Bright, beautiful, butterflies!

A few weeks ago when I was at choir practice at church, my friend Jen asked if I would be interested in making a cake and cupcakes for her daughter Madeline's first birthday. Would I? Of course, I'd love to! She said she wanted to go with butterflies so I told her to take a look online and send me pictures of any cakes she liked, to give me an idea. I did some searching as well, during which I found a really cute idea for the cupcakes. Well, two days later, she e-mailed me a ton of pictures, some more intricate than others, and in the end, she decided on a really cute cake with lots of bright colors.

Then came the baking part. Jen requested yellow cake with raspberry buttercream filling. Now let me just say that this was my first time making this particular cake recipe.I already had a good recipe for the filling, but for the cake - every time I'd made a yellow cake from scratch in the past, it came out very dense, like pound cake. Not exactly what you want for a one-year old's birthday. So I looked everywhere, and then I saw a post that my friend Ann made about a new cake recipe she found for yellow cake that was very moist and not overly dense. Jackpot! I asked her for the recipe and she was happy to share (thanks Ann!). Several hours later - I had all of my cakes and cupcakes baked and ready to frost and decorate.



The decorating was so much fun - I have seriously missed decorating with fondant and gum paste, almost as much as I've missed making royal icing flowers. (which will be coming up soon for Easter!).
All of the flowers and decorations on the side of the cake were made with fondant - the butterflies are a fondant/gum paste mix. I originally dried them in a box, each butterfly in one piece, bent in the middle. They dried okay, but then I realized I would have problems putting them on the cake this way. So I broke them in half and pressed each wing into the cake, with the body in the middle. Not perfect, but pretty darn close!

For the smash cake - I knew I wanted to make it simple. Not a lot of fondant, but cute nonetheless. So I put two ladybugs on the sides, a butterfly on top(to be removed before the birthday girl got to work!), and front and center - the initials of her name - MVP (her older sister has the initials VIP!). It's obvious that she liked it, don't you think?






 Finally, the cupcakes were iced by me with a simple swirl and then decorated by the children at the party (I did the rest while the kids went to burn off their sugar rush!). Pretzels for the wings, an M&M for the head, icing for the body, and for the antennae, I took some black chocolate fondant, rolled it into a rope, cut out little pieces and let them dry so they'd be easier to work with. Much more kid friendly than black licorice.

Thanks Jen for allowing me to be part of your daughter's special day - Happy Birthday Madeline!

Blue and Gold!

A couple of months ago, I was at a cub scout meeting and when the discussion turned to the Blue and Gold dinner, I eagerly volunteered to make the cakes. The cubmaster's wife has made them the past few years, but I figured with her hands full since her son was getting his Arrow of Light award, I'd give her a hand. So here it is - my first sheet cakes. Seeing as it was a cub scout cake, there wasn't a huge budget to work with, and at the time I still didn't have a good yellow cake recipe ( I do now!), I went with a box mix and made two marble half-sheet cakes. Lots of work, but it turned out pretty good and was easier than I thought.

One cake was decorated with the names of the boys in the Webelos II ranking that were receiving their Arrow of Light award that night. It's the highest award any cub scout can receive, and a HUGE deal for these boys. In the middle of the cake, I piped a picture of the Arrow of Light badge that each Webelos II scout was awarded that night.

 Now I couldn't forget about the other scouts - my son being one of them. So I put the names of all of the other scouts - from Tigers to Wolves to Bears to first year Webelos scouts.

 The cakes turned out pretty good, and were well-enjoyed by everyone at the Blue and Gold dinner.

Happy Birthday to the best mother in law ever!

Just when I thought I'd never get another cake order again, at the end of January I got an e-mail from my sister-in-law Jolyn about a birthday gathering she was having at her place for her mom. At the end of the invitation was a request for someone to make and bring a cake. So, of course, I jumped on it! I wasn't sure if I'd be able to - after all, I am merely a daughter-in-law. If one of my many sisters-in-law wanted to make the cake, I was sure that they would be given the task. The next day when I checked my e-mail there were two messages - one from Jolyn stating that it would be great if I could make the cake, and one from my sister-in-law Cathy saying that she would to it (I guess I forgot to reply to all). Well, what followed was a lot of good-natured joking about everyone wanting to make a cake for their mother, but all completely fine with me making it. Yay!
Next up was deciding the design and the cake flavor. Jolyn said that she loved the chocolate cake I made for Cecilia's birthday, and could I make either a buttercream or a raspberry filling. I told her I could do better than that - I'd make a raspberry buttercream. I decorated it with red royal icing roses that I had left over from my flowers and cake design class, since red is my mother-in-law's favorite color and of course with her birthday right before Valentines Day, it felt very appropriate.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

