Sesame Street cake

Today we have an adorable Sesame Street cake made for a sweet little girl for her 1st birthday :)

Each character was hand cut based on a template I created, and Big Bird also had accents done with edible food writer.  The characters and embellishments were done using pre-made fondant, but the cakes were covered in homemade MMF (with a layer of buttercream underneath it).

The top tier was yellow cake, and the bottom tier and smash cake (with Grover) were chocolate.

This was the first time I used an airbrush technique to get a color gradient on each of the tiers, and I am quite pleased with the results :)

Laptop Cake

Given a strange combination of seemingly unrelated interests, I had this mini "epiphany" to make a cake that looked like a replica of the birthday guy's laptop, and to add to the "fun", incorporate a lolcats image.


I had never made a laptop cake before, so I tried to research what others before me had done... both the successes and failures... I'm always trying to avoid catastrophic cake events.


The "screen" was the only part of the cake that was not for consumption- I used a cardboard sheet as the base, used chocolate to "glue" huge wooden skewers  to the back (to later affix to the cake itself), and a handy dandy laminated printout of the lolcats image... then covered it in fondant (and even got a little "Apple" icon on the reverse side!)


The "keyboard" and base cake were yellow cake with vanilla buttercream icing.  The keyboard also had Satin Ice fondant as the main covering, and Duff's fondant for the little keys.  I typically make my own fondant, but since I would be "painting" the cake with edible silver spray, I used a pre-made fondant to get a perfectly smooth surface to spray.  The 77 (yes- I did count them all) typewriter keys were made from Duff's BLACK fondant and royal icing to draw the white symbols.  Making the keys perfectly proportioned and straight was my biggest goal- I had seen so many computer cakes that just looked really sloppy when it came to the keyboard, and that is just something that I knew I could avoid.


I have to thank K for sending me copies of the photos she took of the fully assembled cake- due to transportation concerns, I kept all three pieces separate until they made it safely to their destination :)  Good job getting it all put together, K :)

I was glad to hear that everyone enjoyed the cake- it's a very nice feeling to be able to make someone's day with something that I made :)  Happy Birthday... or should I say, Hapi Birfday? :P

Tiered Soccer Ball

I am very pleased with how this cake turned out :)  No major issues with gravity, and despite my daughter's best attempts to thwart me, it all came together very nicely :)  And I even finally figured out how to do a cursive capital "J", hah :P


The soccer ball itself is all yellow cake with buttercream only.


The bottom layer is my new fave chocolate cake recipe, with fresh strawberries (yum!!!).

Tom & Jerry

One of my favorite little girls is turning 4, and she requested a "Chocolate 'Tom  & Jerry' cake".  Originally I was just going to do a very simple sheet cake design, but I wanted this to have that "wow" factor... after thinking about how I could make it more special, I decided to incorporate the location of the birthday party into the design.  For those who have never heard of "Pump It Up", it's like an indoor bounce-house extravaganza.  Case in point- imagine a whole building FULL of this type of inflatable fun: 

So... there was my inspiration :)

I hand-made small figurines of Tom and Jerry (thanks to Julie for assisting with the body work!) out of gumpaste.  The cake was a dense sour cream chocolate cake on the bottom (which received RAVE reviews!) and a box-mix yellow cake on the top layer, all thinly coated with almond flavored buttercream icing, and topped off with homemade MMF (I used the new line of color gels created by Duff Goldman- WOW the vibrant colors were just SPECTACULAR!).  I was very pleased that the colors I made matched the location so perfectly- while it was technically intentional, I hadn't exactly gone to compare swatches or anything :P

Voilà!

And of course, when we walked in for the party and I saw my daughter climb up to go down the slide, I couldn't help but turn to a friend and say, "Hey, that looks like my cake!!" :P

Winnie the Pooh, and Hunny, too!

This is my 2nd Winnie the Pooh cake, but with a little twist... this Pooh needed to feed more people than a single-layer Pooh could do, so it was stacked on a sheet cake, plus I carved a small smash cake for the birthday boy.

The top layer (Pooh) is all chocolate, and the base sheet cake was French vanilla with strawberry preserves.  The adorable little "Hunny" pot was my first real CARVED cake, so I am quite pleased with how the shape turned out :)  I made the smash cake from scratch, with a little less sugar than normal, and a little heavier texture (more like a pound cake) so that it would stand up to carving, as well as look good in pictures of the birthday boy tearing it up :)  The top of the hunny pot is clear yellow piping gel.

