added a few fun details, like the vanity plate:

And the symbol they'd asked for initially (a last-minute addition Saturday morning). And I'd like to point out that it's all fondant:

Another view:

And I have to admit, it was pretty traumatizing evening for me at the reception. Have you ever been told that your dog or cat was sent to the farm to live and play, only to find out as an adult it died? I live in a world where I drop my cakes off, people oh and ahh about them (excuse the conceit) and then the cakes live long,
happy, safe lives. I don't watch the cakes I spent hours on being cut and eaten.

...But I did this time...

I watched some guy who had no idea what kind of love, sweat, and tears went into this cake CUT THE FRONT END OFF!

There is really no preparing yourself for it. None at all. I might have teared up a bit at this. But then again, people couldn't tell me how good it was unless they did...

Here's my Aunt Linda enjoying her piece:

Linda deserves a medal or something since I decorated at her house. For a woman who likes to clean, she was quite calm about the chocolate all over her dining room table and the pink countertops. Plus the extra trips for more supplies while I made an even bigger mess. And Uncle Jerry too, for trusting me to drive his big, beautiful, new truck all the way to Dallas. :) And of course my Mom for getting supplies and letting me use her awesome mixer at work to bake.

Congratulations Heather and Ryan! Thank you for letting me play such a special part of your special day. I wish you joy, luck, and happiness for you and your new adventure together.  

How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb?

You'll have to fill in your own punchline. :)

But at least one budding lawyer is celebrating his graduation! Not much time to write, so enjoy the pictures.