For my Little Princess

For my daughter's 4th birthday, I knew one thing was a given - it had to be all about princesses. I looked up different princess cakes on the Wilton website and gave Cecilia 3 designs to chose from. One was a doll cake, one was a shaped crown cake, and the third was a round cake decorated to look like a castle. It didn't even take 3 seconds - she pointed at the doll cake and said, "that one - but I want it to look like Cinderella!". So off to the store I went to buy a wondermold cake pan and a doll pick with blonde hair. After styling the hair on the doll pick to look like the famous Disney princess and "painting" the eyes blue (couldn't have a Cinderella with brown eyes!) I was ready to roll.

It was a lot easier than I thought it would be to ice the cake. The hardest part was icing the doll pick and working around the arms and various curves of this plastic torso. Then, for the headband, I first attempted it with buttercream, but it became a huge mess, so I cleaned it up as best as I could and went with fondant for that little detail. It turned out beautifully and my princess was thrilled.

Happy Birthday Cecilia!

Happy Birthday baby Jesus

I few years ago on Christmas I started a tradition of making a small birthday cake for baby Jesus. This year being my first with all that cake experience under my belt made me very excited. I had so many techniques to chose from - fondant or buttercream? shapes or flowers?

In the end I decided on a red velvet cake with peppermint buttercream filling and frosting, with poinsettia decorations.









Merry Christmas, everyone!

My first stacked/tiered cake!

Ever since I finished my cake decorating classes back in June, I've been looking forward to expanding my horizons with one last bit of cake decorating knowledge - stacked cakes. Not just wedding cakes, although that's what most people think of, but I also saw this as a different way to make a lot of cake without doing a half sheet pan that takes up an entire table. So I signed up for the class, thinking it would be a lot of talking, maybe working with some styrofoam, and that would be it. Nope. I had to bring with me to the class a 6" two-layer cake and a 10" two-layer cake. My first thought was "what the heck am I going to do with all this cake when I'm done?". And then, at church the day after I registered for the class, an announcement was made about the fall festival and a need for baked goods. Yes! So right after church was done, I zipped to the back, talked to the lady in charge of the festival and offered to donate my cake to serve as a dessert for the turkey dinner on Saturday night. She was thrilled, and so then I began on deciding the flavor and design of my cake.

Flavor was easy - I wanted something fall-ish, so I went with applesauce cake for the top tier. Then for the bottom tier I chose pumpkin cake. For the design, I went simple - I had a set of small cookie cutters in the shapes of an apple, a pumpkin and a leaf, so I used them to cut out shapes in gum paste, scored veins in the leaves and then made three gum paste mums for the top. I frosted the cake with cream cheese frosting (and used buttercream to even out some of the bumps - thus the mottled look) and used buttercream again to make grass, leaves and vines. Despite the imperfections, the cake was a hit - it was gone in just over an hour!

Baby block cakes!

When I got the invitation in the mail for my cousin, Jessica's baby shower, of course I got all excited about making a cake for the event. It didn't matter that the shower was only one week after the wedding that I was scheduled to make the groom's cake for - I was doing it!

Of course my Aunt was happy to have me make the cake, and even gave me complete creative license. Her only request was that the cake be chocolate, and no girly colors, since her grandchild-to-be is a boy.

It took a bit of searching - so many ideas and so little time - but I finally decided on a baby block cake. Now I had heard some horror stories about working with smaller cakes, which I believed because working with the little round cakes for my niece's smash cake was very challenging (good thing I was able to just fix it with lots of frosting!).

So, to make things easier on myself, I opted to make 4 inch cubes instead of 3 inch ones. The frosting part was easy, and the fondant part wasn't too hard, except that I had lots of little wrinkles at the bottom of each block. Easy fix though - just covered it up with frosting lines.

 And here's the fun part. All four cakes were chocolate, but each had a different filling. One was vanilla buttercream, one was peppermint buttercream, one was chocolate buttercream, and the last one was peanut butter buttercream.

Congrats and best wishes to my cousin - hope you (and your baby!) loved the cake!