Giant Cupcake

This cake was a 1st birthday for a sweet little princess :)  The Giant cupcake was multi-colored sprinkles with a layer of fresh strawberries, buttercream icing, and fondant decorations (the crown was handmade gumpaste).  To top it off, a miniature "smash cake" duplicate was made, identical in practically every aspect to the main cake :)  Not included in the photos is the additional undecorated cupcakes (the party guests were given bags of colored icing and sprinkles to decorate their own cupcakes- messy, but LOTS of fun!!).

Tee-time

This golf-themed cake was made at the request of one of my local mommy-group friends.

The base is chocolate, and the top (ball) is white cake with fresh strawberries.

Physics was my friend this time around- which is a good thing because I was starting to feel a little intimidated by the ball pan :P

Those little indentations were a very painstakingly slow process, but it turned out pretty cute :)

Wow... I just noticed that my cursive J's look like T's.  I wonder how long I've been doing that?!?  Sorry, Jeff!

Soccer Ball

This was my first attempt at making a soccer ball, and I learned a few things along the way.  1) Physics does work against you, and 2) If you can't fix it, HIDE it.

So this cake was a nice moist yellow cake (first problem) with buttercream frosting.  I neglected to cut a small sliver off the bottom of the cake (second problem) to create a flat bottom.  I used creatively attached plate pegs to keep it from moving, and thought I could forgo making the bottom flat by doing this... guess not!  So as I started decorating... actually, as I was almost FINISHED decorating... the bottom layer started to give.  The quick-fix was to fix it with icing as best as possible and then put it in the fridge to allow the buttercream to set and hopefully help hold things together.  When that seemed to prevent any further damage, I was left with the task of trying to HIDE the injury.  I made a banner out of gumpaste and tacked it down with lollipop sticks attached with candy melts.  Here's the finished product (name on cake board blocked for anonymity):

Doesn't look too bad from the front (pardon my fridge contents)...

As long as you don't look TOO closely, it seems fine!

But the side view shows a little of the amorphous quality that the ball was trying to take...

While the client was very pleased with the final cake, I will forever have this lasting image... and the thought of "It came from beyond..."  Hmmm... maybe if I were going for a helmet...

Note to self- a little less oil in the batter will provide a firmer cake without affecting the taste or overall texture, and cut a dang slice to make a flat spot!!

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home...

I made this lovely little ladybug for my daughter's God-mother for her birthday :)

The cake is devil's food, with a low-sugar homemade chocolate buttercream (uses only 1/4 of the confectioner's sugar in my typical buttercream).  The black fondant is Satin Ice's dark chocolate with black coloring added, and the red fondant is from Duff Goldman's new line of cake decorating supplies.

Laura's 3rd Birthday cake

Laura requested a princess castle birthday cake for her 3rd birthday!  I borrowed a castle kit from friends, and this is what I ultimately came up with!!

The top cake was lemon with fresh strawberries (as per the birthday girl's request!), and the bottom tier was chocolate with fresh strawberries.  Some of the fun touches were the sparkly pool of piping gel for Flounder, the food-spray paint on the pebble path, the sugar cube turrets, and the multi-colored sugar sparkles to give the windows a stained glass feel.  Oh, and swiping the princesses and their little friends from the toy box while the kid was sleeping ;)

Beach time!!

I made this cake for my friend's daughter for her 6th birthday!  The only inedible items on the cake were the umbrellas!!  It was a single layer marble cake.  I carved the top and rearranged the carved portions to make a flat "water" area and a raised "beach".  The beach is graham cracker crumbs with a little sugar (for some sparkle!), the water is blue piping gel.  The bridge was made of chocolate wafer cookies glued together with royal icing.  The bears are Teddy Grahams (regular and mini sized), with royal icing bathing suits.  I used peach rings and gummy life-savers as inner tubes.  The beach towels are tie-dye fruit roll-ups.  The 2 beach balls are made out of fondant and hand painted with food colors.  The trees are made of Oreo sticks with green fondant leaves (attached together with royal icing).  The "No Lifeguard" sign is actually made from royal icing and painted with a food writer.

A present for you...

This was my "final" cake for Wilton course 3.  It happened to coincide with my massage therapist's birthday, so I gave it to her :)  It was chocolate with strawberry filling, if I recall correctly :)  The purple fondant was painted with luster dust to give it some sparkle.